With new, innovative apps and programs dropping everyday, it pays to have a powerful computer. But forking out the cash for a pre-made rig can get expensive — especially when it’s perfectly feasible to build your own at a much lower price point. Of course, not all of us have the IT acumen of a Windows technician, but you can give yourself the necessary know-how with the How to Build a Computer Bundle — now on sale for $19.
Featuring five beginner-friendly courses, this collection will guide you through the steps and concepts crucial to creating a computer from scratch, or upgrading your current machine. You’ll start with the essentials, learning all about the functional roles of the various components and hardware that make up a computing system. Then, you’ll move on to more advanced concepts, like making hardware modifications, network cabling, overclocking your CPU, and more.
Plus, this collection also includes training on upgrading laptop hardware, thereby improving the versatility of your newly acquired skill set.
Contrary to popular belief, mastering the fundamentals of robotics doesn’t have to be a mind-numbing slog through programming and electronics courses. SunFounder’s Nano DIY 4-DOF Robot Kit offers an intuitive and beginner-friendly way to break into the field by walking you through building your own programmable robot, and you can get it in the Boing Boing Store for $50.
Going by the name of Sloth, this DIY kit is compatible with the included SunFounder Nano board or an Arduino Nano board. It’s equipped with two legs that you can program to walk, kick, or even dance, and, thanks to its HC-SR04 ultrasonic ranging module, it can even detect and avoid obstacles intelligently. What’s more, this simple kit comes with a visual programming language, allowing any DIY-er to start from scratch regardless of their coding background.
The SunFounder Nano DIY 4-DOF Robot Kit can be yours for $50 when you order it from the Boing Boing Store.
Alice Maz was part of a small group of players who came to have near-total mastery over the internal economy of a popular Minecraft; Maz describes how her early fascination with the mechanics of complex multiplayer games carried over into an interest in economics and games, and that let her become a virtuoso player, and brilliant thinker, about games and economics.
Maz’s long, fascinating essay about her business ventures in Minecraft are a potted lesson in economics, one that shows where financial engineering actually does something useful (providing liquidity, matching supply and demand) and the places where it becomes nothing more than a predatory drag on the “real economy” of people making amazing things in Minecraft.
Back when I was working on For the Win, my YA novel about gold farming, I read pretty much every book and academic paper on the subject of games and economics, and Maz’s essay is among the best pieces of writing on the subject I’ve encountered. It’s especially interesting because all the economic activities are aimed at dominating a server, but Maz never talks about whether, how, or if any of the in-game wealth can be converted to cash money, giving the whole thing a kind of abstract clarity that is sometimes obfuscated in the literature on in-game economics.
Diamonds being not the most valuable but certainly the most valued item in the game, both for their utility and their price stability, the server was littered with buy chests for them. These were mostly of the fling and a prayer sort, offering prices low enough that anyone selling to them was a noob or a fool. But not so low that I couldn’t sell them Charlotte’s. I bought from her all I could afford, bankrupted every single person who had a buy chest at any price, then went back for more. Buy chests in the market shops, scattered on the roadsides, nestled in secluded towns no one remembered the names of, I hit them all. If you were buying diamonds at the bottom of the ocean, I would find you and take all of your money.
At the same time, I dropped my sell price in the market to 16M and did pretty good business for a few weeks. I had the advantage of one of the two best plots there were, the other belonging to Emma. (This I’d gotten via inside knowledge that Zel’s to-be partner was shuttering his store and gifting the plot to a friend. I offered to swap my plot as the gift, help with the deconstruction process, and advise on pricing in the Emporium in exchange, thus getting the prized location without it ever going up for sale.) QuickShop provided a console command to show the closest shop selling an item, and these two plots, though behind hedge walls and not immediately visible, were the closest as the crow flies to the market’s warp-in point. So anyone using the command–and this was most people, traipsing through the market looking for deals being a rare activity mostly limited to speculators–got directed to me or Emma for anything either of us sold.
This all made me a lot of money. I drove a portion of profits into bolstering my diamond and beacon reserves, bought basically any building material I thought I’d ever need in bulk, and still watched my marble balance grow. Up til the diamond bonanza, I’d been making money on a dozen different side hustles. A bit here, a bit there, doing better than most, but regardless the day-in day-out of working the market took up the majority of my time on the game. That made me rich; this is what made me wealthy.
But soon 16M became 14M, and 14M became 12M. A few people started to notice Charlotte’s store, and she restocked faster than I, or anyone, could recoup enough to buy out. Mostly though, it was clear to everyone the price of diamond was falling, even if they had no idea why. I diversified into selling enchanted diamond equipment of all types, priced just so that I could break even on the enchant and move the component diamonds at the same price I sold them for raw. A few of the buy chest people I’d tanked tried recovering some of their money by putting up at a loss the diamonds I’d sold them, but they still couldn’t move product faster than a trickle. Eventually even Charlotte had to cut her prices to keep selling. It was bad.
The Star Control: Origins – Fleet Battles BETA is underway for those who have pre-ordered the game (currently priced at $29.99 on Steam). However, we were able to partner with Stardock Entertainment to give away twenty-five beta codes through the raffle method.
Just enter below and keep completing the actions until December 15th to increase your chances to be among the winners. Good luck!
Star Control: Origins is a science-fiction adventure game set in an open universe that puts the player as the captain of Earth’s first interstellar vessel on a mission to find allies to help save humanity from certain annihilation.
The beta unlocks the Fleet Battles feature, where you’ll assemble ships in a fleet and engage in battle with fleets controlled by either the computer, humans via the Internet or even friends sitting at the same PC.
You can literally design your own ships to use in combat using the Ship Crafting system, or you can download ships designed by others to play with. Ship Crafting not only allows you to decide what weapons and defenses a ship has, but allows total control of how a ship looks.
The goal of the Beta 1 series
The goal of the first beta of Star Control: Origins is to help us with balance, compatibility, eliminating cheese tactics and improving the user experience in designing ships and creating fleets. There will be a lot of changes coming into these betas as we go forward. For example, additional elements will be added to the combat arena such as salvage, temporary boosts to speed, crew replenishment, Precursor relics that help your entire fleet, etc. The arena will be randomly chosen at the beginning of the fleet battle and we hope to have many different arenas available (and possibly an arena editor for players).
What we really want to emphasize is: DO NOT assume that beta 1 is representative of the final game. It is a beta for a reason. We think most people will really like Beta 1. But every time I play it, I find something that has to be changed (the look of the planet or the variance in space backgrounds or a sound effect or a weapons effect or the way the planet interacts with something, etc.). This is where you guys come in: Make sure that the final released version of the game isn’t a 1.0 but is more like a 1.5 of a normal game.
It’s been a while since we covered Survarium, the Free-to-Play online first-person shooter made by Vostok Games, the Ukrainian studio founded by former S.T.A.L.K.E.R. developers.
The game, which is available on Steam Early Access, recently added its first cooperative story-driven mission with Update 0.50. To play this mission you’ll need access keys though, and we’ve got three thousand codes from Vostok Games. After you’ve picked a code from the giveaway below, follow these instructions:
Each code gives 3 Access Keys to play Team Mission.
If a player prefers to play Survarium via Steam he must enter the code on the game’s website using the Steam browser
The codes can be used for old and new accounts
One code per account. If someone else has already redeemed a code he will not be able to use it again
Bonuses of the codes are not awarded immediately, but within 5 to 30 minutes
Expire date: December 24th, 2017
Story mission tells about a conflict between Black Market and The Renaissance Army and also unveils the mystery about secret experiments which lead to the creation of the Forest.
Specifically for this mission developers created a new map with lots of both open and indoors locations. Developers tried to add an element of exploration into the game, and also let players interact with the world of Survarium.
The mission is designed for a squad of three players, and to successfully finish it players need to complete a set of tasks. At least one of the players must reach each of the checkpoints: then defeated squad members (if there are any) are resurrected and may continue. If all squad members are dead, the mission is failed.
While going through the mission players will learn the storyline, but the player can also find stashes containing various trophies which players will receive when the mission is successfully finished.
