August 2012 Archives

Dr. Wei came across the Sushezi device today:

It's rather disappointing given that anyone who has ever made sushi before knows how much faster it is to just use a traditional roller. But in an Amazon review of the Sushezi the reviewer mentions a "$20,000 sushi robot". o_O

Must. Find. Sushi robot.

Unfortunately it is an extremely disappointing robot. Skip to the 1:40 mark to see the pinnacle of it's performance. Fortunately, the music in the video is great.

Left unsatisfied with these craptastic inventions I continued surfing YouTube and found this compilation of wondrous dexterity:

Oh, and a bonus teh tarik puller. What a showman.

For the past 6 months I've been discussing various telco/ISP companies with a friend of mine by email. The great thing about email is that it's easy. The bad thing is that the discussions tend to get trapped in our respective mailboxes and it's also interspersed with cat pictures. I thought there must be a better tool.

What we need is something that we can share links via, and then comment on said links, in private. And the resulting archive should be searchable. And it should be convenient to use -- email & web interfaces please.

I'd heard of Yammer being popular in the enterprise space and surely our basic needs would be a small subset of their epic feature list. I gave their basic account a try (it's free). The email interface seemed to fail to accept an email reply to a post, with my comment showing up 6 hours later. Maybe I caught them at a bad time but as someone who doesn't need the full enterprise suite it seems like a slightly-clumsier-but-private-Facebook. The attraction of something like Yammer is that most of their customers pay, and it's now Microsoft owned, so I have some confidence that they wouldn't disappear overnight.

Maybe I am aiming too high, we only have simple needs. Google Groups should do what we want. And it does... except the new Groups UI is so butt ugly that even as a nerd who values function over form I can't bring myself to use it. I was going to include a screenshot but I don't want to hurt your eyes. I'd go so far as to say that Yahoo! Groups looks better, ouch.

On to Facebook. I've been using it with a group of high school friends to share geeky/tech links and it works well. The email interface works well. And IMHO the Facebook UI is both functional and pretty.

The only weakness in Facebook groups is that it won't index the content of shared URLs -- this makes search a little trickier than it otherwise could be. In addition, both Facebook and Google Groups don't index keywords in URLs unless they are "-" separated. (It astounds me that in 2012 some news sites are still using "_" when "-" has been "best practice" for a decade?).

Pinboard reputedly has one of the best archiving features around but it doesn't support groups. The two of us could share a single Pinboard account but that makes discussion weird.

I've been a Diigo user for several years and I like it. Unfortunately whilst it has private group support it doesn't support discussion associated with a bookmark.

It feels a little weird that with social startups popping up every 5 seconds there's really only one workable option for what seems like a common(?) use case.

I've been playing Team Fortress 2 since its public release in October 2007. Before that I played QuakeWorld TF and Q3F for many years also both of which were essentially free (you had to pay for Quake and Quake 3 but the TF mods were free). TF2 was the first TF variant that I paid for.

Steam tracks play time and over the last 5 years I've clocked up 2,500 hours. I bought TF2 as part of The Orange Box which I think cost about $20.

So I've long held this impression that TF2 is insanely good value for money in terms of cost per hour. Consider a movie is $20 and lasts 2 hours - $10/hour.

2,500 hours at $20? Not even 1c/hour!!! Except that's not the real figure.

On 30 September 2010 Valve released an in-game store called MannCo. There you can buy various virtual items including hats, paints (alternate colours for in-game items), gifts, and keys (for opening virtual crates that you randomly get in-game, pretty much a virtual instant scratchie). So keep in mind this store has been available for ~21 months.

Today I took a look at my Steam transactions and tallied up all my TF2 in-game transactions.

$750 Holy cow.

The largest transaction I can remember making was the $130 I donated as part of TF2's Japan Charity Bundle

Where did the other $620 go?!

One can buy a Pile o' Gifts which gives everyone on a server a gift (a random item). For many months I played almost exclusively on the games.on.net #02 server so it was nice to "pop" gifts there as I knew most of the regulars. Turns out I've used 11 of these suckers for a total value of $220.

And then there's the Secret Saxton ... for when you don't want to give everyone on the server a gift, just a random stranger :) I used $90 worth of these.

$130 + $220 + $90 = $440 out of $750 ... leaving $310.

Keys. As you play the game you randomly get crates. Crates contain various items, including the possibility of a rare hat. Rare hats means extremely low probability, I've never gotten one. To open a crate you need a $2.50 key. Turns out I'm more of an instant scratchie player than I thought -- roughly half of the $310 was spent on keys, and the remainder was miscellaneous hats, paints and tools.

So ... 2500 hours for $750 puts the real cost at roughly 30c/hour. Still good value but several magnitudes more than I was expecting.

And in reality the $750 was spent over the 22 months after the Mann Co. store opened so I've effectively been paying $34/month for a "free" game.

Now you know why TF2 is free to play. "Free" :)

PS: Do I regret spending so much? I am a little amazed at how much I have spent and I'm sure that if the total figure was regularly shown to me I'd curb my spending. However it's still a cheap form of entertainment, not to mention a helluva lot of fun, and I've met some awesome people because of TF2.