Tiny home update: Siding/Roofing is done

My friend and I put all the sheeting on the tiny home today. He has to fear of heights, so he stood on the top of the step ladder and screwed things in, even 12 feet high.

At the hardware store.

3 sheets of siding/roofing done.

A view from the inside after 3 sheets.

Put on all 6 sheets of roofing/siding.

All buttoned up for the next phase.

Moved Tiny House to final location.

The day finally came where I needed to move the tiny house to its final location so I could finish it up enough to move into the place at the end of the month. The weather had been fighting us for weeks, either 120 degrees, or storming, or both.  A perfect day showed up and we took advantage of the break to move the house.  Just me and a friend moved it 100 feet.  But once it was on the trailer we could have taken it anywhere.

Lifted tiny house up.

Put trailer under tiny house and strapped it on.  Was so well balanced that you could move the tiny house up and down with a single hand.

Tiny house in its final location.  So pretty there. Like a park. 

Next up is tying it to the ground so it can't blow away, siding and roofing it. :D After that will finish the insulation and build windows and doors.

Just reached 100,000 page views.

Thank you all for your support. I could not have done this without you!!!

Mini house update.

An insanely strong storm had winds that tweaked the storage shed walls so they are leaning a couple of inches now.  The storage shed seriously needs plyboard sheeting on it.

The mini house with its curved arch wall trusses has stood up to the storms this summer perfectly. They don't even move in the winds.

I gave 30 days notice to my landlord at the apartment. Paid my last rent.   Scary that I am now forced to move over to the mini house and it needs a lot of work still.

I have all the shelves moved over to the 8x8 storage shed now and loaded up with stuff from the apartment. Sliced out a big chunk of my thumb knuckle taking apart the last shelf. Painful, but I heal absurdly fast.

This weekend I hope to get the mini house moved over to its final location and leveled on blocks.  This will involve a bobcat and a trailer and me and a few strong friends. :D

Then I have 2 paychecks this month to get the siding, roofing and insulation on the mini-house and the storage shed.


After that I need to build windows reusing the glass scanner tops from copiers.  I have about 100 of the glass tops in various sizes.  I also want to build a solar powered water distiller, a solar oven, and a solar composter.

I also managed to get some huge sheets of Plexiglas for free and I am going to build a large solar water heater using plastic tubing and a solar powered water recirculating pump.

I managed to find some 55 gallon metal drums for free that held glycol before.  Going to test build a large rocket mass stove that will heat the mini-home during the coming winter.

I will need to get a gravel road put in across fairly flat ground. And plan on putting in a 4 unit mail box with room for the mail person to pull fully off the road to put the mail in the boxes.  With a couple of large locking containers for packages.

My plan for the electrical system is to start with a 100W solar panel from harbor freight, charging a marine battery. Then use dc to dc converters to charge a single laptop, my phone, a monitor, led lights, and a 12v ceiling fan.  Once I figure out how much power I am using I will be able to add more panels over time to 

Once I am living in the mini house full time in September, I will have a lot more time to get these projects finished.  Will take plenty of pictures and post each project here as I work on them. :D

How I would run a game company.

This was written a year ago, and the only notion that I have changed is starting with a pre-built game platform rather than writing the first one from scratch.  By starting with a game platform the company would save a decade of time over writing the first one ourselves.

I would start by buying a decent set of core engines that could do First Person, 3/4 perspective, and overhead view.  Then I would use those engines with a set of scripting and graphic tools to allow designers to script and clothe a game at a very high level.  Ideally this high level scripting and clothing system will work the same as the engines are ported across multiple platforms.

I'd require that most graphics be procedurally generated on the fly from tiny description files.  If need be these resulting textures can be cached on disk after they are generated.  This will ensure that the games levels can be transmitted as rapidly as possible over the Internet.  Perhaps while someone is playing one level the next level is downloading in the background and is generating the images so that the level is ready to play as soon as the current level is finished.  Additionally these procedural designs could automatically add more details to the texture map as the game is played on ever newer, more capable hardware.

The game play should just fall out of how the engine interacts with the rules that are set-up in the game script.  Very little should be specifically programmed for any single game.  My game designers can request cool new features for the next release of the engine, but for current development, unless there is a show stopper, they will have to work within the design constraints of the current engine.

As the current generation of games are being built, my core team will incrementally upgrade the core engines to allow more features that have been requested by the designers.  Nothing will ever be totally thrown out and rewritten from scratch. This is very important. I want to write better games, but I want the change sets to be small enough that I can come up with new games every year.

My company would never do vaporware.  I would write new games on new engines every year.  Not a game that nobody sees for 10 years because the technology is rewritten from scratch every couple of years in an endless loop of broken promises.

Another possibility is that old games could be played with the newer engines, extending their lives.

These engines and design tool chains could be leased to 3rd party game designers to create an ecosystem of similar games.  I would just require the end user to download my core engine, and then they could download and play tiny little chapters that tell stories with awesome game play.

The core engine would actually be an entire game platform that interfaced with a web site to allow games to be purchased on the platform and to handle updates of the core, the platform, and the game modules.