Archive November 2010
Thursday 25 November 2010
I just saw a news/ad mention an iPhone app "my TSA", which you can ask about whether various things are okay as carry-on or checked baggage, by which they "hope to reduce airport congestion" (ha). If anyone reading has an iPhone, please get this app and ask it whether "human faeces" is acceptable as carry-on. Why? Because if they say no then it comically means everyone is smuggling illegal things in the classic drug-smuggling manner whenever they fly, and if they say yes then the obvious available logical consequence is also pretty funny. [00:39] [4 comments]


Sunday 21 November 2010
An interesting development in Kinect stuff (for me anyway) - the unofficial PC driver for the hardware has been used to do something cool already - a surprisingly decent 3D video camera. Since I'm decent at programming and terrible at 3D graphics, it looks like I could use this to make at least the basic primitives for any 3D games I might make - I could make a big cardboard model of things, 3D scan them, then do some fairly simple math to cut it down to a smaller more game-appropriate number of points without losing detail. It also seems likely that, if this is possible after about 5 days, there might be at least a rudimentary skeleton-parsing API available in short order (they already have hand detection), which would mean I could make a Kinect game without an official SDK, which would hopefully mean I could show the game as a demonstration that I merit access to the official SDK. (I'm surprised Microsoft isn't being more lax with that, actually, since a more open SDK would mean more games, and more games would mean crushing Playstation Move.)

I have two games I would like to make using Kinect, but, as always, I should finish making some other games first anyway! I really need to make a lot of money quickly so I can just pay other people to make my games for me. [07:34] [0 comments]


Tuesday 9 November 2010
Today, as I was re-screening a window, I heard shouting from our old neighbour across the road. I looked over and saw he was lying on the ground, bleeding from his head, surrounded by his dogs loping around him and barking. So I went over to see if he needed help.

It turned out he was okay - he'd just tripped, or possibly been pulled over by his dogs. Nasty scrapes on his forehead and elbows but he was alright - he was just having trouble getting up because the dogs were pulling on the leash he was holding, and he's pretty old. So I helped him up, problem solved.

My reward for being a pleasant helpful neighbour? One bleeding dog bite on each leg. Yay!

The moral of the story: never do anything unselfish. (All the various selfish things we did today went pretty well!) [06:25] [2 comments]