Raytracing Quake demos

I decided to combine these two problems into one solution:

• Modern CPUs are idle way too much of the time. Why have all this computational power if we don’t use it?
• I have these funny old Quake demos that there’s no good way to convert to something playable.

My solution is to convert Quake .dem files to .pov files and render them with POV-Ray.

Update: New better screenshot:

Quake scene rendered in POV-Ray. Two more here and here.

Quake is closing in on 20 years old now, and it’s starting to get annoying to make it even work. Yes, it’s opensource, and there are a couple of forks. But they’ve also always been annoying to get working. Hell, even GLQuake in Steam won’t start for me. (yes, I know this is a bad reason, but I’m doing this for fun)

Many of the tools and resources are hard to find. I couldn’t find ReMaic, and only found lmpc thanks to FreeBSD having made it a package. Converting demos to an ASCII format using lmpc helped in confirming that my file parsing was correct.

The steps needed to render a demo:

1. Extract .mdl files to .pov and .png (skin) files.
2. Extract . Continue reading

My mechanical keyboard

You spend all your waking time at a keyboard. This blog post is about keyboards, and can be summarized as: Buy quality, cry once.

I spend a lot of time typing on a keyboard, yet I have never looked into what keyboard would be best for me. There are natural keyboards and kinesis keyboards that people speak well of, but I spend a lot of time typing on laptops and don’t want a completely different setup for laptop and desktop.

I had the same concern before switching to Dvorak back when I was a consultant (thus often using other peoples managed machines), but happily switched after verifying that even on a locked down Windows machine as a non-admin user I could select Dvorak. Also there are adapters from Dvorak to Qwerty that I could use in extremely locked down environments such as the CCIE lab (they required a doctors note though, long story).

So it would have to be a keyboard that looks like a normal one. Preferably with Dvorak on the keycaps. It seems that mechanical keyboards are all the rage, so I thought I’d give that a go.

I ended up buying a 88 key Cherry MX brown-based Continue reading