Stephen Skory

About a month ago I received my iPod settlement gift certificate worth $50. The money was only good at the Apple store. As you can find out for yourself, there’s not much for $50 on the Apple store, save for a few iPod accessories. I didn’t really want any iPod accessories, and besides, most wouldn’t fit my second generation iPod. Of course Apple was hoping that I’d just go ahead and use the $50 as an excuse to by a quad-G5 desktop system for $3,300 (make that $3,250).

Above the iPod accessories, the lowest price items are software titles. I browsed through them and discovered that there was a Mac OS X version of Sim City 4. I’ve always liked the Sim City series, starting with the orginal Sim City, which you can play online for free. I like the planning of a citys infrastructure. As the ‘mayor’ of the city, the player has to lay roads, freeways, railways, subways, power lines and water pipes. The mayor has to also balance a budget of expedatures and taxes (more on that later). The goal of the game can be as simple as building the largest city possible, or the most asthetically pleasing, or one with the ‘happiest’ residents, or one with the best finances. My goal has usually been to have a high population combined with a happy population.

The newest version has many improvements over the previous versions, Sim City 2000 and Sim City 3000. For one, this version supports regions, whereby you can build dozens of cities that are neighbors on one big map. Each city is independent in that you can only edit one at a time, but cities influence neighbors by way of jobs & trade. One of the biggest improvements has been in the graphics. This new game has beautiful graphics with very high level of detail. There are something like six levels of zoom. The closest one is so close you can see individual ‘sims’ (people) on the streets (look for them on the above image of the train station).

See if you can find the county fair & golf course

One of the keys to a well-functioning city is the transportation system. Sims are very touchy about how long it takes to drive to their job. Sim City 4 introduces a very useful tool that allows you to see what kind of traffic goes where through your transportation system. In the picture linked on the right, you can see all the commute traffic that goes through a train station in the center of town (in the lower-left of the picture). You can trace foot traffic onto a passenger train, which gets off at a different station and walks to a jobsite.

I must admit that one key element of Sim City, collecting taxes and balancing a budget, I’ve never really liked. I either cheat to get the cash to run the town, or find some other way to make money, like building a magic building found on the internet. I’m no libertarian – I just don’t really care too much about the fiscal part of the game. If I were really going to play the game for real, I would not cheat. But I don’t want to play it for real, so I feel no guilt.

One nice thing about this game is there is no death & violence, no princess to save, and I can stop the game at any time without losing my progress.

Today I installed a cantenna on the roof of my apartment building. A “cantenna” is a highly directional, high-gain microwave antenna made out of a can, like a soup can. The most common application is for long distance wireless internet links (802.11x). I made my cantenna out of an old Maxwell House coffee can.

The cantenna points towards the UCSD Cancer Center, which is roughly 325 meters away from my apartment. This is outside the usual range for wireless internet. My apartment faces Southeast, while the center is Northwest of my building, meaning I cannot see the building at all from inside my apartment.

After getting permission from the apartment maintainence supervisor, I put a 16″ long peice of 3/4″ square pipe on the facia of the building. On top of that I screwed on an old flag mount, one you would attach to the side of your house on independence day. The flag mount has a part that has one pi steradian movement, allowing me to have a good measure of freedom to aim the cantenna. The cantenna is wired to a Linksys WET11 which lives in a plastic box under the cover of my porch ceiling. From there an ethernet wire goes inside through a small hole in the screen door frame.

It was amazing how easy it was to get a strong connection! I had already done some simple tests, holding the cantenna up on the end of a broom. But nothing was guaranteed until I actually installed the thing. All I have to do is make sure the trees stay pruned back!

While it isn’t the fastest connection ever (~300 kb/s max) it is very cheap (free 99). I estimate I’ve put about $100 into materials. My own DSL/Cable connection would cost that much every two or three months. It’s especially fast to campus computers, where I send most of my data back and forth.