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2716

Q & A / Re: Digging food out of food dish.

« on: December 25, 2011, 02:46:57 PM »

One of the things we had to do to keep our parrot from dumping over his dish was to secure it with a small 1" C-clamp. You may be able to get a stainless steel dish to attach to the bars so it can be elevated and secured to the bars. If you try this I recommend washing the clamp off with soap and water to remove any oil that may be on it from the factory.

2717

News / Re: what kind of animal is this?

« on: December 22, 2011, 05:49:55 PM »

Looks like a deer mouse. It has a bi-colored tail which is a distinguishing feature.

http://www.nsrl.ttu.edu/tmot1/peromani.htm

2718

News / Re: what kind of animal is this?

« on: December 22, 2011, 01:14:13 PM »

It is certainly not a chinchilla. It looks like a mouse to me.

2719

Other Pets / Re: Has anyone used ware treat-k-bob refills with a parrot?

« on: December 22, 2011, 01:00:18 PM »

I got an e-mail back from Ware. They said it was mixed fruit flavor and kiln dried pine. I suspect it's the same stuff the other parrot toys are made of.

Chris

2720

Other Pets / Has anyone used ware treat-k-bob refills with a parrot?

« on: December 21, 2011, 04:43:46 PM »

This is kind of a strange question, but we have an African Grey parrot that chews on wood toys just like rodents.
The rodent chews are a lot cheaper than whole parrot toys at the pet store. I bought one (Treat-k-bobs refill that will fit onto our existing hanging toys) thinking it was just food dyed pine but found it was fruit flavored as well. Just a little unsure if it's safe for parrots. I'll e-mail ware and see if I can get them to disclose what's in it but I wanted to know if anyone does this with their medium to large parrots.

Thanks,

Chris

2721

Health / Re: :( my chinchillas eye.....

« on: December 19, 2011, 11:08:46 AM »

Using antibiotics from other pets can be a problem. If you use too little or end treatments too soon you can end up with antibiotic resistant strains of pathogenic bacteria. If you already have used this on your chin please  be sure to tell the vet. Otherwise wait until you get a diagnosis and a prescription.

2722

Health / Re: Chinchilla tail cut and swollen! What should I do?

« on: December 10, 2011, 04:58:55 PM »

Wish I could help but I'm not a chinchilla owner. If it were my pet I would keep an eye on it and watch for any changes. If this is the first time you've noticed it you really don't have much to go off of. Living with a parrot I know it's important to weigh him regularly as both parrots and chins will hide symptoms until they are in distress and a marked drop in weight is usually a good early warning. However, if the chin goes off its food it's usually pretty hard to get them to recover because it causes major digestive issues. Unfortunately it appears they are sensitive to antibiotics and this can make things difficult too.

I think the fact that your animal is not in constant pain or chewing at the area is a good sign as pain is usually a sign of infection but redness around the wound is a bad sign. The fact that it was cut after something heavy fell on could mean there is an underlying crushing injury that could prolong the healing process.

If in doubt go to the vet but make sure they handle exotics if at all possible. There is a nice list on this website:
http://www.chinchillaclub.com/vets/index.html

2723

Health / Re: Chinchilla tail cut and swollen! What should I do?

« on: December 10, 2011, 10:24:40 AM »

Where on the tail is it cut? Towards the end or the base?

How much swelling is there - pea size, dime size?

Can you see any change in the swelling from day to day? Is it going down or getting worse?

What does the area where the swelling is look like? Is the skin red around the cut?

2724

General Chat / Using a fleece blanket as cage bedding

« on: December 09, 2011, 08:40:12 AM »

I have these questions:

1. How do you use the blanket? Do you spread it over the whole floor of the cage or only part of it?
2. How do you clean it?
3. How often do you clean it?

2725

General Chat / Fleece bedding

« on: December 08, 2011, 04:16:36 PM »

I looked at the website. When I was thinking of bedding I was thinking more along the lines of some kind of cottony substance like batting. Is this like a blanket that you spread over the bottom of the cage? Does it go over the whole floor of the cage or just a section of it? Could a piece of a regular fleece blanket work?

2726

Fun and Games / Flash design tools

« on: December 08, 2011, 04:12:14 PM »

I had some time to do more research on learning flash.
There are some open source game engines available with libraries to make coding easier.
Apparently there are two big ones including Flixel
http://flixel.org/, and Flashpunk khttp://flashpunk.net/

On the flashpunk website there is a tutorial that walks you through setting up the FlashDevelop IDE. It looks very well written. Flixel may allow for more complex systems though.

I did come accross an intriguing website that has free software that takes the WYSIWYG approach to flash games called stencyl. It is geared towards non-coders.

http://www.stencyl.com/

A good website with resources for learning can be found here:

http://flashgamedojo.com

Happy coding

2727

Fun and Games / HTML5 compatability

« on: December 06, 2011, 02:58:04 PM »

I expect that there will be a percentage of users with browsers that cannot natively support it. IE7 is one of them. It appears that most mobile browsers are compliant. The Firefox browser that I use also supports it, however not all demos I tried worked properly. For example the SGDK scrolling demo was slow, although it did work.

At this point it appears that Flash is dominating.

2728

General Chat / Re: New Baby Chinchilla advice

« on: December 06, 2011, 10:35:27 AM »

I keep hearing about using fleece. What exactly is this stuff?

2729

Fun and Games / GameMaker

« on: December 06, 2011, 10:30:43 AM »

I would like to mention GameMaker and SGDK.
GameMaker costs about 100 USD and provides a very nice graphical interface. It can make some cool looking web games. I've never used it but the demos looks good.
http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/windows

SGDK can make games using HTML 5. It is free, but not near as polished and geared towards making platform games. (But it can be used for other types of games.)
They recently began developing an HTML5 export feature. It appears it would require additional coding to make the output work.
I've helped the developers test this one and it a solid IDE for standalone games for OpenGL compliant systems.
http://sgdk2.sourceforge.net/

Blender can be used to make games, but not online games. It is remarkably versatile and its game engine does not require hard coding, but a little knowledge of python can go a long way.

2730

Fun and Games / Re: I need testers for a new chinchilla game

« on: December 06, 2011, 10:15:00 AM »

This is a list of open source programming tools for ActionScript.
I'm sure there are others out there as well. The most important part of this toolset is documentation and learning the language which can be done online. There are some books available as well.

FlashDevelop is a text based IDE for coding Actionscript
It should download and install the API and compiler in its installer.
http://www.flashdevelop.org/wikidocs/index.php?title=Main_Page

SWFTools.org provides command line tools to perform various tasks and useful conversions.
http://www.swftools.org/

SVG2SWF provides a way to convert SVG (vector graphics) to SWF.
This allows you to create the graphical layout using an SVG grahpic
s editor.
http://svg2swf.sourceforge.net/

INKSCAPE - my favorite SVG and vector graphics editor (open source)
http://inkscape.org/

Inkscape also utilizes bitmap images which can be manipulated by this editor.
http://www.gimp.org

Actionscript 3.0 language reference can be found here:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/index.html