So as you may, or may not know, I have been pretty cracked out on Team Fortress 2 for the last few years and have even produced 125+ or so clips of random silly/funny/stupid/wtf moments of gameplay. As part of process I rely highly on two things PREC to automate recording of .dem demos and PLDX Recording Tool to get the .dem file into an x264 encoded mpg4 that is kosher for youtube uploading. A system that once familiarized makes things incredibly streamlined and efficient, however the awesome custom particle eyecandy PLDX tool comes with interfere with one of the best innovations to happen to TF2 Unusual Hats!

So I was talking with my TF2 buddy C.A.Nnon about how it's borked and how to go about fixing PLDX to work with our awesome Unusual Hats and figured it out. Using GCFScape I went into the team fortress 2007 content.gcf file and extracted particles/item_fx.pcf to examine against PLDX's. Turns out, that's all that's needed. I'll even save you some time, here it is extracted for you to easily download. Now what you want to do with that is go into your tf2_recording_tool directory or wherever you have your TF2GUI/TF2 Recording Tool.exe and go into the moviefiles/particles directory. Just to be cautious you should backup the existing items_fx.pcf file in there and replace it with the one you got from GCFScape or downloaded from me.

Done. You're Welcome.

So even before the many months of inconvenience the bedbugs caused I'd been thinking about adding some more shelves to my room, and now it's finally going. Still have a bunch of crap out in the living room for another week or two as I need to finish constructioning two more shelves. Whatever, this post is all pics not words.

Don't get bed bugs kids - shit sucks and I apparently have my downstairs neighbor to thank. Next up, two weeks of living like this:

"She walked out with a lilt in her step and with the silly tuft of bright hair at the back of her head wagging impudently. Definitely a dame to worry about." -Richard Powell, "Say It With Bullets"

New year, new decade - time to get ninjabong.com looking like the rest of this joint. Word.

So the partial vacate notice has finally been completely rescinded and life has gone on. I won't even begin to get into the Kafkaesque depths of deprivity - instead I come bearing a quick and simply gift of a mix tape.

Nothing like coming home at the end of a long day and finding this on your front door :

Boss came to me one day and asked for an old boombox to be outfitted with flashing LEDS and some strobes as a prop for a video shoot he was scheming. So he ordered one off eBay and I got to work outfitting it with LEDs embedded in the speakers while he also located these emergency flashing strobes than run off a single D battery for days, and I was able to take the self-contrained charge/strobe and retrofit them into the lower driver in each speaker housing, since as it turned out weren't even actually fitted with drivers at all and were purely cosmetic speaker cones.

this one says:

So a while ago hack-a-day introduced a really awesome DIY project called The Bus Pirate which is small device for interfacing with all sorts of different chips and devices using a host of protocols. The really slick part is that despite the small size it's extremely flexible due to being a microprocessor with reprogrammable firmware that can be updated to add even more useful features and support more chips/protocols as times goes on.

The one drawback for myself was the use of surface mount components and a PIC uC instead of the simplistic single-sided etched PCBs with through-hole parts and AVR family of uCs I have more familiarity with, so I kept an eye on it in jealous awe until I found someone offering a through-hole version and quickly ordered one up, soldered things together, and had some fun using a MAX7219 to drive a 2-segment LED I had lying around. Getting it working in OS X was fairly trivial thanks to good old ZTerm, which amazes me that it is both still around, still works (even in Snow Leopard!), and is EXACTLY THE SAME as it was 20 years ago when I used it to dial BBSs on a borrowed Mac 512.

Anyway, someone has already documented getting up and running with a Bus Pirate in OSX with ZTerm so I won't bother to reiterate what's already been said there, except that I believe I had to disable Xon/Xoff flow control to get the Through Hole v1a version working right with my particular USB->RS232 adaptor (I have a couple, each is uniquely quirky in some way or another). What I did want to do though is lay out a little documentation that I myself could refer to about reprogramming the firmware on a Bus Pirate from OS X.

To begin with, the main steps for doing so from OS X/Linux are outlined here and I'm just gonna deal with the OS X specifics. It's A LOT nicer than using the Windows P24QP.exe programmer which I found somewhat tricky in actual execution, even if for no other reason than not having to drag everything over to my wintendo for a minute then move everything back on the workbench.

So on my way home from work I dipped into my favorite local bodega to pickup a sammich and hopefully a six of Magic Hat #9. MUCH to my surprise when I looked where Magic Hat usually is I saw something I haven't seen since 1996 when I was living out in southern California while working in my family's restaurant and the distributor dropped off a six. Something I had never managed to find either before or after that six, and after hearing nothing but praise for it I was very interested - and most of it was true.

Was out for dinner last night at the Korean BBQ joint, and after a very long frustrating day continuing the ongoing frustrations of dealing with other peoples work that needs to be fixed before I can even start my work, I took over grilling duties cause I was overdue for something done right - everyone agreed I did quite the job and there were literally high fives all around.

Another few weeks, another new mix.

You will pay more attention.

I made a new mix.

You will listen to it. You will like it. Possibly.

Finally got around to fixing ninjabong.com, prolly mess with it a bit more but seems to be working properly again. Also dumped the buttload backlog of pics up. selah.