Back at the beginning of May, while my wife and I were getting ready for our upcoming trip around the United States, I picked up the following challenge: Build a Flappy Bird like game. No commercial software allowed. Three weeks of time. Bring it to as many platforms as possible. Sound and textures had to be made from scratch. After some research, I ended up choosing the following open source tools to achieve my goal: Libgdx: a great multiplatform game […]
If you’ve seen the pictures that I’ve been posting, you might be wondering about what kind of camera equipment I’ve been using. Today I’m proud to show you the powerful and expensive equipment that I’ve been using to take the shots of my travels. Canon PowerShot Digital ELPH SD750 – Around 50$ on eBay Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to spend hundreds of dollars for a good camera, but that is not part of the living small philosophy. Plus I love to push the limits […]
A few days ago I received the usual e-mail I get every year from a Google Recruiter. Apparently my name must be in one of their databases of possible candidates from the days when I was actively seeking a position there. They like to check on me every once in a while. Here’s what I wrote back: Hi <recruiter name>, thanks for getting back to me. I understand that this is a general position open to anybody who applies. I’m quite familiar […]
Single page websites are quite a hot trend in web design, with vertical scrolling being the most popular (probably because of its ease of implementation). In this article I will summarize a strategy to implement a horizontal scrolling single page website for the purpose of achieving a certain usability goal. Too many times people implement a scrolling strategy just because “it looks cool”, or just because it’s the hot new trend, forgetting that a good design should be functional and aimed […]
The hardest debug situation of my life just ended. Celebrate! I was trying to make a USB audio adapter to work on an embedded device running OpenWRT, but Linux wasn’t recognizing the USB device. The device turned on, but wasn’t getting mapped to /dev. So I think, ok, I probably forgot the modules. I Installed the modules. Still no luck. Maybe I chose the wrong modules? I started trying different permutations of modules (with each try taking half an hour […]
A few days ago I found that there is no way to print on Sublime Text 2. I was a little disappointed with this discovery, printing is such a basic feature that even Notepad offers. Why doesn’t Sublime Text 2 include it? Ok, besides saving trees, I hate to print stuff on paper myself, but sometimes you will be asked to print your code, either by a professor or someone else wanting to review your code. In the meanwhile I […]
I have been busy designing a new application for Glassomium. I’m not sure of how I’m going to call it, but it’s going to work as follow: A user places his/her phone on the table. The table recognizes the phone, confirms the identity of the person. A menu pops out, providing the user with the ability to pull out pictures, videos, contact information and a business card. The menu responds to movements of the phone on the table. Other users […]
I have finally settled on a name for the table top surface window manager that I’ve been working on. It’s Glassomium, a combination of the words glass and Chromium (the open source version of Google Chrome). I’m surprised that I was able to pull out a nice logo out of my rudimentary design skills too! https://www.glassomium.org
Lately there’s been some some excitement about the new Samsung SUR40 table which ships with the latest version of Microsoft Surface. Cool piece of hardware indeed, if I could afford it I would put it into my wish list. Another device, another SDK, another user experience. Am I the only person who is getting sick of porting applications for different platforms? For the past 5 years the “apps” world has taken over. We have created sophisticated games and applications for […]
I’ve always been fairly satisfied with Programmer’s Notepad and PSPad for most of my simple projects with Ruby, Python or HTML. A few days ago browsing my G+ feeds I found Sublime Text 2. At the time of writing it’s still in beta and you can try it out for free, but the author does ask you to pay a small license fee for prolonged and constant use. Here are a few features that I think make this editor worth […]