Took me a while to adapt the rubik's cube, but it's finally done.
Friday, December 14, 2012
Monday, December 10, 2012
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
2 minutes of 2d voxels..
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Portuguese Anti-austerity demonstration
I'm a Portuguese living in Germany, yesterday roughly 7% of my country's population participated in an Anti-austerity demonstration.
That is close to 700.000 people all over the country.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/332900
Unemployment is rising, grandmothers are spending their pensions on their grandsons to suport them, many families live with < 600 Euros (US $790) per month as one of the parents struggles to find a job.
People with degrees usually work 10-12 hours a day with the simple hope of not being the next layoff.
But the employer's demand is not because they want to abuse, instead because they are stressed. Many companies are in kept in near life-support, with increasing taxes, decreasing sales and no other way to increase profits other than demanding more work from the employees. The government measures seem to approve by increasing minimum working hours and basically ignoring employee complaints all together.
Portuguese were told they needed to make sacrifices, for a country already low on expenses, last year that meant a cut of 15% in taxes and an increase of 2.5 work hours.
Our compensation was saying that more cuts would be necessary this year.
Needless to say people weren't happy.
What sadness me the most is how most EU media will handle this. I remember watching CNN life when the same happened in Greece and then comparing it to European sources were everything was minimized..
That is close to 700.000 people all over the country.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/332900
Unemployment is rising, grandmothers are spending their pensions on their grandsons to suport them, many families live with < 600 Euros (US $790) per month as one of the parents struggles to find a job.
People with degrees usually work 10-12 hours a day with the simple hope of not being the next layoff.
But the employer's demand is not because they want to abuse, instead because they are stressed. Many companies are in kept in near life-support, with increasing taxes, decreasing sales and no other way to increase profits other than demanding more work from the employees. The government measures seem to approve by increasing minimum working hours and basically ignoring employee complaints all together.
Portuguese were told they needed to make sacrifices, for a country already low on expenses, last year that meant a cut of 15% in taxes and an increase of 2.5 work hours.
Our compensation was saying that more cuts would be necessary this year.
Needless to say people weren't happy.
What sadness me the most is how most EU media will handle this. I remember watching CNN life when the same happened in Greece and then comparing it to European sources were everything was minimized..
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Fat Aliens
A team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has spotted sugar molecules in the gas surrounding a young Sun-like star. This is the first time sugar been found in space around such a star, and the discovery shows that the building blocks of life are in the right place, at the right time, to be included in planets forming around the star.
The astronomers found molecules of glycolaldehyde — a simple form of sugar [1] — in the gas surrounding a young binary star, with similar mass to the Sun, called IRAS 16293-2422. Glycolaldehyde has been seen in interstellar space before [2], but this is the first time it has been found so near to a Sun-like star, at distances comparable to the distance of Uranus from the Sun in the Solar System. This discovery shows that some of the chemical compounds needed for life existed in this system at the time of planet formation [3].
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Newcomer: 2d sheet of MoS2 puts Graphene transistors in a corner, watch-out Silicon!
Earlier this year I put together a very quick post on the wonders of graphene. What was left unsaid was all the difficulties that are currently part of graphene including its nearly useless as graphene transistors (for computation) / lack of band gap.
That is not to say that is not still an awesome material, it is.
However while graphene hasn't been the holy grail many had expected, one requirement for the upcoming singularity (or an hypothesis/corollary) is that for every door that the cosmos closes, two must open (and thus knowledge grows exponential).
And that is why I was very happy to read this article on the "latest new" 2d material, molybdenum disulfide (MoS2).
The latest “new” material, (...) — which has actually been used for decades, but not in its 2-D form — was first described just a year ago by researchers in Switzerland.
But in that year, researchers at MIT — who struggled for several years to build electronic circuits out of graphene with very limited results (except for radio-frequency applications) — have already succeeded in making a variety of electronic components from MoS2. They say the material could help usher in radically new products, from whole walls that glow to clothing with embedded electronics to glasses with built-in display screens.
(...)
Wang had been struggling to build circuits on graphene for his doctoral thesis research, but found it much easier to do with the new material. There was a “hefty bottleneck” to making progress with graphene, he explains, because that material lacks a bandgap — the key property that makes it possible to create transistors, the basic component of logic and memory circuits. While graphene needs to be modified in exacting ways in order to create a bandgap, MoS2 just naturally comes with one.
The lack of a bandgap, Wang explains, means that with a switch made of graphene, “you can turn it on, but you can’t turn it off. That means you can’t do digital logic.” So people have for years been searching for a material that shares some of graphene’s extraordinary properties, but also has this missing quality — as molybdenum disulfide does.
The lack of a bandgap, Wang explains, means that with a switch made of graphene, “you can turn it on, but you can’t turn it off. That means you can’t do digital logic.” So people have for years been searching for a material that shares some of graphene’s extraordinary properties, but also has this missing quality — as molybdenum disulfide does.
(...)
Wang and Palacios were able to fabricate a variety of basic electronic devices on the material: an inverter, which switches an input voltage to its opposite; a NAND gate, a basic logic element that can be combined to carry out almost any kind of logic operation; a memory device, one of the key components of all computational devices; and a more complex circuit called a ring oscillator, made up of 12 interconnected transistors, which can produce a precisely tuned wave output.
(...)
- read the full article here, on MITnews.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Why time appears to speed up with age
(...)
His conclusion is that the passing of the years goes faster as we grow older.
This makes sense; for instance when you are 10 years of age, a year represents 10% of your life, and seems like a very long time.
However, when you are 50 years old, one year has reduced to only 2% of your life, and hence seems only one-fifth as long.
Summarizing this work, Freeman comes to the conclusion that the actual age (AA) needs to be corrected for the apparent length of a year (AY). The apparent length of a year is inversely proportional to one person's actual age
(...)
Because of the obvious problems with Freeman's concept of time perception, it is necessary to redefine the Effective Age on a sounder basis.
(...)
It is clear that with this definition, one person's Actual Age may already be non-synchronous with time. However, analogous to Freeman's work, the apparent length of a year (AY) is not constant
(...)
The lower boundary condition (t=0) should yield an Effective Age of zero years (EA=0). Therefore ε = 1.
The upper boundary is less apparent. It should be chosen so that at t=tmax, EA = t. At death, the Effective Age and real time are again equal. However, no person knows for sure his or her personal life expectancy. This is clearly an issue for molecular biologists to address. However, if we assume for a person alife expectancy of 80 years (t=80, EA=80), we obtain:
δ = 80/ln(81) 80 ln(t + 1) EA = ---------- ln(81)
This formula can now be used to calculate the Effective Age (and the Effective percentage Completion of Life) as a function of time. This is shown in the following table:
time (yrs.) EA (yrs.) Life% 0 0.0 0 1 12.6 16 2 20.0 25 3 25.2 32 4 29.3 37 5 32.6 41 10 43.7 55 15 50.5 63 20 55.4 69 30 62.5 78 40 67.6 85 50 71.6 89 60 74.8 94 70 77.6 97 80 80.0 100
And thus, the bold statement in the title is justified. Life is half over at age ten, and three quarters over at age thirty. Note the rapid increase at very young ages: in the initial stages of life, life itself makes big strides forward. For instance, consider the concepts of speech, eating and walking; skills that are learned at a young age and are carried on throughout a person's life.
Another interesting observation that we can make is the age at which one year really seems to last one year. This can be calculated quite easily from the derivation above. For a life expectancy of 80 years, it is equal to 80/ ln(81) - 1 = 17.2 years. Quite close to Freeman's original assumption of 20 years.
Consequences:
The concept of Effective Age has far stretching implications. Some of these I have summarized below:
- "Summer vacations lasted almost forever when I was in grammar school":
- True, they did. In fact, when you were six years old, an Apparent Year would be close to three years. That would make a three week summer vacation feel like almost nine weeks!
- "Now that I am older, I can communicate better with my parents"
- Right. As you can see, you're catching up with them! Closing the "generation gap", so to speak.
- "Life starts after 65"
- The credo of many people close to their pension age. Wrong: at 65, you only have about 5% of your Effective Age left. Choose your time wisely; start working late, and retire early.
- "Old people are slow"
- That is such an insensitive comment. Old people aren't slow at all, they simply have a different time perception.
- "Those annoying birthdays seem to roll around faster every year
- True, they do. Better start celebrating your Effective Age.
Friday, August 17, 2012
Book written in DNA code
The researchers claim that the cost of DNA coding is dropping so quickly that within five to 10 years it could be cheaper to store information using this method than in conventional digital devices.
Deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA – the chemical that stores genetic instructions in almost all known organisms – has an impressive data capacity. One gram can store up to 455bn gigabytes: the contents of more than 100bn DVDs, making it the ultimate in compact storage media.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
My first Google Play App
Description
3D Rubik's Cube or Magic Cube.
Play:
With the play option you can have fun and enjoy no stress free play with the Rubik's cube.
With the play option you can have fun and enjoy no stress free play with the Rubik's cube.
Improve:
In this mode, you have the opportunity to continuously challenge yourself. Starting from very the simple, unlock harder modes as you improve.
In this mode, you have the opportunity to continuously challenge yourself. Starting from very the simple, unlock harder modes as you improve.
Hope you enjopy and don't forget to rate :-)
App Screenshots
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Why Pluto is no longer a planet - a picture carnival.
A dwarf planet, as defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), is a celestial body in direct orbit of the Sun[1] that is massive enough that its shape is controlled by gravitational forces rather than mechanical forces (and thus an ellipsoid in shape), but has not cleared its neighboring region of other objects.[2][3] More explicitly, it is a planetary-mass object—having sufficient mass to overcome its compressive strength and achieve hydrostatic equilibrium—but not a satellite.
[
wikipedia.org 7.8.2012]
Why is the distinction necessary? There are many "Plutos" either they're all planets or not.
Examples:
Eris, formal designation 136199 Eris, is the most massive known dwarf planet[i] in the Solar System and the ninth most massive body known to orbit the Sun directly. It is estimated to be 2326 (±12) km in diameter,[8] and 27% more massive thanPluto, or about 0.27% of the Earth's mass.[9][14]. [
wikipedia.org 7.8.2012]
Ceres, formally 1 Ceres, is the only dwarf planet in the inner Solar System, and the largest asteroid.[20][21][22] It is a rock–ice body some 950 km (590 mi) in diameter, and though the smallest identified dwarf planet, it constitutes a third of the mass of the asteroid belt.[23][24] Discovered on 1 January 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi,[25] it was the first asteroid to be identified, though it was classified as a planet at the time.[26] It is named after Ceres, the Roman goddess of growing plants, the harvest, and motherly love.
-wikipedia.org 7.8.2012
Nice powerpoint:
Kuiper Belt Asteriod Belt Oort cloud
Monday, August 6, 2012
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
A Future Worth Working Towards - by Michael Anissimov
It is a light writing on the future of several critical aspects required for a bright future:
1) More space
2) More health
3) More water
4) More time
5) More intelligence
In all it was an interesting reading.
Some lines I feel like quoting:
Some lines I feel like quoting:
"150,000 die per day from age-related disease. 20,000 from heart disease, 17,000 from stroke, 3,450 from traffic accidents, 3,400 die from malaria. In a single day, over 1,200 people will be murdered."
"Why can we store only 4-9 items in working memory and not 27-30? The answer is that we live on an arbitrary planet and an arbitrary level of intelligence was reached by humanity which enabled us to build a civilization."
"We should regard the intellect of Homo sapiens as a good first draft — but improvements on that draft are inevitable."
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Changing your Language/Locale on Android 2.2
My wife's phone's language was set to portuguese, when installing a new keyboard I accidentally switched the language settings to english.
I was very surprised to see that I couldn't revert, the only languages available were: German, Italian, English and Turkish.
I'm not sure where this information is coming from, but when she first started the phone it had a portuguese (although we were in Germany) and we had the option to choose portuguese in the installation language. So maybe the options are retrieved from within the card.
I was about to replace the card by another just to change the locale, but instead found this great app: MoreLocale 2
It unblocked a long list of options, including Portuguese from Portugal.
nice
Friday, July 27, 2012
Roundup of Free resources for 2d games
Extra (Edit): After going through lots of free resources, I've created the SpriteWorld web page. It's a collection of some the many free resources I've found.
Feel free to browse through and don't forget to +1 if you like it.
Feel free to browse through and don't forget to +1 if you like it.
Although Sprite Would has a lot of content, I still recommend you read thought this post.
Another highly recommended reading for developers is this awesome post.
--- Original Post below ---
Metal Slug cloning
- Some nice Metal Slug-like character animations.
Lost Garden
.. a great site with lots of links to free stuff, more below:
- Really nice looking :-)
License: CC like (http://lostgarden.com/2007/03/lost-garden-license.html)
Small World (Lost Gardens)
- SmallWorld Graphics.zip
- Lost Garden License: Read here for licensing details
Zelda like (Lost Gardens)
hasgraphics.com
contains a very nice list of free sprites:
Disclaimer from hasgraphics.com:
All the sprites found on this site are free to use for commercial and non-commercial projects. All the sprites are the property of their respective authors and Has Graphics only features them. We carefully inspect all the sprites we publish to make sure they fit certain quality criteria, and most important that they are available for non-commercial and commercial game projects.
SpriteLib
Also a nice list, although I find the tiles very small.
If you would like to show your appreciation for SpriteLib, please consider making a small donation.
All donations are handled securely through PayPal and do not require an account.
All donations are handled securely through PayPal and do not require an account.
See also: http://qs.kapouta.com/k
License: Unkown
GfxLib-Fuzed is a package of free art assets which can be used by game developers, hobbyists and enthusiasts for their own projects. It is available under terms of the Common Public License .
http://opengameart.org/
This website is great and has so much quality tiles that I recommend you to have a look by yourself.
Collected Art:
Note: Overall the website seems to have a lot of contents, however after a brief search I found very little free CC content. The stars rating is reflecting my opinion as a website for free resources for indie games, not as a whole.
Some other findings:
Aparently DeviantArt has lots of isometric view tilesets: http://browse.deviantart.com/digitalart/pixelart/scenes/iso/
other,
http://fav.me/do00wz
I liked the website, however didn't really find easy to use tiles.
The best resources sites I've found so far.
However I'm not sure regarding the usability of the contents... looking briefly to the forum it seems that it's good for play, not good if you want to make money (otherwise I would give it 5 stars):
So basically, you can use sprites as long you never receive a single cent for whatever you do with them. (This includes "voluntary donations" which is a popular excuse used by smug people whi think they can fool the law with semantics.) (link)
engine001
Lots and lots of resources, however files are in a strange format and tilesets seem too simple.
Unrated:
http://www.gsarchives.net/http://www.bghq.com/
http://acidsound.blogspot.de/
http://www.freewebs.com/
Forums:
http://www.sprites-inc.co.uk/forum/ (very promising)
http://www.spriters-resource.com/community/
http://z15.invisionfree.com/DJ_Universe/index.php?showtopic=2645
Extras:
Here are some sound and music links:
http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2011/12/11/how-to-make-a-2d-platform-game-part-1/
Sound effects asset resources Page name/link File formats Details Active User can contribute Licenses Freepats .pat Instrument patches for software synthesizers Yes Yes CC0, GFDL, GPL, LGPL Freesound .wav, .aif, .flac, .ogg Community-based sound library Yes Yes CC0, CC-BYv3 Obiwannabe sounds andgenerators .mp3, .pd Various game dev sounds including procedural generators for such No No CC-BYv3, GPL[4] OLPC Sound Samples .wav Instrument and music samples, sound effects Yes No CC-BYv3 OpenGameArt sounds flac, mp3, ogg, wav User-submitted repository of game sounds Yes Yes CC0, CC-BYv3, CC-BY-SAv3, GPLv2, GPLv3 public domain sounds .flac, .ogg Sounds mostly in mp3 format Yes Yes CC0
https://love2d.org/wiki/Free_Game_Resources
- bfxr
is an online sound generator.
- Independent Ljudbank
(Swedish)
- Freesound
(Requires registration for downloads, but otherwise bullshit-free)
- Newground's audio
contains free songs and loops.Music:
- http://www.artistx.org/site2/media/free-resources/free-music.html
another listing-type page. Licenses vary.
- Jamendo's free music
(Various)
- Binärpilot
(Evil chiptunes. Big plus for umlaut. Licensed CC-NC-ND. Use with caution.)
- 8bitcollective
(Chiptunes) (Licensed CC-NC-SA. Use with caution.)
- Creative Commons' own list of music, containing lots of links. Two examples below:
- ccmixter
is a "a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want."
- sampleswap
is a "100% free AIFF/WAV collection contains 6.4 GB of sounds"
Also, let me know if you know a good site for me to add.
Keywords:
128x128, 16x16, 2d, 32x32, 64x64, 8 way, character, game, isometric, MM7, platform, platformer, RPG, sprite sheet, sprites, tileset, 32 bit
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