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Author: verdow

Published on Leave a comment on Free and Cross Platform LAN Party

lan2

It's time again for the third to fifth-ish somewhat (bi?)annual LVL1 LAN party! Come to LVL1 noon Saturday the 22nd to hang out and frag your fellow hackers in these free but awesome games. Team Fortress 2 has been the standby game at these events but this time I would like to introduce a few more games that have proven themselves to be a blast at small LANs and are easy to learn:

Xonotic - Beautiful graphics, unique weapons and lots of gameplay options
Warsow - Cell shaded arena shooter with a fun movement system that can make Quake III feel slow
Urban Terror - More realistic shooter (in case people get tired of rocket launchers)
TeeWorlds - quirky little 2D shooter
Armagetron Advanced - quick and addicting 3D multiplayer lightcycle game (like from TRON)

If you don't download and update Team Fortress 2 beforehand you're going to have a bad time. The other games are optional since I will have copies available locally but I do encourage people to go ahead and install the latest versions ahead of time so you can tweak your controls and graphics settings.

Bring cash for pizzas and drinks.

The Monoprice order of cables for the classroom might be showing up Thursday or Friday, if anyone is interested in putting ends on cables before the event please keep an eye on the mailing list. If they don't show up in time I'll just randomly distribute a few extra switches around the space.

Published on Leave a comment on Scheduling Fail, OpenSCAD Workshop cancelled

wheredoipark
So I fail horribly at scheduling, all the streets leading up to LVL1 are all blocked by the Pegasus Parade. I knew something was wrong when people started calling me to park at my place and walk to LVL1. Consequently the OpenSCAD workshop will need to be rescheduled. I will be here tonight (mostly to avoid going back through the crowd to leave) in case anyone was dead set on learning OpenSCAD tonight but the official workshop will be moved to a later date.

Published on Leave a comment on OpenSCAD Workshop

There will be another OpenSCAD workshop May 2nd at 8pm. This will be an intro class on how to use OpenSCAD to make functional drawings to print on the 3D printers. For those unfamiliar with OpenSCAD it is a 3D modeling program that uses scripts to define objects so you draw by writing code, not by using your mouse.

There are no signups or cost for this workshop, just show up with a laptop with OpenSCAD pre-installed and be ready to learn.

Published on Leave a comment on Pimping your Home Network with DDWRT


Tired of your dinky home network with restrictive consumer grade equipment? Do you want to configure your network but can't affordenterprise grade hardware?  Well fret no more; with our new workshop we'll show you how to install DDWRT on a cheap router and make it do what YOU want!

DDWRT is a free, open source firmware designed to run on a wide variety of consumer grade routers and embedded systems.  What this means is you can take a $60 router and make it as configurable as a $600 router just by updating the firmware.  DDWRT can also breathe new life into a dying or supposedly dead router so you can get more mileageout of your old equipment.

The first part of the class will go over installing DDWRT on a Linksys WRT54g but other models/brands are certainly welcome.  Once that is done we'll go over some networking basics and show ways, with real world examples, that you can use DDWRT to improve your home network. Lastly there will be a quick look at some popular routing Linux distros in case you want to take things a step further and build a router out of a computer.

Time: Thurs June 9 @ 8pm
What to bring:
laptop
a network cable or two
old router you'd be OK with bricking (the install process is pretty reliable but it is still possible to completely kill a router)