GRG's Miscellany

This month I have been mostly reading The Conscious Mind by David J. Chalmers . It's a full-on philosophy book, so it was really hard going.  But I did finish chapter 1! Why so slow? Apart from being a pretty slow reader, I only got one chapter read because I was taking Cornell notes as I worked through it. They take a lot of time and effort.  I understand better now why the students I teach hate taking them so much. There were a few important benefits for me though:    - Using them has left me with a feeling that I do understand what I've read    - For the most part I can remember the key ideas    - They provide a really nice summary to read over when I come back to take on the next chunk reading I'll continue with Cornell notes for books that I really want to study rather than just read. For books that I want to read, but might want to refer back to, I'm going to try sticky page-markers instead.  So for popular science or history books, ...

The rest of the project went so smoothly, there's very little to add to the previous post ! The standoffs for the motherboard screwed right into drilled holes in the MDF without needing glue. The HDD and PSU are held to the board by twisty-ties that go through holes in the board.  I didn't trust twisty-ties to hold the PSU's weight though, so I drilled holes for a couple of dowels and glued them in.  The PSU rests on top of them nicely with the twisty-ties stopping it from falling forwards. The shelves are furniture board off-cuts which are screwed to the battens from behind.  Amazingly, I managed to cut accurately enough that they fitted really snugly to the battens.  There is a bit  of give if you press them, but seeing as they're not going to hold anything of real weight I left them as they are. I'm not entirely happy with the cable-mess.  A little more forethought could have had them tucked behind the MDF board, but meh. I've installed...

The actual physical progress I have made is a monitor wall-mount made from battening and MDF. See the monitor hanging magically with no visible support! I made a frame for the back of the monitor from 3 pieces of 6mm MDF: I knew the bolts I had could only go in so far before I hit resistance (presumably from the internal components).  As far in as I was confident tightening them would leave ~9mm gap.  So I figured 12mm of MDF would be fine. WRONG.  It turns out you have far less wiggle-room on these things than I thought. So I had to countersink them through the outer layer.  That gave me the fear though because the outer layer would be the only thing really holding the monitor onto the wall bracket.  So I decided to glue the layers together as well as having the bolts.  It took a couple of tries to get the countersinking to the right depth, but it got there! And before I did anything else, I tested that the panel from the wall-brac...

I managed to make a playable level of a DOS heist game . It's a text-based game, built for 16-bit DOS, so in theory , it should run on a 286 (albeit as slow as a sedated two-legged dog).  I haven't had any time for optimising it, and the code is hideous, but it is  technically playable. The main feature is the visibility check, modelled on the game Monaco: What's Yours is Mine . It scans out from the player, checking if a cell blocks line-of-sight or not.  I made it fairly efficient by splitting the check into quadrants (N, E, S, W) and scanning cells between two edge-lines.  If it encountered an opaque block, it would split the scan up and recurse. On DOSBox, it gets a little slow when you can see a lot of the screen.  I imagine on a 286, this would crawl.  However, the game world does not change at all in the current version, so there are no guards going to creep up on you while you're lagging. I could also help things by designing the map...

I recently took part in a games jam which took longer than a month.  It made me realise how much I prefer the longer-term work to a short, frantic game jam.  However, I know how easily I get distracted by newer, shinier projects.  So I thought I'd try listing a few projects each month that I intend to work on, and then later on in the month posting about how they went. Projects for May: Physical make: wall-mounted PC for the workshop. Coding make: Monaco / Deus Ex -style heist game for DOS Non-coding make: Shadowrun campaign setting for Westworld-style universe Reading: The Conscious Mind by David J. Chalmers Wall-mounted PC I currently use a laptop to re-slice models for my 3D printer.  Worktop-space is at an absolute premium in the outhouse I call a workshop.  Plus, I hate laptop trackpads.  So the idea is to have a wall-mounted PC with a little shelf for the keyboard and another for the mouse.  It'll need a dust-sheet cover as well ot...