HN user
The game dev environment they’re talking about is MakeCode Arcade. I’m also a big fan of it.
There are a number of little handheld gadgets that you can use with MakeCode—scroll down on the homepage and there’s a section that shows them all:
I used to flip the link syntax all the time too. What finally helped me to remember it was noticing how I write links in plaintext emails.
In email, I naturally write things like "...on the example website (www.example.com)..."
Markdown keeps those () in the same place, and just adds the [] so you can delimit the visible text: "...on the [example website](www.example.com)..."
Suppose you want to use asterisks to mark footnotes.* As soon as you add a second footnote,** you're in trouble because your asterisks disappear and everything between them turns bold.
* I had to escape all of these asterisks.
** I see this happen fairly often to people's comments here.
UBC’s CPSC 110 uses Racket. It was built around How to Design Programs when I took it years ago, and at a glance I think it still is.
OpenToonz is cool. When I experimented with it, I found the Tahoma2D variant easier to get going, though.
This looks like it’s a story about some Israeli individuals being arrested for organ trafficking, and not at all a story about prisoners in Israel having their organs harvested.
TIS-100 is great. The “mesh of many tiny cores” architecture is cool, and also somewhat mind-bending — but the simplicity of the TIS design makes it just about possible to get your head around it.
After playing TIS a bit I found it really interesting to read about the Transputers and the Connection Machines, two similar real-world architectures.
David Ackley’s T2 Tile project[0] and Movable Feast Machine[1] look similar to me too, but they take the idea much further; the aim is to create an infinitely scalable and totally decentralized architecture. I only know a little about it, but it’s super cool stuff.
[0] https://t2tile.com/ [1] https://movablefeastmachine.org/
I’m always delighted when I visit HN and see one of your blog posts on the front page; they posts are great and they elicit some of the most interesting HN discussions. It took me a little while to realize that all these good posts were on the same blog, but once I did I had a lovely time browsing through the archive and reading more of the “deep cuts.”
The posts about the System/360 consoles come to mind, for example. I’m not sure how “popular” those were(?), but they’ve been very helpful as references for an art project I’m working on!
Good links, thank you!
What were the problems you encountered?
Obsidian creates a hidden directory in your “vault,” which contains plugin files, plus metadata about your settings, currently opened files, etc. If those settings don’t work equally well on both systems, that would be a hassle. Maybe try copying all the files from inside the directory (so that you don’t grab that hidden dir when you do) instead of grabbing the whole directory.
You might also want to look at the git-obsidian plugin. It takes a little setup, but seems to work well once it’s going.
You can downvote comments after accruing a certain amount of karma (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
Have you looked at the handheld keyboard-trackpad units that Rii makes? They don’t quite tick all your boxes, but I think it could still be a step in the right direction.
I am quite happy with my Rii I8X. The trackpad exceeded my expectations—I have no complaints. Having it centred makes a big difference, compared to the wobbly experience with the full-size units where it’s on the side.
My one complaint is that I can’t quite touch-type on it. But that’s probably OK if it’s for occasional use with an HTPC.
I think other brands make similar keyboard units with mini trackballs, but I don’t think I have seen any with trackpoints.
Cool work, thank you for sharing!
I learned about this phenomenon earlier today, from an artist who does a fantastic job teaching colour theory and colour science under the handle “color.nerd”
If this interests you, I highly recommend having a look: https://linktr.ee/color.nerd
Fantastic!
The comment you're replying to sent me looking for references, too. The closest I found was this article, which mentions an installation at RAF Truleigh Hill: https://www.shorehambysea.com/raf-truleigh-hill/
"This device was a continuous photographic process which filmed the radar screen, processed the film and projected the image onto a glass screen within a very few seconds."
(I wonder whether something like the Eidophor system that NASA used for mission control would have been another option? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidophor)
This comment on a related HN post seems to indicate they're still working: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36542606
Here's the example link from that comment: https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=16748657311...
Edit: and here's a random news article (post?) that has a working embedded tweet: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/30/23780357/new-footage-of-t...
Wow, it would be great to have software that supported this!
I’m an art teacher, and one of my favourite things to do with the kids is to create interactive digital comics. We use software like Krita to draw the pages, and then import them into Keynote to add hyperlinks between pages to turn them into choose-your-own-adventure style interactive fiction. And then we export to PDF…
Here's a ridiculous idea: photographic contact printing using a transparent LCD screen! A good result would probably require commercially made photo paper, but maybe this could work with a totally DIY anthotype process? And the LCD could be salvaged from an old computer monitor...
LCD contact prints: https://pierremuth.wordpress.com/2020/04/18/digital-picture-...
Anthotypes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthotype
Salvaged displays: https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Use-an-Overhead-Project...
Since the title is a bit vague: this is a demo of the Mergenthaler Diagrammer, a tool for (semi-)automating the production of technical drawings like circuit schematics.
From a quick look this is what I ascertained: you select a diagram symbol using a keyboard, use a viewing screen (a specialized projector) to position it on the ”drawing”, and then once it’s in position the projected image is exposed onto film.
I’m a technically-minded artist/art historian who works a lot with projection, and this is a treat! What a great find!
If you like this you might also like Fran Blanche’s YouTube video about how the big screens at Apollo Mission Control worked.
I’m waiting for a uConsole too. Here’s the latest shipping update: https://forum.clockworkpi.com/t/update-uconsole-shipping-rel...
Here’s their recommendation: “WHO suggests that non-sugar sweeteners not be used as a means of achieving weight control or reducing the risk of noncommunicable diseases” [0]
But this is a “conditional recommendation” that “should be considered in the context of WHO recommendations to reduce free sugars intake and other guidance promoting healthy diets, including WHO guidelines on carbohydrates, total fat, saturated and trans-fatty acids, polyunsaturated fatty acids, sodium and potassium.”
This is informed by their findings in ”Health effects of the use of non-sugar sweeteners: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” [1]
The executive summary for that review connects non-sugar substitutes with a low or very-low increase in the incidence of a number of health issues. However, if my quick-skim understanding is correct, the outlook is more positive when using the non-sugar substitutes is compared with… using sugar instead.
Here’s the first paragraph of the “Interpretation” section of that review/meta-analysis:
The results suggest that, in the short term, NSS use may lead to small reductions in adiposity without any significant impact on cardiometabolic risk. There is suggestion of negative health effects with long-term use, but the evidence is ultimately inconclusive.
(That’s on page 43. The preceding Evidence section and the remainder of the Interpretation lend nuance and expand on what those “negative effects” are.)
0: (PDF, 700 kb) https://apps.who.int/iris/rest/bitstreams/1501485/retrieve
1: (PDF, 30 mb) https://apps.who.int/iris/rest/bitstreams/1417548/retrieve
This looks great.
I have been hoping to make a Pico into a little 8-bit-micro style computer, but there’s lots to learn first!
I bought Pimoroni’s VGA demo board (https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pimoroni-pico-vga-demo-ba...), which provides a readymade version of the VGA implementation “Hardware Design with RP2040.”
There are a few emulators that I think should work with that:
- PICOVIC: https://github.com/jfoucher/picovic
- b-em: https://github.com/kilograham/b-em
- pico-zxspectrum: https://github.com/fruit-bat/pico-zxspectrum
I haven’t got any to run yet, but I haven’t tried very hard either.
(There’s also the Picomite, which looks great, but unfortunately uses a different VGA implementation: https://geoffg.net/picomite.html)
Replying to myself to add some context:
I teach “media arts” classes at an art school for young people. (Most of my classes are for 6-8 tear olds or 9-12 year olds.)
Some of my colleagues have used GDevelop in their classes, but the projects have been focused on re-skinning the examples that come bundled with GDevelop. That seems to be a big hit with our students!
Once they have done that, though, they naturally want to start modifying the actual gameplay. And while GDevelop makes that easier than it would be in other tools… it’s still too complex for a short class that isn’t explicitly focused on learning programming.
I haven’t tried Makecode Arcade in the classroom yet, but it’s similar to (and simpler than?) Scratch, which other colleagues have had success with.
So that’s the background for my recommendation of Arcade as the place to start, and GDevelop as the next step after you have outgrown Arcade.
I have had great fun making some simple games in GDevelop!
If you know a bit about programming and have an idea for a silly multimedia project, I highly recommend giving it a go.
The visual interface building tool makes it really easy to slap together a GUI or a game map, and the low-code programming interface makes adding simple logic (and sound effects!) pretty quick too.
It did take me a little while to wrap my head around the programming interface, though. There are many things that I like about it, now that I understand it, but I think there’s also some room for improvement.[0]
Working on my little experiments, I felt like I was often relying on some knowledge of other game programming tools to help me guess what functions to look for in GDevelop, and to build an intuition for how the system was working.
So I think GDevelop does a great job of making it easy to code something up quickly. But I don’t think that I would recommend it as a first step into programming, since I think that building up some familiarity with “how programming works” in a more conventional language will make stepping into GDevelop much easier.
If you’re interested interested in making simple games and want something one step more conventional, I highly recommend MakeCode Arcade. It’s a more limited tool than GDevelop—it’s just for simple arcade-style games—but it’s an absolute joy to use.
[0]: I love that GDevelop lets me browse through the API without leaving the app, for example… but somehow I still seem to spend a lot of time looking things up on the wiki. I would love for them to find a way to build even more of that documentation into the application itself!
This thread gives a brief explanation of the origin of the word “skeuomorph,” which I hadn’t read before despite having read plenty about skeuomorphic design. Cool!
Tanya McCullough’s replies to this thread are also great. I think that identifying the different ways that skeuomorphism is used, as she does, could lead to much more thoughtful and helpful conversations about skeuomorphism.
I made a quick survey of text-based display managers a couple days ago. Ly looks fantastic, but I went with tbsm, which had almost no dependencies and was super simple to get going.
As I understand it, this idea is quite similar to how the central scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, is understood in Sikhi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Granth_Sahib
This is excellent! I have also found Sim Daltonism very helpful for testing out designs. They have a mac app that can add a colourblindness-simulating filter over an area of the screen, and an iOS app that can do the same with a live feed from the camera: https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/
This reminds me of the podcast HowSound, a semi-instructional show about the craft of storytelling for podcasts and radio. I have enjoyed several of their episodes.
Thank you for the lecture series recommendation, I enjoyed those.