You are Cogs the robot, sent to the Cyber Planet to retrieve a piece of technology that can win a war. Fight robot enemies and collect what you need to unlock the path ahead. Can you learn how to survive on the Cyber Planet and if you do who will you decide to give the Gestalt Mind technology to in the end?

The game is a multi-layer 2D physics environment. There are many objects that you can interact with and even pick up and use later. Some times you will need to kill an enemy and other times you will need to explore and find items to move ahead.

The game play uses the whole screen as a control surface in combination with hardware buttons. Optionally a screen overlay may be used as a substitute for buttons. In settings the option to use cheats is given for those who just can't help themselves.

Recommended for devices with at least a 1GHz processor and 30Mb available space on the SD card. A small add is shown on the opening screen only.

To get this game go to my page on the Android Market from your phone or browser.

The upcoming TFC Toys Hercules AKA Devestator is perhaps the most awesome 3rd party Transformers toy ever to be made. The design and quality of these pieces are at the very least on par with anything Hasbro has made and in my opinion far exceed the current offerings from the Dark of the Moon toy line. Fans have been begging to have a large scale Devestator for almost 30 years and this answers that cry. The price is $80 to $100 a robot. This at first seems like a lot but once you get these in hand the size and weight along with the blocky cartoon look make the memory of the cost fade. After buying the first robot Xgraver it became instantly clear that I must own doubles of each of the six robots. One set for posing as The Devestator and one for posing as the Constructicons.

Using the parts that I could get so far I can make this fan mode....Wannabe Hercules.

More than a year ago I started a custom Sharkticon project as a kind of offshoot of my Quintesson project. As a break I decided it was high time I finished it off. Here are three Sharkticons cast in urethane using an RTC Silicone mould. They are painted in Tamiya acrylics. The original sculpt was in plasticine. I doubt I will work in plasticine again because the cost of 3D printing has come down so much. Hopefully my next toy project will be computer designed!

This is my first attempt at making a youtube video. I learned that it is more difficult than it seems. For example, I use a Nikon D90 but unfortunately the auto focus only works for still images. As a result the video is not as clear as I would like. The second problem was getting audio in. I have no decent input device so I had to use my HTC Desire as a voice recorder. I used VirtualDub for joining the video and mixing the audio in.

My youtube channel is here

To start off the new year I present my rendition of a scene from IDW comics Stormbringer. The Wreckers take on Thunderwing in a race to save Cybertron. I read this in Transformers The IDW Collection Volume 2.

I can strongly recommend that any Transformers Fan buy the three volumes of the idw collection. This material is all the early writing by Simon Furman and is fantastic. The art work for Stormbringer in particular has inspired me to go on a spending spree picking up all the comics from the last few years. If you are the kind of person who downloads all the comics as scans then you are missing out. Having these books in hand is like owning a masterpiece and beats looking at a monitor or phone screen hands down.

I wanted to monitor my home using a webcam that I would leave running while I am out. The first thing I tried was using yahoo messenger because the new version has a broadcast feature. This works ok if the viewing device is a pc but not so good if you are using a android phone or iphone. The mobile client for yahoo messenger lacks the ability to view broadcasts. I then discovered a great piece of software called webcamXP that can be found here. WebcamXP is capable of controlling my logitech orbit camera including its panning features. WebcamXP sets up a server on the pc connected to the camera that makes the images streamed from the camera available to the internet. It provides a web page interface that has controls for the camera, if your router is configured correctly and you have a public ip address then you can view this stream from anywhere. The only problem with all this is that the web interface uses iframes for the pan control panel. Iframes are not properly supported in most mobile browsers. I have tried it on android, opera and iphone with no success. To fix this I have written a custom interface that grabs the same urls as the code in the iframe to make the pan occur. Download this file peep.html and open it in notepad, replace any xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx with your actual ip address and place the file in the webroot directory created by webcamXP. Now when you type http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/peep.html in your phones browser, where the xxx... is your pc ip address, you will not only see your ipcam but you can move it too.

Fixing Pan Control for WebcamXP on my Android.

I have just bought a HTC Desire from Telstra. So as a result I have been learning a lot of new programming skills using Android and Java. One of the first obstacles I bumped into was when trying to write files programatically to the SdCard. I obtained the location of the SD card file using Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory but then when going to check if I can write to it using the canWrite method of File it always returned false. I read in a lot of places that setting the permissions in the manifest file for my project would resolve this. After some trial and error I found this is true, but the location of the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE in the manifest effects if it will function. See the picture below for an example.

For the past ten years I have been programming in c++, so one thing that is annoying for me is the lack of rigidly defined lifetimes of objects I create. I am used to having destructors let me free memory when objects on the stack go out of scope and I am used to being responsible for memory I am using on the heap and freeing it as necessary. In Java there is no use of the stack and anything I create may or MAY NOT be freed in the life of my program depending on the garbage collector. To me this seem like a feature designed for a dumber class of programmer and it takes away some power from me. Having said that I do appreciate that there are many tasks I can accomplish in a few lines of Java code that would have needed a lot of native code. Time will tell if it is worth it.

I just bought the game War For Cybertron over at ebgames and it has turned out to be fantastic. I had heard a lot of good things and they are all true.

Back in 2007 I had bought the TFTM game and was very dissapointed with every aspect of that pile of crap. Because of that I stayed away from the ROTF game but finally we have a Transformers game that looks good, plays smoothly and incorporates story elements that fanboys like me want to see. Here are a couple of pics I took of a battle on floating debris around Cybertron. I really love the idea that Transformers can actually hopscotch off their world on the junk left in orbit.

I got the PS3 version and will not be getting the Wii version. Perhaps at a later time I will get the PSP version. The PS3 one was at JB HiFi for $74.95 and at EB Games for $79.54. I bargain down EB Games to$70. An error in their web site showed it at $59 the day before I bought it so I am guessing it will go to that price in about a month. Australian dollars.

For a long time I have wanted to buy a Quintesson Judge by Impossible Toys but it has been something that I always miss out on. I am not one to want to reinvent the wheel but I cant hold out any longer. To this end I am making my own Quintesson and Sharkticon figures. My skills are not up to the level of perfection that Imposible Toys can achieve using computer aided design but it will do for me. Like my Arcee I will be molding these so I can get multiples.

The size I have made these Quintessons is pretty acurate in comparison to the size they are in the Transformers G1 cartoon.

I recently bought Knight Morpher Commander by Mastermind Creations and Warbot Defender by Fansproject. Both are awesome toys and represent their characters perfectly. Defender is a pseudo Classics Springer that is at least on par with what Hasbro would provide. He comes with two blasters that fit into his hands and into holsters at his hips. The blasters also from weapons in the alt modes. Defender transforms into three modes, robot, cyber tank and helicopter. The packaging is the best I have come across. Defender is in a plastic bubble in a box that is in another box then it is in one final layer of plastic card. Perfect for a MISB collector.

Defender also comes with a sword that turns into blades for the helicopter mode. They are very thin but flexible enough to not easily snap. There is also a comic book featuring Defender and what looks like an upcoming repaint. Finally there is a mounting attachment that can be used with some popular display stands.

Knight Morpher Commander is based on the Hearts of Steal comic series that ran several years ago. It is a piece that I would not miss out on but is not quite to the same standard as the Fansproject releases. The transformation is relatively simple but suitable for his train alt mode. His caboose turns into mobile cannon. The cannon can turn into a lance like a Knight would carry. The most noticeable weak points in this toy are the joints. The elbows in particular are very difficult to move to the point where I am concerned about breaking them. This is definitely a display piece and not a toy. It even says that on the box.

I bought both these from Digital Toys

Every transformers fan knows that the one figure we will probably never get is a G1 Arcee. I wanted to have an Arcee that was G1 Styled, at least semi durable and most of all reproduceable. I plan to make several versions of this toy. Paradron Medic in green and Night Ops in grey for starters.

The original toy is made from styrene sheets purchased off eBay. This was joined with superglue and a two part plastic clay. It was pretty time consuming to design and make these parts and ended up taking about four months. After that I needed to make molds from SRT-30 RTV silicon rubber to reproduce the scratch built parts in urethane resin. I put a number of pieces in each mold because it reduced the amount of silicone needed and hence cost RTV Silicon is about $250 for 5 liters in Australia. I bought the silicone from dalchem , a local supplier.

I used cut off sewing needles for pins in a number of joints. I used 2.6mm model tank screws and nuts for some joints and larger wood screws in places to hold halves together. There are also custom ball joints in the shoulders and neck. The guns are held in their slots by friction. The back back snaps together using rear earth magnets similar to what are used in games workshop style dioramas to hold figures weapons on. I am not happy with the size, it is too big to be posed with classics figures. This is mainly because I find it difficult to work accurately at smaller sizes and also because my resin poring setup is not sophisticated enough to work properly at smaller sizes too many bubbles. I hope to eventually be capable of smaller work but this is just a step in that direction. With the experience I have from this piece I now know that the plasticast resin and the SRT-30 silicon are capable of the fine detail in smaller work but I would need a pressure pot or centrifuge to reduce bubbles.

I have been looking for a way to reproduce a statue I have been working on. This statue is too large to mold using RTV Silicon because it would cost me a fortune.

To this effect I decided to do a test piece using plaster as the mold material. I only need one reproduction so I gave it a shot. That brings me to the BFG. I designed this badass gun to test plaster molds on clay original.

My original plans.

Plasticine is used to make a seem around the original. This will be where the mold splits.

Build up an edge to hold in the plaster when it is pored.

I used cornice cement instead of plaster because it is stronger.

The wet plaster can be brushed on to the original to capture all the details and remove any air bubbles. There is a limit to how much detail plaster can get though.

Poor in the rest of the plaster to make a thick mold half.

The finished product is OK considering what it is made of. Next I move to a new project that is a lot more complex.

Once the plaster has set the plasticine can be removed from the surrounding wall and from the base the original had been embedded in.

Build up a new wall to hold in the plaster for the second half of the mold. Paint on Vaseline so the new plaster will not stick to the old.

Poor the second half

Once the two halves are clean tie them together securely with tape and wire.

Split the mold in half and clean out the clay left from the original. This is scary because then the original is gone.

Put the mold into a bucket to catch any leakage. Plaster does not form a very goo seal to hold in the resin.

I used a cheap polyester resin to make this. I hope to use this on a much bigger piece so the price of polyester is about half that of urethane.

Finally smash off the mold to reveal the casting. Fill in any cracks and paint.

This tool can systematically move files and name them according to a set of complex rules.
It can filter the subject files to omit file types or character sequences.
It can perform 32bit CRC on the files moved to validate their integrity.
It can sort the naming sequence according to date to allow for a correlation between name and date.
It can log its operations to be used for cataloging purposes.
It can work in the background for long operations.
It can compare files encountered to prevent duplicated being copied regardless of file name. This is especially good for removing duplicate photos in complicated folder structures.

Download

If you have been to my site before you will probably notice that it has changed. I have been working on my own basic content management system to try and make it a bit easier to add new pages and be able to use images in a sensible way. One of the biggest reasons for my lack of updates in the past was the need to hand code everything. Hopefully now with a more drag and drop approach I can get more up. To see my original site click here For now I have just gotten the code up but not the content into the new system.....