Videos
🎥 Elm Connections #6: Fetching And JSON Decoding Puzzles
In which I use Elm’s HTTP client and JSON decoder to fetch puzzles from an external resource.
🎥 Elm Connections #5: Option Shuffling
In which I use Elm’s random number generator to shuffle the options.
In which I put away Elm for a bit to make the playfield look good (or at least, better than it was).
🎥 Elm Connections #3: Group Matching
In which I work on “categories”, the model and logic that deals with the groups the player is to “connect”, plus find my way with how sets work in Elm.
🎥 Elm Connections #2: Starting The Playfield
In which I continue work on a Connections clone in Elm by starting work on the playfield.
🎥 Elm Connections #1: First Steps
In which I record video of me building a Connections (or Conlextions) clone in Elm (while at the same time, have a go at editing video).
Making some progress in learning Elm for building frontends. Started working on a Connections clone, which I’m calling “Clonections”. This is what I’ve got so far:
It’s been fun using Elm to build this. So far I’m liking the language. Of course, now I’ll have to come up with puzzles for this. 😐
I realise I’ve been posting a lot about Ivy, and not a whole lot about Archie. So to even the scales a little, here’s a video of Archie receiving a head scratch this morning.
🥛🦜
Should state that both vessels hold ordinary tap water.
Spent a little more time working on my idea for Dynamo-Browse this week. Managed to get it somewhat feature complete this weekend:
I probably should say a few words on what it actually is. The idea is to make it quick and easy to run pre-canned queries based on the currently selected item and table.
Let’s say you’ve got a table with customer information, and another table with subscription information, and they’re linked with some form of customer ID. If you wanted to see the subscriptions of a customer, up until now, you’d have to copy the customer ID to the paste-board, change the currently viewed table, then run a query to select the subscription with that customer ID. It’s not difficult but it’s extremely tedious.
This change is meant to streamline this. Now, in a script function, you can define a “related item” provider which, if matched against the currently displayed table, will be given the currently selected item, and will return a list of queries that will display items related to the current item (depending on whatever definition of “related” will be). This will be presented to the user as a list. When the user chooses the item, the query will run and the results will be displayed.
Here’s an example of the script used for the screencasts:
ext.related_items("business-addresses", func(item) {
return [
{"label": "Customer", "query": `city=$city`, "args": {"city": "Austin"}},
{"label": "Payment", "query": `address^="3"`},
{"label": "Thing", "table": "inventory",
"query": `pk=$pk`, "args": {"pk": "01fca33a-5817-4c27-8a8f-82380584e69c"}},
]
})
ext.related_items("inventory", func(item) {
sk := string(item.attr("sk"))
return [
{"label": "SK: " + sk, "table": "business-addresses",
"query": `pk^=$sk`, "args": {"sk": sk}},
]
})
Notice how the last business-addresses item specifies the “inventory” table, and that the “inventory” provider actually uses an attribute of the item. Here’s a screencast of that working:
This feature has been on the idea board for a while. I was trying to work out how best to handle the pre-canned queries, especially considering that they will likely be different for each item and table. Some ideas I had were adding additional UI elements that the user could use to configure these queries. These would go into the workspace file, a sort of an embedded database which is created for each session. This was pretty crappy, especially when you consider that workspaces usually only last until the user exists. It was only a few weeks ago when I considered using the scripting facilities to implement this (which, honestly, shows how much it remains under-utilised).
Anyway, I’ve only just finished development of it. I’d still like to try it for the various related items I tend to use during my day-to-day. We’ll see how well it works out.
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.
Only issue was that the image was huge — 1024 x 1024 — and the tiles in Mainboard Mayhem were only 32 x 32.
I tried shrinking it down in Acorn, using various scaling algorithms. The closest that worked was bringing it down slowly to about 128 x 128 using Nearest Neighbour, than trying to go all the way down to 32 x 32 using Lanczos. That worked, but it required true 32 bit colour to be recognisable, and I wanted to preserve the 16 colour palette used by the original Chips Challenge.
So using the original image as a reference, I bit the bullet and drew my own in Acorn. You can see it here in this test level:
It turn out okay. At least it’s recognisable. Anyway, I coded it up and gave it a bit of a try:
Yeah, it works well. When the player has the appropriate colour remote, they can hit either Z or X to toggle the green walls or blue tanks respectively. I really should add some indicators in the status bar to show which button to press.
Not sure what I’ll do after this. The fun part was coming up with the element. But I guess I’ll have to come up with a few puzzles that use it.
Also got a bit of train spotting in as well. I parked at Kyneton station in the hope of seeing a train go by. Wish I could say my timing was strategic but in truth I was just lucky.
This conversation with @Gaby got my creative juices flowing so I though I’d put together a small video tutorial for using the GLightbox plugin by @jsonbecker. There have been a few updates with the plugin so how I use it might be slightly out of date. Either way, please enjoy.
Success! Managed to get a Go app built, signed, and notarised all from within a GitHub Action. It even cross-compiles to ARM, which is something considering that it’s using SDL. Here’s the test app being downloaded and launched in a VM (ignore the black window, the interesting part is the title).
I won’t lie to you. I got some pretty strong vibes of the Birds at this point in my walk.
🔗 github.com/charmbracelet/vhs
This little tool is awesome. It allows you to easily make GIFs of a command line session from a text-based DSL. I tried it on the full screen TUI app I’m working on and it worked flawlessly.
Now wondering if I could use it for automated testing. 🤔
Here’s another clip of the echidna, taken from the same 2 minute video I took yesterday. It’s also the third video of wildlife looking for food that I’ve posted on this blog. Is a trend forming I wonder? 🤔
Went for my afternoon walk yesterday, and saw an echidna looking for food. That doesn’t happen every day, so it seemed like a good subject for a video.
Saw this on my lunchtime walk today. I don’t often see cockatoos find food this way.
Follow on from the last post, I also had the opportunity to spot a few trains. Here’s one on it’s way to Bendigo, taken just outside Woodend.