The Ogres Are Back!

I’ve brought my Ogre team back out of semi-retirement and am playing them in the second season of my buddy’s new BloodBowl league. My first game was against the humans, and the Ogres crushed them with a 2-0 final score.

Since my returning team was playing against a newly formed team, my opponents received over a million gold pieces worth of inducements, which made things a little more challenging for me. However, an early game touchback and some lucky die rolls saw me to victory.

Sadly, one of my snotlings was killed during the game — the first kill of the season.

Personal Forums! Woohoo!

Huzzah! I’ve got my computer hosting my own personal forums!

Early this morning, before work, I installed an Apache HTTP Server 2.2 on my machine, enabling me to serve up web pages over the internet. It was pretty easy for someone with my level of familiarity with computers to install and set up. I was hosting a test web page in no time!

Then I installed the PHP 5.2.6 module for Apache 2.2, which allows my computer to run PHP scripts which are necessary for fancy web-based programs like bulletin boards. This pretty much set itself up for me.

After that I installed MySQL 5.0, a database server. This is needed to store posts people make on my forums.

I installed the MySQL extension for PHP so that PHP-based scripts could access the database. This was a little tricky, but I managed to get it working after remembering that I had to modify the Apache server configuration file to also load the new extension.

Lastly I installed the forum software, configured it, and blammo! Done!

So far I haven’t actually created any proper topics and such for my forums, but I plan on using it to record discussions for some programming ideas with friends.  But it’s pretty cool to have it all up and running from nothing in such a short period of time!

Steampunk Star Wars Customs

Check out some neat, hyper-technological Victorian-era custom Star Wars action figures at Sillof’s Workshop. Very nice!

I like the little tuft of steam coming out of the smokestack on the R2 unit.

This guy has made a lot of other custom stuff, too. The Gaslight Justice League features DC comic superheroes in a late 19th century style. And the Star Wars: 1942 Biker Scout is great!

Yo, Joe! Wave Nine!

I just got the entire 9th wave of GI Joe figs (on US cards) and the first non-exclusive wave of vehicles from my local collectibles/comic shop Galaxy Comics. Jeremy, the proprietor, gave me a call this morning, letting me new GI Joe stuff was in, and I went over there after work, thinking I would probably be flipping through a bunch of old figures, looking for a few US ones I am still missing from the two past recent waves.

But when I arrived — lo and behold — it was all new! Even the two “filler” figures in the box were ones from old waves that I was missing (each wave typically consists of six new guys, but they send them in boxes of eight, filling the space with figures from previous waves). I offered to buy them all plus the four new vehicles on the spot. Bye-bye spending money for the rest of the month.

This is one of the best waves with such figures as Barbecue, Ninja-Ku, Snow Serpent, and the greates GI Joe action figure ever…

The Battle Android Trooper!

The B.A.T. was my favorite GI Joe action figure when I was a kid. As if being a cool looking robot soldier wasn’t enough: he had four interchangeable hands! The new mold has all the same features as the old one save for an actual recessed chest cavity instead of a holographic sticker.

Cobra always had the coolest guys!

Recipe: Perfect Roasted Almonds

Perfect Roasted Almonds

Ingredients:

  • One bag of raw, unblanched almonds (approx 250g).

Directions

  1. Preheat conventional oven to 325°F.
  2. Spread almonds evenly on a baking pan. You don’t want the pile of almonds in the pan to be more than one almond deep.
  3. Roast almonds in oven for one hour.
  4. Remove almonds and let them cool.
  5. Eat almonds.

These directions should provide you with deliciously roasted almonds that you can add as a flavor accent to brownies and such, or just to eat as a great, healthy snack!

X-COM: Apocalypse on Windows XP

I think I finally got one of my favorite old DOS games — X-COM: Apocalypse — playable on Windows XP. The traditional way to get this game running on newer machines is to use a cool DOS emulator called DOSBox, but the times I’ve tried it in the past have been unsatisfactory…namely because the sound was poor and stuttered a lot.

But I came across a new way to get this game running and I tried it myself. I haven’t officially been able to test out the game since I did the installation of it by remote, but when I get home I’ll try it.

In case you are interested in trying this yourself, these are the steps I followed:

  1. Download and Install Microsoft Virtual PC 2007
  2. Create a new Windows 98 virtual machine.
  3. Install the Windows 98 operating system on the virtual machine. I recommend creating an ISO image from your Windows 98 installation CD and mounting that image within the vm. The free program ImgBurn is great for making ISO images.
  4. Install X-COM: Apocalypse on the virtual machine. Again, an ISO image of the original CD is recommended. However, as with the OS install, you can just use the real CD in your optical disc drive and tell the vm to use that.

And that’s it. The game is ready to go within the virtual machine!

A couple of caveats on the X-COM installer, though: when first running the installer, it sat at a black screen for a while. Just be patient. Also, after the installation is complete, the installer may sit at a black screen indefinitely. You can safely just kill the process at that point.

Cobra Humvee

I recently noticed an Incredible Hulk toy that was released for the new Hulk movie. This toy came with a Hummer which was about the right size for GI Joes. I figured a modern-day Cobra organization would be using these things, so I picked one up. I also grabbed a can of Krylon Fusion spray paint for plastics and bought some decals from Cobra Stickers.

I removed all the stickers from the Humvee, then took it apart. I spray painted the pieces separately so as to be able to get every nook and cranny. There were some designed that were painted onto the truck that the spray paint had trouble adhering to, but the paint eventually covered it after using several coats (with drying in between).

It’s nothing fancy — I just wanted an overall “Cobra” color scheme — but I think it looks okay:

Before:

After:


There was also a “button”, of sorts, that stuck out of the front grill. When this button was pushed in, it would smash the hood (i.e. “hulk smashing action!”). I removed this button and super-glued the two halves of the hood together to give them more stability. A more serious customizer would probably want to putty up the crack between the two halves of the hood before painting it.

The cannon also fires a plastic missile an impressive distance.

Also, the Krylon Fusion paint actually melts the plastic, fusing the paint into the plastic itself. If you’re thinking of using this stuff, you have to be careful when handling freshly painted plastic as its surface is quite deformable while the paint is still wet.

I had the rear trailer hitch piece sitting on the ground, with the bulk of the weight of the piece resting on a painted surface and the plastic edge there flattened out a bit. If your not careful with this stuff, you can easily end up with fingerprints melted into your plastic parts.

Because of this “fusion” action, you’ll want to wait until the paint is nice and dry (at *least* 24 hours) before putting figures in it or you’ll risk melting them a bit.