Last week my son Chris and I loaded up the old Minecraft server and got to work building some cool stuff. For those of you not in the know, Minecraft is an interactive 3D world where the graphics look worse than Wolfenstein 3D (Dos based FPS not the new one or the old top down one on the Apple II) where you begin your existence with just the shirt on your back and empty hands. You run around and beat up stuff like trees and rocks and even dirt until you have collected some basic items that you can combine. The Mine portion of Minecraft comes from the fact that after you have crafted some digging equipment you can build mine shafts and explore the caverns underground looking for more items to combine and to kill off zombies and creepers.

What I like about this game is that you start with nothing and you are pretty much building and collecting your own ‘lego blocks’ that you can use to build some really impressive stuff. After you’ve had your fill at building static structures you can put on your electrical engineer hat on and dabble with “redstone” which is a stone that contains energy. You can combine this redstone with switches, relays, doors  and minecarts to make some very ingeniousness devices. Last night I was working on a model train track that uses pressure plates to turns on redstone to power the traintrack. Later I found out you can put the indigenous animals in the minecart and have some fun making them go around and around. Last we found out there are some plugins for the bukkit server we are using that would allow us to make “warps” so we can warp between various areas of the map. I ended up building some switches with labels above them that when pressed take you to various areas that Chris and I frequent.

Saturday Chris and I had a competition to see  who could make the most impressive display using glass and lava. In this words glass is very strong and lava can’t destroy it. The rule was that we couldn’t see the other persons build until we were both complete. I thought it would be a cool idea to make an entrance to my “bedroom” by making a glass tube that had lava pouring around it. My goal was to build the structure with no lava yet give myself a way to place the lava starter blocks on the top of the structure and be inside the tube to watch it start. Unbeknownst to me Chris took it a few steps further and build an entire room floor to ceiling of lava encased in glass. Like kids with an unlimited supply of legos we were squeeing like schoolgirls until we both felt that we were done. After checking out one another handy work we forgot about the competition and congratulated one another on our achievement.

So how do you get started with Minecraft? Easy, buy and download a copy of the program (or use the in browser version, both of which run on Java) and get to building. If you want to play multiplayer you can roll your own and run the Minecraft server on a machine on your network (or out on the cloud) or connect one to many servers people are hosting themselves. Minecraft unlike most online games does not have a central server or servers like World of Warcraft does. Still not sold? Check out the MANY videos on youtube of people playing warcraft and all the crazy stuff they have build.

 

Some guy built the USS Enterprise

Someone else build Hogwarts!

Another guy built a 16 bit computer!

this guy built Pong.

This kid made a cannon

Sometime this week I’ll get around to screencapping our build and show you around a bit. We’re still learning about redstone and the cool stuff you can build with it so there isnt much interactivity going on other automated minecarts

This looks interesting too: http://www.modsforminecraft.com/

Gangsta lawn care business dad and posse.

My wife Jen posted this on Facebook today and I thought I’d share….. it’s a DadLife!

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• BMX Bikes
• Mountain Bikes
• Pogo Sticks
• Scooters
• Rollerblades
• Skateboards
• Unicycle

Unicycle?? Really? Tell me more? Somehow in my preteens we acquired a unicycle. It was a Schwinn and it was a pain in the.. well, inner legs to be quite honest. The seat HURT and I mean HURT a bunch, I’d have rashes and bruises in my inner thigh near my groin area due to how crappy this seat was made. It was as if they took the back of 2 Schwinn seats and smashed the fronts together to retrofit this seat. I bent the areas that hurt me as much as I could but it still hurt me quite a bit. I learned to ride the thing by holding onto my closed garage door and ride back and forth. Later I learned to free mount and then I got a bit into jumping bit not much. The unicycle was pretty hard to work on and I didn’t have the proper tools or know how to fix it. Changing the tire was a pain in the butt since none of my friends or I knew how to take the wheel off.

Fast forward 15-20 years later and I’m watching the morning news recently and some guy named Terry “UniGeezer” Peterson was on KTLA morning news showing off his impressive skills [Youtube vids] … and modern Unicycle. After seeing the program I was hooked and started researching out the perfect starter unicycle for my height and weight. The one thing that made me happy was that they redid the seat and that the technology was there to make a unicycle more enjoyable to ride. I searched Craigslist and ebay and all sorts of places to see what the correct one would be for me to get back into the swing of things with a unicycle. I knew I wanted a 24″ Torker LX since the seats are good and they are built tough enough for my price point. I didn’t want to spend a fortune on something I may just give up on 10 mins after failing to ride the damn thing. Me being a cheap bastard I looked and looked and looked and had a hard time finding one for under $100 until I found one on Craigslist stating it was a 24″ Torker LX for $65 and the current owner didn’t know how to ride it and gave up. She said they had one other person interested and “if the hippy doesn’t come through we’ll call you and you can buy it from us”. Days went by and nothing, no call or email. I event emailed them to inquire on the status and nothing. Out of the blue I get an email saying if I want it I can come pick it up in Hollywood. So I headed there located the building and had a hell of a time finding parking. Once I arrived the persons mom I was buying from met me at the elevator with the unicycle. I looked it over and and was pretty happy except that I noticed it was a CX and not a LX it also lacked the handle on the seat I wanted too. I tried it out and thought, for $65 bucks its worth buying to mess with. I took it home and gave it a go and MAN did my legs hurt after doing just 30 minutes of riding.

Memorial day weekend I took the unicycle to the park with Jessalyn and we rode around the tennis court. I on the uni and Jess on her scooter. We raced around the tennis court until she was too tired to continue so we went home and she took a nap. I went out front and tried to free mount the unicycle without the assistance of any walls or other objects to help me I gave up after 45 sweaty minutes not able to mount the uni. We had a bday party to attend and Jen suggested I bring the unicycle since the kids grandparents might get a kick out of me attempting to ride the thing. I think I did quite well so we recorded a bit of video showing my progress. I also talked about me picking up unicycling again on the latest GeekFit Podcast.

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Last weekend I attended BarcampLA, this was their 6th event and it was quite good. It was held at the Mahalo office space in Santa Monica CA Oct 25th and 26th. I took my brother along since he’s never been to an event such as this. I could have taken him to some of the previous events I’ve gone to lately but most of them are about podcasting and he isn’t really into that (no matter how hard I press it on him!). Barcamp was a great experience in sharing all sorts of knowledge in an open forum format. Typically someone would plan out a speech or a slideshow or powerpoint and then there would be a time for open questions. Most of the time the person talking was knowledgeable in the topic at hand but I ran into a few instance where they were only running it to being the discussion. Either way is fine since I’ve learned that at these events there is always someone that know more than you do and in some cases LOVES to make that fact quite known (and sometimes annoyingly too).

Our schedule was as follows:

Saturday

• NIA – Play Pong with your brain
• WordPress – Birds of a feather
• Amazon EC2
• Intro to Hardware Hacking

Sunday

• Swiss Army Knives and Multitools
• Using Photography to build your social network
• Widgets and sharing online
• Microsoft Surface
• Lucid Dreams

Saturday

We arrived around 2pm on Saturday, we left our house at 12:30-1:00 and hit a bit of traffic along the way. I tweeted that I’d be arriving at Mahalo at 2 and my friend and fellow OC Podcaster, PodcastJunky replied stating she was leaving at 2 and I could have her parking spot. Santa Monica is known for its crap parking and expensive parking garage rates so it was a good thing she was leaving when we were arriving. We later found out that quite a few cars were parking in adjacent company spots and they were being towed. When we walked up to Mahalo we were greeted by Jason Cosper who was one of the people running the event. I met Jason (known to his friend as boogah) at a local group he started a few months back, a LA WordPress Users Group. For having the entire event on his and his partners shoulders he was quite chill about the whole thing. I asked how things were going then headed inside. We walked in and wrote our names on some name tags and headed to the events board.

We headed to the NIA – Play Pong with your brain group first. The room quite crowded and after a few small technical issues the presenter was about to demo how to play pong using only his brain. He had a headband with some electronics attached allowing for variations in his brainwaves to move the paddle up and down. He did a couple of great his and then during one volley missed it. It was a great demo of what could be done with so little. He also spoke about some research hes been doing with other forms of input, tounge, nose, eyes.. etc.

Our next stop was WordPress Birds of a Feather by Joe Crawford “artLung”

This was a great talk involving many aspects of wordpress. Upgrade frustrations, not being a crappy shared hosting customer using wordpress (wp-cache anyone?), and some great tips on various wordpress plugins. One thing that was not mentioned was podcasting, interesting.

They handed out free BarcampLA shirts

After that they had snack time and then we headed to the Amazon EC2 talk, the room was quite dark since the room being used was where they shoot the green screen video for Mahalo Daily. EC2 is a way of using Amazon’s servers as a private server of your own. You setup the connection to the server using different methods, we used ElasticFox, a firefox plugin that lets you setup and maintain these virtual servers remotely. After spending $0.10 on my credit card I had a fully functional Ubuntu Hardy install running on a virtual machine. I made sure to terminate the connection and the virtual server so I wouldn’t be changed a fee per hour of it running.

Next up we went to the Intro to hardware hacking with Eliot from Hackaday.com. This was one of the talks I really wanted to see and it was cool to see the guy behind one of my fave sites out there hackaday.com talk about all the cool stuff he deals with. The session started with Eliot bringing in this box that had a bunch of hacked hardware in it. In a very Carrot Top fashion he began pulling things hes hacked in the past from it. WRT routers, LED arrays, LED POVs, Dreammaker, etc. It was good fun to be had by all. He also explained some things about how to get into hardware hacking and the various types of breadboards and some examples of the stuff he uses to hack. I need to find one of those small FON routers and hack it.

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Sunday

Brandon and I arrived early on Sunday so we wouldn’t have a hard time finding parking. Once we arrived we checked out the board and got an idea of what we were interested in hearing about for the day.

Swiss Army Knives and Multitools What a cool and interactive presentation. It was mainly a show and tell of all the cool tools people carry with them, oddly even to events such as this.

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The 1st minute or so of this video appears to be upside down, it corrects its self.

Using Photography to build your social network. William Marc Salsberry did a great job showing how he has used his photography to draw attention to himself and his businesses. By doing so he showed us how we can take photography and making people look good to draw attention to our social networks. One of the things he empasised is making your subject looking good allows for a somewhat viral or word of mouth draw to you and your network. People like to talk when something good happens to them and Marc has learned that by taking great photos he’s not only developed a great relationship with the subject but also with their social network. I’ve recorded his session on video, most of it unfortunatly is the screen or the back of his head.

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Widgets and sharing online. Justin Thorpe from ClearSpring Technologies did a session talking about Widgets and how to use them to share info with others or to use for yourself. The sharing with others bit was interesting because there are many websites out there that provide a service that will take existing content and “widgetize” it. You take your RSS feed or other dynamic content and tell the webservice about it then they create a widget using this data. It can be video, audio, text etc. The idea of using widgets for yourself is interesting because you’d use these on a start page such as igoogle or yahoo. You can see your weather, bank balances, traffic info etc all from your private start page.

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Microsoft Surface. My brother and I were really looking forward to seeing this thing in action. It’s an tabletop based interface that allows you to manipulate “assets” on the screen. It uses a camera below the table to read where you fingers are and allows you to move and interact with items on the screen. We were pretty impressed with this Microsofts effort and we’re looking forward to seeing what the future holds.

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Lucid Dreams. It looks like the Tucker Brothers are both avid dreamers. After listening to this session on Lucid Dreaming and how you can control your dreams and interact with the “dream world” it dawned on us that we both have vivid dreams. I asked about taking in your sleep and no one had much to say regarding that.

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Closing

I think BarCampLA6 went off without a hitch, at least I didn’t notice anything. Things went quite well for the group that attended, twitter was in full effect at this unconference. @jasontucker if you want to send me a shout out.

http://www.google.com/search?q=Talk+like+a+pirate+day

I love how this spammer elongated the ip addresses they are using to include four characters per octet.