GRG's Miscellany

I was looking at a game on Gog called Kingdoms and Castles .  It was extremely tempting. But then I remembered that I had already bought SimCity 2000 , which I have always enjoyed.  So I reinstalled it and started it up. I was feeling confident that I could still manage to build up a decent city, but I went in on easy mode anyway because I didn't want to be too challenged. It all started off well.  I survived the inevitable destruction of the power plant, and my budget was in the black.  It was all going well. Then came the earthquake. ...and eventually I realised it was time to start anew.

When I finally realised that actually playing 40K was the worst part of 40K, I decided to just buy and paint miniatures that I liked the look of.  At the same time, my brother was really enjoying making new Space Marine vehicles out of lots of spare parts. In order to give these miniatures life, we decided to start playing Rogue Trader .  It involved making up all the stats and talking things through to make sure we weren't just min-maxing them all.  Plus, we had to make up some house rules to clarify things (and more will follow, I'm sure).  But after all that, we had our first battle: The Rabble vs. Salvage Marines. Salvage Marines (working title) are a lost chapter of Space Marines that get a lot of their equipment from finding old battlefields and strongholds, recovering and repairing all they need.  They have come to an ashen desert world in search of an abandoned Space Marine complex and found that the locals are far from friendly. The Rabble are t...

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...

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 ...

I dun made a steering wheel!!! I used the Teensyduino board and software.  The sketch software was an example provided with the teensyduino installer.  I tweaked it to cut down the 6 axes and 32 buttons to 1 axis and 2 buttons.  I needed to do that because without being wired up, the extra axes produced a bunch of random values, and the buttons randomly triggered. I have yet to test it in earnest.  I suspect it will fall apart in short order.  However, I have learned a lot by making it, so I should be able to make a better one if that happens.

I have been experimenting (read: playing) with milk curds to produce a rudimentary  casein plastic . There's an instructable if you're interested in doing this yourself. First attempt: a lump of pure casein took about a week to dry for me.  Before it fully dried, I was able to pierce it with a bradawl and screw a PC case screw into the resulting hole.  Maybe I'll use this for making my own stand-outs. Second attempt: I thought I'd try to use it to reinforce some corrugated cardboard.  When I make cardboard PC cases, making the case stiff enough is always a design issue. I followed the instructable, but re-dissolved the casein (using a little water and a teaspoon or two of bicarbonate of soda) and soaked it into the cardboard.  I also heated it in a 50° C oven for an hour in an attempt to accelerate the drying. It was a failure: the cardboard warped and was not significantly strengthened. Happy accident: While cleaning up with some paper towel, I d...

I have finished painting an armoured bear from Privateer Press' Hordes game. I sculpted the stream and rocks on the base (I cheated for a couple of the rocks and actually used fragments from my garden). I tried to get the gashes in his armour to look shiny as if the paint was scraped away.  I am somewhat pleased with the result, but it still looks a little untidy to me.  Not enough to bother redoing it, but there you go. And here he is!! He's got a scar going through his right eye so I tried to get a cataract look to it. The base.  Lots of Milliput fun.  And a scuff still to repair. :/