FreeWareCentral

Hello,

This is a notification that there are now contributors being added. They will be able to write posts for the blog as well as Dravailo. Also, to those who got a subscription email, it will, if you wish, notify you of any new posts.

There are several changes now to the site. Note the SideNotes section on the right. It’s now Digg-compatible. You can email posts to friends. There’s obviously the subscription feature. And a new image visualization, which will start to appear!

So, anyway, welcome to the newer, improved forums!

Has anyone heard of this website, http://d***interesting.com (change the stars, obviously)? It is a host to a wide variety of amazing, strange, unbelievable articles. There’s Clever Hans the Math Horse, , and my favourite, The Norwegian Puffin Dog (aka Lundehund).

The Lundehund is an amazing breed of dogs. They’re rare, with only 4 or so in existance at one point, and unique. They have six toes, are very flexible (the back of their head can touch their spine!), can seal their ears (they work in caves), and are only the size of a fox.

There’s plenty of other interesting articles to choose from. The site documents almost everything you’d never ask about! I’m sure that you’ll be surprised with what you can learn when you visit such a site!

As a final note on the interesting or the strange, have you heard of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader series? They’re currently on their 19th edition and have so much interesting info available.

-Dravailo

Do you have Counterstrike: Source, or Half-life 2? Both are great games. CS:S has great online play (you have to try surf maps), Half-life 2 has a good (albiet weird) storyline and a major feature: physics. It has some of the best physics ever.

However, one of the best mods for HL2/CS:S is Garry’s Mod, better known as Gmod. The creator, Garry (duh), wanted more control over Half-Life 2 then was originally offered. He started his mod, gmod, to do so. Now it’s grown into a full product, with version 10 being the most recent. If you have Steam and CounterStrike:Source, you can get it for $10.00 ($24.00 as a bundle with CS:S, if you don’t have it).

It offers so much. A physics gun which can pick up any object, manipulate it in mid-air, then freeze it in it’s floating position until you’re ready to continue. Welding, so that two objects stick together, even retaining distances (eg. Weld a floating object to the ground and unfreeze it. It’ll still float). There’s balloons, thrusters (rockets are awesome), hover-balls, elastics, muscles, sliders, painters, wheels, and many other tools. You can even modify a ragdoll’s expression, like eyes, mouth, eyebrows, etc.

One of the cool parts about this is that you can create great ships and actual vehicles. All thruster/wheel/hover-ball/other control is through the numpad. You could, say, take a cargo crate. Make it float using hover-balls controlled by two keys on the numpad. Add rockets at the back, a few on the front-side, and you’ve got yourself a ship. Here’s pictures:

Also, there’s a great wiki available. Overall, this is definately worth a measely $10.00. However, you can get version 9 for free (note that you shouldn’t go online with it, there’s a security flaw in online play). It’s definately worth it and provides lots of fun. Try making destructable/explosive vehicles with friends, then ram/shoot/thrust into each other to see who bites the dust! Definately give it a try (or at least watch some Youtube videos),

Note, video after the break!

-Dravailo

Read more

My first link today is an interesting article about do-it-yourself (DIY) book binding. Click here to learn about how to bind a book. That way, you can make your own e-books actual paper-back books.

Also, need a cheap camera? Go here to download and print a .pdf that will let you build a camera. It uses real film and is reasonable quality.

-Dravailo

Want to know something completely random? Try browsing over to http://www.wikihow.com/Special:Random. You can learn how to make a whiteboard, manage conflict, write geometry equations, and plenty of stuff you’d never ask about. It’s a lot of information.

Once your done that, for more fun, go to here! Print off the pdf and fold it up for a little mac-mini, as seen in this image:

  Also, if you’re more a fan of Mario characters than macs, you can fold up popular Mario characters here with just a few sheets of paper.

Plus, there’s Advance Wars vehicles for folding too here. They’ve also got Legend of Zelda characters, Tomb Raider, and Star Wars. Plenty of choice.

See you next time,

-Dravailo

This is a bit technical, but a little useful for hiding files. Add them to a .rar archive (.zip won’t work) and get a regular .jpg image. This works best with smaller files, as remember the .jpg will be the combined size of both which could be suspicious. Anyway, put them in the same-ish location. I’ll be assuming the .jpg is called image.jpg and the archive is called archive.rar.

Open up a command prompt. Goto Start->Run… and type in ‘cmd’ without the quotes. Then, browse to the directory with both files. Use ‘cd directoryName‘ to switch to a directory, ‘dir’ to list all the folders/files, and ‘cd ..’ to go back one directory. When you’re at the files, type this in:

COPY /B image.jpg + archive.rar target.jpg

This will create a file called target.jpg. If you open it with a rar program