Posts by twiz

  • Minecraft

    Quote from Buddy

    To avoid animals stomping your crops you can fence them off using wooden fence, ah and the animals spawn everywhere the grass is.

    yup get rid of your grass

  • Minecraft

    I've heard of that before, might give it a try one of these days. How is it at mapping out caves?

    I found my first dungeon today.. spider spawner. No loot chest at all!!! I was pissed

    So after that failure, I wandered around that area a bit since there were some caves around. I was doing my normal thing, exploring some cave systems and mining, when I happened upon a cave.. I honestly can't remember what the entrance looked like. That was 5 hours ago. It was enormous, and beautiful. I've done my fair share of spelunking, and I've seen what I thought were huge cave systems... they are nothing compared to this. 10x bigger than anything else I've ever encountered, and that's just what I explored. Before I threw in the towel today I found more passageways, for another day. They go down further... oh my. I think I'm mostly under the "ocean", as I was near the beach when I entered, and that there's water everywhere. And lava, everywhere. Huge waterfalls of lava into huge lakes... treacherous mining, but beautiful. Mobs all over too. I'm glad I armored up well before setting off.. usually I don't, but it paid off.

    It is also the most mineral-rich area I've ever seen. Iron ore and coal all over it. I went through a dozen iron pickaxes, just mining coal/steel/gold/diamond, and towards the end I gave up mining iron and coal since I had so freakin much. I actually had to stop halfway through and make a furnace so I could smelt the iron ore i'd dug up to make more pickaxes. I stopped twice and dropped chests because I couldn't carry anymore... just to give you an idea, not including the six pickaxes I made and a partial suit of armor, I came out with 232 iron ingots, 320 coal, 30 gold, and 10 diamonds. I wasn't deep enough to get into real good diamond territory... perhaps tomorrow. The lava's there, for sure. Just need a bit more depth. I'm sure I went through at least 64 coal in making more torches too...

    Towards the end, I realized that if I died, I would never find this place again.. I couldn't remember what direction I'd traveled from my base (its a good ways away), nor what the entrance to the cave even looked like. Seeing as I was out of food, and there was lava everywhere, I decided just to pick a spot and start digging a staircase. To my surprise, it wasn't long til I surfaced.. I wasn't very deep at all. I have a feeling there is a lot more beneath me. I kept hearings mobs below/around me... I'll have to pay them a visit :derp:

    This, I will screenshot when I have time. It is too incredible not to share.

  • Minecraft

    Yeah, I spent my first few hours in my current world at the bottom of the map, collecting diamonds/gold/redstone. Have yet to use it for anything besides the one diamond for the jukebox Plenty of lava down there. Just keep your tunnels to 1 block wide x 2 high(just big enough for you to fit) and you'll be fine with the lava. If you bust a rock and it gets bright in your tunnel, backpedal and throw down some stones.. always keep an inventory slot with stone/dirt right next to the pickaxe you're using

    I hope they add some uses for gold, because right now.. its really quite pointless. Besides bling(diamond's got it beat anyways, and way more functional too) and golden apples(the most exorbitantly expensive item ever).

  • Minecraft

    Hmm interesting. I have a boatload of iron, a bunch of diamonds and gold, and have yet to have any desire to use it for anything. Still using stone tool 99% of the time, an iron pickaxe is hardly any faster, and stone is so plentiful the stone pickaxes are basically free. I actually have a need to get rid of stone.

    Well, I made a full suit of armor out of iron, and a few swords, but I'll only break the sword out if I meet some nasty mobs while spelunking. I've got a couple iron pickaxes for mining gold/diamond/redstone. And a bucket out of steel... but right now, I don't see any point in ever using gold or diamond. Gold is actually less durable/fast than stone!

    I've actually used one diamond to make a jukebox, but have yet to put my record in it...

  • Sci-fi apartment complex (WIP UDK Environment)

    Omai, very nice minos!!

    One thing that is a bit confusing to me is this:

    [Blocked Image: http://a.imageshack.us/img812/446/minossss.jpg]

    I'm not sure what's going on here, it doesn't make sense geometrically. An artifact of geometry/uv stretching/viewing angle/lighting? I don't know, but it scares and confuses my fragile mortal mind.

    The next one down(with the awesome giant light in the center) also suffers from this weird geometry look, I still can't decipher what's going on tho D:

  • Buying a new computational device!

    Yeah, all of my "really important" stuff (read: schoolwork) goes in my dropbox folder, so its all backed up online and on my other computer.

    Although, with hdds as cheap as they are now, if you're building a whole system you could just buy a mobo with raid support and an extra hdd for like an extra hundred bucks.

  • Buying a new computational device!

    Interesting read on the subject:

    http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bianca/fast07.pdf

    Figure 2 on Page 8 shows the probably distribution of failure over time for a hard drive.

    Starting on page ten it discusses failures in a specific time period (such as a few hours, as in the time it would take to detect a drive failure and replace the failed drive in an array)

    Figure 10 on Page 13 shows the time between replacements on HTC1, which is composed of 3406 hard drives. When one drive failed, the lowest expected time until the next failure(out of 3406 drives) is around 4 days.

    The probability in HTC1 that a drive will fail within an hour of another drive failure is maybe 5%. With much fewer drives, that probability will obviously drop.

  • Buying a new computational device!

    I think the RAID array is useful for protecting against the random failures and the lifespan failures. Random HDD failures (which are due to the physical drive itself) do happen, and the likelihood of two random failures (even if they have a common cause, such as temperature or vibration) happening simultaneously are very low. Same goes for lifespan. Power surges should be protected against with a surge protector obviously.

    If you properly protect against the common failure modes of a hard drive, the only possibilities for failure would be either normal lifespan failure or a malfunctioning device (manufacturer's error). Keep the temperature down and minimize vibration, use a surge protector. Basically the RAID array is effective against protecting from truly random drive failure(ie, the cause is entirely internal to each device) and lifespan failure.

  • Buying a new computational device!

    I too have heard the Intel Core processors are the bee's knees.. I went newegging to see how much it'd be to upgrade my system, and decided against that rather quickly $300 for the cheapest core i7's.. up to a grand+

    Then I looked at some AMD processors and a quad-core 3ghz is a hundred bucks, great reviews, take well to overclocking, etc... Unless you have cash to burn, seems to be the smart way to go! You get an L3 cache with the i7's, but I've read the performance increase is minimal for the additional cost. An AMD Phenom X2 quad core, 3.4ghz with a 6mb L3 cache is $150, just about half as much as the i7 you have specced.

    I've also heard really good things about the Samsung Spinpoint F3 drives, fast and quiet. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822152185

    $5 more expensive than your specced drive, but it has a better Newegg rating, fwiw. Occasionally they'll go on sale for ~$60, so maybe snap one up during one of those sales.

    I see dux has mentioned the spinpoint already

  • Portal 2

    I could not be more excited for this game. All of their additions to the gameplay seem so obvious, yet I would never have thought of them. And their implementations are perfect; it still looks and feels 100% Portal. I love the direction they've taken the story. I don't think I've ever preordered a game(I'm a cheap bastard, I only buy games once they're in the $20-30 range ); this I will.

  • What have you purchased recently?

    Yeah, rumors are saying firmware/software fix in the next month or so. Even without GPS, the tower triangulation speed is a billion times faster than the iphone, so I'm already partially pleased.

    I just have to say, swype by itself was worth the switch. Swype, combined with the phone being faster in general, and it having a spellcheck dictionary that isn't completely retarded, has increased my typing speed tenfold... and I've only been using swype for a couple hours. Being able to type "now" without the phone suggesting "Noe" is glorious. I have no idea who this Noe person is, but I must have rained ten-thousand curses upon her during my time with the iPhone. And despite never once accepting its Noe "correction", it still offered it up, every damn time.

    As I never really paid much attention to my google contacts before, when it synced... my god. I must have a thousand people in my contacts. I have a lot of pruning to do. I see a roll-o-dex widget in my future.

  • Mafia 2 website/screens

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Mafia

    Quote

    Mafia properly refers to a number of Italian criminal organizations, particularly the Sicilian Mafia and the American Mafia.

    Quote

    The Italian-American Mafia continues to dominate organized crime in the U.S. It uses this status to maintain control over much of the organized crime activity in Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Providence, New Jersey, and New York City, as well as in other cities in the Northeastern United States and across the country, such as Las Vegas, Tampa, New Orleans, Miami, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and many others.

    Uhh... pretty sure there's a difference between facts and stereotypes. And I'm pretty sure the game is not implying that EVERY italian-american ever to walk the earth was in the mafia and a cold blooded murderer. Just most of them

  • Diablo 3

    Is it just me, or are those trailers introducing the monk and the wizard *really* poorly done, cheesy/corny? It looks like a fan-made machinima, not something that should be on blizzard's website. I'm shocked tbh, blizzard is the master of epic trailers and cutscenes and all that jazz, and this looks like maybe they got to the initial rough draft and said.. meh good enough.

  • What have you purchased recently?

    Quote from Serenius

    What phone is that?

    Samsung Captivate. So far it kicks the crap out of the iPhone experience, and I was an Apple phone fanboi for years.

    Right now I'm looking at either that exact phone or the iphone 4. I'm going to the store tomorrow to try them both out... I've had a 2g iphone since the early days, but it's on its last legs.. I love it, but more and more its getting on my nerves. slow, and apple's bullshit is annoying me. I think the iphone4 looks cooler.. but I don't give a shit about that, and the captivate certainly isn't bad looking. And its not like I don't love google and samsung just as much as my iphone (I'm reading this on a samsung monitor in a google chrome browser )! Think it might be time for a change.