My garden is starting to pay off…
Nov 162011
Nov 102011
I don’t usually keep a lot of files around. When I get a new computer I don’t tend to copy all my documents across – anything I haven’t looked at for a couple of months is probably not worth the fraction of a millimetre it takes up on the platter. On the other hand, some things I can never bring myself to delete. Here is something I rediscovered the other day:
This is one of the first MODs I wrote back on the Amiga. I never had a sampler or a very large collection of instruments, but I loved mucking around with MED trying to get a pleasant sound out of the 4 channel 8-bit sound. It is often said that there is a lot of crossover between programming and music, and the soundtracker clones of the 90s made that explicit which is possibly why I enjoyed it so much. Now days I can fire up GarageBand any time I want with any number of sampled instruments. I could say that I regret not having the time to produce music as an adult but the truth is that the inspiration isn’t there any more – my interests have moved in other directions.
Although none of my MODs ever sounded anything like as good as the music from the games and demos of the time, I am still pretty pleased with this one. It must date from form 6 (I was 16) which makes it vintage 1991. Listen to the sound of 20 years ago…
Oct 262011
I have lived in Auckland for 14 years and never been further north than Waitangi. A trip north was long overdue.
This is the view from Opononi, looking across the mouth of the Hokianga Harbour towards the giant dunes. For $25 you can catch a water taxi to the other side where you can get dropped off with a board perfect for sliding down the steep banks. It sounds painful, but the sand is very soft and you can easily control your speed if not direction.
On a whim, we went to a slightly out-of-the-way shop called Labyrinth Woodworks & Maze (that isn’t a link, it’s a time corridor back to 1996) which turned out to be quite a find. It is a small building filled with the most amazing collection of puzzles and brainteasers I have ever seen, curated by a very passionate puzzle-lover who was only too keen to demonstrate his wares.
I have wanted a Japanese Puzzle Box ever since I saw one in a book when I was a child. Now I have one – it takes 10 cunningly concealed steps to open. If I ever go back to Labyrinth Woodworks I will buy the deluxe 21 step box.
Down the road a little way is Waipoua Kauri Forest, home to some very large trees including Tãne Mahuta, which is very, very large indeed.
This is a terrible photo-montage I stitched together using Hugin, it in no way conveys just how big this tree is. I kept expecting a bunch of blue-skinned Navi to show up to defend it.
Sunday night was spent in Doubtless Bay, which was also very nice but not quite as wild and interesting as the west coast. We did take the time to visit Cable Bay, a beautiful beach with pink sand. It is supposed to be packed in Summer, we found it almost deserted (which suited us just fine.)
Oct 212011
I don’t usually pay much attention to the big NZ political blogs. At best, the usual suspects are occasionally insightful, but more often they suffer from varying degrees of simple minded egotism and/or outright vileness. However, like the million monkeys writing Shakespeare that they as a group resemble, every so often someone hits one out of the park:
It’s hard work at the best of times for political parties to attract good candidates. But it’s doubly so for the two main parties, because all the smaller parties are so quick to secure the urine-drinking bank-robbing identity-thieves, leaving National and Labour only the boring and sensible candidates to choose from.
Apart from the woman-bothering expense-rorting ones, those who end up in Parliament for the Nats or Labour often lack colour, but that’s probably because they’re not drinking their own piss…
The rest of it is well worth reading as well.
This election is going to be like the Rugby World Cup – pretty much a foregone conclusion but the also-rans will provide much entertainment.
Oct 102011
House of Leaves By Mark Z. Danielewski
A young man named Johnny comes into possession of a large cache of papers written (or dictated) by a elderly, blind and recently deceased man. The papers make up a nearly complete book, and Johnny devotes his live to putting it all in order. The book the old man was writing is an analysis of a film, The Navidson Record, a documentary about the strange goings on in a family home that is much, much bigger on the inside than its exterior walls can possibly encompass.
Most of the text of House of Leaves is from the old man describing the film (which, being blind, he has never seen) and adding his ridiculously footnoted academic criticism over the top. Despite being fascinated, Johnny, as self appointed editor, feels free to add his own rather more sarcastic and down-to-earth commentary on the plot, as well as long passages documenting events in his own life. Compiling the old man’s notes is taking a toil on Johnny’s mental state, and his additions get more disjointed and alarming.
House of Leaves is a hard book to pin down. The story within a story that The Navidson Record supposedly tells is a fairly standard horror tale of a spooky house, but it is filtered through at least 3 unreliable narrators before we find out anything. Johnny points out that many of the old man’s references are completely made up, and the film possibly never existed. But Johnny himself admits to the reader that he is an expert liar and occasionally adjusts the text. The appendix is filled with “supporting documents” that obscure things every further.
The format of the book itself is worked into the story. Like the house, the interior of the book is slightly too large for the cover. During the more weird passages the flow of text breaks up as paragraphs flow at weird angles or jump across pages at speed. Parts of the text are struck out (Johnny explains that the old man deliberately blotted out some pages with ink) leaving us to guess at the contents.
Parts of the book are incredibly funny, excellently parodying dry academic criticism. The plot of The Navidson Record itself is suitably creepy. Johnny’s tale of woe is a very dated I-take-drugs-and-fuck-a-lot-of-strippers-but-I-really-don’t-enjoy-it first-person narrative that just screams 90s fiction, but the fact that he is probably lying to the reader about much of it makes it a little more interesting. If nothing else, House of Leaves adds a little mystery into what can be a very obvious genre.
Recommended, I think
Oct 092011
Marooned In Realtime By Vernor Vinge
Sometime in the near future humanity invents the “bobble”, a device that generates a perfect stasis field, time does not pass inside at all. Totally impervious, Bobbies can be used as weapons, shielding, long-term storage, or as a one-way time machine into the future. Far into the future in an unpopulated Earth, a small collection of people who (for various reasons) have bobbled for immense amounts of time decide to collectively bobble again for 50 million years.
But one person is left behind, forcibly unable to bobble, effectively murdered as she lives out her natural life while every other living human is in stasis. 50 million years later, the others immediately realise that they have a murderer in their midst. Can old-school detective Wil Brierson crack the case?
Marooned in Realtime attempts that most tricky of feats – the hard science fiction murder mystery, and it comes pretty close to succeeding. The rules of the game (how the bobbles work, the various motivations and personal histories of the suspects, etc) are well laid out and the book never feels dull, almost an action thriller rather than a detective story.
I completely missed the clues that pointed to the murder, the solution hinges on a rather subtle point. But by that stage it didn’t matter because the story has widened in unexpected ways as the full implications of what the characters have discovered about the world and each other becomes clearer. Mystery, action, spaceships, aquatic monkeys, evolved dogs, what more do you people want?
Highly recommended if you like this sort of thing.
Sep 292011
I have been doing this by hand for my entire life – now I feel like an idiot.
How to Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds from SAVEUR.com on Vimeo.
Sep 292011
They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but I have always thought that you can judge a drink by its bottle. The fancier the bottle the more wretched the drink seems to be a good rule to live by.
I don’t know anything about brandy and it might be fantastic, but I am going to avoid this one:
(sorry about the picture, it is not actually that colour)
Sep 272011
Blog writers want feedback. For ages now I have been running a plugin on this blog that allows readers to quickly post things I have written to Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc in the hope that some of my wittier and more insightful musings might be widely distributed. The icons were there for years and, as far as I can tell, the icons were clicked exactly none times. None.
So I have removed that plugin and am trying something else.
Google+ is Google’s attempt at social media (previously) and I am liking a lot of what they are doing. It is sort of like a mixture of Twitter and Facebook, you can follow people without them reciprocating and anything you post can be shared with only a subset of people. +1 is Google’s equivalent of Facebook’s Like button.
If you are logged into G+ you can click on the +1 button to show you approve of the content and want to see more like it. You can go back through the archives and +1 as many articles as you want – go ahead, I’ll wait.
In addition, I have added my Google Plus feed to the sidebar on the right. I am not sure if I will keep this, I post very few updates, but we will see. I quite like having my long form blog posts and my short for G+ updates visible in one place.
Sep 262011
Jeff Minter, with his alter-ego/software company, Llamasoft, has been creating ungulate related games for as long as I can remember. On the Amiga games like Llamatron and Attack of the Mutant Camels were ridiculously over the top arcade perfection, with retro (even then) graphics, lofi sound, and pixel perfect controls. GoatUp is a fine addition to Minter’s metaphorical stable (as opposed to the real stable he probably owns.)
In GoatUp, you control an incredibly nimble and fertile nanny goat who must jump from platform to platform to climb an impossibly tall tower into the sky, picking up bonus items and powerups along the way. Every so often you will meet a billy goat, kissing billy goats gives you more points and also causes you to get pregnant. After a while you instantaneously give birth to a kid that follows you around, if you survive long enough you can get a long chain of offspring trailing behind you. This is useful for defeating enemies, but disturbing if you stop to think about it. Luckily, there is no time to think – you must always be climbing and the game is hard, hard, hard.
The old games lived by their control schemes and GoatUp provides several. The only one that really works well is moving via tilting left or right, and jumping with a touch. You can tell that some thought has been put into the controls, and they work much better than the tilt controls in other games. Speaking of old games, GoatUp’s graphics are deliberately designed to look like various games from the 80′s, some pretty obscure. Part of the fun is trying to remember the particular game that is being invoked.
Recommended if you like this sort of thing.
Sep 072011
Forget the Air Swimmers of the last post, now I want one of these:
Aug 152011
I have to make a choice sometime soon – do I get an iPhone4 now or do I wait for the (unannounced, possibly mythical) iPhone5?
It turns out that what I really want is one of these:
Not sure I can get work to spring for one though.
Aug 122011
OK, it’s an ad but this short animation from Aardman is very well done.
The “making of” video is also worth a look, although it must be the first behind-the-scenes featurette that features more product placement than the main feature (a Nokia N8 you say? Tell me more…) but it shows the effort they went to.
Aug 092011
About fifteen hundred years ago I wrote WordApp, a Java applet tachistoscope that reads a text file from either the local filesystem or the Internet and displays it one word at a time. The idea is that it trains your brain to recognise words quickly, increasing your reading speed. I thought it was a little silly, but according to me web host’s logs WordUp still sees a bit of use even though I haven’t touched it for years.
I was hunting around for something to do with my Arduino while I waited for some other parts to arrive when I had the idea of making a physical tachistoscope that reads its data off an SD card and displays the text using an LCD display I have lying around.
The SD card contains the text to be shown. One of the potentiometers is used to vary the contrast on the LCD. The other is sampled by the CPU and converted into a delay to vary the speed at which the words appear.
Unfortunately the refresh rate of the LCD is very poor, so the text becomes almost impossible to read at even modest speeds. A better display might help, but I am not going to spend any more time and money on something so simple. Fortunately, the other parts I ordered arrived yesterday so I have other things to play with.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 | /* An Arduino implementation of a Tachistoscope. This uses both the LiquidCrystal and SD libraries (and repective devices). The words are read one at a time from a file on the SD card. A simple variable resistor is used to control the speed. In practice this does not work terribly well since the LCD display has a poor refresh rate. Pins: The LCD is connected via pins 2-8. Technically I could get away without the RW pin. The SD card reader is connected via pins 10-13 (the standard SPI pins) The variable resistor is connected via analog A0 Author: Andrew Stephens http://sandfly.net.nz/ */ #include <LiquidCrystal.h> #include <SD.h> LiquidCrystal lcd(8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2); File file; void setup() { lcd.begin( 16, 2 ); lcd.clear(); lcd.setCursor(0, 0); pinMode(10, OUTPUT); // required if I ever change the CS pin from 10 pinMode(A0, INPUT); SD.begin(10); file = SD.open("test.txt"); } // Skip over whitespace, positions the file position at the start of the next // word bool findNextWord( File& file ) { int r; while ((r = file.peek()) != -1 ) { if ( !isSpace(r) ) { return true; } file.read(); } return false; } // Reads a single word (anything up to the next whitespace character) into // the given buffer bool getNextWord( File& file, char* buffer, int bufferSize ) { int r; while ((r = file.read()) != -1 ) { if ( isSpace( r ) ) { *buffer = '\0'; return true; } if (bufferSize > 1 ) { *buffer = r; ++buffer; bufferSize--; } } *buffer = '\0'; return false; } // originally this function did more int readResistor() { return analogRead(A0); } void loop() { char buffer[17]; if (findNextWord( file ) ) { getNextWord( file, buffer, sizeof(buffer) ); lcd.clear(); lcd.print( buffer ); } else { lcd.clear(); lcd.print("--end--"); } int v = readResistor(); lcd.setCursor(0, 1); lcd.print( v ); delay(v); } |
Jul 292011
Regular followers of this website may have noticed that it has been offline for the best part of 24 hours. This was to get it moved from my hosting company’s legacy server to a more modern machine. I use OpenHost for hosting sandfly.net.nz, they perhaps are not the cheapest option (especially if you consider American bulk hosting) but on the plus side they actually rang me yesterday when they saw that I was lost in the maze of account options that their customer portal provides.
The upgrade went smoothly enough although next time I will remember to disable any WordPress plugins before doing the backup since some of them seem to not like being moved. Bouncing them back to active seemed to do the trick.
All this kerfuffle was just to upgrade WordPress to the latest point release. I think everything is working, although I have lost any WordPress comments made yesterday. Let me know if you see any (unintentional) weirdness.