Category Archives: Diary

Powerlevel Warcraft Battle Pets

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I was looking for ways to improve the leveling of my World of Warcraft Battle Pets now that I had a couple of pets in their 20s.  I had been struggling with spreading the XP out among pets, vs having one pet do all the work in a single battle, swap him out for the next battle and hope no one died before the 8 minutes heal was up.

I found a middle ground where I can level a pet from 1 to 10 in only 8 battles, or go from level 22 to 23 in just 5 battles.

Let me introduce you to Stable Master Risera at coordinates 61,54, the east side of Wyrmrest Temple in Dragonblight.  She is steps away from a group of level 22 Dragonbone Hatchlings found at 64,53 in Dragonblight.  You can battle the dragonbones and not worry about having health enough to fight again, because you can just fly over to her and for 10s heal and revive if necessary your battle pets.

Your primary enemy will be the Dragonbone Hatchling, which is a Flying pet.  He’ll be joined by Strand Crab, Arctic Hare, and/or Tundra Penguin.  Of my existing pets in their 20s, I used Jean, my Phoenix Hatchling for she has a good self-heal and she also has an alternate attack, Peck, which is strong against Aquatics (the crabs and penguins) and you also don’t have to worry about her Burn which is weak against the Hares.  Now she is Elemental which makes her weak against a couple of the attacks the Aquatics have available so keep an eye out for those and time your heals well (PetTheory will let you know with a hover over during the battle).  Another suggestion is the Onyxian Whelpling (if you have it from the 5th Anniversary and have him leveled already) (or any of the rare Whelping drops), as he has a similar heal as the Phoenix but doesn’t have the elemental disadvantage.

When I started with Jean at least 20, she wasn’t winning all the time — depending on crits and combinations of skills the enemy used she’d occasionally die (I’d let her as that means more XP for the leveling pet) and my backup Crab would save the day.  By level 23 she was able to win all the time (but I still didn’t like it when the Dragonbone had the combo of Thrash/Adrenaline Rush/Cyclone).  Special note: the Sprite Darter Hatchling was the only pet I was leveling that could hold her own.  At level 8 she was able to kill one the level 22 Dragonbone herself, and then I’d swap her out for the others.  Impressive pet that one is. Today I spent a while here and leveled 8 pets to 10, which was enough to complete Rookie Pet Group (I already had done 7 it seems) and I only need to do a Magic creäture to get the No Favourites achievement (I didn’t have any rare magic creatures so didn’t bother with one of my greens yet).  For those who like the blues, the RNG gave me 4 blue captures in that time.

For those curious, here is a log of taking my Tiny Sporebat from level 1 to 10.  Elapsed time 21 minutes (with worrying about screenshots and taking a phone call).  Note all these list ‘Difficultly Bonus’ but I haven’t mathed out exactly how that works.  The variation in xp earned from fight to fight seems to come from how rare the pets I was fighting were (e.g. greys and whites are less than greens — but not by much).

  • Fight 1: 361XP brings him to level 4 (my companion got 172XP to bring her from 22 to 23)
  • Fight 2: 413XP brings him to level 6 (companion 143XP)
  • Fight 3: 323XP (companion 109XP (plus a death) plus a capture of a rare Arctic Hare)
  • Fight 4: 431XP level 7 (companion 145)
  • Fight 5: 436XP level 8 (companion 146)
  • Fight 6: 438XP level 9 (companion 147)
  • Fight 7: 437XP (companion 147)
  • Fight 8: 437XP level 10! (companion 147XP)

This spot will of course continue to work past level 10 as well: you’ll have a near in-exhaustible supply (unless too many people read this post) of ‘green paws’ to battle, and the stable master available whenever it’s needed.  A single battle with a single level 22 pet will earn you ~388 XP per fight, so at that rate it’ll take you 5 fights to get from 22 to 23 for example (388 per fight for 1860 per level).  More data: it’s 320xp per fight at 23 as well so 6 fights to get from 23 to 24.

Once you’re comfortable soloing three level 22s a single pet, you might consider putting in two level 1 pets and going from there.  My data says that in the first fight they’ll both get 233XP and your high level pet (in this case a 23) will get 90.  Have fun!

Thanks to Doclariv at Internet Kidz Gaming for his youtube video: Fastest Powerleveling Method for Battlepets! which put me on to this location and style of power leveling wow battle pets.

Pad your Youtube views

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I found a bug on Youtube that lets you inflate your video views.  I reported it to them a few weeks ago and they haven’t fixed it yet so I thought I’d share it with y’all.

I’m sure you know that if you repeatedly watch your own video, the ‘views’ doesn’t increase.  Their system is smart enough to know that the views are coming from the same spot and doesn’t count them.  Except!  When there is an ‘edit in progress’ it seems.  So use the ‘Enhancements’ link at the top of your video and do some small change (trim a few frames, or use the new ‘stabilize’ ability) and save your video.  While youtube’s cloud chugs away at reprocessing your video and you see the ‘Edit in progress’ in your Video Manager you can refresh the video page as often as you like and every view will go towards your total count.  I haven’t yet tried to automatic it, but a simple script would most likely cause the counter to go way up.  The most I’ve bothered with for my little video collection is to get a base 100 views as I didn’t want to actually exploit it.

Our videos this week – 2012-41

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It was a busier than usual week for video uploads to our youtube channel, so I thought I’d just include them all here in case you missed some.  To help from missing out, feel free to subscribe to us and you’ll be notified of new videos as soon as they upload.

And our most popular video this past month continues to be Kids Playing in ball pit.

Subscribe to me on YouTube

Kitchens of India Curry Paste

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My favourite prepared meals lately have involved Kitchens of India Curry Pastes.

Our formerly local Indian restaurant of choice, Cuisine of India, closed down a while ago and we never get downtown anymore for Bombay Palace but we found these little packets of paste a while ago at the grocer and whenever they are in stock, we scoop them up.

Playing at The Toy Box

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Thanks to Playground Studios and Theatre Passe Muraille for a great afternoon yesterday. The kids were “having too much fun to leave”. It’s running at City Hall Rotunda until Saturday, and then will be back for a few days in December (at Theatre Passe Muraille, not City Hall).   Thanks to Fancy Pants Kids for the recommendation.

An interesting observation I made: we were barefoot (as we have been for months now), but instead of getting strange looks from people, instead many people thought that they too should shed their shoes while playing.  Goes to show you what preconceptions can do.

How to use Makey Makey as an Arduino

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Our MakeyMakey arrived today (13 days after shipping (we were in the Kickstarter) for those counting) (and thankfully no problems with customs)!  Following the Howto as linked on the back of the board was great for the basic stuff (and I spent more time with the ‘one button games‘ that I should have) but I was immediately drawn to the arduino-ness of the board, but didn’t see anything on the HowTo page.  After digging through the forums and following a few links I’ve deduced the following setups:

  1. If you don’t already have an arduino, download the IDE
  2. Hit up the MakeyMakey Sparkfun page for links to the latest versions of the following.
  3. If you’re on windows, download the driver (presently here) and extract the folder somewhere on your system.  Open up ‘Device Manager’ and find the ‘USB IO’ device that’s unknown (unless of course you didn’t follow the Howto instructions on ignoring the pop-ups during first connection, then  you can just use those links), and click through to it to manually install the driver, and then browse to the place you extracted the ‘driver’ folder.
  4. Download the ‘Makey Makey Arduino Addon‘, which will have a ‘hardware’ folder and a readme.  Either read through the readme, or copy & paste the hardware folder to your ‘sketchbook location’ (find yours in your arduino environment under File->Preferences).  You can also find this on github here.  Having this in place means that under “Tools -> Board” in your sketch software you’ll now have the custom config for the MakeyMakey version of Arduino.
  5. If you want somewhere to start from — e.g. just want to alter what letters are assigned to which pins copy the files from this makey_makey github to a sketch folder and load it up and tweak.  This is also the code to reload your makey makey if you happen to have tried some other arduino program before you found this page and bricked your makey makey.

Hopefully I’ll post some updates as to what the kids come up with soon, but for now, here’s the ad from the makers of this open-source piece of awesome:

Sparkfun has a tutorial posted as well.

Toronto Buskerfest 2012 Diary

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Yesterday I took the kids down to the Toronto Buskerfest . What worked for us last year as well as this, is to arrive just before it opens so we can get the lay of the land and avoid most of the crowds.  I can’t imagine how busy it’d be on a Friday night or weekend because it felt very well visited yesterday afternoon.  We situate ourselves near the kids area and the CTV/CP24 Stage giving us access to a big stage, the shaded kids area, and some bathrooms if we need them (note the business we choose to make use of their facilities does post a sign asking for patrons only — I have no clue where official washrooms are).

We saw the following acts

I had remembered some of the press from Ernest from last year so was looking forward to his show. It got off to a rough start due to technical difficulties (sound system wasn’t powered correctly and it took two technicians to get it going) but while we waited for him to start we got to watch an early preview of Dream State Circus as they performed for a noon-time TV news (which I think we probably we in shot for — anyone see us?), the stilt guys doing this hockey bit, and the creatures the kids really enjoyed were the Giant Seagull people! Ernest gave us lots of laughs (jump over a car on his pogo stick).  A few bits weren’t kid friendly, but it wasn’t the kids area so that could be expected.

We headed into the kids area next for Rob Torres.  He is a fantastic clown, who doesn’t speak at all during the performance (but does make noises), and he really fired up the imaginations of the crowd drawing us all into his world of play and fun.  His show felt completely original and did not have some of the repetition some of the others have (perhaps because he doesn’t need banter which seems to get re-used a lot).

We stopped in at Fancy Pants Kids booth next for the kids to do some dress-up.   Ms Meyer Odell remembered us which made the kids feel really welcome.  We left the tent with temporary tattoos for the kids and a recommendation to see Wolfe & Petersen’s Pocket Carnival.

Daniel Forlano soon tried to start his act, even if some tv-show marketers had invaded his stage and seemed oblivious to him as the performer (one father who was taking pictures of his kids with the licensed characters even complained when “the man with the ladder” walked in front of his shot *sigh*).  His laid back character performance was an interesting change from the usual exuberant buskers, and he tried his best to woo an audience member in his romantic comedy featuring juggling throw pillows, balancing on a ladder as well as standing on the top of a bottle.

We rushed over to catch the end of Dream State Circus’s show back in the kids area.  As they were doing their acro-balance I felt at home putting one kid on each shoulder so they could see over the crowd.  The kids weren’t too comfortable though so I was proud when they decided to squeeze through the people standing so they could get close enough to see for themselves.  One of their balances was like the foot balance my son & I do, which pleased him to see.  Their finale of her standing on his head while they both juggle fire clubs is pretty impressive, but I liked their pre-finale of her doing a handstand on his out-stretched arm the best.

checkerboard guy profile picThis was later than I had planned to stay already, but my son caught sight of The Checkerboard Guy setting up and asked if we could stay and watch.  I’m glad we did.  The only Canadian performer we saw, he was extremely friendly and kept the show at a perfect level for the kids.  Turns out he’s been performing for so long, that an audience member there with her kids remembered seeing him perform in her youth (I took a group photo of them all so got to over-ear the story).

Complaints about the kids area are similar to last years complaints.  Too many smokers — the local business people come out of the neighbouring buildings and use the square as their butt-ground and seem oblivious to the fact that it’s filled with kids for the event (probably not as much an issue on the weekend).  The candy giver awayers didn’t bother with any extra trash-bins so their single serving packaging blanketed the area with plastic.  The square itself isn’t too flat due to the stone layout which gives some of the performers an extra challenge.  Oh, and my usual complaint about the Buskerfest website (Flash ick) was alleviated a bit as I found an html version tucked away.

Afterwards we had a long walk up to Bloor from King St to surprise my wife as she finished her work-day.  I enjoy it when the kids impress me with their fitness.