Category: Blog

Blog Posts.

  • “I QUIT DOTO”

    I call this one "Death Prophet Throws The Game"
    I call this one “Death Prophet Throws The Game”

    I’ve been playing a bit of Dota 2 recently, and when I say “playing a bit”, I mean I’ve played, on average, between five and six games per day for the last 30 days. That’s a decent amount of Dota.

    It was enough that I didn’t even get a chance to dole out a Game of the Year award for last year, and enough that I haven’t played anything else for the latter half of 2013. My game backlog grows ever bigger, and all I can really be bothered playing is Dota. This must be what addiction feels like.

    A recent-ish update introduced ranked matchmaking, which assigns you a real, visible rating of how good (or bad) you are at Dota. From the Dota 2 blog:

    We actually track a total of four MMRs [match making ratings, a numerical representation of how good or bad you are at Dota] for each player:

    • Normal matchmaking, queuing solo
    • Normal matchmaking, queuing with a party
    • Ranked matchmaking, queuing solo
    • Ranked matchmaking, queuing with a party

    The spread of MMRs for normal matchmaking looked a little like this, with various MMRs calculated according to percentiles (higher is better):

    5% 1100
    10% 1500
    25% 2000
    50% 2250
    75% 2731
    90% 3200
    95% 3900
    99% 4100

    It’s also worth noting the following, pointed out by the same matchmaking post on the Dota 2 blog:

    Note that this distribution is from normal matchmaking. We don’t know yet what the distribution will be in ranked matchmaking, but we expect it to be different. The players who participate in ranked matchmaking will be more skilled, more experienced players. We anticipate that any given player will have different expectations and play the game differently in ranked matchmaking compared to normal matchmaking.

    I was reasonably happy with my solo MMR after I completed my 10 calibration matches. I ranked in at 2357, which, according to the percentile table above (i.e. if we’re assuming the percentile distribution is the same for ranked as it is for normal matchmaking), put me smack bang in the middle of the Dota 2 player distribution, slightly better than around 50% of players.

    The idea behind ranked matchmaking is not only for plays to play in what is supposed to be a more competitive environment, a more “elite” subset of the Dota 2 players (only players who have played around 150 games online can participate in ranked matchmaking), and some of the time, that’s exactly what it is.

    But then there’s the rest of the time, where ranked matchmaking is — and I put this in the nicest way possible — a festering cesspool of the worst Dota 2 players, ever.

    The problem, as I see it, is that people in ranked matches take it way too seriously. Sure, it’s supposed to be more competitive, and sure, it really blows when one person on your team is letting the entire team down, but for some reason, ranked matchmaking attracts some truly unattractive individuals and personalities. I can understand not randoming in ranked, I can understand not playing heroes for the first time in ranked, but I can’t, for the life of me, understand why every other person in ranked is a complete douche.

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  • What if Harry Potter was a teen romance comedy?

  • Barley for WordPress

    via Barley: The inline editor for everyone. Change the web. – from archive.org, as the original is now dead

    Barley for WordPress is a super-cool plugin that lets you make changes to posts on the front-end, rather than having to dive into the WordPress editor to make your changes. Great for if you spot a typo, updating a link, or re-writing entire paragraphs.

    But I don’t think I’ll be using it, because as Shawn Blanc discovered, it converts posts into HTML from the WYSIWYG/Markdown backend that I enjoy using. That’s a super-minor issue and shouldn’t discourage “normal” users from picking it up, but it just doesn’t work with my post workflow, you know? I’d rather edit in Markdown than have to write messy HTML in posts.

    Hopefully one day soon the WordPress folks will bring native Markdown support to self-hosted WordPress blogs, not just ones hosted on WordPress.com, but until then, I’ll be sticking with the excellent Markdown on Save plugin.

    — permalink to this post

  • Disney’s Frozen – A Material Point Method For Snow Simulation

  • Stuff from Amazon and other random purchases

    Me, yesterday:

    Amazon not shipping things to Australia is the bane of my existence. Or cool stuff not being available in Australia, one of the two.

    Every time I get a link to yet another cool thing from Amazon they won’t ship to Australia, I put it in a special collection of bookmarks and forget about it for a little while. And every now and again (i.e. a few times a year), I pick and choose a few things that I actually want and do a shipment via OPAS, my package forwarder of choice. Sign up using my referral link, and you’ll get free registration (usually $25) and I’ll get a credit every time you ship something with them.

    Shameless self-promotion aside, this last shipment of stuff from Amazon was pretty impressive.

    stuff from amazon

    In no particular order:

    • Cyalume 10″ SnapLights in green and white — apparently these are the best chemical lights money can buy. I just had to have some. (I have a bit of an obsession with glow sticks. Weird, I know.)

    • Fenix PD35 — pretty decent torch for the money. Takes either two CR123A batteries or one 18650 battery. Seriously bright, too, and the strobe is impressive, to say the least.

    • Gerber E.A.B. Pocket Knife (and the Lite version) — I saw these on Uncrate a little while ago and thought they’d be cool. I had intended to use them as an every day carry kind of thing, but decided that was just asking for trouble. They’re really nice, though. After purchasing I wasn’t sure if they would make it through customs, but here they are.

    • Lenox Gold titanium-edged utility blades — two packs of five. Titanium edged razor blades! Crazy. To go with the pocket knives.

    • iTP EOS A3 flashlight — 96 lumen output from one AAA battery, in a minimal design not much longer than a standard house key. It replaced the ageing Star Wars lightsaber laser that previously adorned my keyring. Waterproof, too.

    • ThruNight Ti2 flashlight — pretty much the same thing as the iTP EOS A3, except with a slightly newer version of the CREE LED inside (CREE XP-G2 versus XP-G). Also waterproof, etc.

    Not pictured:

    And finally, the pièce de résistance:

    Acer C720 Chromebook box

    • One Acer C720 Chromebook (specs via Anandtech). Ever since this was announced earlier in October I’ve wanted one. Didn’t really want to wait for it to become available locally (who knows how long that will take), so I imported one from Amazon. It’s honestly pretty great for a $250 laptop — I’ll have a full review up in the next month or so.

    All in all, all of the above was around $160 to ship to my door — expensive, yes, but it arrived in around 6 business days. The bad news is, I’m already planning my next Amazon shipment (something I should have bought along with the C720 but failed to think about ahead of time). One item might not be so bad, shipping wise.

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  • The Workhorse

    Canon 60D

    In the world of cameras, only Sony are doing anything that really interests me right now. By putting big(er) sensors into small(er) cameras, they’re improving image quality without sacrificing portability. They’re improving low-light and noise performance without having to go to ridiculously high ISOs or invest precious R&D into new noise-reduction algorithms. They’re doing the right thing, or at very least, moving in the right direction.

    It all started with the RX100, released just last year, a compact camera with a non-detachable zoom lens and a comparatively massive 1-inch sensor, the largest in its class. It was the first camera to put a big sensor in a body that was still extremely pocketable, and it was the first camera that offered anything close to the low-light performance of cameras with much larger sensors.

    Not surprisingly, the RX100 received rave reviews despite the slightly higher price point — it was decidedly an “enthusiast compact” camera, and the price reflected its status, but it was still on the expensive side for people looking for an alternative to similar cameras such as the Canon S100 or S110, both of which retail around the $300 mark — by comparison, the RX100 is easily twice that price.

    Regardless, the RX100 was a big hit with the wider photographic community. Someone at Sony must have decided this was a worthwhile path to pursue, because half a year later we saw the introduction of the RX1, the first camera to put a full-frame digital sensor in a compact camera. Not much bigger than the RX100, the RX1 is stil a hell of a lot more compact than any other camera with a large sensor, let alone a full-frame DSLR.

    Like the RX100, the RX1 comes with a non-detachable lens, but unlike the RX100, the lens on the RX1 is a fixed-focal length lens (commonly referred to as a prime). The lens permanently attached to the RX1 is a 35mm f/2 Zeiss, and I for one am glad Sony chose to go with something decent for their choice of lens. Thanks to the combination of quality glass and a full-frame sensor, image quality, low-light image quality and noise performance all improved markedly.

    The only real downside for consumers was the price: at close to what you might pay for a comparable full-frame DSLR, the RX1 is out of reach for anyone who actually wants a full-frame sensor in a compact body without the convenience of interchangeable lenses. You’d have to be a serious enthusiast (or flushed with cash) to fork out for a camera you bought for its size alone, especially when you can get a professional DSLR for around the same kind of money.

    Nevertheless, like the RX100 before it, the RX1 was heralded as a breakthrough in digital camera technology simply because it was the first camera to include a full-frame sensor in a compact-like body. It, too, received rave reviews, despite its expensive price tag.

    By this time, Sony had caught onto what consumers really wanted: DSLR-like image quality from compact cameras. The RX100 II followed with improvements to the general formula, including a new image processing chip for even better noise performance, coupled with the same big sensor in a compact body. Around the same time, Sony also released the RX1 R, a variant on the original that removed the anti-aliasing filter in favour of more effective resolution and slightly sharper images at the cost of possible moire when capturing certain lined patters. Continue Reading

Benny Ling's Bling

Computers are like a bicycle for our minds.