Picked up a copy of Starcraft 2 at the weekend played some of the missions and so far it’s been pretty good some light rpg elements to the campaign ala Dawn of War 2 and a good solid RTS game. They may have taken their sweet time making the thing but it seems to have paid off. The single player is pretty good, often in games like this it gets short shrift to the multiplayer aspects but in this case the missions are varied and pretty fun, the story rolls on and is mostly forgettable but it’s clear effort has gone in to getting a good single player experience, bungie et al take note.
This weekend was also Fishcon where a bunch of people haul a load of computers and junk food down to deepest darkest Norfolk to the middle of nowhere to a converted water mill and play computer games for three or four days straight. This year the trip for me would have been that much more extensive some 6000 miles instead of a couple of hundred so I couldn’t attend in person. Now as people that have lan parties know internet is becoming more and more an essential thing to have. It used to be you could just get by with a local network but more and more games require online authentication to run or their servers only work through the steam interface. That far out in the sticks they struggle to get phone let alone broadband so usually the place was essentially cut off from the internet and anything that required it either had to be done without or require elaborate tricks to make it work. Recently 3g coverage got far enough out that a netbook equipped with a 3g modem could serve as a gateway out to the internet to sort out these sorts of issues. Since they had that connection out to the greater world I could dial in as well. So I did and played some Left 4 Dead 2 with them for a bit on Saturday. For a transatlantic link to a local network running over 3g it was surprisingly lag free my ping was something horrendous but the gameplay was pretty smooth.
The rest of Saturday I spent assembling continuing to assemble my Makerbot I had it put together but the evening and ready to fire up. After some difficulty with loading the latest firmware and then some learning curve on the machine I managed an initial test print which got a bit mangled but seemed to come out reasonably well. The machine has no endstops and relies on manually positioning the start point which after having been used to the repman which automatically homes takes some getting used to.
Next day I tried some more prints but started getting some feed issues. It seems the tension on the filament was not right and the motor was jamming unable to push it into the heater barrel. I had a few goes at fixing it with no luck so I removed the extruder so I can dismantle it and get a better idea of what is going wrong.
I had to put that to the side as I had a metalshop class down at Techshop. It was a pretty fun class we didn’t really make anything but the instructor took us through all the machines and the basics of shaping and forming metal. We used sheet metal cutting and forming machines as well as the more manual tools like bag and hammer English Wheel and the shrinker rotex punch bead maker folding machine as well as the more hardcore plate metal cutting tools like the vertical band saw and the horizontal saw. He got a lot in the class and it ran to nearly 8pm when it was supposed to stop at 6:45 he did get pretty good coverage on everything.
Today I have a laser etching class which should be good fun and will give me the option to make some spares for my makerbot.
Anyway a pretty fun weekend and now it’s back to the grind.
