ricardocabellov5.5

Seems like I change my phone every 3 years. Quite surprising for a nerd.

This time I picked a HTC Magic.



Yes, it's an Android phone, that was the main reason.

Some months ago I realised I wasn't really using my phone, so I did a experiment of shutting it off. It was like that for about 3 months and it was an interesting experience. Like living on the 90s again, having to meet with people at specific places at specific times, ... Totally recommended. However, on that time I had a iPod Touch which made things easier (I could email sole if I was going to be home late from a wireless powered pub). I also used it to see the good things and bad things of the iPod Touch/iPhone platform, and guess what, as a Mac Hater I didn't like it much.

Recently the iPod Touch felt to the floor (while sitting down) and the screen got broken. That was the point when I stopped using it at all and started looking forward to getting an Android phone. (Although Mike very kindly managed to get it fixed. Mike, it's yours!).

So, now that I finally have the phone, I mainly have 3 complains:

1. WTF is with the headphones connector? Why not a jack? At least give me decent headphones!
2. Android OS doesn't really feel as snappy as the iPhone OS, plus the whole system ended up being a bit slower than I expected.
3. Apple sucks!. Apple "asked" to Google NOT TO put multi touch on Android yet. There are many evidences on the net that Android has the functionality ready, but it's not "connected". And guess what, my device does support multitouch by hardware, it's just waiting to Apple for the go ahead. Way to go Apple.

And you'll say - oh no! Another rant email! Not really, because apart from that I *really* love the device. It's like a normal computer in your hand (many apps runing at the same time, barcode/qrcode recognition, google apps interconnectivity, AR applications...) I really could do a very long list of things I like. Maybe the most important one is that developing for it is very easy and I've started :D I'm even planing to make a couple of games :P

You can track my progress on this here.

I got the feeling Android 2.0 will be released with the upcoming new Motorola handset, and it will bring multi touch and a few performance improvements (and many other things, but I'll be happy just with that).

If you ever need to take screenshots of your desktop every 10second (or whatever). Here it's a quick script:

while true ; 
do
scrot '%s.png' -e 'mv $f ~/Desktop/temp/scrot/'
sleep 10
done

Just paste the script on an empty file and change the properties to "Allow executing file as program". Double click and Run in Terminal. Control^C to stop it. That's it.

The terms lossy and lossless are something I learnt recently when I discovered the format FLAC. As example MP3 is a lossy format; distorts the data on the pocess, and the end result is not exactly like the original. FLAC, on the other hand compresses the data but keeps it 1:1 with the original, just like a ZIP does.

Lagarith is the same but for video. There are some other lossless video codecs but from my experience Lagarith, using the YV12 color space when compressing, is, by far, the best. Not only in terms of file size compression, but also in terms of playback.

As an example, I've compressed r08028 at the resolution of 640x480 60fps, which is the resolution it was designed for, and it ends up as 2gb file (uncompressed is 14gb). 2gb is still quite big for a 3 minutes video but with nowadays 1TB+ HDs maybe we can start archiving our demos in this way so we can recompress them to new video formats as soon as they appear without having to mess with emulators and rendering again.

Best thing of the codec is that the playback. On a multi-core machine can play 1920x1080 60fps videos with no problems.

Unfortunately, this codec hasn't reached mainstream and it doesn't have much support yet (ie VLC doesn't play it). But if you happen to be a Windows user, give it a try!

If you want to know more about the codec, here you have some extra info, and here the sources.

Now, if only FLAC could also be used for compressing the audio that gets encapsulated in a .AVI...

EDIT: Forgot to mention. You can use this codec from kkapture itself. And if that wasn't good enough, the whole kkapture process gets way faster (compared to capture to uncompressed frames). Capturing r08028 is faster than the demo itself.

I seriously envy this kid. Love the sounds he gets.

If you had 2 weeks of holidays in September you would probably get a nice apartment in a Sunny island at 5 min of the beach. I would too. But not this time.

Instead I will be going to a Reykjavik hotel for 15 days. Why Reykjavik? Because 15 days in a hotel in UK it's about £1,000 and in Iceland it's £300 (breakfast included)... and the flight from London to Reykjavik costs £200, so that's why.

The idea is to stay inside the hotel room with my laptop all the time (Carmack's style). Hopefully with no distractions. Although I won't lie, I'll probably do a break at some point and visit the blue lagoon... Still, I think I've never been 15 days isolated. I'm much more productive when I'm alone (like everyone else I guess). So I'm very much looking forward to it.

You may think that this is wrong. But you need to understand this... The list of ideas I note down every day keep growing and the fact that the daily life doesn't give me enough time to materialise 99% of them really frustrates me.

Right now I don't know what I'll be working on, need to go through the list of ideas and do a selection... maybe xplsv.tv v2, maybe an android game, maybe a javascript demo... I really don't know.

Any suggestions/requests you may have?

If you were wondering what was Shock / Collapse up to these days, the truth is that hasn't changed much. However, seems like he has moved to the dark side (the good one): open source. The good old chap, not only keeps doing amazing illustrations, but he has been working on a set of brushes and modifications for Gimp to make things easier when doing paintings in Gimp.

http://ramonmirandavisualart.blogspot.com/

Some weeks ago I did yet another chrome experiment for Instrument. In fact, it was a experiment I half started when I realised that with the css property -webkit-transform (and MozTransform) I could scale elements. So I ported my basic 3D engine to Javascript and I got it working in a few hours. But in the end I didn't finish that one.

So for this "second phase" I finished it, but this time using Google Image API. The end result looks like this:



Realtime version: Google Sphere.

Once I had this one done I got totally addicted to Javascript and wondered what else could I try. I have to say that the fact of being able to change the code from anywhere without having to recompile anything is priceless. I keep modifying the Google Sphere every week whenever I find new Javascript tricks, and to improve the movements a bit. The first iteration of the experiment used jsTween but found some problems with it (I actually don't remember what were the problems) and luckily I found JSTweener which with some modifications performed flawlessly.

Then I though about my good old DOF experiment with Papervision3D, and though how could achieve the same effect with Javascript. The trick is background offset. Just check this image and you'll understand :)

While working on this one I really missed the Hi-ReS! Stats because at the beginning it was going a bit slow with only 100 balls. So I ported the Stats to Javascript and thanks to this I ended up having 300 balls runing quite decently. This is how it looks like:



Realtime version: Depth of Field, 100% Javascript (debug).

Of course, you'll need Google Chrome (win/linux/mac) to see all this in full glory.

So, apparently, Javascript is able to move a bunch of pixels these days. Next thing will be to render a actual polygon.

PS: Should I say that the sources are available? ;)

I could watch this site for hours.

Some weeks ago Vectorpark released a incredibly cute little game called Windosill. At first you had to download the game and play it on the desktop, paying $3 to play the second half of the game. Which I happily paid as I'm a big fan of this guy.

Now the game can be played online. It's one of those games with not too hard puzzles that make you feel good (aka clever) at the end of every stage. Also, technically, there are so many thing I don't know how were done. There is still magic on the flash world :)

What are you still reading this? You should be playing the game already.

EDIT: As vectorpark himself pointed out on the comments, for the online version it's still $3 to play the second part, it didn't pop up at me because I already paid for the desktop version. Anyway, it's well worth it!

Composed for the escena.org renoise 2 competition #2

Download the renoise file