FishGuy876

FishGuy876

Programmer, Geek, Beer Drinker

Home page: http://www.cvgm.net

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Posts by FishGuy876

New CNC Bender Completed – ‘Sir Clive’

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I have finished working on my 3rd CNC bender, named “Sir Clive” after the great Sir Clive Sinclair. He received a complete refit and various other components. Details of this hardware/software project can be viewed at this link:

https://www.andykellett.com/cnc-projectshardware/sir-clive-bender/

You can also read about the custom software I wrote to power the machine, named FlexIO, at this page:

https://www.andykellett.com/my-discography/flexio-classic/

This project has been a lot of work, and now it is ready I can finish some other projects. Thanks!

This Weekend Is the Canadian Grand Prix!

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So, this weekend see’s the much-anticipated return of the Canadian grand prix. And it’s about damn time! The absence of the race from this size of the world has left a sour taste in the mouth of North Americans eager to watch the races. Still, in 2012 we will be treated to a custom US-made F1 track in Austin Texas, which I will probably take a road trip to go see that race!!

Anyways, my thoughts on the practise/quali/race for this weekend? I think it will either be Webber or Hamilton who takes the win, most likely Webber on pole position. Schumacher has a lot to gain here and I hope he does really well.

I feel as though the silly incident in the last race between Vettel and Webber will benefit Webber more, seeing as Vettel is still completely unapologetic. I also feel as though Vettel’s cage has been seriously rattled and he is prone to either making another screw-up this race because of his arrogance, or he will just race poorly. We will have to wait and see what happens!!

New PilesOTiles Version Underway… Again :)

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Great news for all PilesOTiles fans, is that I have started working on the game again. I have been experimenting a little with online high score tables and banks, and am slowly starting to come up with a system that I like that will let people record their stuff online.

In the same area, I am also looking into ways to download new board and game data automatically. Id still really like to have a ‘Challenge Of the Day’ feature where you can download the days grid and attempt to get your best score for it, then submit it online to see how you did against other people from around the world.

Other features that will be added to the game include a better level designer with online submission capabilities, some tools to assist with tileset creation, and additional game types. More will follow on this subject in the future, as right now I am trying to finish some secret projects for the Evoke! demo party in August. It seems a long way away, but in reality, I feel like I am running out of time!

Suggestions for additional game features & ideas are welcomed in the comments sections 🙂

Pulse iPad App Gets Steve Jobs’s Praise in Morning…Then Booted From App Store Hours Later After NYT Complains About It

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A screenshot of the sleek interfaced used by Pulse

OK, there are some things that Apple do which are just stupid. There are many other things that they do which I can never really understand. This is an example of one of those things.

Yesterday morning, the pair of Stanford University graduate students who made the hot news-reading iPad app, Pulse News Reader, were ecstatic to be mentioned first–for being among the most promising developers for the new tablet device–by Apple CEO Steve Jobs in his keynote speech at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

But by the afternoon, that flush of entrepreneurial success had turned sour, after Apple (AAPL) informed the two that Pulse was being pulled from the App Store after it received a written notice from the New York Times Company (NYT) declaring that “The New York Times Company believes your application named ‘Pulse News Reader’ infringes The New York Times Company’s rights.”

In an unusual coincidence, the Times Web site was on prominent display on a huge screenshot of the iPad during Jobs’s speech.

Ironically, the Times wrote a big wet kiss about Pulse last week in a blog post titled “The iPad Pulse Reader Scales the Charts,” by tech writer Brad Stone.

“Pulse is a stylish and easy-to-use news aggregator,” wrote Stone. “News organizations still puzzling over their iPad strategies can perhaps derive some hope from Pulse’s success–or at least its price tag.”

Im thinking here that the NYT doesn’t understand trully what an RSS feed is, especially as if you were to visit the newspaper website itself, you would be presented with the same content. Needless to say after this, the developers will pull the publicly available NY Times feed and re-release the app without it. The only loser here is the NY Times, who now lose thousands and thousands of daily website visits, advert placements, and many regular readers. It wouldn’t be surprising if they go after other popular apps who utilize the same system.

While Apple have to comply with the requests of the times, its still a bit stupid on their part to do this after it has just been catapulted to the limelight by the very guy who owns Apple. Hopefully, this will all be rectified soon 🙂

Webber Vs. Vettel – What’s Really Happening

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Image courtesy Of The BBC

Vettel Taking Out His Teammate, Mark Webber

What an interesting race we had at Turkey this weekend! Red Bull handed the Maclaren team a 1-2 finish this weekend due to a stupid move on the part of Sebastian Vettel on lap 40 of the race. This crazy move on the inside of Webber saw Vettel using a ‘scare tactic’ like stance, which resulted in them touching tyres and sending Vettel into a wild spin, damaging Webber’s front wing and causing Vettel to sit out the rest of the race.

This isn’t the first time that Webber and Vettel have come together like this; Who can forget their last encounter in Japan in 2007 during the safety car, Webber was getting ready to take on the race leader Lewis Hamilton, when a young Sebastian Vettel (racing for Torro Rosso at the time) fragged Webber’s car.

The relationship between the 2 drivers at Red Bull has always been cold, and I had said to my wife at the beginning of the year that they are both cold to each other, that there is no team love between the two. Its much more noticeable with Webber, who even after winning races, barely talks to his team mate afterwards. Its always Sebastian who comes to Mark for the courteous handshake for the cameras. Off the track, I bet they never have anything whatsoever to do with each other, which is a shame as being they are a team, despite being competitors, they should still be able to have a good time together. Webber has always been the bull headed one, thinking everyone owes him something and being a bit of a prick on track when things don’t go his way, and Vettel has always been the apologetic, less moronic of the two. He did not apologize after this event, and even made some bad comments afterwards.

The outcome at the track has also caused a bit of a stir among many of the people both in the team, and outside. Looking at the replay of the incident, Mark Webber had the right of way, and was just cruising/holding his position. Sebastian crept up on the inside of the car and made a sharp jab to the right at Webber, which I beleive was a scare tactic to try and make Webber budge, however when Sebastian did this, their tires touched and it sucked the car right into the path of Webber. Different angles of the car show the tyres touching, and Vettel and his jab, so theres no denying that Vettel caused it.

Some of the Red Bull management, including Helmut Marko, believe that Webber should have moved out of the way. These are the same people who would rather see Vettel win the title, as let’s face it, Webber is a bit of a stubbon ass at times, and Vettel is the cutesy german guy who is a star of their young driver programs. I don’t think they even counted on Webber doing this well.

Christian Horner offered some insight into the event, in that Webber had turned down his engine and Vettel hadn’t done so yet. As a result, he was a bit quicker and blamed the push from Hamilton who was right on his tail for the incident, saying if Vettel didn’t pass Webber, then Lewis would have definitely passed Vettel, but with incidents and accidents, injuries can happen, and the use of resources as the Ron Bell Injury Lawyers could be the better option for this. Again, proof that they didn’t seem to want Webber to win. The whole thing is a big mess!

While the press can speculate all that they want to, Red Bull needs to set some solid rules to it’s drivers about preventing crazy stunts like that in the future, most probably collaborating with professionals like Hughes and Coleman injury lawyers to cover the legal part of the whole thing. Webber is supposedly signing up for RB again next year, though after this move, I wouldn’t at all be surprised if he decides to go elsewhere next year to get away from the party politics. If RB need to make Vettel their favourite, then they need to let Webber in on this. What will piss off the team for sure, is the wild speculation that one side of the team is doing something behind the other’s back, such as using different parts, different strategies, and trying to keep information away from the Webber team. For a team so heavily in the winning seat for this year’s title, a big internal issue like this will surely finish that bid unless Horner steps up to the plate and puts his foot down, or up someone’s ass.

I should also point out that a few laps later, Button passed Hamilton in a similar style pass of crazyness, but Lewis took it right back from him and gained extra speed a few corners later cementing the fact that he is a far better and skilled driver, although accidents still can happen, so using legal sources in case of injury is really useful, and you can check over here to find the best legal resources online. The big difference? They gave each other plenty of room to do the passing in that there was no way they would have collided 🙂 Watching Martin Whitmarsh shitting kittens was classic 🙂

Updated OSTicket Install At F1-Software.com

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Well, after receiving a shit load of spam for a while, and repeated failed attempts to get the site to cron properly (resulting in some tickets taking days to notify me they arrived) I have finally broken down and done the upgrade. This new upgrade also allows CAPTCHA support.

Must admit, it went very smoothly and no problems were encountered. Should anyone need to contact us, you can use http://www.f1-software.com/osticket/ which also has a working 5-min cron job \o/

Getting Tired Of iTunes Resetting My iPod!

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I have an iPod Classic 120Gb and since the last couple of iTunes updates, I have been having problems with the thing synchronizing properly. even after reformatting (and upgrading to Windows 7) my iTunes likes to declare that my iPod (which worked perfectly in the car and at work all day) is corrupt and needs to be restored. Bastards!

The really annoying part of this is the amount of music I usually keep on it. Not only do I keep a backup of CVGM on the device, but also my own playlists and songs that I normally get my groove on with. Presently, this collection is quite limited as i’m tired of having to re-copy everything. At present, there are 7,860 songs (32gb) on the device, which takes AGES to restore every time it breaks. The first time it did this, I had close to 14,000 songs on it. Restoring this over the network is a big pain.

Seems to crap out every other sync on average, which is really annoying. With everything else going on with Apple in the news right now, I have pretty much decided that I will not buy another Apple product again, especially as this seems to happen to a few friends iPhones too. Unless Apple produce something that truly impresses me (the iPad was a complete waste of time for what it does) then I shall remain without any new Apple products.

My advice to Apple – fix your existing shit first, before flooding the world with more useless shit that still doesn’t work right!

I should also add that I have looked into using RockBox, but because my 120Gb is newer than their last supported version, they are unable to make it work at all. That really sucks.

Evoke 2010 – You Should

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I will be attending Evoke 2010 this year, and I will also be bringing something very special along with me to unveil, although you will have to be there to truly see what it is!

Evoke this year will be held on August 27th – 29th  at Abenteuerhallen Kalk in Cologne, Germany. I will be attending with many of my fellow goats from our group Brainstorm. We are mostly all staying in the Leonardo hotel, with a few most likely ending up in the Best western hotel, also near to the venue (but I believe that the Leonardo is actually a little closer). Come join us for a beer or 8, because you should!

Watch the official invitation demo:

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube Direkt

WTF Is With That Penalty To Michael Schumacher?

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I’m a little bit pissed off at the FIA and Damon Hill after this weekend’s F1 race at the beautiful Monaco race track. With 2 laps to go, Karun Chandhok and Jarno trulli collided heavily (with Chandhok lucky that he didnt lose his head) and out came the safety car. On the last lap of the race, Charlie Whiting brought in the safety car and declared the track clear and initiated race conditions for the final corner of the track.

The incident happened on this corner, when Fernando Alonso tried with all his might to get up to speed in his car, and slid all over the place while Michael Schumacher nipped him to the corner, taking the extra place at the final corner.

At first, the stweards were all in a kerfuffle because they believed that Michael had passed him before the line of the safety car. When the video footage from his car was reviewed it was very clear that he had already passed the line, so it wasn’t an issue anymore. Then came in the rule about passing in the last lap if the race is finished under safety car conditions, if these conditions are fulfill this could cause different issues like problems with the car or accidents, and for this the use of accident lawyers could be useful, which you can find at sites like https://www.phillipslawoffices.com.

Section 40.11 applies: “When the clerk of the course decides it is safe to call in the safety car the message ‘SAFETY CAR IN THIS LAP’ will be displayed on the timing monitors and the car’s orange lights will be extinguished.” – This is exactly what happened in Monaco. Whiting declared the track ready for racing, so technically, the race did not finish under a safety car. This also applies in the same section if the cars are to finish under a safety car: “As the safety car is approaching the pit entry the yellow flags and SC boards will be withdrawn and replaced by waved green flags with green lights at the Line. These will be displayed until the last car crosses the Line.”
Ref.: Marasco & Nesselbush accident lawyer.

So, of course Ferrari are already being morons by saying that they were told about the rule, that their drivers would remain in position until the finish line. The question is, if that was the case, then why didn’t they tell the rest of the teams, and more importantly, why did Alonso try so hard to keep his Ferrari at top speed going into the corner to avoid being passed?

Many, including myself, were hoping that these questions would be answered by the FIA, however I can probably argue that they never will. Another thing that gets me all mad right now is that Mercedes have announced that they will NOT appeal against the time drop. This really sucks for Michael, as the team have a perfectly good reason to appeal the decision and they are turning their backs on him.

So, once again, the FIA punishes yet another driver who makes a last minute crowd pleasing moment. Here is my middle finger to the FIA.

New Desk Pretty Much Set Up!

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The new desk is almost fully ready, I still have a few power lines left to run, and there are a few other things I need to arrange. The desk itself came from Ikea and is much larger than my old desk, giving me the room to spread out more, and even hook up my old computers all in the same area 🙂

See how many computers you can find 🙂 The rack behind the desk (the far left of the picture) has approximately 7 more computers on it too 🙂

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