Archive for February, 2008
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
Orange Box Modding
Not much new to report in my life but I wanted to write about MINERVA: Metastasis. I’ve been trying out some mods since I bought the Orange Box and so far Minerva is by far the best. Offering the same style of gameplay and feel that Half Life 2 does, it feels like a side story with HL2. You can download it here: http://www.moddb.com/mods/5803/minerva
Another mod of note is ZombiePanic: Source. Filling the void of a zombie shooter until Left 4 Dead comes out, it is very funny and the people I have meet playing it are great. Everyone is into the zombie feel, and the slow speech of zombies looking for braiiiiins… over voice chat from people is great. Gameplay I feel needs some tweaking to balance out the survivors and the zombies and some maps are pretty poor, but it is a nice break from TF2.
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
Published!
My article on custom cables was published up on NSMB.com, if you didn’t read it on my site before go check it out over at http://www.nsmb.com/gear/customcables_01_08.php
That’s the second time my work has been published. The first time was in Elemental, a art book dedicated to 3d art created with Autodesk software.
Thursday, February 7th, 2008
Review: The Witcher
So I recently finished playing The Witcher by Polish developer CD Projekt. It’s a RPG in the same style as Neverwinter Nights, it even uses the same engine that was used in Neverwinter Nights 2. Luckily I played this game using the 1.2 patch and didn’t have to deal with the retail release version of the game. Because the game was released a bit premature, the reviews suffered and I’m sure the sales did as a result. Having never seen sales numbers released or never seeing it in a weekly top 10 sales chart I believe it hasn’t down all that well which is really too bad because with the 1.2 patch this game was very enjoyable and deserves more recognition. Early reviews harped on long load times and game crashing bugs. 1.2 addresses the crashing and the load times, but every time you enter and exit an area you are presented with a loading screen which slows down the game play a lot.
Monday, February 4th, 2008
Need more Cowbell, less snow
Last Friday I hiked up to Cowbell to try and ride some nice downhill in the snow. But there was so much snow it made it very difficult to get down, even the steepest parts required a good deal of pedaling to keep momentum up. I ended up off the trail a lot preferring to ride closer to the tree wells where the snow was less deep. Even though all I can think about is long flowy singletrack where the trail isn’t so white, mother nature has other ideas and keeps dumping Nelson in snow. Time to put the ski boots back on…
Friday, February 1st, 2008
How To: Soldering Cable Ends
Another month another guide. This time around I’m going to show you how to solder your cable ends for a nice clean look on your derailleur cables and brake cables.
I have never liked the cable ends that come on bikes. They tend to come off when they get caught on something, most of them are ugly with multiple crimp marks, or are way too big for the cable they were used on, and will fray your cable ends once you try to take them off so you can’t reuse your cable.
Why would you want to reuse a cable when they are so cheap? One would be the environment, why waste more materials? And two, no need to adjust your shifting once installed because the cable has been stretched already. With a quick wipe down and lube your cable will be good as new. So what is the alternative to cable end crimps? Soldering the end of the cable. Here is what you will need to accomplish this:
