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:
384 karma · joined October 8, 2011
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:
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)..."
* I had to escape all of these asterisks.
** I see this happen fairly often to people's comments here.
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/
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!
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.
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.
If this interests you, I highly recommend having a look: https://linktr.ee/color.nerd
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)
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...
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…
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...
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.
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
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)
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.
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!
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.