Dawn of the Geeks

in-town-vs-out-of-town is the spreadsheet used to support my posts.

The first in the series just lays out the facts. In this we’ll try to form a conclusion. It really boils down to a simple question: do the savings in home ownership make up for the loss in car ownership?

Let’s start with the first observation: You can’t be in a situation where you can’t afford to live out of town but can afford to live in town. There are about 22 working days in a month. So if you don’t carpool, get 24 miles per gallon and drive 50 miles each way you will spend $360 a month in gas going to and from work. You save $700 a month in mortage payments so per month you’re ahead about $340 living out of town. In five years you will probably need a new car having driven yours about 130,000 miles. In the meantime you have saved around $20,000 in monthly mortgage bills.

So if you put the money you save away into a high yeild savings account each month you’ll have enough for a brand new car every 5 years in cash. $20,000 will buy you a very nice car.

Obviously it’s not ideal to break even.

So you have to decide, can you find ways to cut back on vehical costs and gas usage or will you end up at a loss after 30 years because vehical maintenance brought you down?

Personally I think it’s a lot easier to chop off costs on a car rather than a house. It’s hard to find an affordable house in town. It’s easier to find someone to carpool with. Or buy cheaper cars. A brand new engine will set you back less than $10,000. So if you really want to be cheap you can buy an older used car and just replace the engine every 5 years or 150,000 miles.

Once you buy a house there’s nothing you can do to cut down the cost of your mortgage. Eventually you may be able to refinance and get your interest rate down a point or two. But that’s rare and only saves you 10-20K over the life of the loan.

Most of the time you will save money living outside of town. As long as you find a way to carpool. That’s the easiest way to double the life of your vehicals and cut your gas usage in half.

The other thing that makes your decision easier is the advent of the electric car which is happening in just a couple years. That will reduce your gas usage to 0. The estimate is that electric is about the equivelant of $1 per gallon. So you save 75% of your gas cost. Which adds up quickly and makes living outside of town more appealing.

So really I don’t see how you can lose by living outside of town. Unless you don’t find ways to cut back on vehical usage.

There was recently an article on Slashdot about telecommuting and how some business don’t allow it. There are a lot of reasons to not allow it. The main one that caused HP to stop doing it was lost productivity. I suggested carpooling and living out of town to save money. That was poo-pooed because of the assumed cost of car maintenance given the increased miles. So I did the math.

All else being equal I used $160,000 for the cost of the out of town house and $260,000 for the comparable in town house. A reasonable estimate in the Phoenix market.

I’ll start with the 30 year pay off plan. With a 7 percent interest rate the in town house will cost $1729.29 a month. The out of town house will cost $1064.48 a month. So right away you’re saving $700 a month by living out of town. At the end of 30 years you will have saved $239508.90 on the cost of the home itself.

But now we have to start deducting things. The in town home is 10 miles from work. The out of town home is 50 miles from work. Over the life of the loan you will travel 156,000 miles to and from work from your in town home. You will travel 780,000 miles to and from work from your out of town home. Assuming a 5 day work day 52 weeks a year. The car gets 24 miles per gallon and gas costs $4 per gallon. You will spend $104,000 more in gas living out of town. If you replace your car every $150,000 miles and each car costs $25,000 (including interest and fees) then, interestingly enough, you will spend an additional $104,000 in car ownership. Out of town you will have to purchase 5 cars over the life of the loan. As opposed to 1 in town.

So over the life of the loan you will save $31,508.90 by living out of town.

Now let’s look at a 15 year loan. Right off the bat you will save $161,789.09 from the lower mortgage with an out of town home. Your monthly payment is $900 less than the in town home. But now we have to start subtracting things. You will need 2.6 cars over the life of the loan as opposed to 0.52. So you lose about $52,000 in car ownership. You also lose $52,000 in additional gas costs.

So over the life of the 15 year loan you will save $57,789.09.

But in 30 years you will end up losing 46,210.91 from car ownership and gas prices.

So let’s carpool for 30 years. You now save $161,508.90 over the life of the loan.

Let’s carpool for 15 years. You now save $122,788.90 over the life of the loan. With 30 years of car ownership you save $83,789.09.

Let’s say you pay your out of town house off in 15 years but would have to pay off the in home house in 30 years. You save $363,860.60 in house ownership costs. With 30 years of car ownership and not carpooling you’re ahead $155,860.60. With carpooling for 30 years you’re ahead $285,860.60.

Enough to purchase the in town house with a few bucks left over.

Bunnies! finally has a new release. Since the last release bilinear filtering has been added which smooths over pixelated graphics, lighting effects have been improved and bump/depth mapping support has been added to wall textures.

Outside of rendering improvements Exits are now part of the game. Previously the user determined the level order. Now they only determine which level they want to start on. The map designer creates the exits which take the user to the next map.

One of the big issues with lighting was the shadows cast by walls. The lights would wrap around the walls in some cases. The fix was a change in algorithm. Now our friend the vector is used to check the dot product of the wall vector and the light vector. No more light wrap around. There was also an issue with the light intensity calculation which resulted in the colors of objects being distorted.

I think the next step is to add in a messaging system. There needs to be a console mode which will allow the user to enter in text messages and send them. The network protocol already exists. It’s just not yet used in the game. And then from there it’s time to have the server start passing messages between users.

And that of course is the beginning of actual multiplayer.

Circuit City had New Super Mario Bros on sale for $25 so I picked it up. It’s a mishmash of features from various Mario games and some new things. But at the core it’s a back to basics side scrolling goomba stomping good time.

Although I like Super Mario Galaxy I’m tired of complicated 3D games where much of the game is fighting the camera and awkward controls. I’d like to see a Wii version of NSMB with 3D graphics but the same 2D game play. Mostly because I prefer to play games on the TV rather than a hand held. In the mean time I spend my monies on Virtual Console games like Donkey Kong Country and the original SMB games. I have all of them and the Japanese version of SMB2. The Japanese version of SMB2 is just mean. By the second world there are already hidden blocks that you have to hit just right so you have enough room on the screen to go back and jump on top of it so you make it over the otherwise impassable pit.

Ever since 3D graphics started becomming the rage 2D side scrollers have tended to go away. And there’s really no reason for it. Take advantage of the increased GPU power to make better looking graphics but keep the controls simple. I don’t always want a challenge. Sometimes I just want some fun.

It may seem ridiculous but Midi Search already has over 76,000. My goal is to have 1 million unique midi files hosted. To upload your midi files FTP to alt.freeringtoneheaven.com and use the username “midi” and leave the password field blank. You cannot overwrite files that have already been uploaded nor can you delete them.

World Daily Press had a huge update. Previously you could only view news stories from the last 24 hours in various categories. Now there is an archive section which allows you to browse through every article ever shown on the site.

Bunnies! has been in development for a long time now. Well over a year. Possibly two or more. Eventually I want to make it multiplayer but that requires a change in how things work. Currently you advance to the next level as soon as everything is dead. That doesn’t leave much time for chit chat and exploration. So instead the ini file will contain your starting level but the exits in the level will determine which map you go to next.

This also means that a map no longer needs to contain any enemies which allows for interesting levels for players to just hang out in.

Hopefully this weekend I will have time to update the Bunnies! web-site to support this new feature. The other missing feature of the Bunnies! web-site is the ability to configure bump maps and depth maps for tiles. Lighting looks more impressive when you have those configured.

Cubia is a lightweight Wikipedia mirror that can run on older computers (less than 1Ghz) without any trouble. One of the issues that it has had for a long time is parsing the Wiki markup to look like Mediawiki (the software that runs Wikipedia). I was making use of a project that stalled years ago but seems to be the only project that can at least somewhat parse it. I looked for updated versions and it seems as though no one has created a full featured stand alone MediaWiki Parser. Most people apparently just run MediaWiki which is fine when you don’t have millions of articles or you have a very powerful server.

So, I finally decided to see if I could just use MediaWiki. Now obviously I can’t point it at Cubia’s database and just expect it to work. Cubia’s database is nothing like MediaWiki’s database. So the first thing I did was install MediaWiki with its own database. I quickly found that skinning wasn’t going to do it. I needed to pull Cubia’s data into MediaWiki to render while MediaWiki uses a bunch of convoluted code to render a page. Using MediaWiki directly would be a huge code rewrite hassle.

So I took a look at MediaWiki’s index.php file and found that I could cut out most of it. The only code needed is the initialization of MediaWiki. After that code is initialized I just pulled the data from Cubia and ran it though $wgOut->parse().

You do need to add


require_once( 'includes/GlobalFunctions.php' );
require_once( 'includes/Parser.php' );


You also have to get rid of the lines in Index.php that get the page title. That’s done either by setting a variable in the page that includes the mediawiki renderer or by setting the REQUEST value.

Before the Setup.php include in order for this to work. I renamed MediaWiki’s index.php to cubia.php and copied the mediawiki installation into Cubia. Now, when rendering an article I just include cubia.php and it creates a variable with the HTML version of the document.

More work needs to be done to clean up the cubia codebase but it functions rather well. Eventually I’d like to figure out the minimum code needed to use MediaWiki’s parser.

The Boston Herald is reporting that some MIT students are working on a $12 computer.

If you read the article you find that the $12 computer already exists in India but it’s using very old tech and is missing some important things that would make it easier for people who have them to learn skills such as programming.

A $12 computer of sorts - a cheap keyboard and Nintendo-like console - already exists in India, where people hook the devices to home TVs to run simple games and programs.

But Lomas, an American graduate student who stumbled across the computers in Bangalore while on an internship last summer, hit on the idea of upgrading the devices’ 1980s-era technology.

He and others at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology symposium hope to soup up the systems - which are based on old Apple II computers - with rudimentary Web access and more.

The goal is to upgrade the parts but keep the $12 price point. The biggest expense to any cheap computer system is the monitor. LCD screens are not cheap. By having an RCA or coax out they cut out the need to supply the monitor with the system. Any cheap TV will do.

One of the things lost on modern computers is the out of the box ability to program it. DOS and early versions of Windows came with QBASIC. Now you have to either purchase additional software or get an internet connection so you can download a free compiler.

The entry costs have gone up. There is also an artificial expectation of quality that has risen since the 80’s and 90’s. Text and 2D graphics don’t cut it anymore. Everyone wants to make 3D games which requires the ability to create 3D objects and animations. Or steal them. It’s very easy to be discouraged. People don’t realize that rendering graphics is the least of game programming or any programming for that matter. There is a lot to learn that is universal from graphically simple games.

The types of games that $12 computers are perfectly capable of running.