Global Game Jam 2012
Global game Jam was held at Napier University for Edinburgh this year. I took part with one of my friends, Tom Joyce. We had previously taken part in a game jam before. The theme for the 48h game development event was a picture of a snake eating its tail laid out in a circle.
Our interpretation for the theme was the circle of life, but we also took more literal elements in the form of snake poison. Our game celled Apoptosis (official term for the cellular mechanism of programmed cell suicide) follows the journey of a poison acting on a body, at the cellular level (level 1), the arterial level (level 2) and organs (level 3). Hacklab is kindly hosting it here (Chrome recommended).
Ubuntu HUD
Ubuntu has a new feature for the unity desktop, you can “search” for commands in menus of (seemingly) legacy apps and across programs. It creates a really cool console way of interacting with GUI programs. This is better than windows’ search the start menu for programs which I also like a lot. Damn, the HUD looks like it could be better than tab completion, or browser address boxes that Google search! Apparently its planned to take voice commands too… woo!
(annoyingly Robot Operating System is not supported on the latest version of Ubuntu though 
need another LTR quick!!! ) Ubuntu HUD
RaspberryPi prototyping board
Its nearly RaspberryPi time!! I am excited. John Alexander of Shropshire Linux User Group has been developing a breakout board for it.
“This may be of interest to folks in Edinburgh. It’s the first revision of our prototyping board for the RaspberryPI .
All the best John”
Learn to program – Code Year
Computers are the most flexible tool in the engineers toolbox. When I grew up I think I was lucky to be born into the start of the home computer boom of the 80s. Computers like the BBC micro and spectrum were very easy to program, and because computers were so novel, our expectations of what could be achieved were easily within the reach of single programmer. Now were in the millennium, and PCs do so much more, the methods we use to program them are much more complicated. Learning to program has become very difficult on standard computing kit found in the home. So how should the next generation learn how to program?
-
Hacklab status: OPEN!
