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How to unlock all characters in Marvel Vs Capcom 2 Arcade (Naomi/Reicast)

Mon, 31 May 2021 10:20:00 +0000

There are tons of playable characters in the arcade version of MVC2 but you need to reach 33333 EXP to unlock them, which means either inserting 33333 “coins” or playing for thousands of hours. There is a much quicker alternative though and I’m writing this post in the hope that it might help you figure it out a little quicker than I did.

Setting up unRAID on a Dell PowerEdge T110 II

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 09:00:00 +0000

For most of the last decade I’ve been running a headless Mac Mini with a large external drive to run my Plex server and a few other services. Recently I’ve started playing with Docker and it’s really made the Mac Mini start to show its age.

I briefly looked at the “current” Mac Mini’s but when I saw they start at £800 and haven’t been updated since 2018 I hastily looked elsewhere. I considered building my own server but found myself getting carried away by massively over-engineering a system.

So you’re thinking of buying your first 3D printer...

Sun, 11 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The ability to print out almost any solid object you can imagine at home is undeniably awesome but there are a few things that are worth considering before you buy your first printer.

(Please note this post is specifically about FDM/Filament printers. MSLA/Resin printers are an entirely separate subject although many of the same considerations apply)

Do you enjoy tinkering with machines?

3D printers have matured a lot in a short space of time but they are still arguably not quite at the level of refinement of most other consumer electronics. At the very least you will need to carry out the basic calibration and maintenance of your printer. It’s also likely that sometimes things won’t work as you expect and you’ll need to troubleshoot issues that arise.

How do you do everything?

Sun, 04 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

My day job is largely about helping people and teams focus on working on always working on the most important thing next. So I find it quite frustrating when I struggle to prioritise the use of my own free time (#firstworldproblems). Currently I’m trying to work out how and when I can do the following…

Improve my 3D skills

I’ve been using blender for years and I generally feel confident in my ability to create objects and scenes but I know that I don’t challenge myself enough. Blender 2.8 has now been officially released so I need to relearn some things. I feel like setting myself a more complicated scene might be the way to get back up to speed. I’m also keen to get more proficient with Fusion 360 to model objects for 3D printing.

Sanwa Upgrade for 8Bitdo N30 Arcade Stick

Sat, 27 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I’ve been getting back into fighting games and playing on an Xbox One controller just wasn’t cutting it. I did a little research into Fight Sticks (or arcade sticks as I would have called them) and it turns out that they’re still pretty expensive and they rarely support wireless.

A New Challenger Approaches…

The N30 Arcade Stick from 8Bitdo is one of the few arcade sticks currently on the market that supports any wireless connectivity. It can connect to either a PC or a Nintendo Switch wirelessly over bluetooth or physically over a USB cable.

My Top Ten Games

Sun, 31 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The other day I saw that my friend Looch had replied to a tweet from Zachary Ryan asking people to answer with their top ten games as quickly as possible. I quickly rattled off my own list and replied. I’ve been thinking about it since and although there are some notable games missing from my list I think it covers the games I have spent the most time playing along with the games that had the largest impacts on me. So here they are…

Choosing a thin and powerful laptop for blender

Mon, 03 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I pulled the trigger on a new laptop. I had been looking for something portable, powerful and - surprise, surprise - suitable for working in blender. I had spent several weeks trying to decide exactly which machine to go for. The contenders were the Razer Blade 15, Gigabyte Aero 15X and the MSI GS65 Stealth Thin.

Razer Blade 15 - The Gamer’s Choice

The Razer was originally my first choice, it’s basically the MacBook Pro equivalent for gamers, which means it has good internals for the modelling, animation and rendering I want to do. Unfortunately it seems to be constantly out of stock (or not yet released according to Amazon). I even registered directly with Razer to be updated when they came back in stock and have still not heard from them.

Material: Net Curtain

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’m currently working on modelling the whole interior of the house my wife and I are buying. I’m one room in so far but I’ll cover that in detail in another post soon. I hit a snag when I was trying to model the curtains for the windows though.

How on earth do you make a net curtain material?

I tried using the translucent material, then I tried using it mixed with the transparent material but nothing seemed quite right. I had a brief chat with Alex Saplacan on the UK & Ireland Blender Users Slack group and he suggested using Wave Texture nodes to generate the lines in the fabric. After some fiddling about I came up with this which I think works pretty well.

Custom Nerf Guns

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Lately I’ve been watching a lot of videos about prop making and cosplay. I’m not sure I’m bold enough to dress up myself but I really like the idea of making amazing looking costumes and props from such cheap materials. Unfortunately living in London means our flat is tiny and there’s no space for a workshop or even a spare room. Fortunately my wife is awesome and she suggested that we take a long weekend off work so that we could scratch our creative itches. Leave was booked, craft shops, builders merchants and toy shops were visited and a number of Amazon orders were made.

Solid, practical and cheap(ish) laptop

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been fortunate enough to be supplied with MacBook Pros for my last few jobs, including my current role. I passed my own (now aged) MacBook Air on to my Wife when we met and since then I’ve been pretty much using my work machines for personal stuff too.

I was thinking about buying a cheap, reliable laptop for web browsing, coding and other odds and ends. Unfortunately the requirement that it should be cheap pretty much disqualified all Apple products. So I thought I’d look through eBay and see what I could find.

What happened to No Man's Sky?

Tue, 30 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Like a lot of people I had been looking forward to No Man’s Sky for some time. However I didn’t preorder it, and when it was announced that it would not be a multiplayer game I decided it wasn’t for me.

During the week of launch a friend of mine bought it. Having seen the opening of the game and then reading some articles online my wife thought it sounded like something she’d enjoy, something akin to minecraft in space. So I bought it for her as an anniversary gift (‘cos I’m romantic like that) and she’s been playing it on and off for the last week.

Building a PC for Blender

Fri, 08 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been playing with blender for a while now and I’ve reached the point where my laptop is just not up to the job. I have increasingly found that I abandon projects as adjusting materials and lighting requires hour long renders to see the difference. Having considered all the options;

Buying a newer Mac This doesn’t really make sense as it may not actually be an improvement as Apple tend to use AMD graphics cards and Blender seems to work best with NVIDIA cards.
Buying a secondhand Mac Pro and upgrading the graphics card(s) Having spent some time researching this route there doesn’t seem to be much useful information available. It seems that the graphics cards might need flashing to make Mac OS recognise them and the risks involved were too large. Plus the cost of a recent, pre-dustbin, Mac Pro and a good graphics card was equivalent to building a new PC from scratch.
Building a Hackintosh There’s tons of information out there for people that want to go down this route. I had a very cheap netbook running Mac OS X a few years back and it mostly worked fine but there were enough issues that made me not want to rely on it.

Rendering Minecraft in Blender

Sat, 23 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been having an on and off love affair with Blender for three years now. While it’s true that the interface is bordering on user-hostile once you begin to understand the Blender way of doing things it is an incredibly capable piece of software.

Recently I stumbled upon Mineways, a free open-source program which allows you to export sections of your Minecraft worlds for rendering or 3D printing. Being quite a fan of Minecraft (my wife and I had our Minecraft avatars on our wedding cake) I thought I’d have a play with it and see what I could make.

Peeking behind the curtain

Sun, 03 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I’ve begun experimenting with things I would have thought impossible a few years ago. The python script I wrote last week and the data scraping project that I’ve yet to write about have both made me realise that none of this stuff is witchcraft. With my hosting renewal coming up I started wondering about moving from shared hosting to a VPS.

For the last decade my personal sites and email accounts have been hosted with the same shared hosting company. They have always provided me with excellent service for a reasonable price and I’ve always been happy to recommend them to my clients. Now that my requirements have reduced a little and I’ve been seeing VPS offered for a fraction of the cost I thought it worth investigating.

Over-engineering #firstworldproblems

Mon, 27 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I have finally backed a kickstarter campaign for the first time. It’s a 3D printer called Tiko and I’m really excited about receiving it. So excited in fact that I would really like to get it earlier than the February ETA I originally pledged for.

Some of the early backers have been concerned about the lack of updates, photos and videos from the Tiko team and have been cancelling their pledges. This has opened spaces in the pledges with earlier estimated shipping dates. The other day I was fortunate that I refreshed the page at just the right moment and managed to change my pledge to one with a January shipment. That got me wondering if I could come up with something that would alert me when the slots opened up.

What's my motivation?

Sun, 11 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Why am I writing?

I wanted a new project, I have an interest in the web and I wanted to improve my writing. I had been thinking about learning a new programming language for a while and it occured to me that perhaps I could do that and write about it as I went along.

I mentioned the idea to one of the Ruby developers at work. I was fairly sure that as I’m a newb I would have nothing useful or interesting to say. His response inspired me to write everything on this site. He said, “There is always someone that started learning a week after you”.

Cheap HTPC Remote

Sat, 05 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000