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Photo Bucket Update: More On Galleries
Spent a bit more time working on Photo Bucket this last week1, particularly around galleries. They’re progressing quite well. I’m made some strides in getting two big parts of the UI working now: adding and removing images to galleries, and re-ordering gallery items via drag and drop. I’ll talk about re-ordering first. This was when I had to bite the bullet and start coding up some JavaScript. Usually I’d turn to Stimulus for this but I wanted to give HTML web components a try. Continue reading →
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Signed up as a lifetime member to Scribbles. Given how fun it is to use, it was an easy decision. Fantastic work, Vincent.
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Spent some time this evening working on my image hosting tool. It’s slowly coming along, but wow do I suck at UI design (the “Edit Photo” screen needs some rebalancing).
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Test Creek: A Test Story With Evergreen.ink
Had a play with Evergreen.ink this afternoon. It was pretty fun. Made myself a test story called Test Creek which you can try out (the story was written by me but all the images were done using DALL-E). The experience was quite intuitive. I’ve yet to try out the advanced features, like the Sapling scripting engine, but the basics are really approachable for anyone not interested with any of that. Continue reading →
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Idea For Mainboard Mayhem: A Remote Pickup
Sort of in-between projects at the moment so I’m doing a bit of light stuff on Mainboard Mayhem. I had an idea for a new element: a remote control which, when picked up, will allow the player to toggle walls and tanks using the keyboard, much like the green and blue buttons. I used ChatGGT to come up with some artwork, and it produced something that was pretty decent. Prompt: pixel art of a remote control with a single red button styled like the tiles found in Chips Challange, rotated 45 degrees to the right. Continue reading →
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More work on Mainboard Mayhem today. Had a bit more success getting the Windows build into a releasable state.
First thing was the app icon. That blog post I talked about yesterday worked: I was able to set the icon of the executable. I did make a slight adjustment though. The post suggested using ImageMagick to produce the ICO file, but I wasn’t happy with how they looked. There were a lot of artefacts on the smaller icon sizes.
So I looked around for an alternative, and found this package by Lea Anthony. He’s the maintainer of Wails, a cross-platform toolkit for making browser-based GUI apps in Go, sort of like Electron but without bundling Chrome. In fact, most of the build for Mainboard Mayhem was put together by reading the Wails source code, so I trust he knows what his doing. And sure enough, his package produced a nicely scaled ICO file from a source PNG image. Better yet, it was distributed as a Go package, so I could no need to install and shell-out to run it: I could just integrated it directly into the project’s build tool.
Using rsrc to generate the SYSO file with the icon worked as expected: Go did pick it up and embed it into the executable. I did have some trouble getting the Go compiler to pick up these files at first. In short, they need to be in the same directory as the
mainpackage. So if you’re runninggo build ./cmd/thing, make sure the SYSO files are in./cmd/thing. Other than that, no real issues here.
A beautiful site: Mainboard.exe with the embedded app icon One last thing I had to deal with was the console window. Running a Go app in Windows shows the console by default. Perfectly fine for command line tools, but less so for games:
Mainboard Mayhem with that annoying console window. Even the log messages are dull (well, unless you're working on the app). So I had to find a way to hide the console on launch. Since Mainboard Mayhem is using SDL, I’m actually using MinGW to cross-compile the Windows release on an Ubuntu build runner. The documentation for MinGW suggests adding
-mwindowsas a linker option to hide the console:# What I was doing before, which didn't work CGO_ENABLED=1 \ CC="x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc" \ GOOS="windows" \ CGO_LDFLAGS="-mwindows -L…" \ go build -o dist/cclm/mainboard.exe ./cmd/cclm'This didn’t actually work when I tried it: launching the app kept bringing up the console. Turns out what I should’ve done was follow the advice of many Stack Overflow answers, and set
-ldflags "-H=windowsgui"on the Go command:# This works CGO_ENABLED=1 \ CC="x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc" \ GOOS="windows" \ CGO_LDFLAGS="-L…" \ go build -ldflags "-H=windowsgui" -o dist/cclm/mainboard.exe ./cmd/cclm'This works even without the
-mwindowsswitch. Not completely sure why though. I guess MinGW is not actually being used for linking? Or maybe-monly works with C header files? Don’t know. 🤷 But doesn’t matter: the console no longer shows up on launch.
Mainboard Mayhem without the console window. A much nicer experience now. Finally, there was testing it all, and for this I just bit the bullet and set-up a Windows 10 virtual machine in Azure. The rate is something like $0.16 AUD an hour, an easy decision compared to spending time trying to get a VM with Windows 10 running on my machine.
One remaining thing that’s slightly annoying is Windows Defender refusing to launch it after download, doing effectively the same thing as Gatekeeper on MacOS does:
Gatekeeper a.la. Microsoft. I’m sure there’s a way around it but it’s probably not worth learning about it at this stage. It’s easy enough to dismiss: click “More Info” and the click “Run Anyway”:
Clicking 'More Info' gives you a way to launch the app. But other than that, I think the Windows version of Mainboard Mayhem is ready. I’ve updated the website to include the Windows archive if anyone’s interested.
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Spent some time today on Mainboard Mayhem, trying to finish the Windows build. I’ve actually got Windows version of the game being built for a while now. I just haven’t published them, mainly because I haven’t got the app icon set-up yet.
But this week, Golang Weekly had a link to a blog post by Mahmud Ridwan on how to do so. It looked pretty straightforward, so I thought I’d give it a try.
And yeah, the instructions themselves were easy enough, and I wish I could say if they worked or not. But in order to test it, I need a Windows machine. And I don’t have one, and I wasn’t about to get one just for this.
So I tried setting up Windows in a VM using UTM. I got this far:
Yeah, this infinite spinner has been staring at me pretty much all day. I got a Windows 10 installer ISO using CrystalFetch, and it seemed to work. But it just doesn’t want to boot up for the first time.
Not actually sure what the problem is. The error message seems to suggest that it’s having trouble connecting to the internet. Might be that? Or maybe the installation didn’t complete properly? Could be anything. 🤷
So no luck getting this tested yet. I’m wondering if it might be easier to forget virtualisation and just launch a Windows instance in the cloud somewhere instead.
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Installed the latest version of Android today. One obvious change: the calculator app displays fractions in the result. And there’s no way to turn it off.
This… doesn’t appeal to me. Not enough for me to change apps, at least not yet. But I wish there was a setting to change it back to decimals.
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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. Continue reading →
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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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TIL you can enter a photo description in Google Photos. Select a photo, click the Info icon, and a free-text “description” field is revealed. Not super sure what the description is to be used for, but I’m hoping to use it for photo captions.
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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. Continue reading →
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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. Continue reading →
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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!
