GRG's Miscellany

I decided to spend a bunch of this half-term improving my Blender skills. Amongst my many pipe-dreams is one where I make a dropship sim with mostly-plausible physics and technology.  I love flight sims, and I feel that there is a real void of space games (heheh...pun) between the likes of Kerbal Space Program and the likes of Elite: Dangerous.  So one day, it'd be nice to make something to fill that void. In order to chase that dream (at a snail's pace) I decided to model and texture a trans-orbital fighter-bomber.  This was difficult because I am not an artist (as you can tell from the picture).  Also, I lost patience with the texturing, so a lot of it is solid colour for now.  However, I am still proud of the result. In the fullness of time, the texturing will include some kind of squadron markings, access hatches, etc.  I also want to make animations for the canopy, tail planes, variable geometry wings, weapons bays and undercarriage.  The engine exhausts should al

After a long, tedious list of failures, suddenly so much has happened my head is spinning... In the beginning was the new BTEC IT.  And lo, it contained an entire unit on designing and creating database systems (no, not OODBs - education is only just catching up with 1974 :P). So began the list of failures... The prospect of teaching sixth form students how to use Microsoft Access made me taste vomit, so I enthusiastically dusted off one of the department's Raspberry Pis and set up a PostGreSQL server with  phppgadmin  (MySQL has all the hostname guff, and sqlite didn't seem easily multi-user). Everything went smoothly until... the pi's SD card gave out, losing everything. So I set it up again, storing the database on a USB drive instead! Everything went smoothly until... the filesystem kept corrupting, possibly due to overloading the poor little pi. So I got the students into the habit of backing up their work every lesson!  (They were quite amused that th