It's July 4th, which means that for our American members, it's Independence Day. Happy Fourth to all of you. The summer is now in full swing, and we hope you've been taking advantage of your newly-freed time (if you have any) to get some programming and hardware hacking in. Many of our members posted their summer goals; we hope they and the rest of you are making good progress on summer goals. Our staff here at Cemetech has been keeping busy with calculator and computer programming, work and internships, and even the occasional bit of relaxation.

One of the things we've worked hard on is to bring you our best programming contest yet. Cemetech Contest #10: Physics for the first time offers a whopping 4 brand new calculators that you can win. The focus is on educational programs that will help showcase the educational value to learning programming on TI calculators, something we hold dear at Cemetech. We already have close to 15 enthusiastic contestants. If you haven't yet posted about your entry, we encourage you to do so immediately. If you haven't decided to enter yet, consider it! And if you're already working on your entry, keep in mind that you have under five weeks to program, so get cracking! A special thanks to our partners at ticalc.org for posting news about the contest.

Although it's summer, which historically brings a lull to the community, several interesting projects are underway that we wish to highlight:

• On the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition front, two coders have been exploring hybrid BASIC libraries. Patrick "tr1p1ea" Prendergast has been exploring possible sprite and tilemap functions for a TI-84+CSE xLIB, while yours truly has nearly completed a TI-84+CSE Celtic 2 version including a powerful sprite routine.
  
• Newcomer assemblybandit created an App called IViewer to make it easier to view images on the TI-84+CSE; you can discuss ithere.
  
• Cemetech administrator Daniel "tifreak8x" Thorneycroft is keeping up his streak of educational TI-84+CSE programs with Presidential Database CSE, a program to teach you US presidents.
  
• Many of Cemetech's assembly experts have undertaken an initiative to bring Learn TI-83 Plus Assembly in 28 Days up to date, adding more sample code, and fixing long-standing errors in the otherwise admirable tutorial.
  
• Prizm programmer Balping is writing a new Chess game for the Casio Prizm. He is starting with a 2-human-player version, but hopes to eventually implement an AI.
  
• On the hardware front, member CalebHansberry is building an oaken case for his TI-83+, which we think displays beautiful craftsmanship. We previously posted about his work creating a wooden model of a TI-83+.
  
• Cemetech administrator Christopher "Kerm Martian" Mitchell (yours truly) is writing Python code to convert cities to 1:1 scale Minecraft worlds, with the help of an existing project called TopoMC. You can view the progress log here.

There are many other exciting projects going on, so be sure to read the new posts and topics daily, and don't forget to post topics about your own active or completed projects in our Your Projects subforum.

Happy July 4th to you, too! Besides projects that are underway (Redintegrate!), how about any fireworks that might have been shot off?

I came back from fireworks from Six Flags a bit more than an hour ago. Sadly, my day to work on COLLADA model loading... didn't go anywhere. But tomorrow is Friday, which means more time to work on getting it done!

Correction, sadly: it is an 82, not an 83+.

Interestingly, our fourth was entirely devoid of fireworks - due to the massive fires we've had lately, all form of fireworks are banned! Even Pop-Its!

Even though I live in Illinois, where fireworks are illegal, we had a sky filled with fireworks and mortars all bought from Indiana. My contest entry has been moving along at a brisk pace. My current goal is to finish it before I go to Puerto Rico.

Glad to hear that you're making good progress on your entry, ordelore. Funnily enough, another friend of mine mentioned that people from Illinois get fireworks from Indiana, if I recall correctly. Or maybe it was Wyoming. Caleb: ah, my mistake; I thought you had gotten a TI-83+ and fixed its LCD. AHelper, you should make some nice screenshots of RedIntegrate so I can post news about it.

Remember that you can play with my Java based fireworks simulator from last year, if you're still in the holiday spirit.

Oh yes, you mentioned that to me in response to my own fireworks simulator that I wrote for the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition. You can grab it from the Cemetech archives if you so desire.