I just got charged 0.30£ by Niantic, the publisher of Pokemon Go, to verify my age during the user registration process. The payment was initiated from the iOS app and done through a web form. No IAP.
Now I can only hope Niantic doesn’t charge me for something my kids do in the game.
This is exactly the kind of thing I fully expect Apple to protect me from.
“But Tom, what does this have to do with a game about stopping an alien invasion?”
Keeping track of installed applications on multiple computers is a hassle.
Homebrew had been great for installing command line tools and libraries on macOS. Using Chocolatey on my Windows machine inspired me to take things a step further and try the “cask” subcommand for installing desktop Mac apps as well.
brew cask install firefox blender handbrake vlc
Works great. It’s now really easy to keep all the apps updated. Setup on a new computer is very quick. I also found that Tiny Player for Mac already had an entry in Homebrew:
brew cask install tiny-player
Thanks to whoever added it.
After many years of using Macs exclusively, I decided to build a PC.
I wanted to get a Windows machine for development purposes, play a few games and have some fun with the build.
The goal was to get a computer that would last a few years while keeping the budget reasonable. I started with a (hopefuly) future-proof motherboard and a solid CPU. Got a used GPU and reused a few older parts. Here’s what I ended up with:
| CPU | Ryzen 5 3600 |
|---|---|
| MOTHERBOARD | ASUS PRIME B550M-A |
| RAM | 32GB DDR4 3200 |
| GPU | Sapphire RX 570 Nitro+ OC 8GB |
| STORAGE | Kingston M.2 SSD 1TB |
| COOLING | ARCTIC Freezer 34 eSports DUO + 3× ARCTIC P12 PWM 120mm |
| PSU | SilentiumPC Vero M2 Bronze 600W |
| CHASSIS | SilentiumPC Signum SG1 TG |
| OS | Windows 10 Professional |
There were no problems with the hardware, everything worked the first time. Phew!
The machine wasn’t very loud but I could hear the CPU fan constantly spinning up and down, reacting to small temperature changes. Very annoying. I adjusted the fan curves directly in BIOS. The fans now stay at the lowest possible speed until the temperature gets a bit higher. Turns out it never does! Even under sustained load the CPU only reaches about 45℃.
After installing Windows I used Chocolatey to install most 3rd party software and Steam to get some games.
Next step is adding another drive and installing Ubuntu on it. I’m not very much into Linux but Devastro 2 is already using SDL so I figured I might as well give it a try.
A Hackintosh is also an option but it’s low priority because I’m going to keep using my iMac for work anyway. It is a bit slower but also dead silent, and the 5K screen is hard to beat.
I started playing around with MagicaVoxel a while ago. I’m not going to use it for Devastro 2 but I can imagine some city simulation game using graphics made this way: tiny & cute with great lighting. It constrains things in a way I would be happy to work with.
As part of my Blender practice session, I tried to re-create the icon of Sketch.
Here’s the original:
I found two different shapes that could match this image in an orthographic view.
One:
Two:
And a third shape with a flat top if we use a perspective camera and level it vertically with the mid section of the object:
To match the lighting I used a big front light and two emissive surfaces at the bottom and top. I skipped the highlighted edges to save time.
Final render:
And a little spinning GIF as a bonus:
Tiny Loader version 1.2.3 is out now. Tiny Loader is the companion Mac app for Tiny Player. The app is now notarized with Apple. This makes it easier to launch the first time after downloading.
Here is a list of development tools I’m using at the moment.
Hardware
Software
Libraries
Notes
Previous installments
Number of commits is not a good metric for productivity, project health or anything else really. But let’s pretend! It may be OK as a simple activity indicator…
Here’s a Python script I made that graphs daily commit counts on a git repository by year.
Download the script here. Requires Python 3 and PIL/Pillow.
Usage:
pip3 install pillow python3 activity.py /path/to/imgui imgui
Output:
imgui-2014.png imgui-2015.png imgui-2016.png imgui-2017.png imgui-2018.png imgui-2019.png
Example output for imgui:
