The idea first came to me when the teacher brought up that the class would be making a model of a boat, i decided to take it one step further and make a plane :D.

So far i have collected the plans for it as well as some tools that i require.  I will be building a Beechcraft Skipper

Hopefully all will go to plan and it will be built in 7 weeks.

I decided to make a book holder this took me about 9-11 weeks(it actually took me 2 lessons but i made other stuff) and you can check out the folio below. The project turned out excellent and if you were intrested in making something with the documentation i have made feel free to do so(as long as you give me creds though :D).

This project achieved 100% (25/25)

Kudos to templaedhel for the rendered version of the book holder

Download .doc Documentation (includes plans, diagrams and steps of construction)

*There are empty pages for a reason, you have to draw your own sketches, they are just concept ideas so you can draw pretty much anything in that space.

This was something that “seemed” easy and quick and so i tried it out with my U3 enabled Toshiba 2GB USB flash drive. First i tried out UNetbootin and everything seemed to go fine the install was quick and painless(i had already downloaded a .iso image) but as i proceeded to boot my computer and navigate to “boot from USB device” it came up with an error and refused to let me try again until i had restarted the system. This happened many times and after a couple of tries i gave up and booted into windows.

Toshiba U3 Flash Drive

Thinking that the issue i was suffering from was the cause of U3 i quickly removed it and tried again but to no avail. Later the next day i went down to Office Works and purchased a 16GB Sony Micro vault USB flash drive and tried once more hoping for some miracle, but nothing of the sort happened.               

Sony Microvault

I have finally come to a conclusion that my BIOS does not allow booting from a USB device although it clearly states that it does, i cannot seem to solve the problem. After wasting money on a 16GB flash drive and loosing many precious hours i cannot say my experiences have been good although many other people have had success.

Unfortunately for me i will have to wait another day for the release because i reside in Australia and the annoying time difference always seems to get in the way. But one of the most interesting things about the new version is Wacom’s being enabled by default, even though key mapping isn’t supported yet its still a great bonus for the graphics editor. This is just another reason why Ubuntu is so awesome.

Almost forgot, you can find more information about Ubuntu here

Edit: Its finally been released

If you would like to chat to any of us live then you can join our irc at Freenode channel #FreezingMoon.

With the release of Blender 2.5 it will include updates to the Animation system, Window manager and many more. The full list can be found here. The update is due to hit the shelf’s somewhere in June 2009.

Blender being open source, is an excellent tool in creating and editing models and has great potential in future years. The project team i have been working with has used mainly on blender and it has proved to be stable and reliant.

Hopefully in the upcoming years we will see more and more open source based games so that the humble person sitting in his armchair just wanting to create his own game has something to start with, a base on which to build something great.