Hackaday Links: April 23, 2017

‘Member StarCraft? Ooooh, I ‘member StarCraft. The original game and the Brood War expansion are now free. A new patch fixes most of the problems of getting a 20-year-old game working and vastly improves playing over LAN (‘member when you could play video games over a LAN?) And you thought you were going to have free time this week.

About a year ago, [Mark Chepurny] built a dust boot for his Shapeoko CNC router. The SuckIt (not the best possible name, by the way) is an easy, simple way to add dust collection to an X-Carve or Shapeoko 2. The folks at Inventables reached out to [Mark] and made a few improvements. Now, the renamed X-Carve Dust Control System. It’s a proper vacuum attachment for the X-Carve with grounding and a neat brush shoe.

I don’t know if this is a joke or not. It’s certainly possible, but I seriously doubt anyone would have the patience to turn PowerPoint into a Turing Machine. That’s what [Tom Wildenhain] did for a lightning talk at SIGBOVIK 2017 at CMU. There’s a paper (PDF), and the actual PowerPoint / Turing Machine file is available.

System76 builds computers. Their focus is on computers that run Linux well, and they’ve garnered a following in the Open Source world. System76 is moving manufacturing in-house. Previously, they’ve outsourced their design and hardware work to outside companies. They’re going to work on desktops first (laptops are much harder and will come later), but with any luck, we’ll see a good, serviceable, Open laptop in a few year’s time.

Remember last week when a company tried to trademark the word ‘makerspace’? That company quickly came to their senses after some feedback from the community. That’s not all, because they also had a trademark application for the word ‘FabLab’. No worries, because this was also sorted out in short order.

8 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: April 23, 2017

  1. The new download of the old Starcraft is a web install. You get to spend a bunch of time watching it download a couple of gigabytes.

    If you don’t care about online play and want an offline setup, search for Starcraft+1.18+PTR+1202.zip That’s the same thing but can only connect to a “public test realm” server for online play. Blizzard took that down and memory holed the forum thread for it.

    Unzip, run starcraft.exe, play. Portable Starcraft + Broodwar with the latest patch. Run starcraft launcher.exe and it does the same online download and install as the setup linked from starcraft.com

    As for why Blizzard is giving a nearly 20 year old game a new coat of paint for the Remastered edition, the answer is South Korea. As the esports star has dimmed for the old game, and Starcraft II has failed to meet its heights, pumping up the old game to look good at up to 4K, with re-digitized audio, may put some of the old kick back into its competition popularity.

    How popular has Starcraft been in South Korea? There’s a saying that if you want to date a Korean girl, first you must beat her father in a game of Starcraft. ;)

  2. I wanted System76 to be awesome but they weren’t. I bought a Lemur and a Starling (both re-branded Clevo laptops). Both were flimsy and shoddy all round and developed faults with their screens within the first three months. After-sales support was rude and they wouldn’t fix the faults unless I paid for international shipping back and out again, which is a ripe in order to fix something that wasn’t fit for purpose.

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