News

Okay, mea culpa – I didn’t actually have anything interesting for you yesterday. I was out sick, and concentrating on keeping my brain moored to its tether. But today I have a response to allegations of unfairness being brought by certain unhappy parties.

I’ve already explained that no human is involved at any point in the tournament seedings – it’s a straightforward matter of the most-propped rig going against the 128th, the 2nd against the 127th, etc. At the beginning of the month, I set up a tournament. This involves me selecting the number of battles in Round 1 (64) and setting the start and end dates for each round. After that, the computer handles everything else. There is no way for me or anyone else to alter the tournament, whether by deciding which rigs are entered, whose rigs they battle, or any other means. I had nothing to do with the coding, nobody who runs the site on a day-to-day basis has any access to that code, and to suggest otherwise is personally offensive to me. This system occasionally causes frustration – some rigs are set against other rigs by the same author, some are set against rigs that their owners assume they have no chance against, but this is a sign that the computer is impartial, not (as some assume) weighted for or against any rig or modder.

We are considering altering the tournament process so only one rig per user makes it to each tournament, but really, I don’t see how that would be more fair. The vast majority of our modders have more than one rig, and some – like Wolverine and Slipperyskip – have a huge number of them. Without allowing multiple rigs per user, I don’t think we’d have enough rigs per month to make for a very large tournament. Nevertheless, it’s an option we’re investigating, though code-wise I don’t know how easy would be. It can be a little discouraging to some modders to see people win multiple places per month, but I’d venture to say that it’s a testament to their modding abilities and fan base rather than any nefarious goings-on on our end.

If you have questions or concerns about the tournament seeding process, would like to see changes to the way the tournaments are seeded and run, or any other comments, please leave feedback on this post. Or, if you prefer, send it to me privately at nathan at maximumpc dot com.

Hello everyone!

Round Two ends tomorrow night, so be sure to keep voting. Sorry I don’t have more interesting things today. Tomorrow will be better. 

Check it out; we’ve got a new How-To guide from mlwilkins on the joys of Bondo. We’ve got a gold-leafing primer from thechoozen in the works, too, and something from 1500W on using LEDs. Those should be ready soon, so keep your head up!

We’re always looking for more How-To Guides, so don’t forget to submit ‘em if you’ve got ‘em. If you have submitted one that hasn’t gotten published, it’s probably because you don’t have pictures or a video. If that’s the case, shoot me a line and we’ll talk.

We’re still trying to figure out exactly what we can give as a "bounty" of sorts for how-tos. It probably won’t be much, but maybe a lil’ something. But hopefully you would submit a how-to out of the kindness of your heart and the willingness to share with your fellow modders, rather than thought of material reward. Because that’s not why we do it, is it?

Hi folks,
As round one of the May tournament draws to a close (the round ends tomorrow night), we’ve been noticing a few minor voting anomalies on rigs by a few users. We’ll be keeping an eye on those, so play nice.

Remember to encourage your friends, debtors, clan-mates, guild-mates, life-mates and housemates to vote for you. And keep tuned for our next challenge!

If you’re hitting up Maker Faire, head to the Contraptor’s Lounge at 3pm. I’ll be there with (hopefully) Maximum PC’s Will Smith. We’ll try to find Datamancer, too.  Shoot me an email at nathan@maximumpc.com if you’re planning on attending.

Mod Shop is pleased to announce the winners of its Comic Book Modding Contest, sponsored by Windows Vista Ultimate, Corsair, and Antec. Entrants were challenged to create an original computer mod with a comic-book them, and were judged based on originality, craftsmanship, design, and adherence to the theme.

The Grand Prize is awarded to Bruce Webb, for his inventive Batman’s Utility Belt rig. This fully-functional computer is built into a recreation of, you guessed it, Batman’s utility belt. Bruce  will receive, among other prizes, a trip to the San Diego Comic-Con to display his rig at the Maximum PC/Gamer University booth.

Second place is awarded to Ton Khowdee’s IRONMAN Mark I.

Honorable Mentions:
Christine Greenwald’s Way of the Warrior
Nick Falzone’s Three Evils

Congratulations to all the winners and everyone who participated! Thanks again to our sponsors. We’ll be announcing our next modding challenge in the upcoming weeks.

Congratulations to Sheldog23! Liquid Metal has won the April tournament, trouncing Wolverine’s Pentagram Htpc.

In other news, I forgot to set May’s tournament to activate automatically, so it wasn’t showing up for a few hours today. That has now been fixed.

Comic Book Challenge contest winners will be announced tomorrow.

Shoot me a line if you’re going to Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA this weekend; I hope to see some of you there.

See that battle right above this post? It’s the only battle left, and it’s Liquid Metal vs. the Pentagram HTPC!  Liquid Metal Pentagram sounds like a death metal band. Anyway, you have until like midnight to vote, and that’ll determin this month’s winner! So do that.

So who’s gonna be at the Maker Faire in San Mateo this weekend? I know I’ll try to spin by on Sunday; hope I see some of you there!  Sound off in the comments if you’re gonna be there and you want to say hi, and we’ll try to schedule something.