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.
Panda Puzzle from 1975
I was reading this article from Brickset about a scanned Bricks and Pieces No. 2 from Spring '75. It was an interesting read and a fun look into LEGO's past. I especially liked the "What is it?" article, a puzzle of instructions laid out in layers. I was pretty sure I knew what it was, but I just had to give it a go in LDD to verify. I was right, it was a Panda! Not content with just a simple screenshot, I exported it into POV-Ray. I think it came out very nicely.
Quoting Quotes
Last night I happened to notice that my last blog post didn’t look quite right when viewed in an RSS reader. Come to find out, it appears that the code that converts the UBBC tags wasn’t undoing a quote conversion earlier in the code. This caused the regular expression that tries to show bare URLs as real URLs to convert parts of my image tag into an anchor tag. Not quite what it is supposed to do. It took me hours of futzing with the code to unravel the mess. Fortunately, it was an easy fix. Use the same darn subroutine that the articles use. Duh. One freaking line of code to change.
Major ZX81 Updates
A few things have changed over the list eight years. As I wind down the use of my ZX81 site, incorporating it my main one, much of below is invalid. That doesn’t mean that changes weren’t important at the time. Ideas come and go, and it is good to remember where we came from. Below is a recap of what was.
New ZX81 Programs Section
I’ve added a new ZX81 Programs section that lists all of my ZX81 programs available so far. The list includes the name, a brief synopsis, and options to list or run the program as available. I still need to add a more complete description option. The code is there, I just haven't decided how I want to deal with the pictures. But hey, at least you can run every program I had available before, plus a few new ones.
January’s Program: Water Bug II
I did it! After a lot of recording, cleaning, and tweaking I was finally able to get Water Bug II loaded! Hit the link, wait for it to load, then hit enter to give it a whirl. Then use the 5, 6, 7, and 8 keys to move (left, down, up, right) just as they are on the ZX81 keyboard.
Slow Going
I really meant to have a number of my programs converted this month. I found a tape player and have been trying to load my ZX81 programs off the original tapes; however, I keep running into a problems.
Polar Bears
A more interesting scene using the Polar Bear from January 2011 Monthly Mini Build.
Polar Bear
![olar Bear by Steven Reid[/url], on Flickr](https://live.staticflickr.com/5006/5341984354_603c3391f0_n.jpg)
Polar Bear is the January Mini Build. This is celebrated monthly at LEGO(R) Stores. First new render for 2011. Rendered with POV-Ray 3.7 R2.
Celebrating Thirty Years of ZX81
This years marks the 30th anniversary of the Sinclair ZX81 home computer. To celebrate, over the next year I plan on updating my ZX81 site with site updates and monthly spotlights.
Celebrating Thirty Years of ZX81
This year will mark the 30th anniversary of the ZX81's debut. Hard to believe this little wonder is turning thirty and how much the world has changed. My goal is to celebrate the occasion by continuing to update the site with new content. I’d like to do a monthly showcase of programs as well.
A Little Change of Color
I finally got around to updating the image and colors for my ZX81 site. I'm using a more muted pallet originated from the pages of the book in the logo. I've decided to keep the same basic layout of the parent site.
8029 Mini Snow Speeder
Thought this unreleased LEGO mini snow speeder would be fun to render. Not sure why this wan’t released. It was probably due to the cockpit. Oddly, LEGO released the instructions, apparently in 2008.
Topography Troubles
I recently upgraded to Chrome 8 and ran into a minor problem. The text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; CSS option now causes hyphenate.js to display the hyphens in some words all the time. This, obviously, isn’t the desired effect I was going for. Because of this I turned off the optimizeLegibility option. I haven’t found any bugs or mention of this on the various sites yet. I did some more testing and found that there is subtle kerning going on, but little in the form of ligatures and other font improvements. So, for now, I’ll leave this option in my tool box to come back to at a later date.
Pardon the Dust and Debris
I’m in the process of updating the old flat design of this site into a more dynamic one. The original site was designed in the nineties for use on GeoCities and its various requirements and stipulations. Now that GeoCities is dead and the content has been moved to better hosting, I’m taking the opportunity to migrate the site to WebAPP.
6803 Space Patrol
Ran across this 1983 Class Space set while perusing Peeron. It is a pretty simple model so it was nice quick project to build and render. Unfortunately, I didn’t have part 4360 (Black Minifig Accessory Camera with Side Sight) already. Fortunately, the piece had been modeled as part of the LGEO library so I used it. Some days I think I should just give up modeling my own.
Reliving Childhood: Macross
Much to my surprise, I finally figured out one of the other cartoons I used to watch when I was Italy. Along with Daitarn 3 I remembered watching another show with a ship that accidentally pulled a city with them. Sadly, searching for such a broad term was a bit harder than I thought.
Electronica and an X-Wing
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I have multiple hobbies. I tend to want to try new things, which often means I don’t stay focused. In the case below, I divided my time between two of my interests.
Fun with Fonts
I decided to play around a bit and try a different font for my site. My original goal was to use something with better kerning and ligatures, but most browsers don’t seem ready for that yet. I settled on using Trebuchet MS as my new site font. It has a bit more character than Verdana and better reflects the style I was looking for. It is a generally web safe font supported by most platforms.
Halloween LEGO Fun
Ran across these great seasonal models perusing Brickset. They are simple yet effective, really showing how LEGO models can shine with such few bricks. The Jack’o’lantern is just perfect and I love the use of the cheese slopes as teeth. I liked the yellow eyes of the bat. I didn’t bother modeling the ghost. It is a good model, but not enough to model.
Sea Swallow
I was having fun again with LDD and POV-Ray and thought this would make an interesting render after my first attempt. I also uploaded a slightly different version to LEGO’s gallery with different eyes stalks.
Waterfall v2 (Updated)
Okay, I went a bit overboard creating an updated version of my Waterfall with more accurate bricks and logo. I even randomly rotated the bricks to break up the monotony of the the logos. The first version with the LEGO logo was a bit too uniform.
Topography and Hyphenation
I’m a sucker for topography, something I really enjoyed in college when using LaTeX to get really cool looking printouts. A lot of that fun was lost with I started using applications like Word that do a pretty good job of kerning and hyphenating text without you having to do anything. Using (X)HTML I often just let the browser do what it does, even if it leaves a lot to be desired. This changed today when reading A List Apart’s wonderful article The Look That Says Book.
Waterfall
This is the second version of my simple waterfall experiment. I limited myself to a 4x4 plate and the bricks and colors available in LDD. I added a bit more foliage and color variation to the cliff.