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Spent some time today building a site for my Go utility packages. A feature I’ve decided to add is a Go template playground, where you can test out Go templates in the browser. Not something I’ll use everyday but I’ve occasionally wished for something like this before. Could be useful.
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Mainboard Mayhem
Project update on Mainboard Mayhem, my Chip’s Challenge fan game. I didn’t get it finished in time for the release deadline, which was last weekend. I blame work for that. We’re going through a bit of a crunch at the moment, and there was a need to work on the weekend.
The good news is that there wasn’t much left to do, and after a few more evenings, I’m please to say that it’s done. The game is finish, and ready for release.
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Project update for Mainboard Madness. Well, today’s the deadline for getting the thing code complete, and what a surprised, it’s not finished.
To be fair, it’s pretty close. All the levels are more or less done, and the beats of the in-game lore have been added. It all just needs tightening up a little. I spent today working on the end-game phase, which mainly involved coding up the credit sequence, and making sure I include credits for those involved in the original game (and who’s artwork I lifted).
The work remaining is to finish one or two game elements, adding a proper app icon, and finishing off the website. I’m wondering whether to add sound, but I feel bad enough taking the artwork from the original game, I rather not take the sound effects as well. That will mean the game will remain silent for the time being, but I can probably live with that for now.
I think we’re still on track for getting this finished by this time next week. Last dash to the finish line, then I can put this 9 year project to rest for a while.
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Working on my Chips Challenge “fan game” this morning. Added the notion of “lower thirds,” which will show text at the bottom of the play field. I’m hoping to use it for narrative or way-finding, like here in this hub level:
Also working on puzzle design. There’s about 19 or so “real” puzzles but I’m wondering if it’s worth adding a few tutorial ones for those that have never played the original Chip Challenge before. I’ve done about 5 such puzzles and I think I need to add maybe 3 or 4 more to cover everything I’m hoping to demonstrate. I wish I liked puzzle design more than I like tinkering on the engine.
Of course, the big question is why I’m working on this at all. There is, for lack of a better word, a vision for this, in terms of narrative and structure, but this project has been in development on and off for about 9 years or so, and I’m wondering if it’s time to just stop working on it altogether. I really am starting to get sick of it, in a way. And yet, this project has shown remarkable staying power over that time that I feel like if I don’t actually wrap it up, it’ll just continued to be worked on. It feels like the only way to end this project is to finish it, in one way or another.
So I’ll set myself a dead-line: something releasable in two weeks, and actually released a week after that. After that, no more! I’ll work on something else.
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Attempting to design an app icon for a Chips Challenge fan game I’m working on. Going for something that looks like the fireball sprite in the original game with a hint more realism and tinted in the colour blue. For reference, here’s the original fireball sprite:
And here’s my attempt:
I started with Stable Diffusion to get the base image:
Prompt: a blue plasma fireball shaped like a throwing star with four points on a white background, pixel art Then imported into Acorn to rotate it, colourise it, and distort it to look a bit closer to the original sprite.
Desaturating the original image got rid of the purple centre, then applying the Glowhoo and Hue Adjust effect recolourised it to the blue I was looking for (I’m not sure what the Glowhoo effect does, but it seems to adjust the colour based on the pixel intensity, so it was good enough for what I wanted). Finally, I added a Twirl Distortion effect to achieve the slight warp in the star.
And yeah, it’s not going to win any design awards, but it’s good enough for now.
Oh, and just for kicks, here was my first attempt of producing the sprite using Affinity Designer.
That’s definitely not going to win any design awards. 😂
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For reasons that are “totally” coincidental to the news of the day, I had a quick check to see how much the domain Y would cost:
Hmm, might be a bit much for a joke domain. 😃
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A really nice quality of life improvement you can make in Terminal.app: map Option-Backspace to
^W(Control-W, or\027) so that pressing it in the shell will delete one word to the left, like most other MacOS apps:
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I’ve been working on Micropub Checkins over the last week. It’s been a bit of a rush trying to get it into a usable state for an upcoming trip. And by “usable”, I mean a form that I can tolerate, and when it comes to projects like this, I can tolerate quite a lot. It can have a really dodgy UI (which this does) and miss some really important features that are annoying to work around; but if it works, and doesn’t loose data, I’ll be fine with it.
The main screen showing the recent check-ins. Note the lock next to some of them. These won't be published until the locks are removed. The last week was dedicated to making the act of checking in distinct from publishing it. Until now, check-ins were published the minute they were entered, meaning that you cannot check-in somewhere unless you’re comfortable with people knowing where you are the minute you do. Yes, some people like it that way, but not me. And I’m aware that this’ll only be the case if people are following my check-in blog, which I’m doubtful of.
So pressing the floating action button and choosing a check-in type now starts the flow of a new check-in that will get saved in an SQLite database. You can edit the check-in whenever you like, so long as it’s not published. Currently there’s no real way of deleting a check-in unless it’s been published. This is a bit dodgy, but it’s a good example of how tolerant I am with working around these feature gaps for the moment.
The newly styled edit screen. Notice the rating field, which will appear for eateries. Check-ins can be published by tapping the upward facing button on the main screen. Any check-in with a lock is private and will not be published until you toggle the “Ready to publish” switch in the properties. Doing so will not change the date of the check-in: it will still have the date and time that check-in was created.
The targets are currently hard-coded but they can be turned on or off. I had a bit of trouble publishing a check-in to two targets, so I'm not sure if I'll keep multi-target publishing. On the subject of publishing, I had some issues with Dart’s date and time methods. The method on the DateTime class used to produce an ISO-8501 date-stamp don’t include the time-zone if the date and time is not in UTC. This is important as I want the post date and time to be as close to the check-in time as possible, and in the time-zone of the phone. DateTime knows all this, including what the time-zone we’re in. So why didn’t the developers include it in the ISO-8501 date-time string?
This is really strange. Fortunately, ChatGPT stepped in to help out, writing a function which will add the time-zone offset to the ISO-8501 date-time string:
String formatTimeZoneOffset(Duration offset) { String sign = offset.isNegative ? '-' : '+'; int hours = offset.inHours.abs(); int minutes = (offset.inMinutes.abs() % 60); return '$sign${_padZero(hours)}:${_padZero(minutes)}'; }Honestly, ChatGPT has been so helpful over the past week with this project, I probably should give it a credit if I get this polished enough to release.
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I got a little bored today so I added task progress indicators to this Obsidian roadmap thing I built for work.
What the task progress indicators look like. When a task is created, but is not yet scheduled, it appears as an outlined rectangle. It turns into a grey rectangle when it’s added to the sprint. It then changes colour as the task progresses through the software lifecycle; turning purple while it’s being developed, blue while it’s being tested, and finally green when it’s ready for release.
They’re implemented as embedded SVG images, added directly to the note much like the span element used for status labels.
Move the insertion point over the the SVG image to edit the markup. It’s nice being able to add embellishments like this. Obsidian treating notes as regular files on the file-system is a huge advantage for these sorts of automations. No need to learn how to make a plugin; just write a shell script1 that’ll output Markdown, schedule it to run a couple of times a day, and you’re good to go.
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Back working on Micropub Checkin. Re-engineered the home page to now include a list of what would eventually be check-ins — both historical and soon to be published — complete with the check-in type emoji as the icon:
Main screen for Micropub Checkin The same list of emoji icons now adorn the check-in type picker as well (except for the airplane one which seems to always be shown as what I can only describe as the “Wingding” representation):
The check-in type picker I went around a bit trying to work out how best to use these emojis icons in the
leadingslot of theListTilewidget. I expored trying to convert them toIconData, but it turns out just using aTextwidget with a large font worked well. I wrapped in in aWidgettype with a fixed font-size and so far it looks quite good, at least in the emulator:class EmojiIcon extends StatelessWidget { final String emoji; const EmojiIcon({super.key, required this.emoji}); Widget build(BuildContext context) { return Text(emoji, style: TextStyle(fontSize: 26.0)); } }Also started working on a Cubit to handle state for the main page. I had a bit of trouble working ont where the soon-to-be database call to get the list of checkins should go in the cubit. After asking ChatGPT, it looks like the initializer is the best place for it:
class CheckinListCubit extends Cubit<CheckinListState> { CheckinListCubit(): super(LoadingCheckinListState()) { loadCheckinList(); } void loadCheckinList() async { var listOfCheckins = await read_database(); emit(FoundCheckinListState(checkins)); } }I’ve got some scaffolding code in place to simulate this, and so far it seems to work.
I need to start working on the database layer and having the ability to edit and delete check-ins before they’re published. I think I’ll tackle that next.
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Hmm, either Daniel is super obsessed with the Beths (or at least posting about it), or there’s a bug somewhere. 😀
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Building F5 To Run
At the risk of talking about something that I’ve only just started, I’d thought today I write about what I’m working on right now.
I’ve been going through my digital archives this weekend, trying to get it into something more permenant than the portable USB drives it’s currently stored on. Amongst all that stuff is a bunch of QBasic apps and games I wrote way back when I was a kid. Over the years it’s laid dormant but I do like revising them from time to time.
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What would be a nice addition to the spell-check suggestions menu is a brief (3-5 words) definition of the word. I always find myself choosing the wrong suggestion, and a feature like this would help a lot.
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Updating Bocce Scorecard
I didn’t get to a lot of side-project work this week, but I did have to make a large change to a project we use to track scores for our “bocce club”. So I’d though I’d say a few words about that today.
We had our bocce “grand final” a few weeks ago, and one of the matches resulted in a tie between two players. Unfortunately, the Bocce Scorecard web-app I build could not properly handle these, which meant that I had to fix it.
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Getting some pretty strange spam emails sent to my Gmail address (which I still use). It’s the same badly formatted multi-MIME message body with different From and Subject lines. They’re trying to get… something from me? Logins, maybe? Worst phishing attempt ever!
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Updates To Dynamo-Browse And CCLM
I started this week fearing that I’d have very little to write today. I actually organised some time off over the weekend where I wouldn’t be spending a lot of time on side projects. But the week started with a public holiday, which I guess acted like a bit of a time offset, so some things did get worked on.
That said, most of the work done was starting or continuing things in progress, which is not super interesting at this stage. I’ll hold off on talking about those until there’s a little more there. But there were a few things that are worth mentioning.
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Follow-up from my earlier post about ChatGTP this morning, it turns out I probably should’ve RTFM:
Thanks to @andreab@social.lol for the tip.
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Here’s a bit of a blast from the past. I managed to get ccedit working again. This was the original level editor for workingset.net/2022/12/2… my Chips Challenge “fan game” I’ve been working on.
I’ve been designing a few levels for it recently, but since moving to a new Mac, the level editor I was using was going to be difficult to port. It’s QT application and the QT bindings were a pain to setup, and I rather not go through that again. I was using a Mac at the time I started working on it, but I wasn’t yet ready to go all in on MacOS. So to hedge my bets, I decided to go with QT as the UI toolkit.
This was 5 years ago and I’m unlikely to go back to Linux, so choosing QT was a bit of a bad decision. I think if I had my time again, I’d go with something like AppKit.
Anyway, the level editor still works but I have to log into a screen share to use it. I’d like to be able to edit levels on the machine I’m using now.
The code for the original level editor was still around but it hasn’t been touched in ages. It’s basically an SDL application — the same graphics library I’m using for the actual game itself — and the SDL v2 bindings I’m using are still maintained, so updating those were quite easy1.
One thing I did have to pull out was the Lua VM2. The editor was using old C Lua bindings. Better Lua VMs written in pure Go are now available, so I didn’t want to keep using these old bindings anymore. In fact, I didn’t want to use Lua at all. Lua was originally used for the level scripts, but I replaced this in favour of another language (which is no longer maintained 😒, but I’m not changing it again).
The original CCLM Editor So far the editor boots up, but that’s about it. I can move the cursor around but I can’t add new tiles or load existing levels. There seems to be some weird things going on with the image name lookup. I originally thought image name were case insensitive, but after looking at the image name lookup logic in the game itself, I’m not so sure.
How much time I’d like to spend on this is still a bit of a question. It all depends whether I’d like to release the game itself in some fashion. There are still questions about whether I’m allowed to, given that the graphics are not my own. Still need to think about that.
But in any case, good to see the old editor again.
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Trying out Keyboard Maestro to automate some niggly things I occasionally need to do. Got my first macro working, which converts a selected string
FromCamelCasetoUPPER_SNAKE_CASE.
So far I’m impressed. Looking forward to finding other things I can automate away with this.
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On the subject of birds, I was looking at my status.lol statuses this morning. There are only a handful on there but I saw these two and it made me smile. I obviously posted them while I was looking after my sisters cockatiels last November.
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Poking Around The Attic Of Old Coding Projects
I guess I’m in a bit of a reflective mood these pass few days because I spent the morning digging up an old project that was lying dormant for several years. It’s effectively a clone of Chips Challenge, the old strategy game that came with the Microsoft Entertainment Pack. I was a fan of the game when I was a kid, even though I didn’t get through all the levels, and I’ve tried multiple times to make a clone of it.
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Spent the day restyling the Dynamo-Browse website. The Terminal theme was fun, but over time I found the site to be difficult to navigate. And if you consider that Dynamo-Browse is not the most intuitive tool out there, an easy to navigate user manual was probably important. So I replaced that theme with Hugo-Book, which I think is a much cleaner layout. After making the change, and doing a few small style fixes, I found it to be a significant improvement.
I also tried my hand at designing a logo for Dynamo-Browse. The blue box that came with the Terminal theme was fine for a placeholder, but it felt like it was time for a proper logo now.
I wanted something which gave the indication of a tool that worked on DynamoDB tables while also leaning into it’s TUI characteristics. My first idea was a logo that looked like the DynamoDB icon in ASCII art. So after attempting to design something that looks like it in Affinity Designer, and passing it through an online tool which generated ASCII images from PNG, this was the result:
I tried adjusting the colours of final image, and doing a few things in Acorn to thicken the ASCII characters themselves, but there was no getting around the fact that the logo just didn’t look good. The ASCII characters were too thin and too much of the background was bleeding through.
So after a break, I went back to the drawing board. I remembered that there were actually Unicode block characters which could produce filled-in rectangles of various heights, and I wondered if using them would be a nice play on the DynamoDB logo. Also, since the Dynamo-Browse screen consists of three panels, with only the top one having the accent colour, I thought having a similar colour banding would make a nice reference. So I came up with this design:
And I must say, I like it. It does look a little closer to low-res pixel art than ASCII art, but what it’s trying to allude to is clear. It looks good in both light mode and dark mode, and it also makes for a nice favicon.
That’s all the updates for the moment. I didn’t get around to updating the screenshots, which are in dark-mode to blend nicely with the dark Terminal theme. They actually look okay on a light background, so I can probably hold-off on this until the UI is changed in some way.
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Ok, thank you for the insistent reminders, Patreon. I know my subscription for CGP Grey is coming up for renewal. You only need to tell me once. 🤦♂️
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Project Exploration: A Check-in App
I’m in a bit of a exploratory phase at the moment. I’ve set aside Dynamo-Browse for now and looking to start something new. Usually I need to start two or three things before I find something that grabs me: it’s very rare that I find myself something to work on that’s exciting before I actually start working on it. And even if I start something, there’s a good chance that I won’t actually finish it.
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Flight home from the US is next week. I’m hoping for an uneventful trip. The news is not cooperating though. 😏
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Dynamo-Browse Running With iSH
Bit of a fun one today. After thinking about how one could go about setting up a small dev environment on the iPad, I remembered that I actually had iSH installed. I’ve had for a while but I’ve never really used it since I never installed tools that would be particularly useful. Thinking about what tools I could install, I was curious as to whether Dynamo-Browse could run on it. I guess if Dynamo-Browse was a simple CLI tool that does something and produces some output, it wouldn’t be to difficult to achieve this. But I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I said Dynamo-Browse is a bit more sophisticated than your run-of-the-mill CLI tool. Part of this is finding out not only whether building it was possible, but whether it will run well.
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Google Photos came up with this amusing suggestion today.
Just to be clear: it was the birds that were rotated, not the camera. 😀
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Audax Toolset Version 0.1.0
Audax Toolset version 0.1.0 is finally released and is available on GitHub. This version contains updates to Dynamo-Browse, which is still the only tool in the toolset so far.
Here are some of the headline features.
Adjusting The Displayed Columns
Consider a table full of items that look like the following:
pk S 00cae3cc-a9c0-4679-9e3a-032f75c2b506 sk S 00cae3cc-a9c0-4679-9e3a-032f75c2b506 address S 3473 Ville stad, Jersey , Mississippi 41540 city S Columbus colors M (2 items) door S MintCream front S Tan name S Creola Konopelski officeOpened BOOL False phone N 9974834360 ratings L (3 items) 0 N 4 1 N 3 2 N 4 web S http://www.investorgranular.net/proactive/integrate/open-sourceLet’s say you’re interested in seeing the city, the door colour and the website in the main table which, by default, would look something like this:
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Working on recording that how-to video again this morning. Managed to get a take that I’m happy with. This is after maybe 35 recordings in total which didn’t work (wow, video is not easy). Now downloading the trial version of Final Cut Pro to try and edit the thing.
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Overlay Composition Using Bubble Tea
Working on a new feature for Dynamo-Browse which will allow the user to modify the columns of the table: move them around, sort them, hide them, etc. I want the feature to be interactive instead of a whole lot of command incantations that are tedious to write. I also kind of want the table whose columns are being manipulated to be visible, just so that the affects of the change would be apparent to the user while they make them.
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Intermediary Representation In Dynamo-Browse Expressions
One other thing I did in Dynamo-Browse is change how the query AST produced the actual DynamoDB call.
Previously, the AST produced the DynamoDB call directly. For example, if we were to use the expression
pk = "something" and sk ^= "prefix", the generated AST may look something like the following:
The AST will then be traversed to determine whether this could be handled by either running a query or a scan. This is called “planning” and the results of this will determine which DynamoDB API endpoint will be called to produce the result. This expression may produce a call to DynamoDB that would look like this:
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Saw someone at work use Numi to show some maths so I’m giving it a try. Only just started using it but I already like it. Feels very similar to Tot and Boop: a small MacOS utility that fits nicely in that middle-ground between Calculator and a spreadsheet.
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It could be that I’m just an old fogie that doesn’t like whimsy, but chalk me up as someone who doesn’t like the wiggling seek bar in Android’s playback notification.
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Those “Accept Yours” & “Accept Theirs” buttons in GoLand’s conflicts dialog are a bit of a tease. Might be that I’m missing something (which is possible) but I though a file appearing here means that I manually need to review it. Would anyone blindly accept changes like this?
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I’ve been seeing this message an awful lot recently when I’m trying to use mobile data. I originally thought it was Telstra, but now I suspect it’s Android, as restarting the phone seemed to have fixed it.
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The names for GitHub Codespaces are randomly generated, but I kinda like the one chosen for this website repo. Seems fitting in a way.
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WWDC Videos In Broadtail
Some more work on Broadtail. This time, I added the ability to use it to download Apple WWDC videos.
The way it works is based on the existing RSS feed concept. In order to get the list of videos for a particular WWDC year, you “subscribe” to that by setting up a feed with the new “Apple Developer Videos” type. The external ID is taken from the URL slug of the web-site that Apple publishes the session videos. For example, for WWDC 2021, the external ID would be “wwdc2021”.
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Feed Rules In Broadtail
Generally, when there’s a video that I’m interesting in watching, I take a look at Broadtail to see if it’s available. When it is, I go ahead and download it.
However, some videos take a long time to download — we’re talking 10 hours or so — and they’re usually published when I’m not looking, like during the night when I’m asleep (thank’s time-zones). So I’d thought it would be nice for Broadtail to kick off the download for me when the video shows up in the feed.
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