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Table-top Games / Re: Sagrada
« Last post by Dragon on January 17, 2025, 21:47:11 »
It had been more than a year since we played Sagrada, but we've played 3 times already this month. Beth won today, with 71 points, beating me and Isaac. When we played last weekend, we had a full 4 player game, since Anna joined us. I won that time. And the day before it was just Beth and I. Beth beat me that time.

One thought that I've had with this Sagrada board is that I wish there was space to fit my fingers between the dice spaces, that way I could pick up or set in a die without bumping the other dice so much. I don't have the skinniest fingers, but they aren't too fat either, so I can just imagine it must be a real pain for players with thicker fingers than I have. I also wish that the board would show the requirements of the space wider than the dice size, because when I'm considering which tools to use, knowing what the restriction is under a die that I may want to move is a big factor. I like that the dice fit snug, so they don't get shifted around much, so I wouldn't want that to be lost, so maybe some hemispherical cut outs to show what is underneath would be a good way. Minor complaints. I'm sure it would be a factor in the cost, but if they reduced the overall size of the cardboard window frame, since half of it is just decoration anyway, I wonder if they could offset the cost of making bigger cards and wider spaces.
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Table-top Games / Re: Turing Machine
« Last post by Dragon on January 01, 2025, 17:23:10 »
We played Turing Machine again last night. Twice before midnight and twice after midnight, so that makes it the last game that I played in 2024 and the first game that I played in 2025!

I also won for the first time on Christmas Eve. I only won once though in the 4 games that we played that night. I was close but two times I had just one more question that I needed an answer for more than Beth and/or Isaac.
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Blogs / One Year Later
« Last post by Dragon on December 30, 2024, 18:05:43 »
I can't believe it's been nearly a year since I posted any blogs. So many things have crossed my mind. So many things that I haven't really wanted to put out there in public view. Things have been tough at times this year, but I have also been enjoying a lot of this year.

I've gotten into more of the Raspberry Pi/robotics stuff this year. I got a library card earlier in the year while Grace was going to a painting class at the local library. While I was there I came across a book about doing robotics with the Raspberry Pi and it looked interesting. I hadn't had a library card in years. I was happy to find that our local library doesn't even have late fees for checking out books, and it even has automatic renewal for books as long as someone else hasn't reserved the book. So I checked out a book from Matt Timmons-Brown called Learn robotics with Raspberry Pi : build and code your own moving, sensing, thinking robots. It was a pretty good book, but even though it was published in 2019, it was already outdated since some of the code libraries are no longer supported and available code libraries weren't compatible with the latest OS. Unfortunately, that meant that I wasn't able to complete everything in the book, but I did still enjoy working on it. I even used my 3d printer to build a chassis for my robot. 

I've also played a record number of boardgames this year, 78 different titles with 221 plays counted. This is only counting boardgames that I've played face-to-face, not boardgamearena.com, abstractplay.com, or similar digital versions. Although there is still another day to play this year, it probably won't change the games that are in the top 10 (*tied) most played games this year. There are a few on here that were played primarily against my son or my brother, but the top were favorites of my wife and daughters.

1) Skip-Bo (played 15 times this year, including twice that I played with my grandparents)
2) The Chameleon (played 12 times)
3*) Do You Even Know Math? (played 9 times over just a few days)
3*) Kingdomino (also played 9 times)
5*) Dungeon Heroes (played 8 times)
5**) Turing Machine (played 8 times; Update: two more plays on New Years Eve bumped this up)
6*) Dominion (played 7 times)
6*) Chess (played 7 times)
6*) Quoridor (played 7 times)
9*) Scarab Lords (played 6 times)
9*) Roll For The Galaxy (played 6 times)
9*) Wingspan (played 6 times)

In addition to those boardgames and digital board games, I've also enjoyed getting back into codecombat.com, practicing with programming in Python. Many of the challenges on codecombat.com have been easy for me to complete, since they have a lot of the code already setup for each scenario along with comments of what to do next. Still, there have been a few throughout the course that were difficult. There is a lot that is only available for premium members on that site, but I'm still just going through the free stuff. Maybe next year I'll get back into codingame.com again. That was fun when I did it before, but it's been a while since I've tried anything on there. 

Lego kits have been enjoyable this year too. I've been building things with the Lego Education Spike Prime. I've tried getting my youngest daughters into it, using the suggested builds from the Lego Competition Ready lessons. I also got a really cool Optimus Prime set for my birthday from my brother. In a lot of ways, this seems like the year of the robots for me. 
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Table-top Games / Turing Machine
« Last post by Dragon on December 30, 2024, 17:59:36 »
I got the Turing Machine board game for Christmas this year. I honestly did not expect my wife to be interested in the game much, but once she tried it, she really liked it. I played against Chris and Isaac the first time and then Beth joined us for 5 more games on Christmas Day. She admitted later that she wasn't really interested in playing it at first either, and expected that it was going to be more difficult than it ended up. Chris won most of the games we played that day, but Isaac tied with him once, and Beth won once on her own and tied with Chris once. I didn't win any of the 6 times that we played that day, but I'm sure we'll get a chance to play again soon. Beth has even been suggesting it as a game for Grace and Anna to play with us. 
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Scale Models / Re: Lego Trains
« Last post by Dragon on December 30, 2024, 17:50:26 »
I finally got around to adding the automated track switching with the Lego Education Spike Prime this month. I setup the train set on the coffee table and just had a switch track that ran a tighter path than the outer path. It took a few hours to get right, but I finally got the mechanism dialed in to flip the switch after the train passed 5 times.

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Unfortunately, OneDrive and User Account Control seems to make it more difficult to backup files now. Since my last update on this thread, I got a new computer with Windows 11. I had a few files that I wanted to backup to my external storage drive. Robocopy would run, but it wasn't picking up any of my new files that were in my Documents (under OneDrive by default now) folder. I tried multiple settings, even got the files so that they were local and not just in the OneDrive cloud, unlinked OneDrive, and still it was having trouble copying the files. I found that it was just easier to install Cygwin with rsync.   

It took a bit to sort out which directories I wanted to exclude, since I don't need all the extra AppData that Windows wants to keep, but I do want most of the other stuff within my User directory. I eventually came up with this:

Code: [Select]
rsync -avhk --dry-run --exclude "AppData/*" --exclude "Application Data" --exclude "Local Settings" --exclude "ntuser*" --exclude "NTUSER*" --exclude "Recent/*" --exclude "*.lnk" --exclude "LocalLow/*" --exclude "Cookies/*" --exclude "Searches/*" --exclude "SendTo/*" --exclude "Start Menu/*" /cygdrive/c/Users/drago/ /cygdrive/d/Nathaniel/ >> /cygdrive/d/Nathaniel/rsync.backup.20240826.log
And after the dry-run was confirmed...

Code: [Select]
rsync -avhk --exclude "AppData/*" --exclude "Application Data" --exclude "Local Settings" --exclude "ntuser*" --exclude "NTUSER*" --exclude "Recent/*" --exclude "*.lnk" --exclude "LocalLow/*" --exclude "Cookies/*" --exclude "Searches/*" --exclude "SendTo/*" --exclude "Start Menu/*" /cygdrive/c/Users/drago/ /cygdrive/d/Nathaniel/ >> /cygdrive/d/Nathaniel/rsync.backup.20240826.log
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Blogs / Re: Raspberry Pi and Python
« Last post by Dragon on June 16, 2024, 13:44:22 »
Still having trouble with the wifi adapter this time. Trying to connect to internet via ethernet cable to another one...

https://medium.com/@wendysanarwanto/sharing-internet-connection-to-raspberry-pis-wired-to-local-network-937d864fe205
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Blogs / Re: Raspberry Pi and Python
« Last post by Dragon on June 15, 2024, 17:02:47 »
Looks like the Ralink firmware isn't the right thing for this hardware. Running a different command, lsusb, I see [Zydas ZD12118] at the end of the line for the Belkin Components, so I'm going to try installing the zd1211 firmware, which is actually the same one mentioned on page 56 in the book I got.

Code: [Select]
sudo apt-get install firmware-zd1211

Tried this on a Rasberry Pi with Pi-Top installed and I was getting errors that it couldn't be found so I started looking around online. I found it on https://salsa.debian.org -
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/zd1211-firmware/-/archive/debian/master/zd1211-firmware-debian-master.zip
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General Discussions / Re: 3D Printer Projects
« Last post by Dragon on June 08, 2024, 09:22:32 »
Looking for some SD Card holders?

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4808044 (Floppy Disk Micro SD Card Holder)
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4871695 (USB and SD card holder - looks like a door/cabinet)
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4221435 (Mechanical Iron Man SD Card Holder (Updated))
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1418159 (SD Card Box - holds 6 full sized SD Cards plus added space)
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5939958 (Print in Place SD Card Box)
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6051482 (Bigger print-in-place SD Card Box)
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General Discussions / Re: 3D Printer Projects
« Last post by Dragon on March 01, 2024, 23:30:27 »
Here's a set I might print since I recently introduced my brother to the OGRE game: Low-Poly Game Pieces for OGRE at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2520770

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