Via the excellent Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
May 302009
May 172009
Dvb-T Receiver (patent pending)
I recently bought a Pinnacle PCTV DVB-T Stick Solo 72e (bonus points for Pinnacle’s over-the-top naming scheme), because the public TV services in Belgium switched to digital broadcasting. It was the €40 pricetag which turned me. The box contains the USB 2.0 stick and an antenna. I advise on attaching this antenna to a metal object (the attach point is magnetic). I attached it to my desk lamp. I can’t light it and watch TV, but that’s a setback I can live with. No issue.
What’s the real issue then? More behind the cut.
Jan 062009
Interesting art/game project: Levelhead. By combining filming and motion tracking of a little white cube, you can manipulate the projected game world inside by twisting and turning. Video behind the cut.
Dec 302008
Dec 212008
Some final results of my computer graphics project. I implemented a graphics rasterizer, which is the implementation one would follow if you wanted hardware-accelerated graphics on today’s GPU’s, which have pipelines dedicated to vertex transformations.
The other option was a raytracer, which is not (yet) suitable for real-time applications due to calculation complexity.
Nov 282008
If there’s one thing I’ve always envied console users for, it’s the universal system compatibility. You buy a disc, pop it in, and performance (I’m ignoring TV quality here) will be the same for you and other players you encounter.
Not quite so for a PC gamer. I’m sure everybody is familiar with the so-called minimum requirements for a game. This brings me to the first problem. There’s a huge ambiguity over what is acceptable as game performance. In game A, meeting the minimum requirements might be good enough to actually load the game into memory and gaze at a slideshow of half-baked pictures, while for game B, meeting them might result in a fluid – although low-end – gaming experience.
So here’s my proposal for what a true minimum requirement would have to look like. Continue reading »
Oct 202008
So, the new academic year has started. I’m following a Master in Computer Sciences now, option Human-Machine interaction. I’ve got a bunch of interesting new courses (Computer Graphics, Distributed Systems, Compiler Construction, …), but the workload is getting pretty heavy. I’m also organising events for the improvisational theater group I’m active in, Preparee.
So I’m going to do the very thing I think is a landmark in laziness: instead of writing out paragraphs and paragraphs about the tidbits of interesting things I’ve found in the last few weeks, I’m going to sum them up. That’s right. Yes, Dave, I’m afraid I can do that.
- I’ve been using Drupal a lot for the Preparee website. It’s quite complicated to get started with at first, although the module system is a bless. It was hard to get things running, since we opted for drupal 6.X, and a lot of modules still don’t have release candidates for the 6 series. Especially the Date module had some problems, but with my little project living against the dev-release line, I helped to debug it.
- The Telectroscope is an awesome art project.
- World of Goo is the best indie game I’ve played in a long time. It’s a physics-based puzzle game with a unique art style and tremendous music. It’s quite hard to believe this is a two-man project. I try to avoid using the phrase Bedroom Programmers here, since it tends to sound quite homoerotic.
- Automated P2P enforcement gone wrong: printer sued for downloading Indiana Jones 4. Of all movies, the poor printer.
- Promising one-man MMO: Love. Procedural animation and rendering.
- Video series I’ve laughed at lately: twisted cubicle workers in ManInTheBox and the ever sarcastic Zero Punctuation.
