Playing With Sharp Objects

Do you find yourself reading a lot of books from certain categories? Check out Powell’s RSS Book lists. Subscribe to the feed you need and keep up with releases when they come out.

Amazon offers the same in their Category feeds covering books and a whole lot more. Now that Amazon is offering groceries, I wonder how long until they post grocery specials in an RSS feed.

Don’t forget to check out LibraryThing when you want ideas for buying that next book or to see what other people like you are reading..

Just freshly added to the MonkleyChow SVN repository, support for a privacy checkbox in the edit page for the frames view. Checking the PRIVATE checkbox will make sure that anything you have selected as PRIVATE will not show in OPML, RSS feeds, or aggregator output - only you will see those feeds and the corresponding articles. Also, remember that you can set your .htaccess to block those opml, rss, and aggregator pages if you don’t wish to provide those services in the first place.

I’ve also added a lot more to the Spanish translation recently. Once I have all the translations done for es_US, I’ll be ready for anyone that wants to translate the messages.po file into a language of their choosing. Volunteers wanted!! I want to get about 6 total languages supported before the next release: Polish, romance languages (I’ve covered Spanish - French, Portuguese, Italian?), and hopefully Arabic and Chinese. Volunteers wanted!!

[part 2]

Things you must have:

• Halo Mapping Tools v3.5 (hmtv3.5)
  ( http://halomaps.org/index.cfm?pg=3&fid=1343 )
• 60 plugins pack for Hmtv3.5
  ( http://files.halomods.com/viewtopic.php?t=4198 )
• Full version of Halo PC (buy it here if you dont have it)

In this mod I will explain how to make Master Chief jump higher and have no falling damage! BEFORE MODDING CREATE BACKUPS OF ALL YOUR HALO PC MAPS!!!!!!!!!

• To do this go to c:\program files\microsoft games\halo
• Copy all the masp from the MAPS folder
• Right click and create new folder
• rename the newly created folder as BACKUPS
• paste all the maps from MAPS into BACKUPS
• if u mess up one of your original maps in the MAPS folder,
• copy the same map from BACKUPS into MAPS, and its good!

Instructions for Jump Higher and No Falling Damage Mod:

1. Open up Hmt v3.5 (make sure you put the 60 plugins into the plugins folder).
2. Search for you maps, go to c:\program files\microsoft games\halo\maps.
3. Pick Bloodgulch.map.
4. You should now see a ton of options appear on the left of the Hmt window.
5. On the left side, Resource Browser, where all the options appeared, four down from the top is [bipd] Biped(2 items), select this, then select Characters\cyborg_mp\cyborg_mp
6. Some new items should appear on the right side of the Hmt window now.
7. On the right side of the screen, scroll down all the way and look for a check box with Jumping and Landing writen next to it.
8. Where it says jump velocity you should see 0.07 writen in the text box beside it.
9. Change this to 0.14 (this is twice the jump height)
10. Now hit the Save button thats next to revert on the upper left hand side of the screen.
11. You must save after each change u make (can get annoying)
12. Now on the left, Resource Browser, search for [jpt!]Damage(81 items)
13. Select this tab
14. Under this new tab, select globals\distance
15. On the right hand side of the screen now, scroll down and look for Minimum Damage, Maximum Damage(minimum), and Maximum Damage(maximum). In the text box next to them change them all to 0.
16. Click the Save button again.
17. Now over under Resource Browser select globals\falling
18. Scroll down on the left hand side again until you come across Minimum Damage, Maximum Damage(minimum), and Maximum Damage(maximum).
19. Once again change the numbers in the text box next to them to 0, and save again.
20. Close Hmt (always Close Hmt after you done a mod, or else halo wont load that map).
21. Start Halo pc, go to Bloodgulch and fool around!!!
22. Extra - Now that you’ve done this go back and experiment, make Master Chief jump higher, or lower!

Explanation of this mod!
Ok what you just did is made it so Master Chief will jump higher
without being damaged by falling from high heights. You went into Jump
Velocity, this changed how fast he jumped up…making him jump
higher…making this number higher will infact make him jump higher. I then had you
go into globals\distance. This is if Master Chief were to go to
heights he’s not supposed to, it would make him die. I had you change
Minimum Damage, and both of the Maximums to 0. This will eliminate a
distance making him go as high as the ceiling of the map without dieing.

Finally, i had you go into globals\falling. This is what controls Master
Chiefs falling damage. You changed Minimum and both the maximums to 0.

This eliminated falling damage, as 0 damage wouldnt be anything at all!

Try fooling arounf with these mods, and try to make your own mods, try
to make him jump higher, or challenge yourself and make him jump lower!

Check back soon for my next tutorials, also check the video of what your mod should look like!

-Bigern1990

Based on conversations I’ve had with a few former users of the original FoF and another FOF project, FOF-redux, here is the near future roadmap for Monkeychow.

• Internationalization. We have translators for Spanish (myself) and French (Andrew Arensburger of ooblick.com), but to provide real widespread use of the software, we need a lot more. I will be providing messages.po and message.mo files for locale “en_US” in v38 in SVN that anyone can use to submit similar files for their language. After we have about 5 languages in there, I’ll do another full release of the code to get the ball rolling for general users. For details on internationalization in PHP using gettext, see here. Please volunteer so I don’t have to resort to Babelfish!
• OPML filtering by tag. Send feed lists to people based only on the currently viewed tag. Not a high priority item, but handy.
• Merge the frames and non-frames code to reduce code redundancy. (DRY) The duplicate coding for panel and frames view should never have been done that way.
• Some sort of skinning and CSS revamp, maybe as part of a new preferences panel. The current look is very minimalist, but it’s not for everyone so we need to make “pretty” an option to bring more users into the fold. At the same time, I’d like to reduce the clutter and some inefficient use of space. Andrew Arensburger has been submitting code in this area. This goes in hand with the code merge, so we may even want to merge the two altogether and have a preferences field determine how much of the interface shows.
• Preferences leads right into multiple users. By adding multiple users this can become more of a social service that anyone can install, allowing you to let a circle of friends join (invites?) or let anyone read feeds off your lists. If anyone has ideas about how the database might be revamped to support multiple users and keep track of what they individually have read, I welcome your advise.
• AJAX effects like live search and collapsable article fields. I don’t want to make it too heavy, but that can really help with the look and feel of the tool.
• Provide an easy self-contained way of using this with Cygwin apache to provide an easy to install desktop version for Windows users.

I don’t really have any set dates for this, but that is the order we’ll be putting our efforts into. Please comment here or email me if you have any additional suggestions.