I'll start by addressing the big problem with this game: On its easy difficulty setting (dubbed "Friendly"), the game is much too hard for casual players -- at first. The game starts in media res, with Spider-Man fighting the thugs of Wilson Fisk, aka the Kingpin. Since this videogame is frequently compared with Batman: Arkham Asylum, I'll…
Through a World of Warcraft discussion message board, I heard of a research study being conducted by West Virginia University on the relationships between videogame players and their avatars. In a "what the hell" mood, I responded to the survey with a story about one of my WoW characters. I thought the story was minor, but to…
The New York Primary Elections are on Thu, Sep 13th. We've learned in recent years that primary elections are very important; the results of those elections bear on issues like who the superdelegates are at the Democratic National Convention. I've been doing some web research on the candidates. I found Ballotpedia to be a very useful resource,…
Once again, I'm in an introspective mood as I contemplate my history in the Craft. It's been forty-three years since I took out a copy of Real Magic from the reserved stacks of the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Without that book, I never would have engaged with paganism in my later years. It's been…
I'm still working on the biography of Isaac Bonewits, though I admit my progress has been slow. I periodically scan more documents from the last boxes of papers Phaedra sent me. One big issue with my research was transcribing interviews. I have about 70 hours worth of interviews so far, with still a few more to go.…
Of course not! The setup I described in my previous post has an issue that's not obvious: the fans are on all the time. They're powered by the +5V pins on the Raspberry Pi. The fans were pretty quiet, but they were still audible in a quiet room. It was also a waste of power. I wanted…
I knew from the start of this project that I'd need to put all the components in an enclosure. This was to be a semi-permanent installation; I couldn't have wires and heat sinks dangling everywhere. Sam Groveman suggested this type of project box. I picked one that would be big enough to hold the solid-state relays along…
Did you read part 7 yet? If you thought to yourself "I don't need to read part 7" that means you need to read part 7. (The exception is if you're a licensed electrician, of course.) Now I've reached the stage that Goldy is dreading: Working with power cords. The point of this project was to use…
In my previous post in this saga, I'd just reached the point when I start talking about power cords. Before I go any further, we have to deal with some practical stuff. Starting with my next post on this project, I'm going to describe how I worked with wires that carry household current. These lines carry 120V…
In the last part of this overly-extended saga, I described how I got a Raspberry Pi to send signals to the pins on its circuit board. The next step is to get the signal from those pins to control the flow of electricity through a 240V power cord. I found several posts on the web (here's one)…