Another book that O’Reilly Media was kind enough to send me was Fashioning Technology: A DIY Intro to Smart Crafting. I like making stuff, and I’m confident enough in my manhood to admit to the internet that I learned to sew, crochet, and knit a bit as a kid even if I only remember a bit of it now. I can thread a needle and I know where a bobbin on a sewing machine is. So I figured this book would be pretty fun and useful. I love Make Magazine and Craft Magazine. This book is a pretty direct summary of techniques and projects from Craft that can get you started.
This review is going to be a bit short. This book has a lot of strong aspects. It covers techniques and materials well. I didn’t even know some of this stuff existed, and just reading about the materials and techniques alone really got me going and inspired to start making. Everything is very clearly written, and makes the entire process very non-daunting even if you’re pretty new to the DIY world. Even the explaintations of electronics were really practical and friendly. That’s hard to do. The printing is great, on high quality paper and the entire book conveys a feeling of ‘fun’ really well.
Normally a part of Make and Craft magazines that I like the most are the detailed tutorials stepping you through how to do various things in great detail. For example there’s a killer article on soldering SMT components and projects in the newest Make Magazine that’s worth buying this issue solely for that project alone. Yet, for some reason in this book the projects totally lose me. Page 76 onwards until the references in the back of the book just don’t do it for me. The technology primer section at the beginning was so dead on, and so great, but then this section fell a bit flat for me. It’s not that the projects are bad… so much as useless or at least to me. To be frank, this book is targetted at women, which I am not one of, so maybe that’s why I don’t get the projects. Reading the primer sections I was imagining all sorts of neat things to make and build from the things I was learning and then I just didn’t find them in the later sections of the book.
The LED braclet is pretty cool, and could be modified to something useful. The Rock Star Headphones are pretty well useless. The Space Invader Tote has a few neat things, but I can’t imagine any girl I know using it. The Birdie Brooch completely loses me (and this is coming from someone that wants a wearable computer like we all imagined in the 90’s so badly!) although it does step someone through etching a circuit board and using ICs a bit, which is a nice thing to show. The Photochromic Blinds are one of the best things in the book, and give a nice intro to screenprinting. The Cardboard table is neat, but not great. Then things just go down from there for me as it moves into the interactive toy section. I could see someone really enjoying them if they have kids, but not many other people… then again maybe that’s the target- a making mom!
Overall this is a good book, and well worth getting… if just for the technology primer section, and the screenprinting and PCB etching tutorials- then get a subscription to Craft Magazine and go from there. I don’t think they expected many people to actually go through and make all of this stuff, but rather take it as inspriration and/or modify it to suit their own needs. That’s great, but the projects themselves just left me feeling a bit lukewarm. My only other request is that they start releasing these books with a spine that you can easily open up and lay down (maybe spiral bound?) I find that when working on a project its hard to keep these books open. The retail price is $30, but it seems that Amazon has it for $20, or used copies for even less so its not a bad deal at all.
O’Reilly’s Learning Rails (2008) by Laurent and Dumbill is a great way for a non-programmer, but techie person to dive into rails. I took AP Computer Science AB in High School, which was in C/C++ but I haven’t done much programming since, except a bit of cut and paste PHP and some javascript hackery. Early in College I thought to teach myself web programming in Perl/CGI but the languages were just so complex that I couldn’t get my head around building anything really useful and they have become a bit depricated except for sysadmin purposes. I’ve worked around programmers for the past few years now and I’ve yearned to get back into programming. Yet, I keep trying to pick up what should be really awesome books and not being able to dig in. They make too many assumptions about your pre-existing knowledge or just don’t fit with my learning style. I’ve found that they make sense in a classroom situation or with a mentor to help guide me, but they just don’t fit me. I understand technology. I understand HTML, yet some concepts go a bit over my head.
For those completely non-programmers out there reading this Ruby on Rails is a framework (basically a lot of stuff done for you already) that makes developing web applications happen really quickly. Its sometimes taunted by developers in other camps as being unscalable due to the growing pains of its most prominent application, Twitter, but that really isn’t an issue. Rails is best suited towards rapid application development for testing and prototyping.
I took some photos for O’Reilly’s Ignite Boston 3 a few months ago and in return they’ve sent me a nice selection of O’Reilly books, including this one. I guess they sent it to me a bit ahead of publishing date, which was nice of them. I’ve found this book to be the perfect fit as an introduction to Rails. It isn’t condescending as a ‘For Dummies’ books might feel, but it doesn’t fly over your head or go into insane detail in trying to explain every intricacy of the framework. In fact, several times it tells you to not worry about something and that you can look into it later but not to sweat the small stuff.
This book doesn’t take the approach of many Rails tutorials that rush you through building a complex application in 5 minutes. Those make too many assumptions of knowledge and are made for showing off more than learning. This goes through in a simple logic manner to explain the layout of a Rails application and how to extend it. You won’t be a Rails master after reading this, but you’ll be ready for your next Rails book and you won’t be lost or confused.
The first chapters go through the basics of installing Rails (giving you multiple options) and explaining some problems you might hit and how to get around them. I already had Rails installed, but I’ve had problems before in reading other tutorials and wasn’t able to understand the layout of the application, how to start the programs, or what the hell these Gems were. This got me around that and I feel much more comfortable with such things.
It steps through basic MVC structure and handling of input, getting it into a database and dealing with RESTful interfaces. The mid section of the book elaborates on this more and gives you room to start actually building some interesting things. The book ends up talking about deploying basic Rails apps, Apache integration, SVN/git, Ajax and other useful topics.
The appendices are really useful and don’t just feel like tables from an encyclopedia. Appendix A takes you through a quick Ruby crashcourse which was really useful. It might still be a bit too high level for your mother to grasp quickly, but if you’ve ever done any sort of programming then you’ll get it almost instantly. The other appendices are equally useful and definitely aren’t just page filler.
So if you’re just trying to wrap your head around Rails I wholehearted recommend this book. I haven’t found a better introduction to Rails, but you likely won’t find a bunch of super-geeks recommending it as it was probably too low of a level for them to want to read. You’ll be able to dig through most of it in a long afternoon, and internalize most of it in a week or so. The examples are clear, short and easily understandable. There are no multipage sections of code to copy, which are often tough to understand and prone to typing errors. The next up rails book that I’d recommend for an aspiring programmer who doesn’t have a large history in programming would be Agile Programming in Rails.
I almost never purchase games the day they come out, and for good reason! The hype machine around most of these games is so big now that it’s hard to tell the crap from the gold. I personally don’t like throwing $60 out the window and for whatever reason I just don’t rent games much anymore. But regardless of this, I went out and purchased Fable 2 for the Xbox 360 the day it was released. Yet, once again the hype engine overpromised and underdelivered.
I didn’t play Fable 1, so I wasn’t fully sure what to expect. Fable 2 is a cool game. It’s an Action/RPG game much in the style of the Zelda series. The main difference with Fable however is that it takes the Zelda ideas and throws the ability to do bad things into the mix and kicks everything up to a much more adult level. Oh and you have a dog that helps you dig holes in the ground and occasionally finishes off an enemy.
The game has a fun graphical style, but it doesn’t feel all that “next generation” to me as Metal Gear Solid 4 did. There are plenty of glitches graphically. Leaving the menu system normally reveals this, as the screen looks as if its at some 8-bit console resolution for a few seconds.
The music is forgetable. I literally can’t recall a single song in my head. Yet I can almost transcribe music from many of the Final Fantasy and Zelda games from memory. It’s not bad, just nothing memorable.
The play control is pretty damn good. I was wary of the simplified combat, but then I remember that is exactly what Zelda had and it worked perfectly. Jumping, as in Zelda is generally only when you’re at an edge/trigger point.
So with those things being good about the game what is weak? LOTS! I don’t think any major gaming publication has covered this well. I guess they were paid off. Big shock there.
Flaws:
Bugs, bugs bugs. I feel very honestly that this game was pushed out before it was done. Another 3 months and it could have rocked. There are parts that simply aren’t play tested, aren’t smoothed out and stick out horridly. In any other game these could be acceptable, but this was supposed to be one of the biggest games ever. Hype machine wins.
Co-Op play is a hack: I don’t know what they were thinking. Co-Op play is stupid, useless and broken. You find your friends and join in as a henchman. You can see their character but they can’t see yours. You run around and kill stuff even faster than before. Oh, and the camera goes fixed-angle. If the entire game was like this it would be an outright bad game.
It is too easy! : First, there is zero consequence to dying. There are no ‘lives’, no ‘continue’ button you have to hit, and no resetting to the beginning of a section. When you die, you fall over for a second… lose a bit of experience (5% of unused experience?)Â and then come back with full life and keep hacking away. I think you a chance of having a ’scar’ too, but who cares?
On top of that, there is zero challenge. No enemies except trolls (only 3 or so of in the game) have difficult timing. None of them have special attacks that matter, and the AI might have been better on a NES system. This is 2008, the enemies need to work together, react, have tactics, use the environment and generally make you hate them. I’d say that this was one of the easiest games I’ve ever played
The dog was useless: I felt a bigger connection with my horse in SotC, or with my Blob in “A Boy and His Blob” from 20 years ago. The dog did nothing for me. There were no quests related to him. He couldn’t die, so you never cared to defend him. He just found random treasure. He was useless in battle. Getting him to do tricks wasn’t fun. I had more fun with a tamagotchi or neopet.
The economy got broke really quick: Once you found out how to make a bit of money chopping wood, and you bought a few places you were set.
They introduced MMO style grinding: The endgame stuff was all MMO style grinding. Who cared about getting 1,000,000 gold to buy the castle. Nothing happened when you did. You didn’t have to defend it or anything. Even with a broken economy 1,000,000 gold was a lot to get and very pointless. Negative points to any single player game that does this.
The plot sucked: The guys at work told me that I shouldn’t have expected a great plot from this. Zelda’s plot was simple so maybe I should cut it some slack, but as soon as I heard “choice” in a game I thought of the choices having as much bearing on the game as they did in Chronotrigger. Yet, no. The “end game” choice that you make is silly and there’s only one sane choice of the three. While I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, the plot is EXACTLY what they lady at the beginning tells you. Go find three ‘heros’, and beat the bad guy. That’s it.
Love is stupid: Even though as far as I remember Zelda and Link never got their groove on, I always felt a strong draw towards finding the princess. Yet in this game, getting married to a random villager takes all of 5 minutes, and has little bearing on the game. Yea, they give you stuff. Whatever. I felt nothing in the relationship. Zero depth.
You can’t sacrifice children: At one point in the game you can sacrifice people to an evil temple. Yet you can’t take the children there. Blah. If I am able to play evil in the game I want to be able to be SUPER evil.
No Blood: I’m not expecting a gory game, but its just cool to see a bit of splatter here and there, even if just to illustrate the type of weapon I use.
Magic was boring: I found the entire magic system to bore me. I used “Fire” for the entire game, and it was generally wear compared to my sword, slow, and a liability. I tried some of the other abilities but there was nothing inventive there.
The inventory menus sucked: Nuff said. Taking potions took forever. The ‘clothing’ system was a joke. Play tested? I think not.
Zero consequence: No matter how many villagers I slaughtered, or what I did… the world kept going. The people of Albion must breed like rabbits, because there were always more to kill. They never amassed against me to draw and quarter me. They actually were just a bit resentful or a bit scared. It didn’t feel like the lord of death had entered the room and was about to end them if they stopped facing perfectly North, or if I forgot which was North was. In Grand Theft Auto the police WILL end you if you act up too much. That’s part of the fun.
Too short: I can’t remember the last game I beat this fast. Seriously.
They however did a few really cool things right:
The world around you: You could hear the world around you. Not as in creatures and stuff, but you can turn it on so that you hear every other person playing the game nearby you over XBL! It made a single player game into a cool multiplayer situation, like you were sitting in a room with 100 friends all playing the same sections. Very cool. Very fun.
Debauchery and wrongness: I wasn’t a “good” guy in the game. I cheated on my wife. I had two wifes. I had threesomes with hookers, no condoms. I think one was a man. I got STDs (I wish there was some consequence from this asides from just the number. Shouldn’t i go blind or at least spread them back to my wife?). I dugg up a lady’s body parts from graves for her sick lover. He raised her from the dead and she fell in love with me. I married her, had sex, had a child, and then since she was a bitch I sacrificed her to the Temple of Shadows. Fun stuff. And then I came back to my normal family and acted like nothing was wrong. Oh, and I killed a few hundred villagers because there didn’t jump when I walked by. And the guards too. In fact, why did I “save the world” asides from to save my own ass. If I was really evil I’d have simply taken over and pulled the switch myself.
Just Fun: Despite being a broken game on many levels, it was pretty fun and I did play all the way through.
Overall, it wasn’t the 10/10 A++ game that many places had billed it was. It was a 7.5/10. This isn’t the new Zelda. This isn’t the new Chronotrigger. My number 1 place to kill hookers is still Liberty City. And if i want good roleplaying storyline there is still always Baldur’s Gate. Well worth playing, but nothing like they said it would be.
I updated my iPhone to firmware 2.0 the day before it came out. I was glad to see that it didn’t complain too much about having a jailbroken phone, and I was pretty happy. I immediately went out to get some apps.
However, I’ve gotten a handful of applications now and realize that most of them honestly suck or are worthless. I guess this is true with every platform, but even many of the “Top 10″ applications really aren’t all that useful and are just a waste of time and money.
Let’s go through what I’ve tried so far:
Bank of America- This is a pretty nice application, but it’s really just a re-wrap of their website as an application. This is a trend that many websites seem to be going for. Wrap up your website, and call it an app. It’s good for checking balances, but little else. C+
Google- Again, just really a re-wrap of the iPhone website. I really wish Google would have done something more but they didn’t. It’s basically just replaced my Safari shortcut to Google apps. C-
Remote- This is likely one of the best applications I have. I have three computers running Leopard, with one of them always hooked up to my media setup. It basically acts as a really sweet iTunes remote control. I wish it looked a bit more like the iTunes on the iPhone. Maybe in revision 2. I’ll give it an “A-“
Monkey Ball- This game is horrible. Likely the worst $10 I’ve ever spent on a game. It was #1 on the top 10 just because it was demo’d as a 3d iPhone app with motion control from Sega. Thankfully I think people have realized that this is the worst game since ET on the Atari 2600. F-
PayPal- This is oddly cool. It actually approximates what PayPal initially was attempting to be as a company. If I don’t mind the PayPal fees, I can actually do things like beam my friends money at the dinner table to pay for dinner or something. I wish it did something super cool like pick up on which iPhone is nearest to transfer the money or something, but as is its pretty good. B+
AquaForest- Also a waste of money. It’s a neat tech demo, but if someone records a video of it online then that’s all you’d ever need to see. Oddly enough more entertaining than Super Monkey Ball. D-.
SmugShot- I have a Smugmug account, but I only like to post professional photos for sale- not junk from my iPhone. I could care less about this app. F. Useless
Twitterrific- It’s a decent Twitter application. Pretty smooth really, but I wish it did a few things better. Searching Twitter would be great. Since it doesn’t “push” in the background you don’t get refreshed while your phone is dormant. Wake me up when it’s updated to be a push-application.
Wordpress- I get it, but blogging from that onscreen keyboard? Umm. No. C-
Pandora- This is pretty awesome. Moreso if you have the 3G phone. It stops the music when my phone is locked though, which isn’t cool. A-
Facebook- Just another website re-wrap. B-
eBay- Just another website re-wrap. C-
Bloomberg- Another website re-wrap but it’s fast and useful and shows the graphs well on screen. B+
Tap Tap Revenge- This is the best free game out there I think. Flawless. Amazing. Fun. A+
AOL Instant Messenge- It worked for me, but it still kinda sucks without Push. C-.
Overall the apps aren’t all that great. I think a lot of people honestly did better without the official API and writing jailbroken apps. Julia Roy also seems to have been dissapointed by many of them. Plus the 2.0 update made things so slow that it was almost unusable. Apparently 2.01 is supposed to be better, but it took them a while to address the issues. I’m installing it right now.
Starting at GamerDNA they assigned me a 17″ Macbook Pro even though I already had a laptop personally. This was much appreciated on my part, as I always hated having to keep my computer “ready for business” at Jazkarta and installing a ton of crap on it that I didn’t want/use. If my personal computer broke because I did something to it odd (like running a Developer Release of OS X) then I was screwed.
Anyway, I got a new laptop. It’s got the 17″ high-resolution (1920×1200) display, 2GB of RAM (gotta upgrade this to 4GB next month) and a 512MB GeForce 8600M GT video card. Its also got all of the other standard options. If you don’t know what comes standard then go to Apple’s site or Google it.
I already have a relatively new 15″ Macbook Pro C2D 2.2ghz 4GB that I reviewed before and I love much. This is my 5th Mac that I’ve had personally or assigned to me (actually 6th if you count the studio computer that I used to use daily at Taylor’s studio).
Let me say, this computer screams. If you need anything stronger than this… then you are either doing HD/4K video, serious data analysis, a hardcore gamer, or something else crazy. This is the fastest computer I’ve ever had.
The 17″ High Resolution screen is amazing. I have the matte screen which imho is the only way to go. Glossy just looks like hell. I don’t like my photos on glossy paper generally, and I don’t like glossy screens either. I also compared the non-LED backlit screen vs this LED backlit one, its a night and day difference.
The 17″ has an additional USB port, larger speakers, weighs a bit more, and has a much larger battery than the 15″. Battery life is superb and outlast my 15″ by at least an hour. The sound is crisp and clear, worlds above my old G4 iBook 12″.
Upgraded from my 15″, but now available as standard options, are the new multitouch mousepad that rocks much more than I thought it would, My 15″ has a 128MB video card (can’t remember the model, but this one is much faster). Also the new ones come with a smaller and lighter power supply which is always a plus.
Downgraded is the fact that it no longer comes with an Apple Remote. I fear that Apple is phasing these out, as fewer and fewer of their systems come standard with it. I think it’s a really nice feature, but I guess the found that few people were using them. I use mine nonstop, as I generally keep one of my systems hooked up to my 37″ 1080p monitor at home and to my main speaker system. They also have a slightly different keyboard layout than my 15″, missing the lower enter key and switching around the volume and expose key. No biggie but a tiny bit annoying.
So asides from saying, “its fast” how fast is it? Well I’m not about to bust out benchmarks, but it runs WoW on my 37″ external screen at 1920×1200 at all settings maxed out and gets between 40-120fps in all scenes. Everything else also flies on it. I exported some videos to YouTube and the compression was nearly instant. Team Fortress 2 and Halflife 2 run at full resolution, with everything cranked at respectable frame rates that are totally playable.
The downsides of the system are… well somewhat obvious. Its big. I’m about to hop on a flight in a few minutes with it… and I don’t think its going to fit into my coach seat well- certainly not if anyone is beside me. I do wish that Apple still sold a smaller footprint notebook, but I guess they think that we should all buy Macbook Airs.
As a plus, my Crumpler Customary Barge shocked me. It holds a 15″ Macbook Pro AND a 17″ Macbook Pro, plus all cables, my D-SLR and extra lenses/flashes and a ton of other stuff. Of course I worry that it would be stolen with over $10,000 of gear in it (although they won’t be running away as it weighs a TON then and literally hurts after walking a mile), but it works. Hell, I could probably throw an Eee-PC, a Macbook Air, and a Kindle in there with it and would still have room.
Not sure if I want to leave this monster on my desk, or have it as my main unit on my back. I might actually just go get an Eee-PC for super-mobile stuff and only carry a “main” laptop if I need it. Save my back!
