Telnet gateway form

For those that still wish to use the telnet gateway, I made a form that links to the VPS in Europe. Hopefully it works for you, however, that server might go down without notice.

Mosha down for the holidays

Because I'll be rather busy for the holidays I'm not able to properly manage the Mosha server, it will therefore be down until the 8th of January. My apologies for the inconvenience. If you're using cliser, you might be able to still connect using the europe.mosha.net server running at ports 8080 and 8000, but I'm still setting that server up and it is quite unstable. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Daemon of Cormagan blog

I started another blog related to my novel. Together with my blog on my electronics project, this will mean this blog will become even more starved for content, but at least things are now properly separated.

Mosha down

As I wrote on the Facebook newsfeed, Mosha is currently down, as it can't be turned on in its current location. I can move the server, but for that I would need a wireless AP with ethernet connection (as there is no ethernet port in the new location) and the amount I received in donations is less than half. The old location will be available again on the 5th of May, so at that time Mosha will be turned back on.

Talker

In my novel, which I hope to publish this year, I have the concept of a talker. My illustrator asked me what such a device looks like, and I decided to try to make a raytrace of one, which you should be able to see. A talker is basically a steampunk version of a cellphone. It doesn't use electricity, instead it uses a combination of air pressure (stored in a tank, and increased using a manual pump, similar to that of a blood pressure meter) and phosphorus, which is charged in sunlight. The description in my technology document is as follows:

Transmitting: The talker has a light source (portable ones use a phosphor compound, which charges as long as it is exposed to light, wall mounted talkers usually use a friction light). When in use, the vibrations of the speaker cause a small mirror to vibrate, causing the light to change in amplitude. The crystal shape changes this light into a beam, which can be sent over a distance.

Receiving: When a beam hits a crystal anywhere, it is captured, and using the structure of the crystal aimed at a tiny metal valve that expands and contracts based on the amount of light (when there is no light, the valve is closed). The valve allows air to flow from a pressure chamber (manually inflated using a small pump in portable talkers, using a continuous pump for wall mounted versions) into a hose that ends in an ear piece, which allows the receiving party to hear the voice.

Signalling: Certain wavelengths will not be aimed at the valve by the crystal, but instead will cause the crystal to glow in a particular color, indicating in incoming call, or show other important information.

Switching: The large crystals mounted on top of mountains are connected to glass pipes, linking to exchanges, where operators receive the calls and redirect them to other talkers or to other exchanges using glass rods.

In the device on the picture you can see the green crystal (with the light green light of the phosphorus behind it), the mirror, the rubber ball used to pressurize the copper tank, the valve under the lens under the crystal, the blackish rubber tube leading to the ear piece, which can be attached to the side of the tank when carried. There is also a hook that allows you to hang the talker from your belt. The most important component of the talker is the crystal, which has four tasks.

1. It needs to convert incoming light into heat, using a lens that is attached below the crystal. The heat operates a miniature valve that responds rapidly to these heat changes, and allows minute amounts of air to escape from the reservoir depending on the amount of heat (or light). Diffuse is filtered by the crystal, and never reaches the valve.

2. It receives light from the phosphorus via a mirror. The mirror is mounted on top of the reservoir, aimed at the phosphorus and the crystal. Two springs hold the mirror at an angle at which it is at the verge of sending light to the crystal. When the mirror vibrates, the mirror will reflect the phosphorus on the crystal, which will turn it into a parallel beam emitted in a specific direction.

3. When parallel light of a certain wavelength is received, the crystal will light up. This allows the user to ensure correct alignment (the crystal is able to correct for certain variations, but aiming is important). For stationary talkers this ability is used to alert a user that there is an incoming call.

4. Diffuse light is gathered and aimed at the phosphorus, allowing it to charge when not in use.

Early steps with Starcraft 2

This weekend I completed the campaign of Starcraft 2. I played it mostly on casual, except those scenarios that I failed to complete on casual, which I replayed at a harder level. I was a bit disappointed in the length of the campaign: for some reason I had expected... More. It's the same reason why I stopped playing World of Warcraft: I like the parts that are hardest to create: story lines. I don't really care doing things a second time at a harder level if they continue to look the same (in Ulduar things looked surprisingly different on hard modes, which made them something I wanted to do).

However, I don't think people play Starcraft 2 for the story. In fact, I only played the campaign so that it would be marked as complete on my profile: I was already heavily involved in playing with other players. I use "with" deliberately here: my first games were with a friend of mine against the computer. Unfortunately the AI is easily tricked by a cloud of mutalisks, which you can build before their first wave hits. By carefully attacking their base right at the moment they arrive at yours, you can force their army to return to their base, leaving you more time to build more units... So fighting against the computer became slightly less interesting.

This is where we decided to form a group and fight in a dedicated 2v2 league, for which we developed and tried out a number of strategies, some of which I will describe in later blog posts. For some reason, playing those 2v2 games reduced the number of practice games I had available as well, and after doing some practice games too, I decided to qualify for 4v4. 4v4 had one problem, though: despite being fast, my MSI GX630 is not fast enough for that mode. 3v3 works fine, but in 4v4 the battle is over before I can do anything. So I decided to quality for 3v3 next.

I'm avoiding 1v1 because I'm playing more to cooperate with other people rather than fight against people. Of course, most people seem to think of this differently, and there were even cases where my partners started to fight each other over resources, rather than focus on the common enemy. But this is part of the fun. I'm still in the copper league at all levels, which means I'm in the bottom 40%. But that's ok, I'm only just beginning to grasp how everything fits together, and there might be many things that I'm still missing.

My "new" keyboard

My old keyboard, a 1984 Tulip, sadly died. The CTRL key had already broken off once, but I had managed to glue it back on. This time the damage was too much, though, and I had to get rid of it. Fortunately I had another keyboard, the Northgate Omnikey Ultra, in storage. This is a slightly more modern keyboard, from 1989, and is actually a step up from the Tulip. Some of the keyboard layout is a bit odd (I fixed most of it by reassigning scan codes, but there are still a few areas that I need to get used to) but the typing is amazing. I had used it before at work in Rochester, but there the people complained about the noise (it is loud) so I stopped using it. A keyboard like this makes you want to type. I looked on the Internet, and generally people seem to agree (Wikipedia calls it "the best in the industry". Other websites talk about "a legend in the computer industry", "personal favorite", "best keyboard", and the leader of PC World's column "the 30 products and services we miss most").

And PC World is right. The Tulip keyboard, the Northgate, and the IBM Model M keyboards are no longer available. The only way you can buy them is used, and given their lifespan of about 30 years, they will eventually only be seen in musea. Creative Vision Technology tried to make a keyboard like them in 2006, but it seems those aren't sold anymore either. What these keyboards have in common is that they use Alps Slider Switches, rather than a membrane. This means that they are more susceptible to liquids (if the liquid gets into the switch, your keyboard is basically dead) but also that anyone typing on them will notice that they are better. They aren't necessarily ergonomic (they can still cause carpal tunnel syndrome) but they just feel extremely good. And, just faster than sound flights, they are no longer commercially available.

The disappearance of these magnificent keyboards is most likely caused by the mouse. Because the mouse became more important in the interaction with the computer, the keyboard became less important, and people were no longer willing to spend $190 on a good keyboard. Instead, they bought a $5 keyboard and a slightly more expensive mouse. Which is fine for people that never used the old keyboards. But I will miss them. Let's hope my Northgate will last a long time, still.