Arena_Saw

June 29th, 2009

Working on this with buddy Frunk. This is a direct port of classic TF2 gimmick map Arena_Cow. But better. The ultimate team fortress 2 gimmick map to meet all your gimmic map needs. Because we’ve replaced all the wooden cow props with saws! Mwahaha! Also the celing is high enough that ragdolls can be thrown straight up, to dramatically arc back down on the other side of the map. Arena_cow has a painfully short celing.  Download Arena_Saw_A1 here! Long list of things to fix, like the sides of the blades shouldn’t kill you (only the saw edges should), cut down on the volume, and add some sawmill style basketball hoops. The grass sort of shows you where you shouldn’t go (stay on the beaten path).

Other things to fix: The Wall in 1856 :  also I feel like the blu side is a bit harder to navigate, -⑨- Trapped Firefly :  have a kill counter that says how many people died to saws

Arena_Saw at FPSBanana

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Note the engineer in the upper right corner, flying through the air. This is a common occurance on arena_saw

SAM 5.0 Unlocks Huntsman, Dead Ringer, Cloak and Dagger, Etc

June 1st, 2009

Use Steam Achievement Manager 5.0 to unlock the newly released Milestone Achievements including the Huntsman, Razorback, Jarate, Dead Ringer, Cloak and Dagger, Dead Ringer and Ambassador. Use SAM 5.0 to unlock Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) achievements on November 17th, 2009. Below are some charts that breaks down your chances of random drops in Team Fortress 2 (TF2), hats and more. The short, short version is that 1 in 244 drops is a hat. The rarest hat is the Spy’s Fancy Fedora and the most common is the Pyro’s Beanie.

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Spy-Sniper Update Now Out, Sort of Works with SAM 5.0

May 23rd, 2009

anlvfd.jpgWell the update is out. The Steam Achievement Manager, v 5.0 is out now. It allows you to do a variety of things, such as unlock achievements. Sadly though, achievements are not linked to unlocking weapons. So really all you’re doing at this point is impressing your friends by unlocking all the achievements early, rather than getting them normally. Weapons are unlocked at regular time intervals based on play time, and there is a random chance you will get one at each interval. The upside is that you can idle (in spectate mode) in various servers to get achievements. Valve had more to say about random weapon drops on their web page.

But for now, here is Steam Achievement Manger 5.0.  All of the usual instructions apply;

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How do you use it?

  1. Install Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 if you do not already have it installed.
  2. Download Steam Achievement Manager.
  3. Extract it to a directory that is convenient to you, but not your Steam directory. It’s a ZIP file, if you don’t know how to extract a ZIP file then you probably shouldn’t be trying to use this tool.
  4. Run Steam if it is not already running.
  5. Exit any active VAC protected games if any are running. While this tool does not directly interact with any game itself, it is better safe than sorry.
  6. Run Steam Achievement Manager and do whatever you want in it.

SAM is created and maintained by Rick at http://gib.me/sam

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Meet the Spy

May 16th, 2009

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Uploaded leaked video. Meet the Spy video on youtube. Lots of little details, very cool.

TF2 Spy-Sniper Update - Unlock Huntsman with Steam Achievement Manager

May 13th, 2009

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Well Valve has announced the Sniper Update Spy Update, due out Tuesday, May 19th Thursday, May 21st. Of course there will be unlockables, the first announced Tuesday, is the Huntsman Bow. And also the Dead Ringer and Cloak and Dagger watches. These should be unlockable using the Steam Achievement Manager 4.0. Steam Achievement Manager 5.0.

In theory this should work for thes sniper unlockables. Valve has been playing around with unique items (hats) which might indicate a shift away from achievement-based weapons earning such as the Force-A-Nature (FAN), Backburner, Heavy and Medic unlocks. But for now we still have the steam achievement manager.

How do you use it? Follow below the cut! :

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Antworks Antfarm Gel Recipie

May 13th, 2009

antworks-green-illuminated-ant-farm_1.jpgI saw a video of ants building tunnels in this stuff via time lapse on youtube and got to wondering, “wouldn’t it be cool if I got two 4×8′ sheets of Plexiglas and made my own ant farm using about five gallons of this stuff?” Sadly the manufactuer has the market cornered and doesn’t just sell the gel in powder form. BUT - Looks like someone recently stumbled upon the recipe, in the form of the actual patent(!). US Patent 5803014 - Habitat media for ants and other invertebrates. It can be difficult to find all the different ingredients. They are not always available in supermarkets. Try looking at local specialty shops in their baking section, or google for “make your own soda” and check ebay or chemical supply companies. Most of the ingredients below are also found in many times of soda. Make sure you purchase FOOD GRADE ingredients. I’ve made the recipe more human readable below the cut. Instructions should be the same as making Jello, heat to a boil, mix all the ingredients together well, and then pour at near boiling into the final holding device. The faster the gel cools the thicker and stronger and more dirt-like it will be. I wouldn’t recommend an ant farm much thicker than 2 or 3 inches due to cooling problems unless you live somewhere like Norway and are doing this outside in the dead of winter.

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F-Holes for Cigar Box Guitar

April 12th, 2009

boxfholes.jpgSo I accidentally swung by the cigar shop and walked out with a cigar box. This is approximately a 7″ x 9 1/2″ cigar box. Nobody ever seems to give the dimensions for these things, and in the cigar shop they always look smaller than they are. The 7″ x 9″ Partagas Black Label box is a perfectly good size. My other box, a Padron 3000 is 11″ x 7″. Both good sizes. Anyways, My last guitar is very quiet due to the fact that the neck is glued to what would have been the loudest part of the sound board (ala Make-style). I’d always wanted to add F-Holes but never had the tools, especially once the lid was sealed up. So this time I went out and bout an 8″ ‘Drill Saw’ item# 97831 by Pittsburgh. I found my F-Hole pattern by googling for the term and came up with this image: (click below to see the rest)

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Cigar Box Guitar Tuning Notes

April 2nd, 2009

tuning_fork_new.jpgCigar box guitars are great in that there are only three strings, so you can try out all sorts of different tunings without having to tune an entire six strings. Changing the tuning on regular guitars also seems to make them not hold regular tunings very well for a couple of weeks after you switch back to regular EADGBe, so keeping your “regular” instrument from going out of tune is another plus.

  • Open tune to AEA using the ADG strings from a set of .12’s guitar strings
  • If your cigar box guitar is tuned in A, use a harmonica in the key of D
  • If you have a harmonica in G you would have to play the guitar in D

Tunings from low to high - open tunings are easier since strumming it “open” will always result in a clean sounding chord. You have

  • Open A - AEA
  • Open G - GDG
  • A7 - AEG “Jazz tuning”
  • A6 - AEF# “Hawaiian tuning” or “Uke” or “Ukulele” tuning
  • G9 - GDA “Mandolin tuning”

Tahitian Ukulele pt 3

March 29th, 2009

taropatchuke.jpgWell six months go by and I realized I haven’t made any progress on this instrument. The roughed out shape has sat by my bedroom door almost every day since and eventually you just sort of tune those things out. Anways, the last to days: Progress!

For those of you just tuning in, a Tahitian Ukulele is an instrument from Polynesia/Tahiti that is carved from a single piece of wood, with a thin piece of circular wood  serving as the soundboard overtop a cavity. The sound hole is on the back side of the instrument, which is what I’m covering here today. The instrument is strung with fishing line, with a total of 8 strings.

Carving the sound chamber wasn’t actually  half as difficult as I thought it would be. I found where the bridge was going to be located, and drew a circle based off that. I was dissapointed with the size and kept drawing subsequently larger circles until I’d filled as much of the space as I could. I ended up with a soundboard approximately 8 1/4″ in size. Coincidentally this is almost exactly 75% the diameter of an 11″ banjo drum. The spacing between the outer and middle ring turned out helpful, it was almost exactly 3/8″ - the size of my largest drill bit. This came in hand, see below:

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Wooden Bikes

March 15th, 2009

20090312bike01.jpg Wooden bicycles are always a fun novelty.  I saw what at the time seemed like a very sad image, a child riding on a very crudely constructed wooden scooter. After seeing this video I was happy to see that these sorts of bikes are used as a basic type of transportation for many people in Rawanda. It’s somewhat heartbreaking to see kids in abject poverty with toys like these, but on the flip side, it’s amazing what potential humans have using the tools at their disposal with essentially zero budget.

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These things are pretty neat. You can’t go very fast, but considering what the chinese carry on their bikes these are really a peasant’s truck.You can also race them downhill apparently, but if you live in a third world country, I would imagine this beats the crap out of transporting drinking water from the stream to your village.

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