Back in 2002 when I purchased my first telescope, an 8″ LX90, the first month or so of usage brought up a very frustrating problem. When slewing the scope to a new target it would suddenly stop mid-slew, yet the motors continued to whir. The cause, the RA clutch had loosened and was no longer engaged, gotos were now ruined and after tightening the RA knob to engage the clutch I had to start the alignment process over again. Very frustrating.

I solved the problem after receiving some useful suggestions from the LX90 yahoo group, not a single clutch slip in nearly 7 years usage Earlier today I received an email asking about how I fixed the issue so I thought I may as well type it up.

The cause of the clutch slippage is pretty simple, as is the fix. The knob that you tighten on the base of the LX90 to engage the clutch is pushing against not only the clutch but the top of the LX90 base too. As the scope slews, the friction between the base and knob is sufficient to slowly unscrew and disengage the clutch. So the fix is simply to raise the knob off of the base of the LX90.

To do so, use an Allen key to loosen the small screw on the side of the RA clutch knob. Then turn the knob anti-clockwise until it catches and starts to unscrew. It should eventually come fully off as the photo below shows.

Notice the circular scratch marks from the RA knob contacting the base.

Inserting a nylon or fibre washer (not metal) over the bolt that protrudes from the base, one that is small enough to fit inside the hole, will raise the RA knob just enough to prevent contact occuring with the telescope base when the clutch is engaged.

If you look at the base of the bolt, you should be able to make out the washer I’ve added. Here’s a close up

Re-assembly is straight forward, just be sure the clutch is fully engaged before you tighten the tiny screw on the RA knob.

With this simple fix, you only need to apply a little pressure when tightening the RA knob and engaging the clutch. Also, no matter how much you slew the scope, the knob should no longer contact the base and cause the clutch to slip.

More recently, I’ve taken apart the DEC axis to fix a significant (when viewed through eyepiece) amount of slop of 5-10 degrees. When I get a spare moment, I’ll upload photos of the disassembly. They show the amount of excess grease inside the dec axis and the cause of the slop, an over tightened screw on the worm gear!

Its been a while since I’ve made an astronomy post, not because I haven’t had the scope out imaging, but because I haven’t been all that happy with recent results. My images have been showing a nasty central brightening that prevents fainter details been brought out in post processing.

Why is this a problem? Take a look at the image below of M51. I’ve stretched the data a little to emphasise the brightening. The problem is that in order to bring out fainter details in the galaxy or the lower magnitude stars around the edges of the image, the data levels need adjusting. However, long before those stars are visible, the bright centre has spread across the entire image and ruined it.

Vignetting

After doing some research, it turns out this is known as vignetting and is a problem caused by the telescope optics. MAPUG-Astronomy describes this in great detail, but the important part is

The image is brightest on axis, at the center of the field of view, and dimmer off axis. This is a classical case of vignetting. Note that this is not a sharp cut off of the image, but a gradual dimming of it. Unfortunately, it is a feature of folded telescope optics which cannot be avoided.

Flat Frames

Although nothing can be done to prevent vignetting, it turns out there’s a way to account for the dimming and in turn remove it from the images. Enter the Light Box. By taking a photo of an evenly lit area, the dimming of pixels from vignetting can be isolated and then in turn removed from the light frame.

I’ve built a light box using foamboard to construct the box and holders for the diffusers. Two sheets of opal perspex slot into the holders to diffuse the light (from four LEDs) and present a flatly lit front pane. The box is loosly based on the many designs posted throughout the net. It won’t win any awards for construction, but it was cheap About £25 in materials which can likely be sourced for cheaper than that.

Here’s an avi showing the light box image captured by the CCD in various rotated positions to ensure the field is evenly lit and that the dimming is due to vignetting and not shoddy light box construction

Flat Field AVI

Calibration

After calibrating the images with the flat field frames, here’s the result.

The bright gradient has now been eliminated. All that remains is a bit of signal noise which can be handled by stacking multiple short exposures. Below is the first stacked and calibrated image. I’m still working on alternative ways to process the fits data to improve the image, but a quick processing shows promising results.

After a closer inspection of the combined frames, there is still a slight gradient from the bottom of the image moving upwards towards the centre. Whether this is due to the light box not providing a totally flat field frame or simply light pollution, I’m not yet certain.

A Trio of Galaxies

• Exposure Time: 30×120s Avg
• Date: 2009-03-05 03:06 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 10×120s Avg
• Flat Frames: 10×0.8s Avg
• Apparent Dimension: 11 x 7 arc min
• Visual Brightness: 8.4 mag

The centre of the image shows two galaxies, the first and larger NGC 5194 and just above it NGC 5195. The two colliding galaxies are better known as M51 the Whirlpool Galaxy.

During processing I noticed a faint object in the lower right corner. According to the reference of bright galaxies, this is IC 4263, a magnitude 15 galaxy measuring only 2×0.4 arc minutes in size.

The image to the right has had a high pass filter applied as an attempt to sharpen the image a little. I’m still not sure which of the two I prefer most.

I’ve glossed over all the details of calibrating images, but if you’re interested in knowing more there’s a few sites with more detailed descriptions. Such as AAVSO

There’s still a lot of room for improvement. Still, compared to my previous attempts at M51, I think the light box was worth every penny

Gears 2 was released on Friday and my first impressions are pretty good but there are several problems too.

Co-Op

A friend and I played through the co-op campaign on normal yesterday and were pretty happy with the game. It’s basically the first Gears with some new locust types to kill and a more engaging story and characters. I actually remember the names of the characters this time around, it’s hard not to when you have a better storyline such as with Dom and better characterisation as with Carmine.

Bugs

Gears 2 is certainly “more” and “bigger” than the first, but unfortunately that includes bugs as well. However, considering I only bought the first Gears about 3 months ago by which time all the major issues were probably patched, I’m hopeful we’ll see a patch for Gears 2 that resolves most of the bugs.

One of the more annoying bugs I’ve encountered a few times is a weapon bug where by selecting a weapon causes it to vanish from the selection wheel, after selecting each weapon you’re stuck with the last selected weapon, unable to pick-up or drop or use any weapons at all. There was a similar bug in the first Gears but you could usually cycle out of it, this one needed a restart from the previous checkpoint to clear.

I’ve also encountered quite a few rendering bugs where the floor and walls vanish and my character just hovers in mid air, occasionally falling down through where the floor should be, then popping back up again. Another bug was where the host could see Locust, yet I could not. This happened in particular on the level where you’re defending the city from the incoming reavers and have to kill 3 or 4 of them. My friend could see and shtot the reaver in the courtyard, I could see nothing.

Fingers crossed those will be tracked down and fixed before too long.

To sum up the single player/co-op campaign, I loved it. Really enjoyed the levels, even though it’s more of the same from Gears, there was just enough variety to make it a joy to play through. I’m looking forward to playing through again on Hardcore and Insane.

Photo-Cam

The addition of a screen-shot facility is welcomed, especially with the integration with the Gears Official website where you photos can be included in a Gallery. Not as impressive as Bungies Theater mode though, but a feature I think more games should include.

Multi-Player

Now the multi-player side is a different matter entirely. Epic have gone with a Halo 3 style of matchmaking, which is a great idea. It means we get to “party” up with friends, then have the system locate similar skilled players to populate the free slots in our team and match us up against an opposing team of similar skill.

However, there appears to be something wrong with how everything is working, we spent several minutes sat watching the game try to find 3 players to fill out our team with, then after several more minutes of trying to find a team to play one of our teams players quit, causing the search to begin again. After about 10-15 minutes we finally got into a game.

The only play-list we were matched up straight away and into a game within under a minute was the wingman mode. All the other modes were the same story, wait 5+ minutes to find a match, or never find one at all in the case of territories. I tried several times on Saturday to play just one game, but didn’t get a single match.

Unlike with Halo, there’s no indication of how many people are playing in the selected playlist. So whether nobody was playing territories, or there was something wrong with the match making (bug/overloaded?), I’ve no idea. It’s certainly more frustrating trying to get into a game than Gears 1, though I’m hopeful the situation will be resolved in the coming weeks which makes this a minor complaint.

P.S I’m aware of the NAT issues that can slow down matchmaking, my router is configured correctly afaik and the 360 shows NAT as fully open. I had to sort this out a while back due to voice comm problems in Halo 3.

Playlists

Speaking of play-lists. I hate these. In Gears one, I enjoyed playing Execution, I disliked playing Warzone. This wasn’t a problem, just set the search filters, find a game with a low ping and off you go, took under a minute to find and get into a game. With Gears 2, I have to hope that the “team” I’m matched with, want to vote for Execution and not Warzone or Guardian. Otherwise I could be forced to play a mode I dislike, or worse, quit out and ruin the game for the rest of my team.

I have the same issue with Halo 3. I enjoy death match games, yet there is no ranked “Slayer” only mode in Halo 3, you have to instead just play Social Slayer (we don’t have that option in Gears 2). There is the option to veto a game mode, or map in Halo 3, but then you’re stuck with the next choice, which could (and often is) be an even crappier game mode.

This is one area where Gears 2 has improved on Halo 3’s system, although they have the same annoying use of play-lists, they do show BOTH game mode options and then maps at the same time. Allowing players to vote for one or the other rather than having to veto and hope the alternative is better.

Still, I dislike the idea of playlists. Map cycles I’m fine with, it’s not often I really dislike a map enough to not play it the odd time it comes around in a cycle, but for game modes, why should I have to play king of the hill or odd-ball when I just want to play slayer (in Halo3), or Guardian/Warzone when I want to play Execution in Gears 2?

Ghost Cam

The Ghost Cam is a nice idea, when you’re dead you get to “spectate” the match. However, it does mean you get to tell your mate exactly where the enemy players are hiding. This will probably be even worse when the new 360 dash is released if it includes the option to private chat to more than one person at once!

I couldn’t see any way to join games that have Ghost Cam disabled. Wingman just doesn’t see like as good an idea, when you kill off one player only to have him watch his Wingmans back via the ghost cam, or go scout ahead for him. Why is this Cam available in Public games which are Ranked?

Ranked Games

Speaking of Ranked games, where is the option for _SOCIAL_ games? Gears 2 has two server types, Public and Private. If you join a Public play-list, you get placed in a team with other players and play a ranked game with most of the options locked so you cannot change round duration, map etc which makes sense, it is a ranked game after all and needs to be kept consistent and fair (see ghost-cam above).

Private, allows just you and your friends to join, again this is a good idea. Sometimes you just want to play with your mates in a relaxed game and perhaps have some bots to pad out the numbers (I like the fact bots have made an appearance btw

However, what is missing is a SOCIAL mode. Why can’t we host a server just like with Private, where you can select the map, round time, game mode and so forth but still allow ANYONE to join it. Then once you’re all in the game, the same players continue to play together map after map, game mode after game mode, with drop-in/out replacement of players mid game. Allowing you to play with and against friends, but having random people fill out the remaining spots rather than bots.

This is something I found useful in the first Gears when you’ve had enough of the Ranked games (especially when you’re sat watching players on your own team in death cam glitching, map exploiting and cheating in general), you could go online with a few mates and let other random players fill out the numbers. As it’s an unranked game, the number of glitchers was greatly reduced. Give the host the option to kick/ban players from the current game in social and it’s problem solved. This is missing from Gears 2 though

On the whole, I’m a very disappointed with the current way the multi-player side works. Not game play wise, I really haven’t played it enough to be able to form a good opinion of that (what little I have has been pretty good fun), but just in the way you have to find a game. It takes too long and you cannot simply play the game mode you want. Could Epic fix this, I’m sure they could and I’m hopeful they will.

Hoard

Get a few people together and see how many waves of Locust you can defend against. What more is there to say about this game mode than it rocks. This mode works well in both single player and on Live, the matchmaking works fine too because it’s the only “mode” in that play-list. So you get exactly what you want, with the exception of maps, but that adds a bit of variety and you can always host your own map and invite friends to join.

Achievements

Achievements are weird, they’re meaningless, yet you just have to try and get them Gears 2’s achievements are better than the first in that they’ve removed the grind based ones, i.e “Kill X people with weapon Y” and most importantly they’ve made it so you can get these in non-ranked matched too. There was an irritating tendency for players to spoil ranked games because they’re trying to get the Chainsaw or some other kill achievement rather than playing the game. Sure, players can now “boost” by getting achievements in private games, but who really cares, if they want to, let them. For everyone else, you can finally enjoy getting the achievements without ruining other peoples matches.

On the flip side, the achievements look like they’re going to be way too easy to get this time around. The grind ones that have been removed wouldn’t have been so much a grind now you can do them in co-op.

One nice addition though is the ability to see how far you are from getting a given achievement and knowing how many collectables are in a specific part of the game. It’s more fun hunting when you know roughly where the item should be.

I just wish the achievements were not quite so easy to obtain. The only one that looks to be semi difficult is surviving the Hoard to level 50.

Map Code

One interesting extra item shipped with the game. A redeemable code allowing you to download several of the original games maps, redone for Gears 2. Why isn’t this just available as a free marketplace download? Is it just a ploy to to limit the purchase of pre-owned copies? Or an attempt to stick it to the pirates with the unfortunate side effect of also affecting those that are strapped for cash and buy the game pre-owned?

I’m hoping it’s aimed at pirates, but it still seems like a stab at those who buy pre-owned too.

Final Thoughs

I think the multi-player side is been spoiled by a few issues with the way you find games and the limitations of play-lists and lack of social host options. Other than that, the game is a worthy sequal to Gears and with the exception of the current bugs (which will hopefully be patched before too long) the singleplayer/co-op/hoard side of the game is incredibly good fun.

Don’t let my blog post convince you the game isn’t worth getting. Far from it, it’s certainly worth the money (£30 in Asda). I just felt like covering some of the parts of the game that don’t appeal to me, there’s plenty of good stuff in there that I’ve not mentioned. I just hope the matchmaking system isn’t the way all games are going in the future, at least not unless they include playlists that have only one game mode.

Winter is usually a great time for astronomy with longer nights and the sun setting at a reasonable hour, with the forecast for last Friday as clear until 12am I thought I’d put in a few more hours imaging. I hadn’t realised it was a waxing gibbous moon until after I’d lugging all the gear outside and started setting up.

A nearly full moon, combined with a slightly hazy sky limited the choice of objects severely. The moon was out of the question, as I’ve yet to buy a moon filter, even on the lowest exposure setting of 0.001 seconds the ccd chip was becoming fully saturated. So I turned instead to the Orion Nebula, M42.

At magnitude 4.0 the nebula is visible as a fuzzy gray blob to the naked eye, just below the belt of Orion. I took a total of 90 exposures (81 usable) at 15 seconds each in an attempt to not burn out the central core on the 15 second exposures, whilst bringing out the fainter detail.

• Exposure Time: 15×81s Avg
• Date: 2007-11-23 23:47:55 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 15×15s Median
• Apparent Dimension: 85×60 arc min
• Visual Brightness: 4.0 mag

Since it looked neat, I’ve uploaded a pseudo colour version, this isn’t in anyway the true colour of the Orion Nebula, I don’t have any colour filters yet

I believe this is my best image to date. Although it’s still not quite in focus, the exposure was perhaps too long resulting in a burnt out core. Not to mention the moon/haze made post processing a nightmare with a bright central light gradient to remove.

Collimation of the scope is still slightly out. I spent an hour before taking this image to improve it a little, but it’s going to take stabler skies before I can collimate at a reasonable magnification. I think the sky stability and lack of good collimation is partly to blame for the difficulty in achieving a good focus.

I’m looking forward to re-imaging this object on a moonless night to see how big an improvement I can achieve.

The usual clouds that seem to be permanently situated above the UK parted for a few days, which finally coincided with a few evenings I had spare. The LX90 hasn’t seen the night sky since way back in March, when I last had it pointing skyward for my first real attempts at collimation.

The seeing over the last few nights, has still been poor, with stars twinkling away making achieving critical focus very difficult. The collimation adjustments from March do seem to have improved things, although I still think finer adjustments will be needed on a night with better seeing.

On the first nights outing, Polar alignment was woeful and gotos were constantly 1/4 fov in the finder off. Still, I managed to image a few objects, the two most notable been a double star cluster in Persei and M33 a spiral Galaxy in Triangulum.

h Persei Open Cluster

• Exposure Time: 6×60s Avg
• Date: 2007-09-08 02:44:37 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 7×60s Avg
• Apparent Dimension: 30 arc min
• Visual Brightness: 4.3 mag

The image above is h Persei (NGC 869), which along with Chi Persei (NGC 884) forms a double cluster. The full double cluster was a little too large to fit into the tiny fov of my CCD camera, I’ve not calculated the exact fov yet, but it’s somewhere around 30 to 60 arc minutes.

Open clusters are interesting objects as they contain hundreds, sometimes thousands of stars, all of which were born around the same time and are still gravitationally bound (however loosely) to each other. This is in contrast to Globular Clusters (such as M15 which I imaged on Monday and will upload later) which are strongly bound and often contain millions of stars in a tightly packed ball, making them stunning visual objects.

M33 Spiral Galaxy in Triangulm

• Exposure Time: 15×60s Avg
• Date: 2007-09-08 02:12:17 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 7×60s Avg
• Apparent Dimension: 70×45 arc min
• Visual Brightness: 5.7 mag

I’m quite pleased with the M33 image, the stars are reasonably well focused and the spiral arms are fairly visible. It’s far from a perfect image, with a good proportion of the outer arms not visible, but considering the skies were a little hazy and how blurry my previous images have turned out, I think this is a huge improvement.

Also just about visible on the edges of M33 is NGC 604 a diffuse nebula.

I also imaged M31 the great Andromeda Galaxy, however after underestimating the sheer size of it, the image ended up containing only the bright core and a few dust lanes.

At the start of this week I also managed a third night imaging several objects, M15, M101, NGC7780, NGC 281 (Pacman Nebula as well as a poor image of M42 taking during early dawn. I should have these processed and the best uploaded to this post later this week.

M15 Globular Cluster in Pegasus

• Exposure Time: 15×60s Avg
• Date: 2007-09-10 23:48:16 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 15×60s Avg
• Apparent Dimension: 18 arc min
• Visual Brightness: 6.2 mag

GID 23 took place a few weeks ago on the 11th/12th of August.

It all began at approximately 11:01.34pm Saturday night, with nearly half of GID#23 already gone and yet I still had no idea what to do. Tom suggested I team up with him to do something similar to the original Teaminator.

We had no idea what the game was going to be about only that it had to involve Tea. A large part of the core code was already in place from previous GID’s Tom had done, which left us free to concentrate on more game specific issues.

The result by the end of Sunday was larger than expected and shows clear signs of the games and tv show we drew inspiration from; Monkey Island, Dizzy and Open All Hours.

I finally got around to playing Treasure Island Dizzy the other night, which I used to have for the C128 (or was it the Amiga, I forget which). It’s strange going back and playing games which I played many years ago. Some games I remember as amazing, and yet on playing them again all the fond memories of how good the game was, which you’ve over the years raised onto a pedestal of “how games should be”, comes crashing down as you suddenly realize you’ve built the game up to be more than it really was. Fortunately that isn’t the case with Dizzy nor Monkey Island (which I’m also part way through replaying)

I had forgotten just how HARD older games really are. Most games these days you can pickup and play for some time before you die, try playing Dizzy for more than a minute without dieing several times!

The GID did highlight a few areas of the Engine which could do with improvements, which has resulted in a complete overhaul of the dialogue system to now use a node based tree structure. This enables dialogue to be constructed through a parent/child relationship of dialogue and dialogueItem nodes.

Special purpose nodes can also be inserted into the tree allowing actions to be performed on the display of specific dialogue or the selection of a dialogue option. New node types will be added in the future to support a variety of actions, for example, enabling a quest, playing an animation or transitioning the camera. A general purpose callback node functions as a stop gap until new node types are available.

The Quest system has also seen a significant improvement along with the addition of an NPC Editor

Brew Isles can be download via the GreatGamesExperiment.

For a change the skies were relatively clear on Monday night so I took the opportunity to take the scope out and take a few images. Unfortunately I made a few mistakes during setup that resulted in woeful polar alignment giving a 5 second max exposure time before star trailing became apparent, compared to the usual 5+ minutes I’ve acheived with previous drift aligning… With fog rolling in I had little time to correct it and instead made do.

Despite using the fastest exposure time my ccd camera was capable of 0.001s, the moon was still over exposed. Really a filter will be needed to reduce the light gathered by the scope for future attempts. Still with a bit of post processing I’ve managed to isolate the overexposure to a smaller area.

• Exposure Time: 1 x 0.001s
• Date: 2007-03-27 00:42:07 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 2×0.001s averaged

The second image was taken through the first wave of fog and suffered for it, especially with it been a 1/2 moon and limited to 5 second exposure times If I’d noticed the fog coming in, I’d have packed up before the corrector plate became saturated, the dew heater didn’t stand a chance

Still, you can just about make out the spiral arms of M51 and the companion galaxy above as well as the effects of the moon and fog despite post processing attempts to clean it up I plan to reimage this pair of galaxies on a fogless night with more suitable exposure times to really bring out the detail.

• Exposure Time: 20 x 5s aligned and stacked
• Date: 2007-03-27 01:26:36 UTC
• CCD: Starlight XPress MX716
• Scope: LX90 8″
• Dark Frames: 1×5s

Tuesday was again a clear night, but yet again fog rolled in early. Knowing the nights imaging would be short, I decided against setting up for photography and instead spend the time collimating the scope to get the mirrors aligned correctly, which after allowing 90 minutes cooldown didn’t leave all that long.

Seeing was only good enough to collimate with a 12mm eyepiece, still I felt it improved views of Saturn and the moon considerably unless it was a placebo effect, guess I’ll find out next time I the ccd camera is setup. I’m sure given a night with better seeing allowing a 6mm eyepiece to be used, I could improve on the collimating further, which I’m hoping will improve the problems I’ve been having achieving a good focus whilst imaging.

Not only are Baen Books selling DRM FREE EBooks, but they’ve gone a step further by providing the first and sometimes second book in several series for free. Not a bad idea considering if you like the first book in a series it’s likely you’ll want to read and thus purchase the rest of the books in the series.

Here’s what they have to say about this:-

Baen Books is now making available — for free — a number of its titles in electronic format. We’re calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online — no conditions, no strings attached. (Later we may ask for an extremely simple, name & email only, registration. ) Or, if you prefer, you can download the books in one of several formats. Again, with no conditions or strings attached. (URLs to sites which offer the readers for these format are also listed. )

Why are we doing this? Well, for two reasons.

The first is what you might call a “matter of principle.” This all started as a byproduct of an online “virtual brawl” I got into with a number of people, some of them professional SF authors, over the issue of online piracy of copyrighted works and what to do about it.

There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was….

You can find out why on the Baen Library Intro Page as well as the complete Baen Catalog

Another interesting part of the Baen site is the “Webscription eBooks”, which for $15 gains you access to 4 books. What’s novel about this is that you get access to the 4 books 3 months prior to their official publication, not the full book mind, just the first 1/3, then a month later you get the 2nd 1/3 and finally 1 month before official publication you can download the full book. All for a single payment of $15. Of course you can continue to pay $15 per month and every month gain access to 4 new books.

The idea of getting early access to only part of the book isn’t really something of interest to me, however if you’re a big fan of some of the authors that use Baen publishing, then the prospect of getting your hands on part of the book 3 months in advance as well as the complete book 1 month in advance of its official print publication may be quite appealing.

Still, the reason I decided to do what amounts to a sales pitch for Baen Publishing, is that they’re doing something I’ve wanted to see for a long time. DRM less publishing.

Considering when you buy a book in print you get to read that book and won’t find that you’ve lost access to it one day because you’ve upgraded your coffee table or had to change the model of your reading glasses.

Yet with EBooks, we’re expected to accept that if the maker of the software used to read the encrypted, DRM ridden books, stops been made or isn’t available for a future PDA we may buy or perhaps new OS (vista?), we would lose access to all our library of books.

With DRM less EBooks, this isn’t an issue. Buy once, archive it in a few format such as mobipocket reader, txt and html and you’re pretty much safe to assume it’s going to work or at least be importable into a wide range of ebook readers in the future. Even if it means converting the EBook into a proprietary format to get it onto your PDA of choice. The fact that you have a clean archived version of the book (html/txt etc) means you can continue to convert the book and never lose access to it. No need to worry about replacing broken PDA’s with new models, or perhaps if Sonys EBook hardware ever takes off, moving your library over to a new device.

Not only is the lack of DRM a big big plus, but the prices on the print and ebooks are reasonable too.

I’m sure it’s going to take time before EBooks take off en-mass, assuming they ever do. But I personally will never purchase an EBook that contains DRM, so I can honestly say I hope Baen books are around for a long while, I imagine I’ll be visiting their site a lot more in the coming years.

If only other ebook publishers would follow suit, it wouldn’t kill them to drop the DRM and it’d be nice to see EBooks cost less than their printed counterparts (I doubt the cost savings are been passed on to the authors! Maybe I’m just jaded)

Baen Publishing is doing DRM less ebooks, music.podshow.com is doing DRM less indie music and Stardock are making copy protection free games (well they use serials, but it’s at least a non-Draconian form of protection) All three are placing their trust in the consumer rather than assuming everyone is a criminal and really deserve as much success as they can get.

For anyone that hasn’t already seen it, I’ve posted a Shelled! postmortem over on the GarageGames Site. You can also download the PDF version.

You may have noticed the books on the right hand side of this blog. I thought it was about time I started listing which books I’ve read, I’m reading or I’m planning to read. Hopefully I’ll give a short review of each once I’m done. For those in the UK I’ve added a link to the Amazon page for each book too, yes I’m after the affiliate commission but I’ll only recommend books I’ve read and found useful. Besides which, it would seem most people that read this blog are not UK based anyway.

Hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

PS: Guitar Hero ROCKS! Go buy it

Shelled! is finally out the door and it’s FREE! For those that don’t know what I’m talking about, head over to www.shelledgame.com to read about the game and download it.

I played for a few hours the other night, with 5 other people, great fun. Very easy for the odd grudge match to develop when you get shelled by another player The poor AI always take a pounding in round 1 while everyone tries to stock up on cash for those nukes and high fives.

Out of all the shell types, there are only two I find I don’t use at the moment. Every other shell has its uses depending upon the terrain. Slider shells are useful on very hilly terrain, high fives are great for a quick fly by shelling, the machine gun works great as a defensive shell when your jets have overheated and you have a tank inbound. The use for the leveler isn’t obvious at first, but it can give a slight advantage on a few levels, I’ll leave you to figure our which and how but a hint is the rocket comes into its own on the same level.

You could play Shelled! using nothing other than the default shell and do fairly well, but if you happen to play another human player that has discovered fly by high five shellings, you’ll be in for a hard time making first place!

The game has a few nice tactics, which may at first not be apparent, after a while though I’m sure most people will work them out. Remember the machine gun is your friend, turtles with rocket jets are meant to fly and although the nuke is costly, nothing says good night better than a direct hit with one

I’ve had a great time developing Shelled! and wanted to say what a pleasure its been to work with Joshua, Andreas and everyone else on the Shelled team.

Happy Shelling