Fire Soda

I had a dream where there was a fire flavored soda. It had a goofy cartoon unicorn on the bottle that was on fire and screaming, though in a really silly depiction that was more like how you’d advertise hot wings. You know, where there would be some guy whose eyes were bulging and he was spitting fire, and somehow this makes the product more appealing? It had the advertising line “What do people who don’t fear death fear who death who?” This was weird on many levels, including the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever been able to read text in a dream before. Seems like an odd place to start.

I think the idea was something like, there’s probably some bumper sticker line “I’m afraid of people who are afraid of death.” Some kind of statement on people who never leave their bubble. So the soda asks us, of the people who don’t fear death, what kind of person scares them? A sort of roundabout way of saying the same thing, though more open-ended.

The point I’m making here is: where is my fire flavored soda?

Arduboy

A while back I backed something on kickstarter called Arduboy, and I got it in the mail a few days ago. I decided to inaugurate the little guy by remaking the game that I can’t seem to stop remaking: FANBOAT. The greatest game that ever graced GWBASIC. Arguably. By me.

IMG_4577

Anyway, check it out! It currently runs from the Arduino desktop app but not from Codebender; dunno what problem they have with it. But if you have an Arduboy, you can figure it out, I’m sure.

Suicidal BB-8

So you know I have that BB8 toy? Well whoever programmed it gave him a tendency for suicide.]I let it run out of batteries, but today I put it back on the charger. It has an inductive charger, so it can only juice up when it’s sitting on the pad the right way. In the spirit of giving him personality, they added this thing where if he’s out of batteries, or critically low I guess, when he’s on the charger, he droops his head forward dramatically like he’s powered down. Thing is, it doesn’t have a control for his head separate from the weight shifting that drives him around. Basically, in order to move his head, the entire internal mechanism has to rotate. This has the effect of lifting the inductive surface off of the charger, which prevents him charging further.
So I put him on the charger, he wakes up, rotates himself off the charger, and being without batteries, dies. Put him back -> wakes up -> kills self -> repeat.
I managed to prop up the charging surface so that he still ended up on it while being dramatic like he do, and managed to ride through his little animation long enough to get minimal power into the battery. It’s not an unsolvable problem, so I just think it’s funny. They also patch the firmware on occasion through the control app, so it’s possible that this is a bug that was solved already, but I haven’t powered my guy up in a while so he may be rolling with old code for the moment.