Today, like most Fall Sunday’s, is a great day to watch Football. It was fun watching San Fransisco play, but I often hack around on the computer during games. Fortunately there is plenty of time between commercials and time-outs to work on code.
Slide Show: What’s Old is New
I recently started using FlashControl for Chrome to control which sites use flash. I was getting annoyed with sites I ran across sucking up my computer’s CPU with flash programs. It is annoying how many sites use flash, my own included. I’d swapped out my original JavaScript slide show some time ago for Flickr’s slide show to show off my recent LEGO renderings. It always annoyed me that Flickr wrote the slide show using Flash and wouldn’t display properly on my iPod. I didn’t bother me much until FlashControl started blocking it. It was time to do something about it.
October’s Program: 1985
October’s program is one of my later games from 1985 which is aptly named 1985. It has decidedly simple game mechanics. Set in an alternative reality, the Earth is gone in this version of 1985. Humans are colonizing Earth II, but you need to clear the mountains for agriculture needs. Yes, your job is to hit any key to clear the land. Things couldn’t be easier, right?
September’s Program: Odyssey
This month I present another simple game, Odyssey. It doesn't include instructions, so here is a quick synopsis. An evil computer has trapped you in a space ship. To escape, you have to remove the memory boards in order to shut down the computer. Sounds familiar? Obviously this program was inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey. To play, use “Z” to move left and “.” to move right. Hit the “M” key to remove a memory card. Try to remove all of them in time to beat the computer.
Dish PPV Highlights Userbar
Sometime back I created an animated userbar that showed the current PPV movies on Dish. Sadly, soon afterwards Dish changed their support pages to require a login, breaking my script. Sure, I could log in to get the information, but that kind of defeats the purpose. I decided to try to at least get the UB working again, even if not the full movie list.
Space Lander 2011
I couldn’t leave well enough alone. All that analyzing and nitpicking of the original Space Lander made me wonder what it might be like if I had rewritten it. Almost 28 years later, here is the reborn version of Space Lander 2011.
August’s Program: Space Lander
Okay, this may not be the large program I promised, but I choose Space Lander for a different reason: it's horrible! Okay, maybe it isn’t that bad, but it definitely wasn’t one of better programs. This was from 1983, clearly one of my earlier attempts. Actually, it is kind of refreshing reminder how much better my programming has become. If this helps others learn, then by all means check out the listing.
Lighthouse
LEGO Store’s Lighthouse is the Monthly Mini Model Build for July ’11. I thought this would be a nice quick and dirty build, but I ran into a minor problem. I didn’t have the wheel element in the build modeled.
July’s Program: Sugar Cube Munch
Another simple program. Like many that I wrote for the ZX81, Sugar Cube Munch was small with a singular purpose. In this case, the goal is to eat all the cubes of sugar as quickly as possible. Once all the sugar is eaten, the game is over and the number of turns is revealed. You can give it a try by using the ZX81 arrow keys 5,6,7, and 8 to move around.
June’s Program: Beo One
I was searching through my stack of programs and decided to choose a short and sweet program for June. Beo One is definitely short, clocking at just 33 lines of code. Well 35 if you include the two new save and run lines I added. This is a simple talking head graphic program, which is the sweet part.
21009 Farnsworth House
I actually started 21009 Farnsworth House before my last model, but made the mistake of rendering it on my older desktop. It took over a week to render due to the glass and higher anti-alias requirements. I should try this on my daughter’s iMAC to see if how fast it renders with a newer computer.
Electric Shake
I wanted to create some more electronic music to listen to while at work. Electric Shake is a simple ambient beat to relax to. As always, uploaded to my ACIDplanet.com site for our enjoyment.
21008 Burj Khalifa
Ran across this model from a YouTube stop motion video and thought it’d be a fun build. You can see more pictures of the real model on BrickSet. I think my render came out well, even if I had to do a little color correction first.
May’s Program: BOLT
Can you believe it! First day of the month and I have a program uploaded! Okay, so it is another graphic one and isn't very exciting, or long. But hey, you can't blame me for not trying!
April’s Program: Sphere
I’ve been a bit busy this month so I choose a relatively short program in order to not miss my self imposed deadline. To that end, I present to you April’s belated graphic program: Sphere. This program will easily run on a 2K ZX81. With some trimming, if you are so inclined, it will probably run in the original 1K of RAM as well. Although I doubt too many people with a ZX81 have less than 16K of RAM. Take a look at the listing to get a feel for how small this program really is.
My Mac Wanna Be
I geeked out a bit today by loading Ubuntu onto an old laptop that I’d been having problems running Windows on. Seems the issue was a bad hard drive as it started to slam the drive head against the stop during the first installation. I pulled a drive from another broken laptop to fix that problem and started over.
March’s Program: Lock £ Fire
March’s program is Lock £ Fire. I wrote this graphic game in 1985, although I have to admit I don't remember it much. It is a bit hard to play as the keys aren’t very sensitive and the aliens jump around as you try to “lock” onto them. It doesn’t help that I used an odd keyboard layout which adds to the difficulty. The aliens are shooting at your shield and, if they get through, the game is over. Note that you don’t kill the aliens, but they may change their look. When you shoot them enough, the next level starts. Every 10 hits will clear some of your shields as well. Boy, I must have been in one of those moods when I wrote this.
Random Names
What do you do on a lazy Sunday? Write programs of course! I was reading Tim Hartnell’s book Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer and ran across a little gem for generating random names. It is short and sweet and easily converted into Perl.
Digging for Old Books
For some time now I’ve listed the ZX81 books I own on my original ZX81 web site, but I hadn’t put much effort in searching the web for them. Mainly this was because I already own them, but mostly because it never occurred to me to do so. I ran across an online copy of Sinclair ZX81 BASIC Programming which made me wonder what other books existed out there. Sadly, my search uncovered very little legitimate books. However, World of Spectrum did have a good number of the books and cover art available.
Bird
It's a rainy Saturday afternoon which provides a perfect opportunity to render LEGO's monthly mini build with POV-Ray. Bird by SafePit, on Flickr
MGC Shuttered
It came to light that another Xbox 360 site is shuttering their doors: MyGamerCard.net. I was using an MGC gamer card on this site for years due to oddities with the official one from Xbox. I dropped it recently as I didn’t feel it was as important to my site anymore, but I really enjoyed the stats MGC provided and I stilled used my MGC userbar as a forum signature. Sad times indeed.
Watching the Guild
I recently stumbled across The Guild. Yes, I'm a few years behind, but I got hooked and am now on Season 4. Although I don't play MMO's, I can still relate from my RPG roots. The production value is excellent and writing is spot on. Worth a watch, even if you aren't a gaming nerd.
Easier Way to Update Album Artwork
After my long rant against WMP, I found a more elegant solution to my problem in iTunes. The answer was right under my nose, well touch-pad, so to speak. All I had to do was use the “Clear Album Artwork” option on my collection which removes the iTunes artwork, but not the embedded artwork.
February’s Program: Golf
This month’s program is a simple game of Golf. Although not overly exciting, it does show off a few ZX81 BASIC features.
Is WMP Dead and Other Music Adventures
So I picked up an Android phone this weekend and said to myself, “Hey, can I get music on this thing?” The answer, obviously, is yes. But, if you remember, I use iTunes and iPods. I bravely went off looking for iTunes to Android sync utilities.