Abiyasa Blogs

This Sunday, I and my wife will go to Shanghai. My dad, mom, and brothers will fly directly from Jakarta. We will have a family vacation in Shanghai and Beijing. I am so excited since it’s going to be my first time in China

So I start listing all the things I wanna bring. My Nintendo DS is a must! When I took my DS, it was covered in dust. It’s been more than 2 months since I played my DS. Hmm…

Do I still like my DS?

Yup.

Maybe there’s no good game for DS?

Nope. I still haven’t finished my FF Tactics A2.

So?

When I get home from work, my eyes are tired. I need to relax my eyes. Therefore, I avoid dealing with a small screen, like DS, or watching movie on iPod (who wants to do that at home anyway ). That’s why I choose PS3 or Flash game on my laptop when I want to play game.

Maybe I should get this jumbo DS

On my previous post (fixing a broken wacom pen), I accidentally glued the pen tip to the iron core. The glue was a mess; the iron core, the plastic part, and the pen tip, all sticked together

This causing the Wacom tablet couldn’t detect any pen pressure although the pen tip position is detected. The pen tip is not moveable, that’s why.

Since the eraser part was still working and I rarely use it, I decided to desolder the and move the eraser part to the pen tip.

my plan

Preparation

I bought a cheap solder iron (around 3 EUR), 10cm tin solder wire (less than 1 EUR, no need to buy one big roll), and if necessary, a solder sucker. I didn’t bought this last item.

If you haven’t done any soldering before, just ask your friend or someone to do it

Soldering Time

The idea is to desolder both pen’s coil wires and the eraser’s one, and exchange them (see my plan above).

First, I open the wacom pen. It’s easy since I have it opened before. Then desolder the pen tip part.

There are two parts you have to desolder: the part which connects the wires from the coil, and the other part which stick the plastic part to the PCB/component board. Once you desolder these parts, the pen component can be easily removed. Read the rest of this entry »

Since yesterday, I have been changing my Blogs themes, and also updating Wordpress to 2.7.1.

The themes which you can see right now (dilectio) is maybe for temporary.

Sorry for any inconvenience

Most of the video game reviewers complain that the new Prince of Persia is too easy. The prince cannot die since Elika, his new sidekick, will always save you. If you jump to the wrong place or pit, Elika with her magic power will grab and save you from falling down to the bottomless pit. The fighting mechanism is very simple that some people can do it with their eye closed.

I am quite surprise that the game gets a bad review for these features. Because for me, this game is a bless.

As a grown up with a full time job, I am juggling between work, family, gaming, exercise, sketching, facebooking, friends, and my personal game projects. Game which requires long time to master or finish cannot fits to my schedule anymore.

Some people might have said to me, why don’t you buy or play casual or easier game? Well, I am not a casual gamer. I’ve played Prince of Persia since it was on PC. I played all the Sand of Time trilogy. I enjoy frustrating platformers like Megaman series, Yoshi Island, or Super Mario Bros. I am hungry for more hardcore game titles!

I am a hardcore gamer (so does my wife) but I realize that I cannot finish games like Final Fantasy XII anymore despite I like it very much. It’s too long and takes a lot of dedication.

I already schedule every weekend for Final Fantasy Tactics A2 on my DS. So I have only 30 minute (or 1 hour if I am lucky) on workday evenings.

This prince of Persia fits me. I feel that I can achieve something in this tiny amount of time, and the game is very forgiving. You actually can die on Prince of Persia but instead showing the traditional game-over-continue screen, you get a short animation of Elika saving you from falling. This gives you the feeling of ‘hey, I don’t die. Let’s do it again’ feeling.

I’ve tried the demo of Mirror’s Edge. After 30 minutes playing (with a lot of fallings/dying), I was frustrated and I stop playing it. I am not saying the game is bad, it’s just not for me.

Some gamers said the more forgiving games are not challenging. For me it is. Allocating time for following and playing good games is already challenging enough for me. I wish that more and more games are friendly to people like us, older and used to be hardcore gamers.

Beside, don’t those game designers also getting older and have family too?

I have been learning ActionScript 3.0 for my next project, and I tried WiiFlash two days ago. WiiFlash is an additional library/tool for Adobe Flash (ActionScript) so you can use your Wii Remote. You can download it from their website http://wiiflash.bytearray.org/

On my first try, the demo didn’t work

I ran the WiiFlash server 0.4.3 and it’s able to connect to my Wii Remote. When I executed the SWF file (Wiimote Demo.swf), the demo didn’t show any Wiimote’s data. I think the demo cannot connect to the WiiFlash server.

So I opened the FLA file (Wiimote Demo.fla), try to build and run it.

It worked!

The demo showed the Wiimote’s data. So the problem only occurs when you try to execute the SWF directly.

I tried using Flash player debug version and get a message something related to security. I figured out that’s because the SWF file is running from the local file but it’s trying to access the network. This is restricted according to the Flash sandbox security policy but luckily you can set the permission manually.

Using the Flash authoring tool, go to the Publish Settings (see figure below). On the bottom of the window, you can see the Local playback Security. By default, it is set to access local files only. Set it to Access network only, build the SWF file, and now your SWF file can connect to the local WiiFlash server

note: I need to know whether this method still allow your SWF file to access local file..