Goblin Valley Panorama

Goblin Valley Panorama, originally uploaded by fincher69.

An approximately 45 megapixel panorama of Goblin Valley State Park in Utah. It took me a bit of playing around with it, but I thought the stitch came together pretty well and provided a cool view of the plethora of "goblins" that were there. Definitely a unique place!

Stitched together with DoubleTake.

Post to test Facebook integration

Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.

Repurposing an old Android phone as a portable gaming device - Part 1

Recently, I have been interested in a platform for mobile gaming.  I kinda lost interest in my old DS, and my Droid 4's battery life goes from shoddy to downright abysmal with just a little bit of gaming. I heavily considered a PS Vita, but it is still a bit more of an investment than I'm willing to make at the moment. Then I found this guide on Lifehacker for turning an android device into a media/gaming center.  I didn't necessarily need everything described in the guide, but I figured it was a good place to start using my old Droid 3. First I decided to focus on setting up the NES emulator first. I have played around with a few in the past that worked pretty well, but both the software controls and using keys on the hardware keyboard were lacking. I rarely use both my PS3 controllers, so I decided to see if I could use the one that is starting to wear down with my phone. So I decided to try out Sixaxis Controller by Dancing Pixel Studios. It is handy that is has a free app that tests your device then the actual app is only $1.99, which is pretty reasonable. To pair the controller with my phone, I had to install libusb then use sixpair to tell the controller the ID of my phone.  It was pretty simple and painless.

Then I started playing with a few emulators. Initially, I wasn't having any luck with using the controller in the emulator, but it turned out that I just didn't really read the Lifehacker guide that closely, haha. Basically you have to go into the sixaxis setting and map the controller buttons to actual keys.  Once I figured that out, I tried out NESoid (my fav of the ones I tried) and everything worked perfectly! I only have a handful of ROMs (the format the games come in) at the moment, but if this becomes my consistent mobile gaming platform I'm sure that collection will soon grow. ;-) Next I figured I would play around with putting it on a larger screen. That probably won't be part of its main function, but why not!? A little while back I ordered a mini-HDMI to HDMI cable so I was able to plug my phone directly into my second monitor (or any TV that has HDMI) and voila! It was just like having an NES but with snazzier controllers! [caption id="attachment_1528" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Booting up some Mega Man 2![/caption] I played a few games, and the controller was pretty responsive and a great step up from playing on my phone. My phone was fine for games like Dragon Warrior where it is never necessary to act quickly. One game of Tecmo Super Bowl and I realized how subpar trying to use the keyboard actually was. So with pretty minimal setup and $1.99 I had a nice little emulator that I could hook to any TV with HDMI and play with a wireless controller. Nice! Phase two of making this into a DS/PS Vita alternative will be fashioning a mount like the Gameklip. While it really isn't too expensive ($15 + a likely shipping charge), I believe I could put together something fairly easily that would cost me a lot less.  My first thought is to just refashion my car mount to connect to the controller.  It may be a little bulky, but I'll sacrifice a little space for it being practically free! (or pre-paid I guess, haha) Additionally, I imagine I should be able to get at least a SNES emulator running, maybe Genesis too. There's also the standard Android game library (Angry Birds, etc.) that I can use. If I think I'll be using those much I may want to put a little more thought into make the mount for the PS3 controller fairly easy to remove. The only real thing that is lacking, which is pretty minor, is that the PS Vita ties in with your PSN account for trophies and such. While I admit it is kinda silly, I can't say I would be disappointed if some kind of trophy system was released for Android. Or even better, Sony released a tie-in so Android developers could actually earn PSN trophies!