I had been hanging on to these books in case I ever found myself wanting to do some Java programming. But as I’ve come to learn (mostly because of Python, but also through following the Perl 6 saga), languages change and evolve and so a couple books from nearly 20 years ago probably won’t be […]
Category Archives: programming
2019 In Programming
This was a VERY busy year for my coding. This year I had over 769 commits to GitHub; my previous best was 58 in 2014. The commits were very unevenly distributed. If you look at the graph of my commits, outside of a busy week in January and another in May, I didn’t really start […]
BBQ Thermostat Project: First Live Test
This is copied over from my Hackaday.io page. Today I was smoking a turkey so I figured it was a good time to do a live test of my project. There was good news and bad news. I think it’s illustrated quite well by the following graph: On the good news front: While I didn’t […]
Unity 2D Game 6: Tilevania
The sixth, and final, game of the Udemy class on Unity 2D was a tileset Metroid-Vania game which the instructors named Tilevania. I never played Metroid and maybe only played Castlevania once, but its legacy does persist in some newer games like Spelunky. This was the closest I’ve come to making a Mario clone. My […]
Unity 2D Game 5: Glitch Garden
The fifth video game I made in Unity was another clone of a game I spent a lot of time playing, this time as an adult – Plants vs Zombies. For comparison, here’s Plants vs Zombies: and here’s my finished Glitch Garden: We learned a lot of techniques and reinforced even more, but the biggest […]
Git gets interesting
This used to look pretty regular. Just two parallel lines with the devel branch connecting into the master branch here and there. But then I merged master into devel because I added issue templates on the github website directly into master. Things got….interesting…. Here’s the before (but a few weeks ago): Here’s what it looks […]
Unity 2D Game 4: Laser Defender
The fourth game we worked on was another game that I spent a lot of my childhood playing. We made a Galaxian/Galaga clone: My mom’s youngest brother had a Nintendo and lots of arcade ports. When I was young he lived in the condo above my grandmother’s condo and whenever we’d go visit her, I’d […]
Unity 2D Game 3: Block Destroyer
My journey through 2D game development using the Unity engine continued with our third project: a clone of Brick Breaker or Arkanoid. In case you’ve never seen it before, this is Arkanoid: It’s got a pretty important legacy, Breakout, the version that Atari created, was an important stepping stone for the two Steves of Apple […]
Discovering new git GUIs
When I wrote about checking out KDevelop, I mentioned that it was due to a blog post by the Kate developers about how to evolve Kate going forward. Last night I came across a new article in the same vein in which they looked at potential git GUIs to use from within Kate. In my […]
Learning how to make 2D Games in Unity
I’ve been playing video games since I was somewhere around 5 or 6 years old and got a Nintendo Entertainment System for my birthday from one of my aunts. I also inherited a Tandy computer from my dad when I was younger. We had a bunch of edutainment games – like this Sesame Street game […]
New Release (v1.9.3) of my Extra Life Donation Tracker Software
I’m getting really close to finally getting this program to where I wanted it to be 4 years ago. My most recent release adds in the Team info to the GUI (and the previous release, which I didn’t blog about added team info in general). I’m getting feature requests and bug reports and all those […]
BBQ Thermostat Project
I recently started an electronics hacking project to build a thermostat for my Weber Smokey Mountain. You can find details at Hackaday.io, but if you’ve been here long enough you know that I don’t trust other sites to continue to exist. (It’s why I copy my book reviews over from Good Reads). As of right […]
My First Pull Request to a project I don’t own!
When MakeMKV added a new requirement for ccextractor, allowing it to grab subtitles that are encoded on the DVD or Blueray as Closed Captioning instead of subtitles, there wasn’t a package available for Fedora. (There is now, but at the time where wasn’t) So I wanted to make an RPM that I could host on […]
Addendum to my KDevelop Post
A couple days ago, I wrote about giving KDevelop another look and posted it to reddit’s r/kde. In my post, I’d said it was annoying to have to configure the color schemas per file. Someone commented on the subreddit that if you use the View->Schema menus it’s per file while if you go into Settings->KDevelop […]
Moving to KDevelop for my larger Python Projects
When I first started programming it was just at the prompt of my Tandy computer. Then it was in the QBasic text editor on the IBM computers at school. But when I started programming again with “real” languages, I ended up going with Emacs. Although I was first annoyed at the way commands like save […]