Scott's Blog

Brazil has a strange relationship with electricity. Something like 95% of the electricity in Brazil comes from hydroelectric, yet they charge an arm and a leg for it. A few years ago we had the "Apagão" (big-unplug or big-turn-off) where you had to halve your electricity consumption from the same time last year. This was because it hadn't rained enough and the water was getting too low behind the dams to make electricity. The real problem, of course, is that the government hasn't been investing in new electric generation plants. Worse was, that after the emergency, everyone had learned how to use less electricity (by buying compact fluorescent lights (at twice the normal price), for example) and was being more energy efficient, so the hydro company increased the prices. Why? Because they weren't making enough revenue! At my home they charge R$0.5684/kWh which is about USD$ 0.3072/kWh. That's 204% more than the New York region ($0.1508/kWh) or 217% more expe...

Puxe (pronounced "push") - means pull no - means "in" or "at", "no happy hour" would be "at 'happy hour'" sex - means "Fri" or sexta feira. Sexo would be sex. uai (pronounce "why") - it's an expression similar to "look", "well".

We we cleaning out some closest and my son picked up an old game of mine: Baldur's Gate from 1998. It's pretty tough for him since it's all in English and it's pretty complicated, but he likes it. These old games still are lots of fun.

So today I'm 101010 (in binary), or 33 in base 13, but nobody makes jokes in base 13 * . I guess most geeks know that 42 is the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything", unfortunately I need to explain the special significance to everyone else. Somehow, I do feel wiser this year, perhaps it's just the senility making me forget my ignorance. * *is also 42 in ASCII.

The self adhesive poster came back from the printers and I quickly realized that I should have re-measured the MAME console. The SVG file that I used was the original blueprints, but not exactly what I actually ended up cutting. My final console ended up being a bit deeper than the plan and some of the holes were placed by eye. So you can see in the image that some decals that were supposed to be on the sides (like "Nintendo" and the packman ghosts) ended up appearing on the bottom. Also, some of the holes don't line up nicely with the text like "Start" and "Pause" are more obvious. The resolution also isn't that great, I'm guessing that it's 100 DPI instead of 300 DPI which I was expecting. But from a distance it looks pretty nice and I'm still glad that I went and did it. I'm a little wiser now - next time I'll make sure to remeasure.

Here's my and my Son's effort for a MAME console design. Not the prettiest, but it was fun creating it. I've sent it to the printer's and it should be ready tomorrow. The one I sent to the printer doesn't have the circles nor the black border which comes from my original design when I built it three years ago. The format that they liked the best was the PDF version which Inkscape exported without any problems. The mistake I made was to not to shrink the "paper" to the size of all the boxes so I ended up paying for a little extra white that I probably won't need (it ended up being R$35.11). I think I should have also left cut marks in the diagram to make it easier to align and cut out the pieces, we'll see if that will be necessary.

I've been wanting to make a plastic print to cover my my son's MAME console for a while now (3 years already?). All I need to do is get some bitmaps, or even better some scalable vector images, from a couple of games, put them together and send it to the printer, right? I knew I was in trouble, when after a few searches I got my own blog listed. Seems there aren't that many game fans making nice svg images of popular videos game characters. I did find, however, the spriters-resource.com which has the sprites from a lot of games, the problem is, they are all tiny. For example, here's what Megaman looks like . Zooming that up 8 times, for instance looks kinda crappy: Using the cubic interpolation 8x does only a so-so job: I tried various filters and effects and got the look I think I wanted which you can see here: I wanted to fiddle with the steps so I put it all in a python plugin which you can find here (here's a direct link to the code which may have some u...