The cupcakes are carrot-orange cupcakes, with marzipan base, cream cheese frosting and marzipan figures, colored with food coloring. My girlfriend made the Portals with split-turret, the cake and the cube on the cake. I made the turret, the cube without a cake and Wheatley

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Comments are welcome

Remember the awesome Plants vs. Zombies cake my girlfriend gave me last year?
This year she gave me a self-made awesome Super Meat Boy soft cuddly toy! It's now always watching TV with us

You might think "OMG H4X!!!one!!". Well, not really. I didn't manipulate the game or browser in any way, I simply let my computer move my mouse and play the game.

How does it work?

• Take a screenshot of the current grid (or field)
• Check the color of the pixel in the middle of each gem on the grid
• If it's a hypercube: move the hypercube randomly to a direction
• Check for each gem whether moving it is a valid move
• If so, move it!
• Repeat until the minute is over
• ...
• Profit!

This performs pretty well, check out the video below:

Improvements still to be done:

• It does not recognize every special gem, this should be fixed
• The first valid move is now performed immediately, perhaps a better heuristic is possible (e.g. find hypercubes first, then search for multipliers... etc.)
• It should have a shortcut to e exited, now it keeps on running; making the mouse impossible to use until the minute is over.
• The code is a bit messy, should be cleaned up.

Funny thing: Normally Blitz guarantees there always is a new move, however I happened to have a field once with no further possibilities, probably because of a race condition between my bot and the game, see below.

Questions and comments are welcome

Installing dropbox:

Make sure you have Dropbox installed.
You can create an account here. (yes, that's a refferal link, but it will give you and me 250MB extra)
Information about how to install Dropbox under linux can be found here. There are Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu packages available, as well as a Dropbox-repository for Ubuntu. Other Distro's need to compile from source.

Information about running a textbased (CLI) version can be found here.

Symlink to Dropbox:

In order to sync the files in your dropbox, you simply move the configuration files you want to sync into a folder in your dropbox (mine is called nix):

mv ~/.bashrc Dropbox/nix/.bashrc

The following step is to create a symlink for the original location to the new location:
ln -s Dropbox/nix/.bashrc .bashrc

On other PC's you can simply remove the original config file and then create a symlink to your Dropbox.

Note that ln -s will also work for any directory. In case you're wondering, these are the files and folders I keep synced in my dropbox:

~/.bashrc
~/.screenrc
~/.vimrc
~/.bash_aliases
~/.bash_logout
~/.ssh


It's an AWESOME Plants vs. Zombies cake. If you don't know the game, you must've been lying under a stone for a while... Anyway, I just LOVE the game, and the cake.

The cake is a chocolate cake with a green grid of butter-cream containing egg white. The cake characters are a Sunflower, Peashooter, Chomper, Potato Mine and a Zombie all made of custom colored marzipan.

Just look at all the little details! Gleeeeee. More pictures below

Comments are more than welcome I'll make sure my girlfriend will read them

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• updated:
  • WordPress
  • WordPress plugins
  • LightWord theme
• chosen the wider variant of the LightWord theme
• created a child-theme of the LightWord theme
• added a few plugins
• added my twitterfeed to the right
• created a custom 404-page
• I'm planning to add a few pages:
  • Change my avatar
  • My homemade music
  • Stats
  • My twitterfeed

Failed to import events: Some of the events in this file were not imported because you had imported them to Google Calendar before. Other events in this file have been imported..

Apparently Google prevents you from (accidentally?) importing the same appointments twice. However, I wanted to import them anyway. Luckily for me, Google only checks the UID. Since all my UID's started with UID:INBPC-08, I did a find and replace all on the text, and changed it to UID:INBPC-09. Now GCal was able to import them again

Cheers!

su: Bad item passed to pam_*_item()

Since I didn't find my solution on the internet (the only solution I could find was removing wrong entries from /etc/environment), I'll post mine here:

I had a floating equals-sign in

/etc/default/locale

You should check that file, it should only contain something like

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

If that doesn't fix your problem, you might want to check your /etc/pam.d/su for strange entries.

Backslash:
\backslash may be used in math formulae, but not into text itself, use \textbackslash instead
Tilde:
You can use \textasciitilde in text, $\sim$ in math and another option is \texttildelow.

April 14, 2009

Still quite empty

On the 14th of April, the board still was quite empty, just a few resistors inserted. The soldering had begun.

Bent leads

At the bottom you can see how I bent all the leads, just before cutting and soldering them.

Check out those shiny resistor-bridges!

Just adding some more resistors...

Voltage regulators

Voltage regulators in place. As you can see, the IC-sockets, headers, DIN-sockets and the power-switch also have been placed already.

April 18, 2009

8 pieces of the 6582 SID chip

Received my SID-chips! Hooray! Those chips will eventually actually synthesize the sound

Capacitors, the lot of 'em

Caps in all shapes and sizes

Caps soldered to the board

And there they are soldered

Great, enough backlogging for today. Expect more soon

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