HOW TO: Make your own WIFI signal booster dish

Have you ever wanted to boost your Wi-Fi signal? Obviously something like that satellite dish on the left is going a little extreme, but in a sense, it follows the same principals of what I'm going to explain right here.

Now, if you can get your hands on one of these "skimming spiders" (preferably clean) it just so happens to be the perfect shape for a pretty good Wi-Fi antenna.

First of all, you need the "parabola" shaped dish, which is conveniently present in that stainless steel skimming spider on the right. Next, you'll need a USB extension cord, because if you try to squeeze this thing right next to the plug, trust me, it's just going to be a pain. Of course, you'll need a USB Wi-Fi adapter to actually recieve the signals with (any one will work).

And you'll need a piece of small plastic pipe (PVC) or some garden hose to insulate the adapter and the extension wire from being damaged or slipping loose from where you want it to be.
Last but not least, you'll need a mathematic equasion! Don't run away yet, it's really easy. Just 3 easy steps:

1. Find the diameter in milimeters and multiply that number by itself (Diameter to the 2nd power). (The diameter is just the measurement from the left side to the right side, or just the width of it, not the circumference.) As you can see to the right. Ex: for a 128mm Diameter you would multiply 128x128 = 16,384mm

2. Now you find the depth from the rim of the bowl, to the lowest point in the bowl (In a straight line from the center to the center). Let's just say it's about 32mm deep. Then multiply that by 16. Ex: 32x16 = 512

3. Finally, divide the answer from step 1, by the answer in step 2.
Ex: 16384/512 = 32mm

Now, that means the signals will be focused 32 milimeters out from the center of the dish... So you want your USB Wi-Fi adapter's reciever to be in that general area (the closer the better). Here's a link incase you really wanna get technical about the "Focus" of the dish.

You can always turn on some kind of Live Wi-Fi signal monitoring app and make minor adjustments until it's as good as it's gonna get.

Finally, you don't have to go with just a cooking utensil, that's just a general idea to show you how wide the spectrum is. The best would be something solid, or a mesh with closer weaving... Because the holes aren't actually the key, just the dish shape. The bigger the better, too. Here's an idea for you if you want something REALLY GOOD:
Aluminum WOK LID. LOL! Or, a metal mixing bowl. Anything metal with that particular shape, as long as you use that formula to figure out where the Wi-Fi adapter goes, it should work fine. Plus it's easier than trying to find that special Wi-Fi card that accepts a pigtail connection for one of those fancy antennas that probably cost a ton anyway. Alright, that's all for tonight... Morning...

Another Flash Game Engine I Found

This flash based game engine uses action script 3, xml, etc. They provide the core engine as open source (free) and then they offer premium components to add functionality to your game (which you have to pay for). There's going to be an Editor made with flash and a networking premium component for enhanced networking. They provide simple networking already.

The core engine comes with a default game setup so you can start with something and just edit and change until you have what you want. It has 2d physics, sprite or swf-based 2d rendering, tile maps, pathfinding, and flash UI capability... So, out of the box, you can make a nice 2d game with simple networking and physics.
I might reconsider this over Alternativa Platform. Depends which one comes out on top. But it's already open-source, which is always a plus.
The image on the right is an example game made with the engine.

Ubuntu Mobile Internet Device (MID) Edition, Maemo or Moblin on a Pandora?

Today I was poking around with the idea of installing something other than Ångström on an OpenPandora. There are a few nice candidates I ran across:

• Maemo - This was one a lot of people over at the OpenPandora Forums post talking about Maemo on the pandora. Seems the discussion came to the conclusion that it wouldn't be worthwhile to try very hard to port Maemo over to work on the pandora, even though there is a new version of Maemo coming out soon, which will use much less closed-source applications and will support ARM architechture as well as OMAP3 (which OpenPandora uses)... All in all, it's by far the closest match.
  
  
• Ubuntu MID Edition - This one had me a little bit excited at first, but then I realised it was designed for x86 architechture so it wouldn't work on a pandora. BUT! I love the fact that it's made by the people who make Ubuntu. They have released Ubuntu 9.04, which supports the ARM CPU, so that gives me hope when it comes to them porting MID Edition over to the ARM architechture... Anyway, this would be my dream OS for a pandora, for a couple reasons:
  1. It supports Adobe Flash.
  (But I know it can't be supported even if ported to ARM because the Adobe Flash package isn't open source, so it wouldn't be able to be ported over itself) But you know what that means, Alternativa-made games would work on it. :D
  2. It supports Java.
  Not just JavaScript, but actual Sun Microsystems Java. That is something Maemo doesn't have, AFAIK.
  3. It's Ubuntu.
  So you get all the support and applications that Ubuntu does, because of the large repositories. You also get the steady updates and the friendly community forums they have.
  In my personal opinion, if I flipped open any screen and saw that desktop glowing back at me, that would just be the icing on the cake. Even though, I'm only listing ALL of the OSs I would want to see on a UMPC, this one has got to be, by far, my favorite so far.
• Moblin - This one is actually being developed by Intel, but it's open-source, which is kind of surprising. Sadly, it only supports Intel ATOM CPUs (obviously, since Intel is making it) which means not ARM or others.
  Here is an intro video they made talking about it's features... Looks really sleek and comfortable to use. Well, that's about all for today. See you tomorrow!
  

Cool Web-Based 3D Flash-Based Game Engine I Just Ran Across

Alternativa Platform - I found this cool game/misc 3D Flash engine just now...

I tried some of the demos and they're really nice. Especially the Bunker demo.
I'm actually in search of a good platform-independant game development medium at the moment and this looks promising...
One of the cool things I noticed about it; when you move the view with the mouse, it kinda goes into a simple render mode where the textures don't have buffering (just pixelated) which helps performance greatly. Then when you stand still it goes back into high quality only when the view stays still.
Another feature I noticed, when you first launch the demo game, it loads basic low quality textures as placeholders and then dynamically loads the full quality textures in the background while you're playing. That's cool for playing faster without waiting for huge downloads to finish first.

I don't know, I'm considering developing a game that's playable within a browser, so when OpenPandora is released, my game will be playable on it too.

You can go ahead and click that screenshot of the Bunker demo to try it yourself... It's just a small area you can walk around in, but it's nice to see for yourself.

A List of The Best Native Linux Games I've Found

I use Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 so I wouldn't know about other distros.
When I say "Native" Linux games, I mean they were designed or compiled from source to run on Linux without emulation.
Getting down to business: Each entry will be the link to the corresponding website where you can download these games. I wont list games you can't download and play for free.

• Quake 4 For Linux *.run Packages FTP Downloads
  Torrent Download For the Current Version
  Documentation / Installation Instructions
  Technically, it's not free but it's a very good example that Linux can definately be used for gaming commercially.
  
• PlayDeb.net - This website maintains a list of games specifically converted/compiled to be easily installed on Ubuntu Linux by way of *.Deb packages.
• Urban Terror - This Counter-Strike clone is actually very good. It's not setup the exact same way, but you can still choose your appearance, good guys or bad guys, different weapons, etc. The maps and graphics are well done. There are also a lot of players and servers in the server browser too.
• Tremulous - If you've ever played a mod for Half-Life a while ago before it went Source, there was a mod called "Natural Selection"... Anyway, this game is somewhat similar in the aspect of FPS/RTS gaming. It has excellent graphics and it's free!
• Cube 2: Sauerbraten - No, it's not a German website, it's all written in English. Ok, this one is interesting; it has superb graphics, awesome in-game map editing, and the game engine it uses is entirely original in code and design. Best of all, and my focus of interest here, The Game Engine is Open Source, which means, with some programming knowledge, you can use it to make your own game with! Refer to their terms and licencing to make sure you're allowed to release as commercial projects, etc.
• Warsow - This is a basic deathmatch FPS with somewhat arcade/futuristic style graphics with some cell-shading effects. Nice graphics, fun game.
• Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory - Probably the most widely known free, high quality Native Linux FPS out there. Tons of servers and active players online at all times, from all over the world. The graphics are excellent, there are tons of voices and other ambient effects, the controls are familiar, but best of all, aside from choosing one side or another, you choose character class, which decides what kinds of guns you get and your job on the field. For example: Engineers build structural objects along the map to advance spawn points and eventually capture the entire map and win the round. Very fun and customizable. This game supports many mods as well.
• PlaneShift - This is an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) available for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. The graphics are nice, the community is very friendly and welcoming, and the game is pretty solid. There tends to be a large base of RPers (Role Players), so if that's not your cup of tea, they wont bite or anything... All in all, another gem for Linux.

So, aside from those, there are more but I haven't tried them. There are a good deal of Windows games that will run using Wine, but don't expect any miracles.

Any game that uses Java or Flash or embeds in a webpage is also available on any operating system that supports the runtimes and plugins required by the game (Such as Java and Flash).

By The Way, there are a lot of emulators compiled for Linux and some you will recognize.

• NES - FCE Ultra / GFCEU (Gnome FCE Ultra Front-End)

• SNES - ZSNES (My favorite SNES emulator)

And others, but I haven't tried or installed them yet so I can't tell you if they work or not.
Actually, if you are playing an emulator, you might want to play those games with a controller/gamepad/joystick... Here's how I got mine to work with a nice GUI-Based app for ease of use.