All posts by The Plaid Mentat

Gaming

Warhammer Table

Spending a lot of time in the car on the way home from Thanksgiving gave me a lot of time to think about an idea for a Warhammer gaming table. The idea is a bit of an amalgam of three technologies that I have seen somewhat recently:

  1. Projectors hanging from the ceiling: I call this a technology, but I guess it’s more of an idea. My first interest in this idea spawned when I saw someone using it as a method for projecting dungeon maps onto a gaming table where the characters would then move around their miniatures to simulate their characters moving through the dungeon. The beauty of this idea, in my mind, was it’s simplicity – there was no program running in the background, it was simply a method of projecting a map somewhere useful.
  2. Team Ninja’s fusing of webcam technology with a projector: Jessa’s senior project group is working on a piece of software that allows a feedback loop to the process – the projector projects a virtual environment and uses the webcam to allow a physical interaction. They are currently working on how to allow the virtual environment to communicate with “smart” physical objects so that they can interact both ways.
  3. The L3D’s Pita Board (at least, I think that’s what it’s called): This bit of tech uses an electronic chess board built into the table to allow the table to detect the locations of certain keyed physical objects. The interesting thing here, for me, is not so much the board itself, so much as the method of user interface. Moving the figures on the board allows the user to change what the program is doing and how it works, without ever having to touch a keyboard or mouse.

Now that you know where I’m coming from, let me flesh out the idea a little more…

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Books

Phillip Jose Farmer’s: The Dungeon

I’ve just finished Phillip Jose Farmer’s: The Dungeon for the second time, and there are so many reasons why I love this series that each book could probably be it’s own blog post. But, since I’ve already moved on to reading something else, the thought would probably be lost to me before I got into it. So, I’m going to have to cover all six books at once. The primary side effect of this is that I’ll be mostly covering the first five books because, sadly, the last book is as bad as the rumors say.

In short, the story in The Dungeon is that of a hero’s journey. In long…

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Past

Voices From the Past…

…Like 15 Years ago. Or maybe just a week, we’ll see. At any rate, I’m out of town this week with no access to the Internet, so I had to publish something early (since Jessa broke the news about my blog early). Originally I had planned on getting all this up the week after Thanksgiving so that I could keep up with my promise of “at least once a week” without missing the first week after launch. Plus, I figured I could get a buffer going just in case things got dicey. Well, none of that, so instead I am checking out the delayed publish feature of pivot and bringing you something slightly different from the norm.

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Uncategorized

It Starts…

As you might have guessed, if you’ve made it this far, I’ve got a blog. What this means is actually two-fold – first, it means that I can start writing on a reasonably regular basis, but it also means that I have set some goals to do so. The big question is then, Why?

The first reason is that I really enjoy writing. As strange as that might seem coming from a Mathematician/Computer Scientist, it’s true; writing is something I truly enjoy doing. It’s a creative outlet (even if what I am writing is not necessarily creative, I like that I can be creative with the language), it’s a mental outlet (all those things that I think about that I can’t write anywhere else), and it’s a physical outlet (it exercises my fingers when I’m too restless to read, but too mellow to run a marathon).

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