Hung Truong: The Blog!

The Come In/Go Away Welcome/Unwelcome Mat!

I saw this at BoingBoing. It’s a welcome mat that says “Come in” when you view it one way, and “Go away” when you rotate it 180 degrees.

I guess the idea is that when people are entering your house, they feel welcome, but then when they leave and look at the mat, it tells them to go away (which they’d probably be doing if they’re looking at it from that angle).

Or vice versa, the mat could act as some kind of barrier, with people seeing “Go away” as they’re about to enter, and “Come in” when they’re ready to leave. Theoretically, no one would enter or leave the house, which would create a state of home equilibrium, perhaps. Unless there are other entrances…

There’s also a doorhanger, in case you need to signal to people whether it is acceptable to enter a particular room.

Wii Play for Nintendo Wii – Review

I got Wii Play from Amazon.com yesterday. The main selling point is that it comes with a wiimote and costs $50, so the game itself is worth $10. It comes with a bunch of minigames, much like Wii Sports, but they’re not all sports.

Out of the nine, I’d say 3 or 4 are actually fun to play.

The Shooting Range game is not Duck Hunt, which makes me sad. Basically you just shoot stuff. Sometimes the Duck Hunt ducks will fly by and you can shoot them, but otherwise you just hit targets.

Find Mii is lame, unless you enjoy finding people in crowds. Table Tennis is really weak, because you can only control the horizontal action of the paddle. Tennis in Wii Sports is about 100 times better, and it comes with the Wii when you buy it! Pose Mii is also pretty boring.

Laser Hockey is actually very fun. The graphics are cool, and who doesn’t like air hockey? I need to get a friend to play this one with me, since the CPU is kind of dumb. Billiards is good too. It’s not quite ready to be its own game, but I enjoyed it (and I actually played it more than once).

Fishing is worthless. This looks like a tech demo. An unfun tech demo. Charge is kind of okay, and very surreal. I like how it uses the wiimote, at least. Tanks is also very fun with the nunchuck. I imagine getting 4 players would make this very, very fun.

In the end, if you’re looking to get an extra wiimote anyway, then Wii Play isn’t a bad buy. If you already have enough controllers, I don’t think it’s worth $50 for the game. There’s some good games, and there’s some not so good games. I personally think Wii Sports is more fun. Laser Hockey might be worth $10 by itself though.

Hung Truong: In PHP!

So I decided that I should do a little bit in PHP since I’m going to have a Google interview soon and the most I’ve done before is manipulating other people’s code. I have my (semi-) professional site thingy over at the root of the site, hung-truong.com. One thing that bugged me about doing that quick site was that I was writing everything in static html. So I had to statically write the menu bar thing so it showed the active menu item for each page. A lot of code was repeated, and it was generally pretty ugly.

I figured it’d be a good exercise to redo that simple site in a php template of sorts. So I used this pre-existing templating class and modified it for my needs. Yeah, I’m still manipulating other peoples’ code, but at least in this case, the code is simple enough so that I understand how all of it works (I haven’t taken the time to go digging around in all of WordPress’ source yet).

Unfortunately the class was really simple, and it still couldn’t handle my dynamic menu bar list thing. So I wrote a quick class called Menubar and it works! You can see the php version of my professional website at this location. I might end up just making it the official one, once I know it’ll work ok.

It was a bit of work, and I didn’t really change anything to the actual site, but if I ever end up adding another section, it’ll be a lot less work than before. Plus it sorta refreshed my (almost non-existent) PHP coding skills!

LocoRoco for Sony PSP – Sorta Review

So I bought LocoRoco from Amazon.com after some crazy glitch that let me order it for 60% off. It finally came while I was out of town and I got a chance to sit down and play it.

LocoRoco is one of those weird Japanese games that become famous due to their weirdness. In LocoRoco, you roll a yellow ball animal thing by tilting the world left or right. You can also bump the world so the ball can jump. When the ball eats red flowers, it can grow. You can also blow up the big ball into smaller balls, and reform the big ball later on.

Basically, the idea is to get the ball as large as possible and to make it to the end of the stage. You can get attacked by black spiky things that will reduce your size. At the end of the stage, you see how well you did getting larger, and collecting other random stuff.

And that’s how the whole game goes. There’s not much else. If you’ve played one stage, you’ve sorta played them all. I got through the first world.

One plus is that the game is super cute. Like the little yellow balls will sing in random pseudo-Japanese (it’s not actual Japanese, but it uses Japanese syllables). And the theme song is sorta addicting. Just listen to it! [audio:LocoRoco Title Theme.mp3]

So yeah, LocoRoco is sorta repetitive, but also way cute. Like me!

Threadless Spring Broke Sale – $10 T-Shirts!

So there’s another $10 t-shirt sale goin’ on at Threadless.com. I had a lot of referral credits ($30 worth) so I picked up some tees. I was only gonna order one, but then they said I had to use all of my credit at once, so I ordered 3. Stupid Threadless!

Anyway, here’s what I ordered:

Pencil Forest

When I saw Pencil Forest debut a few weeks ago (or was it last week?) I thought it was pretty cool. But not $15 cool. Luckily, it’s $10 cool.

It sorta doesn’t make sense though. So the guy is cutting down the tress to make pencils? But why are the trees made of pencil shavings? Oh well, I guess it doesn’t really need to make sense.

Para Poppins

I’ve wanted Para Poppins for a while now, though I don’t think it’s ever been in stock during a $10, which is usually when I’ll buy shirts from threadless. It’s just the kind of weird, off-beat shirt that I find myself gravitated towards. I’m sure Mary Poppins will show those insurgents who’s boss!

Stone Jungle

Stone Jungle is a pretty cool looking shirt that has some city stuff on the top, and nature stuff on the bottom! How artsy fartsy! I got it because I was forced to get 3 shirts. I like the design, plus green is my favorite color, so yeah, there ya go.

In fact, I just noticed that all the shirts I ordered today have a shade of green in them… Weird.

The Threadless Spring Broke sale lasts until March 12, so get the shirts you want now! And vote for this shirt to be reprinted!!!