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Web-based port of Laurie Spiegel's _Music Mouse_. Instant composition; just wonderful to fiddle with. Suddenly thinking about interfaces for this.
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Using a Raspberry Pi to emulate the memory of a NES cartridge and then outputting that data through the original NES. The making-of is good too.
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Impressive, fun, immediate.
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A good list of ways to protect any MCU circuit – not just an Arduino.
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Good crunchy post on the design of the axe-recall feature in God Of War (2018); particularly interesting on how it evolved, how players perceived variance in its implementation, and the subtleties of its sound and rumble implementation. And yes, there's screenshake. It's one of the simpler functions to grok in the game, but one of its best mechanics, I think. Looking forward to more posts.
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Beautiful. Poppy Ackroyd soundtrack, too.
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Yeah, that. See also 'drawing is thinking' – drawing exposes the paragraphs I left out of paragraphs I wrote. I've been writing documentation recently and boy, that properly forces you to think about how to describe the thing you're doing.
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Janelle Shane – with some effort – trains neural networks to make knitting patterns. Then knitters from Ravelry make them. I love this: weird AI being taken at face value by people for art's sake.
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Quite like the look of Stimulus for really simple interactions without too much cruft.
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Really rather impressive port of Prince of Persia to… the BBC Micro. From the original Apple II source code which is, of course, also a 6502 chip – although not quite the same. The palette may be rough and ready, but the sound and animation is spot on. I'd dread playing this with the original micro keyboard, though.
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"You are a traffic engineer. Draw freeway interchanges. Optimize for efficency and avoid traffic jams." Lovely.
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Useful, this stuff is not nearly as easy as it should be in ES.
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Great interview with Meng Qi, with lots of lovely stuff on being both a musician and an instrument bulider. I need to return to this.
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This feels… familiar. Two things resonated a lot, though: the description of Hymns Ancient and Modern as a tradition to come from, and especially the description of 'cramming for A-levels' – my version of that was a combination of Fopp and Parrot Records at university, and the local libraries' CD sections during my teenage years.
He's a better musician then me, though, clearly.
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Node.js/CoffeeScript powered Rack server. Lovely idea, simple configuration; shame it completely takes over port 80. Some of us write applications in things other than Ruby from time to time. Thinking about the best way of hooking it all together.
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S3-backed, Mac-specific backup tool. Looks nice, and well-thought-through.
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"MockSMTP is a native Mac application that embeds its own SMTP server. It also features an e-mail client browser, enabling instant viewing of both raw content and HTML rendering, so you can see how your mail looks when delivered." What an excellent idea.
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"Use and create Delicious bookmarks from the Safari web browser" – with a single keyboard shortcut. My main reason for sticking with Firefox was its Delicious integration, but if this is any cop, I think I'm save from terrible memory leaks for the future.
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"I tend to see them as having much more in common with the approach of an architect or landscape designer in terms of shaping and creating flows, confluences and possibilities for enjoyment… As a result I really do think that critical appreciation and commentary from the world of architecture and design could be illuminating and progressive." Jones on the lack of perception – outside games criticism – of games as design objects (rather than media objects). It is excellent; I agree with it all.
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Card-based dungeon-crawling game. Basically: card-driven roguelike. Should print it out and take a squint sometime.
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"Taps is a temporary web service you run on a server that has access to the database you want to export. You can then run the client to connect to that service and pull data out of it in chunks. It works through firewalls, doesn’t require a direct ssh connection, and – best of all – it’s database independent. So you can export from a MySQL database and import to PostgreSQL, or vice versa."
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Vast, detailed CHUD article on an older treatment Cameron wrote for Avatar, which does sound more interesting than the version we got; sadly, it also sounds very sprawling – there's even more world-building going on. Still, some elements cut from it – notably, Hegner – seem like a real shame to have lost.
One thing I usually forget to do when I backup a computer is back up my MySQL databases. Partly, because they’re not stored in my Library (I don’t think); partly because I forget how many I have. mysqldump only backs up one database at a time, unfortunately. What would be great is something that dumps all of the databases in the system.
Anyhow, whilst on hold to my ISP this morning, I decided to solve this problem once and for all.
The end result is a pair of Ruby scripts which you can get from github.
The first will iterate over every db on your system (when run with an appropriate username and password) and spit out a .sql file with a filename corresponding to that database. The second look at a folder of .sql files named similarly, and for each one, drop a databases with that name, re-create it, and restore from the .sql file.
I’m sure I could do it just fine in a bash script, but it made sense to use the tool that comes most quickly to my hands, and that means Ruby. Once you’ve got Ruby installed, the rest is easy. Clone them, patch them, fix them; they’re basic, as maintenance goes, but handy.
Here we go…
11 December 2005
So after a few hours of backing stuff up to the external HD, I’m ready to go. No, really, I am. I’m going to take a whole-disk image as further precaution (in case I forgot anything), but other than that, I think I’m ready to go.
I’m going to reformat the disk and give this computer a nice clean start. With any luck, all my iPhoto and iTunes libraries can be restored in a flash, and then I can go about the boring process of patching the computer and reinstalling applications. My mail database seems up-to-date, even if the program itself is stuffed.
Erk. Nerves. Here we go…
Update: slowly, we’re getting somewhere. Just recovering Mail now…