Musings of an aging computer nerd hitting 0x32
Call of the Python
I started learning Python last year to do some scripting at work for testing, I recently discovered the game libraries (pygame, pyglet, etc) so have started looking into writing a game.
This is something I’ve been wanting to do from an early age back when I got my first 8-bit computer and never had the time or the skills to achieve.
After just a week of using pyglet during my lunch hour at work and a couple of hours at night I’m well on my way to finishing my first game, a breakout/ arkanoid clone.
Enjoying every minute of it.
Doodle’s Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery
Chuckie Egg in DHTML
Note: 1 of this post’s 3 links are now broken — mostly dead 2008–2013 feed-syndication infrastructure (FeedBurner, Gawker, AOL’s old blog network, Pheedo, Yahoo Pipes). Left as originally published.
Sometime your jaw just drops
Le Mans 1968
Note: 13 of this post’s 20 links are now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr
farmNsubdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.
I’m in the process of scanning in some of my Dad’s old slides and I came across a selection he took from his visit to Le Mans in 1968, two years before I was born.
Here’s what I’ve scanned so far, can’t wait to see what else is in the slide box labeled “Le Mans Sept 1968”
Installing Repton 1 under Wine
Good news that it works apart small issues with the responsiveness of the pointer in the menus.
Download and buy at http://www.superiorinteractive.com/repton/
You can run it full screen or in a window as shown below.
Even after 25 years away from the game I still remembered how to do the first level, scary or what.
Poster Printer
Note: 14 of this post’s 19 links are now broken — mostly dead 2008–2013 feed-syndication infrastructure (FeedBurner, Gawker, AOL’s old blog network, Pheedo, Yahoo Pipes). Left as originally published.
Easy Poster Printer is a free software program for the Windows operating system that enables a user to create a poster out of an image or photo that is loaded into the software. Veteran users might already know the concept that is applied to those images from services such as Rasterbator or Block Posters which we reviewed earlier.
Arcade Puppy
Basically a version 4.2 variation with a lot of retro game system emulators installed.
Picture shows Arcade version of Puppy Linux running on a VirtualBox VM; running the game "Thrust" on the Spectrum emulator.
Linux Distro hunting
I’m looking for a new Distro to run on my old PCs at home.
- Low profile, able to run in small amount of RAM
- Fast booting
- Python
- Firefox 3.x, Opera 10.x or Chromium browser
- Mplayer or similar for video playback
Doodle’s Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery
Remote control using Twitter
I have been thinking about running task on a Ubuntu Linux machine remotely using Twitter. Why you ask, due to firewall restriction where the machine is located I can’t get direct access to it but it has connection out to the internet.
- I send a direct message to a Twitter account which only follows me and I follow on my main account.
- This contains the code for type of download and the URL of the download.
- The Python script is started by cron at scheduled times.
- The script connects to Twitter and checks for direct messages.
- It parses the direct message and either spawns a WGET or youTube-dl command to get the resource.
- If its a video it then runs a command is run to convert it to divX ready for upload it to my phone.
- If its a file then it is virus checked.
- Finally the direct messages are deleted from the Twitter account and a reply sent to my Twitter account.
Converting MP4 files to other divX and mp3 formats
I find myself often converting MP4 video files to divX and mp3 format to play on my LG phone.
#!/bin/bash
echo “MP4 Conversion”
for f in *.mp4;
do
echo “…Processing $f file…"
ffmpeg -i “$f” -vn -ac 2 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 128k echo $f|cut -d. -f1.mp3 > /dev/null 2>&1
mencoder “$f” -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=1 -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=3 -o echo $f|cut -d. -f1.divx > /dev/null 2>&1
done