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The fol­low­ing plot shows our car’s fuel con­sump­tion over the past 16 months. It’s a pretty old car but is still doing kind of mostly okay.

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I can finally show off my week­end pro­ject! Well okay the vestiges of it star­ted a couple week­ends ago and it bled into this morn­ing by a couple hours, but I think it still counts as a week­end project.


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This is an addendum to this post where I was try­ing to make NHL ’94 more challenging.

I’ve all but given up on try­ing to give the com­puter an extra use­ful player in shootout mode. Giv­ing the com­puter an extra player who stands and does noth­ing is trivial. Unfor­tu­nately, the “AI” for shootout mode is - maybe not sur­pris­ingly - hard-​​ ( Read more... )

For the past year or so, I’ve been tim­ing how long it takes for me to go through the check­outs at our gro­cery store to see which is faster.

The meth­od­o­logy is quite simple. Once I’ve got all my gro­cer­ies, I go to the same spot near the check­outs. To avoid bias­ing myself, I check my cell phone to determ­ine whether to go through the self ( Read more... )

As any­one born around 1980 would know, gam­ing reached abso­lute per­fec­tion with the release of NHL ’94. It’s great if you want a 10-​​minute diver­sion and I’ve been play­ing a few minutes of here and there for the past few months.

There’s one ser­i­ous prob­lem with NHL ’94, how­ever: the AI is abso­lutely ter­rible. Play­ing in single-​​ ( Read more... )

After yesterday’s fail­ure I brought a bit of extra duct tape and super glue and got the car back in work­ing order with the cam­era affixed to it nicely. I took it out again this after­noon to see if I could get the cam­era to sur­vive some small jumps off some staircases.

The good news is my duct tap­ing and super glu­ing worked. The cam­era didn ( Read more... )

The last time I attached a cam­era to my remote con­trolled car the major prob­lem, from my per­spect­ive, was that it was too bumpy, to the point of not being able to see any­thing, really. The solu­tion to this is two-​​fold:

1. Do it on pave­ment instead of snow.
2. Attach the cam­era more securely.

Since it’s been crazy nice lately - 4º for the past ( Read more... )

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I’ve always loved remote con­trolled cars. I think at one point in ele­ment­ary school I even lis­ted R/​C car driver as a future pro­fes­sion of mine. While I did have some actu­ally really nice cars as a kid, one dream of mine which never came to fruition was to put a video cam­era on the car. It would be like being trans­por­ted to a mini­ature ( Read more... )