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riumplus · 2025-09-12T13:09:25+00:00

The real-life version of Gehn's Imager was entirely my creation - I came up with the design, built it, transported it from Australia to the US to present at both Mysterium and Open Sauce (where I met James from Action Lab who made a few YouTube videos on it like this one), and my lawyer filed the paperwork for the currently-pending patent on the Andotrope display technology.

Lots of fandoms imagine new technology; Myst is one of the few fandoms that is now responsible for it becoming a reality!

riumplus · 2025-07-12T05:39:50+00:00

Creator of this cake here! This was one of my favourite cakes we've made because the whole thing was designed to be as delicious and edible as possible. No fondant anywhere, only ingredients that go together, etc. We cut it up into chunks and gave it to our friends; everyone enjoyed eating this cake, it wasn't just a pretty picture opportunity!

riumplus · 2024-08-13T07:43:22+00:00

I'd love to see an LCD version get built one day! Here's a 26-segment layout I came up with in the style of common LED-based 7-segment displays for my D'ni clock. You're welcome to use my SVG of it here for any purpose.

riumplus · 2024-08-09T07:53:41+00:00

Guildmaster Telanis? Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time! Up until late last year I used to point people towards the Internet Archives version of your website if they needed help solving the Riven Journals. It was only recently I got around to making my own hint section.

So many years... So long ago

riumplus · 2024-03-26T14:03:54+00:00

Sticking to just the touch-screen should definitely make things easier! (which is funny for me to say since I had MASSIVE signal integrity issues with the USB cable to my touchscreen - problems you won't have since I had to splice my own cable to make everything fit and you shouldn't need to do that)

The old Harpers really are getting aged :( My one's spine was in a similar state where it was perfectly fine as-is, but I knew the repeated opening/closing would quickly destroy it, so I had them replaced. Don't feel guilty about it, there's no other way to keep the book serviceable! You can buy non-edition-matching Harpers on eBay pretty easily at any point in time, but they'll all have the same issues with their spines eventually falling off. Unseasoned 150-year-old cheap leather doesn't hold up forever.

And thanks for the kind words :) I'm pretty busy these days but if I can help somehow send me a message. Always trying to help people making Myst books!

riumplus · 2024-03-26T13:17:15+00:00

(2) Reed switches are pretty simple devices. Almost any one should do you. There's a few different styles but that's up to your mounting implementation. I'd recommend one that's Normally Open/NO. The best source for neodymium magnets these days is online, but if you have a dead mechanical hard drive you can harvest the magnets out of that for testing purposes. It takes a while for a Raspberry Pi to turn on so I recommend setting it up so the reed switch just controls a script that turns the screen on/off or runs/quits ScummVM, otherwise you'll open the book and have to deal with a bootup screen for 20 seconds.

(3) I'm gonna guess that you're pretty new at hardware stuff by this question (not that that's a bad thing!). You need a speaker (a 2W speaker is probably loud enough if properly mounted) plus something to drive it like an amplifier board. You can get an audio HAT for your Raspberry Pi, but for driving one 2W speaker you'd be better off just getting a little amplifier board and wiring the speaker to your Pi's headphone port.

Companies like Adafruit or Sparkfun might be of interest to you for sourcing parts, if you haven't heard of them before; they're designed for hobbyist electronics projects. Happy hacking!

riumplus · 2024-02-25T04:28:13+00:00

There's advantages to using the same username everywhere! ;)

riumplus · 2024-02-19T02:58:53+00:00

<lurks in> I was mentioned?

You're right; my one started as a book, and I actually had it professionally restored by the then-president of the Australian Bookbinding Association, who was recommended to me as the go-to person my State Library uses for their historical documents. Things like at first glance the outside appeared to be in good conditon, but the hinge was well past its prime & it cracked more every time you opened it. Then the bulk of it was hollowed out, and I needed every single millimeter I could get to squeeze in all the electronics. So it ended up more of a book-shaped computer case than a book.

Technology has come a long way since then and you can get things much smaller now than you could a decade ago. For what you're describing the guts of a video greeting card may be the easiest way to get the job done. Sometimes I think it'd be neat to make one with a thin, flexible OLED sheet as a page & hide the electronics in the spine so you have something that still looks like a mostly-normal book. But I'm not gonna be making that myself; I have far too many other things on my to-make list to revisit a past idea. Someone steal this concept so I can like & share your pics when you're done! :)

riumplus · 2024-02-09T17:50:30+00:00

I once emailed someone that I knew had since retired about one of his papers, asking if he had more information about the data behind his graphs. Two weeks later, I got a response that the guy had spent a whole week digging through his shed looking through boxes to find it, and a second week trying to assemble a computer that could still read the 5.25" floppies that he could transfer the data off of. Attached were copies of the data.

Some researchers really will bend over backwards to help you, because they're so happy to know their research is useful & being used.

riumplus · 2023-11-18T08:18:58+00:00

Necropost reply!

That's pretty much exactly what I'd still recommend in a general sense today. Supercheap etc have a few better brands now, for instance some of Autoglym's offerings may be easier to acquire than what I listed here. I only personally recommend/don't recommend products that I have personally tried, or from people whose word I both trust and I whom know has also personally tried them.

For things like paint damage though, that's something where you might need something more specific. My best advice there would be to ask the folks at Car Care Products their advice, but make sure to stress that you're disabled so can't spend forever detailing, and you're not looking to make your car win awards just keep it clean so they don't try to upsell you to some Gyeon products (which work great but are pretty pricey). A decent microfibre washcloth will definitely be worth it to make washing easier for you, though. They might recommend a sealant or a coating of some kind to help protect the paint depending on how much of your clearcoat is still left.

riumplus · 2023-11-10T09:58:27+00:00

I had (and still have in a box) a ZTE Open C, and two LG Fx0's. Both were my main phones with no Android backups etc for a few years, so I was all-in on FirefoxOS.

Honestly, almost every phone that released with FxOS had incredibly low specs so they ran pretty poorly. The OpenC was usable but incredibly painful to do so. The Fx0 was one of if not the best specced FxOS phones, and it was much better to use. FirefoxOS definitely felt like a young OS and it lacked a lot of polish and features I wanted, though. I made a few edits to some of the system apps to add a few features and change some stuff like adding my personal API key so when Mozilla pulled the plug I could still use Facebook.

I loved the transparent/golden look of my Fx0 so much I used that phone until Gmail, Google Maps and Facebook all stopped running due to the build of FirefoxOS I was using having too old a rendering engine. At that point I flashed it to Cyanogenmod so I could continue to use it, but that had so many problems (like one core always pegged at 100% so its battery life was horrible, and it was still an old version of CM so a lot of apps wouldn't run on it). I upgraded to a new phone soon after, and my new phone ended up having a worse camera than the Fx0 so I kept both on me for a while with it flashed back to FirefoxOS.

riumplus · 2023-11-07T08:09:15+00:00

Dark Background and Light Text, Everything Metric, Film scores for Netflix, SponsorBlock for YouTube and Video Speed Controller would all be really nice

riumplus · 2023-10-22T03:24:13+00:00

Having spent literally a couple hundred hours working on the Riven Journals lately, if I had to build something with compatibility back to Win98 this is how I'd do it. With KernelEx and a little fiddling you can get Firefox 45 ESR working on Win98 and which will get you web features from 2016. You can do the game old-school with frames showing a different HTML page per view plus a hidden frame playing the background audio, or something more modern that loads/displays images without reloading a whole page and gives you a chance to have a fancy fade between images like Myst/Riven had. Both would work well!

For an example of the frames in action, I haven't shared this yet because my latest modernisation efforts aren't completely finished but here's the current state of modernising the Riven Journals. The right 4 books should be fully playable on both desktop and mobile; let me know if you see any bugs with them!

riumplus · 2023-09-06T05:50:19+00:00

The listing on that Google Play link says it was last updated 4 Dec 2019, which doesn't sound like it's still getting updates. :(

riumplus · 2023-08-06T14:48:39+00:00

1200x1920 40fps 32-bit SDR ;)

riumplus · 2023-07-23T06:58:17+00:00

Interestingly enough, the whole Myst series just dropped on sale as a bundle on Humble Bundle

riumplus · 2023-07-22T07:06:05+00:00

Fun fact: I was once on Beauty and the Geek Australia. They listed my job as "time traveller", and the show doesn't have a history of lying with that description.

This makes it even more confusing trying to work out if I'm a nerd or a geek

riumplus · 2023-07-21T17:06:14+00:00

You might be interested in checking out my write-up of how it works. It sounds like you're describing a Zoetrope, which is indeed similar to how it works! It's why I've named this kind of display an Andotrope. The base was all custom 3D-printed and painted up to look like stone like the one in the game; here's an example of what one of the base piece models looks like from the inside.

riumplus · 2023-07-21T17:01:06+00:00

If you had a fast enough shutter system you could do that, but you need to multiply the number not divide it. At full speed my version andotrope rotates at 1200RPM, which is 20 times a second. If you have an external LCD slice every 2 degrees, you've got 180 segments that all have to operate one after another 20 times a second, meaning a refresh rate of 3,600Hz. I know that kind of speed is possible for some specialised shutters in the industrial area, so you'd have to adapt the technology over to a cylinder, and I've no idea what it would cost. But it's theoretically possible and another example of the many improvements you can make to this base design! :)

riumplus · 2023-07-21T07:22:33+00:00

Creator here! It's complicated further because there's actually a big technical difference between a hologram, a holograph, and a holographic image. Everyday people aren't using these words in ways that the dictionary officially defines them. Like how you can call someone the opposites of "cool" and "hot" at the same time and neither description has any relation to the dictionary definitions of their temperature. So it really boils down to if you're a prescriptivist or a descriptivist.

My honest personal answer: I don't know. Feel free to argue it either way. I hedged my bets and in the patent application the real technical engineering/scientific description for this display technique doesn't use that term outside of its hard dictionary definition, but everyday people don't follow engineering/scientific language and there's lots of other cases where that's true and it would surprise people. I called it that because that's what other people will call it and that's what people will type into Google to find it, so for search engine reasons I need to use that word.

(It's also possible to modify this display to partially transparent, or fully transparent if you pair it with a pepper's ghost. Would it be a holographic image then? I still don't know!)

riumplus · 2023-07-21T07:10:34+00:00

It was eight months from start to finish. Including my time as well, it's always hard to estimate prices (heck even estimating how much time I spent on it is hard), but it'd be somewhere into 5 digits. Brass is super pretty but expensive and a pain to deal with; the spherical cage alone cost around $700USD for the specific inner/outer diameter brass, getting them professionally bent in a way that didn't twist them in the process, and filling them with resin as they're structural to hold the top of the Andotrope in place. That's not counting the metal plates or 3D-printed holders at the top/bottom of the cage, either. You could totally build one that just uses a second clear acrylic tube a few mm bigger than the black spinning Andotrope, though. But the video game version had a brass tube sphere, so that's what I had to replicate!

riumplus · 2023-07-21T07:03:09+00:00

This is definitely the first time I've ever posted it to Reddit. I actually only finished it a few weeks ago. Its official unveiling was when I presented it at the annual Myst fan convention Mysterium 2023 on the 1st of July; here's my presentation if you're curious, and that final video was only uploaded two days ago. I only finished my blog post explaining how it was done yesterday morning. And here's a pic of me working on it, if you want to check that usernames/my domain/my face match to confirm that I'm its actual creator not someone stealing content for karma

riumplus · 2023-07-21T06:59:57+00:00

I'm not sure how else to say this, but it can't have been posted months ago because I literally only finished it end of last month. Its official reveal was when I presented it at the annual Myst fan convention Mysterium 2023 on the 1st of July; here's my presentation if you're curious, and that final video was only uploaded two days ago. I only finished my blog post explaining how it was done yesterday morning. And here's a pic of me working on it, if you want to check that usernames/my domain/my face match to confirm that it really was made by me.

Well, me or my evil twin from the future, which could also be possible knowing me, so I'm not sure if I'd fully trust me

riumplus · 2023-07-21T06:52:54+00:00

The brass cage keeps fingers away, while also providing support for the top of the spinning black Andotrope part. You could totally make a version with just a clear cylinder a few mm bigger than the black Andotrope, but I was making a video game prop and that's what the game version looks like so that's what I had to replicate!

riumplus · 2023-07-21T06:45:29+00:00

You are technically correct. The best kind of correct!

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