A little while ago I started work on home building a VR display. Partly to get to know how the hardware works and partly because there do not seem to be much VR displays that run out of the box on linux. I at least got the display/headset part working. Next is getting the positional readout of the headset. In itself this should not be too difficult (there are chips and libraries for that). The difficult part is going to be getting tools like steam to recognise the device.
Have been trying out some bookbinding techniques and bought some dice while on holidays. The dice are ‘nostalgia’ dice by Chessex. So, I decided to make a little box for the dice; perhaps a present for someone. The techniques used for the box are based on the excellent tutorials by DAS Books. The paper on the cover has been made less fragile by covering it with paste and applying bees wax. Some pics:
Last time I posted about the keyboard I had built. This was actually a precursor to building a cyber deck. Or at least a prototype for one. I am planning to use the machine I am currently building for note taking and keeping track of tasks (Taskwarrior is a really useful tool). In a sense it is an impractical and under powered laptop. However, I suspect that it is actually much more pleasant in social situations. It is always a bit unpleasant to be in meetings where everybody is hidden behind a laptop screen. With a laptop you are screening yourself of from the other people in the space (which is sometimes what you want). With the more flat design of the current designs, it is more like using a note book. Also the keyboard is, of course, much better than what you regularly have on a laptop.
I recently finished my A⋅TE⋅B1 keyboard. Although I just wanted to build a working keyboard, it actually sounds and feels really nice. Below a picture of the finished board:
One of the reasons to choose for an ortholinear layout was that the keyboard had to fit on my 3d printer. That limited the width to 25cm. I also decided I wanted to be able to enter some other character that I sometimes use during coding or writing. Mostly mathematical symbols. When I started with this project I kind of expected that that would be just possible: Unicode has been around since the nineties. But it is still basically ASCII. For example, to get a “ü” on a German keyboard, the keyboard just sends the key code for “[” (which happens to be at the same place on a US keyboard). The OS where you have set the keyboard to German then translates this to “ü”. It feels weird that you can’t just send over Unicode symbols. I used QMK to programme the keyboard. QMK does have an option to send over Unicode, but this makes use of OS-dependent functionality. It just send over some key combination then the Unicode hex code and then a closing key combination. Under linux this works now for me under most applications.
The visualisation consists of a number of 3D-printed ‘light boxes’ for each of the districts in the municipality of Rotterdam in The Netherlands. By inserting punch cards into the model, users are able to select different datasets for the visualisation. This was built as a prototype. The goal is invite users to look and play with statistical data.
Using a map of all districts in The Netherlands (CBS and Kadaster), the districts of Rotterdam were selected and each district was scaled and written to SVG-file. These were converted to 3D-models using OpenSCAD. The boxes were printed in white PLA and the covers were printed in transparent PLA. Holes were drilled in the back for the LEDS (took some experimenting to find the correct number and positions). The boxes were attached to each other using a 3D-printing pen and were attached to a muliplex board.
At the start of travel the players decide on the following:
In principle these choices hold until they reach, their destination, the end of the day, or until they have an encounter. Then
In the previous post I summarised the rules relevant for wilderness travel in Dungeons and Dragons 5e. Although there are plenty of rules for wilderness travel there are also rules missing. I thought it would be interesting to also have a look at what the earliest editions of Dungeons and Dragons did with the subject. Old School Essentials is what is called a retro-clone. It basically summarises and cleans up the Basic/Expert rules of D&D from 1981. Compared to the vast amounts of text in the 5e books, the compactness of Old School Essentials is refreshing. New players might find them a bit too compact, although I am pretty sure that many new players will also have problems with the D&D 5e books. The rules of Old School Essentials are also much simpler than D&D 5e (e.g. skills and feats are missing).
For over a year now, I have been running a Yoon Suin campaign using Dungeons and Dragons 5e. Traveling into an unknown continent is an important part of that campaign. Therefore, I am currently interested in mechanics for running wilderness travel. As I am currently running a Dungeons and Dragons 5e game, I first wanted to see what the documentation of D&D 5e has on wilderness travel. To be honest, there is more information in the rules than I initially expected. It is, however, scattered around. Pieces can be found in different chapters in both the Player’s Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s Guide and nowhere is there a clear explanation of how to exactly run this. For combat this is spelled out in extreme detail (the order in which players take turns, what exactly they can do in in a turn, how to run and select monsters, etc.). Therefore, the main thing missing in the books seems to be an explanation of how wilderness travel should play out. As an example, let’s say that the party wants to travel to some village. There are persons looking for them that they want to avoid. They have two possible routes: use the road or travel through the forest. On the road they arrive faster in their destination (which might be relevant for the adventure) but they have a higher chance of being spotted. When traveling through the forest they avoid being spotted, but it takes longer and they run the risk of getting lost, running out of food and there are also dangers in the wilderness. How do I determine they are spotted on the road? How often should I check for encounters in the road or in the forest? Daily? Hourly? How often should they roll a check to avoid getting lost?
I work as a methodologist/data scientist/scientific programmer at Statistics Netherlands. In my spare time I play table top role playing games and I like to build stuff: electronics, dioramas, wood, 3d-printing, …