bad news: i got no monies or greets for this and my nice spec highlights and mip-mapping were disabled in the final for some reason
good news: tons of people are now touching, swiping, and stroking my ball!

here’s a link to the full info for the app so you can download and install it on your iPad! be sure to rate it five stars in the app store and comment that you loved stroking blackpawn’s ball!!

in addition to lines which i covered in the first post, i’ve now been using circles, rectangles, text, images, and layers. these are all super easy just like the lines. for example:

<text style="font-size:10px;fill:#ff0000" x="4" y="16">ReticulateTheSplines</text>

<image x="8" y="30" width="256" height="256" xlink:href="base.jpg" />

i’ve found it really handy to go into InkScape and make a quick SVG by hand then load it up in a text editor to see the right markup to use for different things.  for example with layers InkScape has it’s own namespace and extra options so you can put really spammy data in topmost hidden layers and only reveal them when you’re zoomed in on some area of interest.

here’s a link to the full W3C SVG standard which is a great reference for all the possibilities. and here are some new examples of this madness in action.

also on the gw2 site there’s now an info page on the professions starting with the elementalist. check out the cool videos, screenshots, and wallpapers at the bottom!

though we didn’t make it out in person, xplsv took 1st in the hi-rez graphics compo with kirill’s rad render! it’s actually using assets from a demo we started after finishing our invite for blockparty 2009. we wanted to release the demo at blockparty 2009 but didn’t have time to finish and then again for 2010 we wanted to do it and again didn’t find the time. don’t worry though we’ll release this guy eventually.

congrats to everyone who did manage to make a release or make it to the party! and how great to hear the fifth edition of blockparty will be on the west coast in california! see you there?

but anyway sole has been diligently blogging daily on her breakpoint demo progress so i should at least be able to manage weekly updates right? thanks for being a good influence sole!

so recently i’ve added what i think are some really neat animation and sync controls to the demo system but haven’t capped a video of that yet so you’ll just have to wait for those details. also got in material support, more controls over copied instances, metaballs, and mesh displacement.

here are some new pictures of a simple scene generated in demo studio and rendered offline:

and once again here’s a peek at the construction:

okay now i need to get in a match of SC2… or maybe two…

with lots of the core of the new system done now i can get things animating and syncing to music. here’s one of the quick tests from this weekend and a peek at the ui showing how it was done. the music is from Zardonic’s remix of Nine Inch Nails Ghosts track 35.

defraggler is a hard disk defragmentation tool.

drop box is great for sharing files between your computers and keeping them in sync. use this referral link to give me free megabytes

evernote is billed as your “external brain” and that’s a wonderful way of describing it. you can toss everything in your account that you want to remember or find again later.

i use freemind as a much better tool for notes and such than notepad or excel. using hotkeys you can manipulate trees of text crazy fast.

keepass lets you store and also generate secure passwords.

progress quest is a great alternative to world of warcraft. it let’s you level up forever with no effort or monthly fee!

pyscripter is currently my favorite editor for python scripts.

truecrypt let’s you easily create virtual hard drives. it’s great for keeping your source code secure or to use as a temp drive to avoid fragmentation.

windirstat is a great visual tool to help you find out what’s eating up all your precious disk space.

hopefully one of these is new and helpful for you

so to get started on the next decade i’ve upped the ante and created some software to help. inspired by gordon bell’s research and latest book Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything my app grabs a screenshot of my multi-monitor desktop every 15 seconds and stores it off with lots of metadata. this was actually a bit too much data for my tastes since each compressed snapshot comes out to many megabytes. so i added an additional layer of inter-frame compression similar to what is done with video and this gets me down to well under 100 kilobytes for most snapshots and it’s currently trending around 100 megabytes per day. this still sounds like a lot but that 1.5TB drive is actually large enough to store that rate of data for me for the next 40 years! ridiculous right?

of course you’re probably wondering what the point is… well, there are lots! for one, just like the journal it is fun and rewarding to go back in time and see what my life was like in the past and recall the things i was thinking about and doing. it helps to gain perspective on things. with this automated capture now so many more possibilities unfold. my simple playback app at the moment can already give me fast replays of the past as well as statistics on my activity (how much time spent coding, web browsing, chatting, etc). in the future i’ll be able to run OCR on the data to recognize any text on screen and then be able to search effectively and quickly extract text from my computer at any moment in the past. further in the future i’ll be able to feed all this into generic AI software to train it to respond, work, and think like me so i can have great digital assistants and even further in the future provide a much more accurate history and memory to my simulated consciousness after all of our brains have been scanned and moved to processors in space!

anyway this work is the reason i didn’t make as much progress as i wanted on other projects this holiday.