Greedy Fat Cats

I've been a long-time reader of Penny Arcade and even been an Enforcer at PAX for the first six years of its existence.  I have a ton of respect for the folks behind Penny Arcade including Mike Krahulik, Jerry Holkins and Robert Khoo among others.  Today, Mike tweeted, "... Gamestop is a greedy fat cat that didn't do shit."  I have very specifically taken this quote out of context because I find the comment itself interesting as an indication just how much the Internet has changed things in our world.

When I was younger, the supply chain behind bringing a good (as opposed to a service) to market was pretty much assumed to be: manufacturer, distributor/wholesaler, retailer and customer.  Each step in the chain provided some benefit to the customer.  The manufacturer created the good.  The distributor or wholesaler was good at getting a certain class of goods from various manufacturers to tons of locations around the country or the world.  The retailer provided a clean, stable, safe and (sometimes) knowledgeable environment from which you could inspect, sample and purchase the good.  I would not have known about a great many computer games in my youth had my local Egghead Software not stocked them.

The role of the retailer has certainly changed significantly in the last few decades.

3D Printing Potential Boon to Miniatures Wargaming

I've been following the 3D printing scene for a little while, thinking that I'd really like to get my hands on one of those and do something really cool with it.  3D printers like the MakerBot Thing-O-Matic have the potential to be the beginning of something really special, I believe.  It's one of those ideas that I can't yet conceive of how it will revolutionize things, but I believe it will.  Perhaps this is how my parents felt when my dad was working with computers in the 1970s and thought that we should have a computer at home because they knew that it was going to be the future.  But I digress ...

Anyway, I've been on a "reduce all the things" binge around the house because I'm at the point in my life where I want things simple.  The problem here is that I've been a good American consumer and bought a metric crapton of crap!  (I think I've found a new state of George Carlin's classic stuff/crap dichotomy: When you no longer want the stuff you have, it becomes crap.)  I want to organize my house and one of the easiest ways to organize things is to reduce the number of things that need organizing by getting rid of the things you don't really need but are afraid to throw away.  Getting a 3D printer (one more thing) that will allow me to make things on demand (probably a whole bunch of things) is ... shall we say ... somewhat counterproductive?

So I've been able to resist the temptation to purchase one of these wonderful contraptions, so far.  But that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about what I could do with one of them, if I were to purchase one.  And then I saw on Twitter that someone had made a 3D terrain map of the Hudson Valley using a MakerBot.  Then it hit me, what if game clubs or game stores purchased MakerBots and started printing their own miniatures, terrain and so forth?

Currently, there are a couple ways to obtain or create miniatures suitable for wargaming.  One can purchase off-the-rack mass-produced miniatures.  Or one can create one-off or even small run miniatures using a resin casting method.  Resin casting generally provides lower-quality miniatures than mass produced ones, but are generally cheaper than their mass produced counterparts.  I would expect 3D printed miniatures to be more expensive than resin cast and possibly mass produced miniatures, but to have quality rivaling or even exceeding in some cases the mass produced miniatures.  The exact differences in cost and quality would require more research.

But think of the convenience!  What if I were a sculptor with some talent for creating miniatures models?  Or a 3D artist?  Perhaps I could sell designs that people with 3D printers could use to create their miniatures with?  Perhaps deals could be struck between the artist and game stores where the artist gets a percentage of every miniature printed by the game store?  Perhaps new miniature wargaming companies could sell designs with their rule sets so people could print the miniatures at home or take them into the game store to be printed for a modest sum over cost of materials?  And just think, for the people for whom the painting of the army is ninety percent of the fun of having a huge miniature army ... an endless supply of things to paint!

The mind boggles!

Trials and Tribulations with My New iMac

I recently bought a new iMac, making my conversion to The Dark Side complete. I got it almost completely tricked out. I was especially glad to get the SSD/HD combination. It's a 240GB SSD for the system drive and then a 1TB HD for whatever. The problem is that the way the system comes configured from the factory you would end up just using the SSD for everything unless you do some wizardry first. So I had to go and teach myself the wizardry through a couple failed attempts before I landed on what I believe, now, to be the proper solution.

Form 1: Default Configuration
The default configuration from the factory makes the SSD the main drive where everything gets stored.  The system, all the applications, all the user folders, everything.  The problems with this configuration are that I have a 1TB drive that is now useless and the SSD is only 240GB.  This is big enough for a while and may even be big enough if I wanted to really watch my disk usage.  But the whole point is that I don't want to watch my disk usage!

Form 2: Move /Users to HD

This is more like it!  So now I have the operating system, applications and such on the super-fast (but small) SSD and all my big fat user files like pictures and music and videos on the HD.  This is how I did it:

1. Create a Users directory on the HD (named "Macintosh HD 2" by default).
2. Copy the contents of /Users to the new Users directory.
3. Open System Preferences.
4. Select Users & Groups.
5. In the lower-left corner, click the lock to unlock and make changes.  (Authenticating as an administrator also, if necessary.)
6. Right-click on a user and select "Advanced Options...".
7. Where it says "Home Directory" click the Choose button and select the new directory in the new Users folder.  (This would be /Volumes/Macintosh HD 2/Users/[username] if everything is still on its defaults.)
8. Click Ok and repeat for the other users.

The problem I ran into with this configuration is that some stuff I use at the command line chokes on a home directory path that has spaces in it.  This led me to ...

Form 3: Delete /Users and Create a Link

What the link does for you is that anything that looks for "/Users/Foo" gets sent to "/Volumes/Macintosh HD 2/Users/Foo" instead.  But it is all behind the scenes and isn't the wiser ... so it doesn't have a chance to choke on the spaces in the path.  This is how I did it:

1. Delete /Users.  (Not a big deal because everything was already pointing to the other drive.)
2. Open Terminal.
3. Type the command: sudo ln -s /Users /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD\ 2/Users

The nice thing about this is now /Users and /Volumes/Macintosh HD 2/Users were essentially indistinguishable.  But then I read this article from MacWorld and learned of a weakness in my plan ...

Form 4: Abandon the Link and Go Back to Form 2

The problem with this plan is exposed in the final paragraph of the article.  (Good thing I read the whole thing!)  What happens if at some point the HD dies?  The system could still boot because the SSD is working, but it can't because it doesn't have a way to log in as any valid user!  But how do I take the advice and still keep my command line stuff from choking on spaces?  Rename the drives!  I renamed "Macintosh HD" to "System" and "Macintosh HD 2" to "Data".  Then I had to delete the link and recreate the /Users directory.  Here's how I did that:

1. Open Terminal
2. Type the command: sudo rm /Users
3. Type the command: sudo mkdir /Users

Then I went in and created a new administrator user called "backupadmin" and left their home directory in the default /Users location.  Any other real users I create will have to be migrated to the HD by hand, but I think this will work best in the long run.