Game Gardeners

TeamDroid » DIY Hollow Out A Light Bulb

2006-05-19T22:53:00.000-07:00

TeamDroid » DIY Hollow Out A Light Bulb: "When I was growing up I had a keen interest in the sciences. Mostly because of the cool gear that scientists used, you know, beakers, flasks, Bunsen burners that sort of thing. Well, not only did I not have the money for those sorts of thing but I had no idea where to even buy them if I could. So I had to improvise. One of the better improvisations I was able to do was to hollow out a light bulb and use it for other things. The glass that makes the envelope of the build is quite heat resistant and the screw base is good to attach things to (even better if you can find old ones with brass bases, you can solder to those). I made a number of small boilers in order to learn about steam and distillation. I hope to show people that even if a bulb burns out, it can still be useful."

Improvements to Renuzit Trumpet Mute

2006-05-19T22:43:00.000-07:00

Improvements to Renuzit Trumpet Mute: " Although I'm a very beginner, I realized, that 'the original renuzit mute' plays badly out of tune. This was confirmed by my teacher, a professional trumpet player. The mute raises the pitch of some notes, perharps due to shortening the bell. To make it play in tune, I removed the 'plug', that closes the top of the container (on the side, that is pushed into the horn)"

NASA World Wind

2006-05-19T11:41:00.000-07:00

NASA World Wind: "World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there. Virtually visit any place in the world. Look across the Andes, into the Grand Canyon, over the Alps, or along the African Sahara."

The Gwigle Game

2006-05-18T23:04:00.000-07:00

The Gwigle Game: "an educational game to help you use Google more effectively. Can you figure out what is being searched for by looking at the results?"

The Gwigle Game

2006-05-18T23:02:00.000-07:00

The Gwigle Game: "an educational game to help you use Google more effectively. Can you figure out what is being searched for by looking at the results?"

Virtual Stock Exchange - Home

2006-05-18T22:46:00.000-07:00

Virtual Stock Exchange - Home: "Virtual Stock Exchange is brought to you by MarketWatch"

The MegaPenny Project | Index Page

2006-05-17T15:14:00.000-07:00

The MegaPenny Project | Index Page: "Visualizing huge numbers can be very difficult. People regularly talk about millions of miles, billions of bytes, or trillions of dollars, yet it's still hard to grasp just how much a 'billion' really is. The MegaPenny Project aims to help by taking one small everyday item, the U.S. penny, and building on that to answer the question: 'What would a billion (or a trillion) pennies look like?'"

Homemade Juggling Balls - Science Tricks - Surfing Scientist - The Lab

2006-05-17T00:00:00.000-07:00

Homemade Juggling Balls - Science Tricks - Surfing Scientist - The Lab: "They cost next to nothing and look great, and they're perfect for learning how to juggle."

Ruby on Rails Podcast

2006-05-16T16:25:00.000-07:00

Ruby on Rails Podcast: "The Rails podcast features interviews with people who are doing cool stuff with the Ruby language and the Rails framework."

GorillaMask.net Video: The Evolution of Dance

2006-05-12T12:09:00.000-07:00

GorillaMask.net Video: The Evolution of Dance: "The Evolution of Dance!"

Zillow.com - Your Edge in Real Estate

2006-02-09T19:38:00.000-08:00

"Satellite map with home value estimates"

The Kirk Center - The University Bookman

2006-02-08T09:14:00.000-08:00

The Kirk Center - The University Bookman: "The University Bookman Table of Contents, Vol 44, No. 1 (Fall 2005)"

LJBook (Turn your blog into a PDF Book)

2006-02-07T23:34:00.000-08:00

LJBook (Turn your blog into a PDF Book): "A LJ Book is a book with all your entries extracted from your LiveJournal, DeadJournal or AboutMyLife. It's a PDF Document ready to print. It's produced in about 3-4 minutes."

Poynter Online - Fifty Writing Tools

2006-02-07T23:23:00.000-08:00

Poynter Online - Fifty Writing Tools: "My friend Tom French, who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, told me he liked my tool list because it covered writing from the 'sub-atomic to the metaphysical level.' By sub-atomic, he meant the ways words, phrases, and sentences work. By metaphysical, he meant the ways writers live, dream, and work."

Cool Tool: Tick Twister

2006-02-07T21:16:00.000-08:00

Cool Tool: Tick Twister: "This is the greatest tool for removing ticks from dogs or people."

Beautiful Soup: We called him Tortoise because he taught us.

2006-02-07T11:36:00.000-08:00

"Beautiful Soup is a Python HTML/XML parser designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping. Two features make it powerful: 1. Beautiful Soup won't choke if you give it bad markup. It yields a parse tree that makes approximately as much sense as your original document. This is usually good enough to collect the data you need and then run away. 2. Beautiful Soup provides a few simple methods and Pythonic idioms for navigating and searching a parse tree: a toolkit for dissecting a document and extracting what you need. You don't have to create a custom parser for each application. "

DIY Live » DIY Archive » Electronics Tutorial

2006-02-06T22:28:00.001-08:00

"I know that starting out in Electronics can be intimidating. There is a lot that you have to understand in order to really get a grasp of electronics. Sure, you can find some schematics, and put them together, but without understanding what resistor to put with a LED, and why you pick that resistor for that LED, then you can’t really do much except for just copy other people’s designs. I decided to find a few links for everyone to go to that will help them understand circuits, and circuit design."

DIY Live » DIY Archive » Electronics Tutorial

2006-02-06T22:28:00.000-08:00

National Cornbread Festival Home Page

2006-02-06T00:37:00.000-08:00

National Cornbread Festival Home Page: "If you didn't attend last year's festival, you missed a very exciting cook-off contest! When the judges finally got together and made their 'not so easy' decisions, they came up with these results along with the winning recipes:"

NASA - SuitSat

2006-02-04T21:37:00.000-08:00

NASA - SuitSat: "SuitSat can be heard by anyone on the ground. 'All you need is an antenna (the bigger the better) and a radio receiver that you can tune to 145.990 MHz FM,' says Bauer. 'A police band scanner or a hand-talkie ham radio would work just fine.' He encourages students, scouts, teachers and ham radio operators to tune in."

We Like The Moon - the Spongmonkeys try and cash in on the kittens' success - By Joel Veitch rathergood.com, song by Joel and Alex Veitch

2006-02-04T15:30:00.000-08:00

We Like The Moon - the Spongmonkeys try and cash in on the kittens' success - By Joel Veitch rathergood.com, song by Joel and Alex Veitch

the evangelical outpost: Sizing Up People By Their Accents

2006-02-04T14:45:00.001-08:00

Sizing Up People By Their Accents: "The Foreigner accent is a rather broad category that covers all people from such non-native English speaking countries as Germany, Korea, and Australia. It’s rather easy to pick out and generally shows that someone has the good sense to leave their third world country - France, for example - and come to the Promised Land. Texans have no problem with foreigners."

the evangelical outpost: Sizing Up People By Their Accents

2006-02-04T14:45:00.000-08:00

L'ART ET LA MANIERE DE PLIER UN TEE - ALL TRIBES HOT STUFFS

2006-02-02T19:35:00.000-08:00

"L'ART ET LA MANIERE DE PLIER UN TEE"

Projection clock

2006-02-02T18:59:00.000-08:00

Projection clock: "The first time I saw a projection clock (a friend had shown me his projection clock, which he used to project the time on his bedroom ceiling), I knew I could easily build my own by converting a watch with an LCD display. I bought a very very ugly watch in a dollar store. So ugly that it really is unwatchable ;) At least it's easy to disassemble... "

Macleans.ca | Culture | Books | Why should he have to live what he writes?

2006-02-01T23:17:00.000-08:00

"The trouble with the memoir racket is that most folks who lead interesting lives don't want to write and most folks who do want to write have lives that consist of sitting around in their underwear staring at the keyboard and getting up to refill the coffee mug every 20 minutes. Hard to work that up into anything 'brave' and 'inspirational.'"

Choose Your Retro-Gram!

2006-02-01T23:06:00.000-08:00

"Retro-Gram Classic The pragmatic look of an early 1930s telegram. Our signature Retro-Gram features a yellow-paper background, particularly appropriate for messages that will be viewed on-screen (rather than printed)."

Searchlight - Search and Subscribe your network

2006-02-01T09:24:00.000-08:00

"Searchlight brings Apple's Spotlight to the network. Through a web interface you are able to search with incredible speed for documents stored on your server. A click on one of the results connects your computer to the server and shows the document."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to PHP

2006-01-31T13:19:00.000-08:00

"Learn everything about PHP, from getting your first application started to what the future of the language holds."

04-05 Ice Wall 1

2006-01-31T10:44:00.000-08:00

"Alaskan Alpine Club The ice wall adventure, 17 October 2004 to 6 January 2005"

China Pics

2006-01-31T10:43:00.000-08:00

Harbin Ice and Snow World 2005

Beautiful Soup: We called him Tortoise because he taught us.

2006-01-31T10:14:00.000-08:00

Big Zookeeper

2006-01-31T10:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.bobpitch.com/files/zookeeper.swf

HYDROFOAM

2005-07-26T16:39:00.000-07:00

"HYDROFOAM Documents récupérés sur le net pour faciliter la consultation voir origine plus bas"

rc boat-plane hybrid

2005-07-26T15:18:00.000-07:00

amphbious land,water,air model

TCS: Tech Central Station - Harry Potter and the Half-Wit Prigs

2005-07-26T10:23:00.000-07:00

"Never one to avoid leaping on a bandwagon I am going to tell you about Harry Potter. Or rather, how others who cannot see a passing wagon without similarly leaping aboard have managed to get their facts a little, umm, confused. The perpetrators are our old friends, Greenpeace International, who have decided that US readers should boycott the local edition of the latest Harry Potter and buy the Canadian one instead. The reason is, you see, that the US version is not printed on recycled paper:"

Some java resources

2005-07-25T23:23:00.000-07:00

Yvan Cartwright's Lecturing Notices

"FSDD extra tutorial on 6th March 2002. Powerpoint slides - Java Syntax & Classes" I'm going to use this as our syllabus of sorts.

Windows: the sweet smell of success

2005-07-25T23:17:00.000-07:00

Ahh, so it turns out that just downloading the zip file is all you need to do to get the gg things working. If you check it out from svn you have to do some other fiddling. So, we were able to build and run atlantis from the command line, with great rejoicing. Still to do: get everything working under eclipse. I'll start up a new page that has complete step by step procedures for getting to this point under Windows and on the Mac.

need to install samskivert, etc

2005-07-24T22:06:00.000-07:00

Asking these questions on the gg msg board:

So, I finally got java + ant working on windows... hooray! Now when I try the first step of the build, I get a bunch of "package does not exist" errors on com.samskivert.util. Should that have been fetched from the checkout of svn://code.threerings.net/gardens/trunk/projects/games, or should I get that somewhere else? Basically, should I install any libraries or tools before starting to build atlantis? Many TIA! Mark -------------- So it seems the answer might be: Download the three libraries listed on http://gamegardens.com/howto/ under Libraries and Documentation. samskivert has a jar file. narya has a zip or tgz file. toybox doesn't have anything as of yet. Can someone loan me a clue as to what, if anything, I should do with each of the above?

2005-07-24T21:49:00.000-07:00

Now ant and the compiler seem operational... at last! Now I think I need to get the gg libraries installed, which are not pulled in from the games download.

compile: [javac] Compiling 19 source files to C:\Documents and Settings\MarkH\My Docu ments\gg\threerings\games\atlantis\dist\classes [javac] C:\Documents and Settings\MarkH\My Documents\gg\threerings\games\atl antis\src\java\com\samskivert\atlanti\Log.java:28: package com.samskivert.util d oes not exist [javac] public static com.samskivert.util.Log log = [javac] ^

Windows: need to set JAVA_HOME

2005-07-24T21:43:00.000-07:00

Got this message, so set JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_04 I also removed one of the various JRE's that had been installed.

C:\Documents and Settings\MarkH\My Documents\gg\threerings\games\atlantis>ant di st Unable to locate tools.jar. Expected to find it in C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5. 0_02\lib\tools.jar Buildfile: build.xml prepare: compile: [javac] Compiling 19 source files to C:\Documents and Settings\MarkH\My Docu ments\gg\threerings\games\atlantis\dist\classes BUILD FAILED C:\Documents and Settings\MarkH\My Documents\gg\threerings\games\atlantis\build. xml:60: Unable to find a javac compiler; com.sun.tools.javac.Main is not on the classpath. Perhaps JAVA_HOME does not point

GG needs Java 1.5, Mac only has 1.4 installed

2005-07-23T22:54:00.000-07:00

Need to install Java 1.5 on Mac. It's here. Also installed ant, to follow along with GG getting started howto. Update: the above java 1.5 link is only for osx 1.4. According to the Apple Java FAQ, you will have to be running Tiger to use java 1.5. :-( :-( :-(

Interesting article by GG

2005-07-23T21:28:00.000-07:00

Interesting article by Michael D Bayne, one of the Three Rings guys:

Last week, I described a distributed-object system and implemented a simple chat applet. If you recall, I promised something a little more exciting than a chat applet to demonstrate the true usefulness of the distributed-object system. This week is upon us, and I present to you something very exciting indeed¹. I have written, for your amusement, a multiplayer networked game². True to my claims, all player interaction takes place through the use of distributed objects. In fact, with a few small additions, last week's distributed-object system became this week's foundation for networked games³.

Need Subversion

2005-07-23T21:21:00.000-07:00

You will subversion, the revision control system to download some of the files. Follow the download link from the subversion home page. For windows, TortiseSVN is pretty nice. For Mac, it seems the command line version is your only option.

Mac setup

2005-07-23T17:53:00.000-07:00

Downloaded the mac download from eclipse.org. My firefox setup downloads the tar.gz file to the desktop and automatically extracts. This resulted in a folder "eclipse" which I dragged into the Applications folder. I think you have to drag the eclipse folder and not just the eclipse.app bundle into the Applications folder. Selecting Applications/eclipse/eclipse.app started Eclipse. I was able to build the sample hello world project without any trouble.

First trial lesson

2005-07-23T17:27:00.000-07:00

Alex and I sat down and followed the steps in the eclipse tutorial for setting up a java console program (the hello world example). Everything went pretty smoothly and we were able to get it running with a minimum of fuss. The key thing in eclipse seems to be always to add a new something (e.g. class) to an existing something (e.g. project). We messed around with variable declaration, printing variables, expressions and conditionals. I'm going to look for some online java beginner course outlines to follow.

Getting set up for Java programming -- Win XP

2005-07-23T17:13:00.000-07:00

Both kids primarily use Windows. I primarily use Linux and Mac OS X. Figuring out what to set up on all of these boxes has proved to be rather troublesome. There are so many things you can potentially install, and so little guidance on what you should install. I started with the windows box (XP). I ended up downloading and installing several versions of the jre and j2se sdk from java.sun.com. I also ended up installing and then uninstalling the netbeans environment -- it seemed to be a visual development environment, but it was only for netbeans. I ended up installing the J2SE 1.5 SDK and Apache Ant in c:\. I added both directories to the path (look under My Computer/Properties/Advanced/Environment). I installed Editpad so I could read the README files distributed with these packages. They all come with Unix-formatted text files, so Notepad won't display them properly. With all of this done, I was able to run the sample programs which came with the SDK. Unfortunately, I thought all of this was going to be a bit overwhelming for the kids, so I did a bit of web searching and decided to try the Eclipse environment. Eclipse comes as a zip file. I unzipped it to the shared documents folder, and made a shortcut to the eclipse binary from each person's desktop. So far, that seems to be the most workable solution going forward. Once I get to the point where I can build and run a GG (gamegardens) game, I will post the exact steps and downloads I needed to get to that point.

Hola~

2005-07-23T16:57:00.000-07:00

This summer I'm working with two sixth graders to learn programming. We like Puzzle Pirates and were intrigued when we found out the company behind Puzzle Pirates, Three Rings, have another site gamegardens.com. Their home page describe it thusly:

What is Game Gardens? A place to play online multiplayer games and a place for game developers to create their own multiplayer games and host them for others to come and play. [...] Create your own games: If you can program in Java, you can use our multiplayer game toolkit to create your own games, and then upload them to the site for others to play. [...] Chat with fellow game makers: Use the message boards to share ideas on how to make games and to get help if you're just getting started

Both kids have a bit of experience with hyperstudio and logo, and of course are mad crazy about games in general. We'll use this blog to document what we've done and what our experience has been. My main goals are to:

Keep track of what all I've downloaded and installed. Getting set up for Java programming on a fresh computer is not simple due to the zillions of choices of things to install, most of which assume you already have some familarity with Java development.
Keep a list of links of resources we've found useful.
Assist anyone else who might be interested in using Game Gardens as an educational tool.
Solicit help from anyone who might have experience with this.

Regarding that last item, all suggestions and feedback are enthusiastically solicited and welcomed!