Posted on
by
A Minecraft farmer-type villager standing inside the composter, with his crops nearby.

The latest Minecraft update, “Village and Pillage,” has completely revamped villager professions and trading, and made major changes to the village structures as well. Each profession now has a work site defined by a block like a stone cutter, or a loom, or a composter, etc. and unemployed villagers will try to fill jobs based on what’s available.

Now, Minecraft has always been (in my experience, anyway) pretty good about upgrading existing worlds as the game engine changes.

  • Unexplored areas will generate using new rules.
  • Previously explored areas will remain the same, except…
  • Specific blocks will convert as needed (ex: if you built a generic wooden fence before they introduced fences for each type of wood, it will convert to an oak fence.)
  • All areas will start operating on new rules.

Normally this works great! But can you see the problem with villages?

Yeah. The villagers operate on the new rules, which means they need work sites to do their jobs, but the existing villages were built without any workstations.

So the village near my current base suffered an economic collapse, or perhaps an attack of existential mass ennui, leaving every villager unemployed.

Fortunately, all the new workstations are craftable. Even the ones that the player can’t use yet. So I spent some time on the wiki, writing down the ingredients I needed, went back to my base, crafted all of the ones I could, and started placing them around the village.

And it worked! Pretty soon I was able to trade with a farmer, librarian, fisherman, butcher, cartographer, etc. I’m still waiting for some of the unemployed villagers to pick up jobs. Maybe they need to actually walk close enough to the job sites or something?

Anyway, here’s the list of ingredients I put together based on the wiki article on villagers. You can get the crafting recipes from the wiki or in the game from the recipe book:

Minecraft Villager Job sites

Job Site Block Profession Ingredients
Blast furnace Armorer 5 iron ingots, 1 furnace, 3 smooth stone
Smoker Butcher 4 logs, 1 furnace
Cartography Table Cartographer 2 paper, 4 planks
Brewing Stand Cleric 1 blaze rod, 3 cobblestone
Composter Farmer 4 fences, 3 planks (Java) or 7 planks (Bedrock)
Barrel Fisherman 2 wooden slabs, 6 planks (Java) or 2 wooden slabs, 6 sticks (Bedrock)
Fletching Table Fletcher 2 Flint, 4 planks
Cauldron Leatherworker 7 iron ingots
Lectern Librarian 4 wooden slabs, 1 bookshelf
Stonecutter Mason 1 iron ingot, 3 stone
Loom Shepherd 2 string, 2 planks
Smithing Table Toolsmith 2 iron ingots, 4 planks
Grindstone Weaponsmith 1 stick, 1 stone slab, 2 planks

(Yes, a few of these are actually different in Bedrock Edition and Java Edition! I don’t know why Mojang would deliberately introduce differences in something as basic as crafting recipes, but apparently they have.)

Depending on how you play the game, you may never need to do this. If you generate new worlds all the time, or if you’re happy to just pull up stakes and move to a new area in the same world, you’ll encounter the updated villages to start with. But if you play like I do – explore the same world slowly, digging in, building up and establishing bases as I go – you’ll be glad to know that this works to manually upgrade your villages.

Posted on
by

Flickr has spent the last day offline, moving the rest of their services out of Yahoo’s datacenters. But to keep people involved, they’re holding a Good Panda Photo Contest where you print out the panda from the “Down For Maintenance” page and take a photo of it off having some adventure.

I went a little overboard with getting the panda into whimsical situations! 🙂

I plan on posting the one with the coffee mug as my entry once uploads are working again, but I may post a full album of the panda’s adventures!

Update: Flickr seems to be stable again! And entries aren’t limited to just one photo. Here’s the Flickr version of this gallery, and here’s the official contest group where everyone is sharing their Panda adventures.

Update: The kid got in on the action as well!

Posted on
by

After several days not being able to see any of the birds I could hear when I went for a walk on break from work, I saw a whole bunch of them hanging out on a lawn, eating seeds or bugs or whatever it is that these particular birds eat. Of course since I’d been walking to lunch, the only camera I had with me was my phone. No optical zoom, and I couldn’t get too close without spooking them. I figured what the heck, I’d give it a shot (or several) with the phone and see if I got something clear enough to post to iNaturalist.

I didn’t, as you can see, but it’s a great example of something I’ve found fascinating about digital zoom: The way it can make a photo look like it’s been painted with brush strokes rather than captured with pixels.

Personally, I’ve never understood why digital zoom is implemented as a resize instead of just cropping to a lower resolution. Even back when the full resolution on cameras was low, I’d rather have a clear 640×480 image than a blurry 1280×960. The only reason I even enabled digital zoom on an actual camera (rather than just cropping it later on my computer) was because it made a difference to the auto-focus, exposure, etc. choices the camera would make.

I suppose it’s marketing: They promised you however many megapixels, after all!

Posted on
by

Discussion of food allergies tends to focus on children (for a lot of reasons), but a recent study found a much higher rate of food allergies among adults than expected. They found that 10.8 percent of American adults – that extrapolates to 26 million people! — reported a convincing food allergy (based on actual symptoms reported – another 9% reported allergies, but their symptoms didn’t match the diagnosis – presumably at least some of the rest are genuine intolerances). That’s actually higher than the rate among children found by another recent study, which came up with 7.6%.

Now, my first thought on reading this was: Of course! Kids with food allergies who were counted 10, 20, 30 years ago have grown up, and we’re adults now! But it’s more than that: There’s a lot more adult-onset allergies than anyone expected to find.

The JAMA article goes into the numbers. Of those who had a convincing allergy:

  • 48% developed at least one allergy as an adult
  • 26.9% developed allergies only as an adult.
  • 53.8% developed allergies only before turning 18

More than a quarter of adults with food allergies didn’t have them as children. That’s a surprise! And it raises questions: Is there a different mechanism that triggers childhood-onset allergies vs. adult-onset? (Other than tick bites, of course.) What about those of us who had allergies already and added more? Is there some sort of saturation threshold?

There are still a lot of unknowns about food allergies. But we do know that they can be deadly serious, and they affect a lot of people.

Posted on
by

Purism’s explanations for removing various safety features from Librem One’s social network sound like someone explaining why they removed the mirrors, brakes, horns, seat belts, airbags and signals from the cars they’re reselling, because they know those cars are only ever going to be driven on a track where they’ll never have to change lanes or negotiate with other drivers.

Even though there’s a bunch of driveways on that track, connecting to the public road system.

If a collision does happen, we can call in the tow trucks and ambulances. But giving drivers tools to avoid collisions or reduce injuries? That would be interfering with their freedom!

Posted on
by

Smudgy clouds, colors enhanced to bring out a straight rainbow effect.

I could barely see any colors in the cloud at all without my polarized sunglasses, and when I took a photo through them, I still had to bump up the saturation.

Thin clouds and contrails cross the sky. A bright rainbow-like ring circles a spot just out of view above the frame. A fainter rainbow-like line runs across the sky below it.I’ve seen several of these over the years. The brightest one was nine years ago, while the longest was just last year. It’s a solar halo caused by reflections inside ice crystals (near ground level or higher up in the atmosphere) that in theory could circle the entire sky parallel to the horizon. In practice, it’s rare for ice crystals of the right shape and orientation to cover more than a small area from any given viewpoint, so mostly people see fragments of them.