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"Perhaps “saving handwriting” is less a matter of invoking blind nostalgia and more a process of examining the historical use of ordinary technologies as a way to understand contemporary ones." Fascinating and thoughtful article about the relationship of tools (the fountain pen), materials (ink), and skills (cursive script).
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"Sycorax is a Twitter client, written in Python, that choreographs the online behavior of fictional characters. Other tweet schedulers make your personal Twitter stream look like a clockwork robot is behind it, posting tweets at the optimal time for penetration into your social network. Syxorax lets fictional characters use Twitter the way real people do. Your characters can post at odd hours and talk to each other, taking their lines from a simple script you write, but without any ongoing work from you." Very nice.
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"Here is a memory-friendly function that should be able to split a big file in individual queries without needing to open the whole file at once:" Yep, that'll do.
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"Competitors should take a page from Apple's playbook here and be open about stuff that will give you a competitive advantage and shut the hell up about everything else. Open is not always better." If only because: you get a hell of a launch day. (But also because: you'll never promise things you can't deliver).
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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.
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Anne on New Zealand's Snapper card, and getting used to the rhythm of its RFID reader. I found the fact that the government will sell you a USB reader – so you can top up at home – fascinating.
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"I have to print my bed, so that I can lie in it." Lovely BruceS fiction; not just futurism, but hyperlocal futurism at that.
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"Welcome to Microdungeons.com. I'm still getting this thing ready, but here's the plan: starting in the first week of January, I'm going to post 3 new microdungeons a week." Dungeons drawn on 4" x 3" stock, three a week for a year. Yet another 365-style project I'm going to end up subscribing to.
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"convert man pages into PDF documents and save them to a specified directory; (batch) print or view PDF man pages from the command line". Which is, you know, clever.
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This comment (linked) on this Stack Overflow thread is the clearest explanation of this yet, and it made things very clear – and doable – for idiots like me.
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"Handcrafted wooden toys of recently extinct animals. I selected these four creatures for their beautiful shapes and patterns. Choosing an anthropomorphic approach, I designed them with simplified, humanistic shapes and statures. Once unfolded, the packaging becomes an information graphic about the animal inside. These toys are meant to incite wonder and interest in creatures that existed only a short while ago." Beautiful.
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IGF Finalists are announced. That's a not-half-bad list.
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"Players stand in front of a green screen while the game films them and creates a music video background while they sing. Their performance is then emailed to them or burnt onto a DVD players can take home." Awesome. Unfortunately, the project has been canned. Still, it's worth watching the slightly cringey videos of the developers playing it, because it's a nifty bit of code.
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"It all boils down to a Ruby script that runs on OS X only and uses OS X’s really awesome typography and subpixel antialiased font rendering. Why not tap into this to make those headline graphics? With Rubycocoa you can easily whip up a small app that draws some text, and save it into a PNG file." Um, blimey.
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Icebergs and Shorelines; I love the Icebergs series particularly. What a rich page for a gallery.
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"3. Take Notice: Be curious. Catch sight of the beautiful. Remark on the unusual. Notice the changing seasons. Savour the moment, whether you are on a train, eating lunch or talking to friends. Be aware of the world around you and what you are feeling. Reflecting on your experiences will help you appreciate what matters to you." All very good advice – and, frankly, what I knew already – but this one felt particularly appropriate, given Noticings.
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This is a pretty good guide – made sense, got me up and running fast, and nice and clearly written.
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"In a sense, a child, by definition, shrinks Scribblenauts’ scope: the game’s potential solutions are necessarily limited by vocabulary, so players with a smaller vocabulary have fewer options open to them. But, free of the dry, efficient logic of adulthood, a child’s imagination also opens the game up in ways beyond most adults’ reach." Simon makes a strong point about Scribblenauts.
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"Little command line REST interface that you can use in pipelines." Ooh. That looks nifty.
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"See why I say I can't play like a player?" Richard Bartle dives deep into Stranglethorn Vale to explain what he "sees" when he plays MMOs, and to try to explain why he can't play them like, say, I can. It's a nice reading – even if I'm not sure the zone works as well coming from the Horde perspective – and his insights are strong.
What’s Schulze Listening To?
20 February 2009
So we listen to music on speakers – not headphones – quite a bit in the studio. Or at least Jack does, because they’re in his batcave.
And sometimes, I’m not sure what’s playing from next door, but I know I like it – and it’d be good to know what it is. Fortunately, Jack mainly listens to last.fm radio (and even if it’s not radio, his iTunes would still be scrobbled).
So I wrote wotlisten.rb. You can see it (and get it) as a gist on github. It doesn’t use audio recognition, or the last.fm API, or RSS; it uses plain-old screen-scraping.
(Somewhere near the top of my list of coding tools is Hpricot, because it’s a lovely HTML parser that you can scrape with as fast as you can think. Or, at least, as fast as you can write selectors. That was the case here.)
So: you throw in a username, and wotlisten.rb tells you what they’re listening to. Or what they were last listening to. It doesn’t distinguish between the two – and why should it? This is Situated Software at its most useful: I assume you can hear the music that’s playing, and that you know the last.fm tag for the user playing it (and: until very recently, I assumed that person was Jack Schulze; this updated 2.0 release lets you pass in any username).
It’s unremarkable code in the extreme, but notable for the fact it took ten minutes to bang it out; it came out as fast as I could think it. I’m getting to the point where, especially with Hpricot and similar, this kind of tools is second-nature to write. It’s taken a long while to get there, though.
The script proved useful upon several occasions that day. More to the point, it paid for itself handsomely a few hours later, when we discovered that Schulze was playing Bonnie Tyler’s Holding Out For A Hero.
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"Red dot fever enforces a precision into your design that the rest must meet to feel coherent. There’s no room for the hereish, nowish, thenish and soonish. The ‘good enough’." Dingdingding. +5 points to Taylor, as usual. Place, not location.
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"TinkerKit is an Arduino-compatible physical computing prototyping toolkit aimed at design professionals. The interest in physical computing as an area in development within the creative industries has been increasing rapidly. In response to this Tinker.it! is developing the TinkerKit to introduce fast iterative physical computing methodologies to newcomers, and particularly design professionals." Standardised modules, standardised connectors, Arduino-compatible. I remember Massimo showing me his keyboard-emulating board ages ago. Nice to see Tinker productising the platform, too.
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"The buttons are designed to look very similar to basic HTML input buttons. But they can handle multiple interactions with one basic design. The buttons we’re using are imageless, and they’re created entirely using HTML and CSS, plus some JavaScript to manage the behavior." Dark, dark voodoo, but very impressive – and excellently explained by Doug Bowman. It's nice to see Doug blogging again.
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"If 2009 is going to see the emergence of high-quality browser-based games, then 2009 is going to be the year of Unity. It has: lots of powerful features; iPhone support; Wii publishing; a developing community; quality developers using it; and an upcoming upcoming PC version. In short, it is about to make a major splash. I feel compelled to jump in with it — the indie license is cheaper than the Flash IDE."
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"bash completion support for core Git." Ooh. This looks really, really nice.
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Fantastic, all of it.
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Sneeze is the latest minigame inside Routes to be released. It's a bit like Boomshine and Every Extend, except using the common cold as your weapon. Children are easy vectors, the elderly are slow but you get more points for infecting them. Lots of fun, and great splatter effects.
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"This story clearly illustrates the problem with ordering over the phone." Oh dear.
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"A set of rudimentary exercises intended to prepare students of rhetoric for the creation and performance of complete practice orations (gymnasmata or declamations). A crucial component of classical and renaissance rhetorical pedagogy. Many progymnasmata exercises correlate directly with the parts of a classical oration."
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"Our team of investigative journalists has compiled a database from four years' worth of company accounts to show how much the FTSE 100 companies make in pre-tax profits, and how much they pay in tax. We have published this data as a user-friendly interactive guide at guardian.co.uk/taxgap/data." But, as well as the user-friendly guide, there's also all the data. Bravo.
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"Unlike other games, L4D brings this entropy to the surface — there's a palpable feeling of dread throughout, as if the world is relentlessly and mercilessly trying to turn you into a red mist as fast as possible." Not convinced entirely, but this is a really important point: the best games expose their mechanics in plain sight. The systemic nature of the game – the entropic tension between survivor and zombie – is clearly critical to it, and there's no point where that's not made clear.
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"FreeAgent is an easy online accounting tool, perfectly suited for freelancers and small businesses." Lots of good support for UK-based business, especially when it comes to tax calculation.
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"Templates are simple ruby files containing DSL for adding plugins/gems/initializers etc. to your freshly created Rails project." That looks very handy.
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I've had this bug for ages. Basically: when you upgrade to Lightroom 2, keywords from Lightroom 1 aren't exported by default, making exporting to Flickr irritating, because you end up having to rekey some (but not all) keywords. This magic Lua script fixes everything.
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"During Condition 1 weather, winds gust at speeds of anywhere from 50 to 60 MPH and the wind chill hits anywhere between 75° F to 100° F below zero. Ouch. Not surprisingly, personnel are prohibited from leaving their buildings during these storms." Which gives them ample time to make videos like this.
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"Most usability experts will agree, Dr. Donald Norman’s book “The Design of Everyday Things” is required reading for any aspiring user experience or product designer. But it’s also an excellent resource for game creators – even if it’s less commonly found on studio bookshelves." NGMoco's blog, on POET, and what it means for game designers. Not rocket science, but really well explained to a non-specialist audience.