General update on the current state of my life

Hello everyone!

Thought I'd give something of a general overview of my current October "2016" (but is it really, etc.). Life updates are something I'm really, really bad at, and I thought it would be nice if I didn't just have 140 characters or a broken platform to play with. Not that Google isn't a total joke.

Maybe I'll move this blog over to my real website, which uses Let's Encrypt, which is a free SSL certificate vendor, and offers an automatic client to refresh (since oddly it only gives 3-month certificates).

Job hunting is sour. I had really hoped to be able to carry on getting people to contract me to make websites but I haven't had anything for going on 7 weeks now (gosh, I sound like a mother telling you the age of her child). My usual contract profession is that I build websites for people at home (If you happen to know anyone who needs it, please get in touch), but I am also an avid musician who plays the guitar and keyboard mostly, and am interested in perhaps joining a local band.

I'm making a plethora of new software (mainly because I like coding and I'm often bored, see my GitHub). I was inspired by Matt Parker in his video about letter to number relationships, so I tried to build something automated to see if I could find more. I do love maths and have made a bunch of programs to do a few maths-y things (here are some more!). I've even got myself onto the Online Encyclopædia of Integer Sequences (twice!), and made a Node.js library for accessing it.

A few things I've made that I'm particularly proud of are Project Chaplin (edit 2021: archived) (code) the first free software video sharing website, a half finished social network manager, an automated Apache vhost manager, a clever command-line Omegle client, the beginnings of a first person shooter, with its inspiration in a set of software-rendered demos. I have also made a DeviantArt and Pinterest photo scraper, and had yet another thought about how universal packages should be built.

A few more toys (I wouldn't call them big projects) I've created are a dumb wordoid generator, a Pastafarian finite state machine, a program to play cricket with the input stream to teach me a bit of C++, a few spacey gravity simulators, an equation-based synthesiser, a webcam-based tone generator, a third-party Jamendo audio player, and even a edit: 16, 32 and 64-bit OS, to teach me assembler and C.

Although hardly started, I seem to love gamepads so much, I made something that looks almost like a game (with free pictures taken from the Internet) that basically does nothing but allow you to test a gamepad.

On the useful scale, I decided I wanted to see how up-to-date a few popular GNU/Linux distributions were, so I made a little tool to find out. I might extend it with something or add automation later.

In the future, I will probably re-make my static silly Linux-based distribution into something more sensible (stay tuned), make something to do fun things with Wolfram Alpha (I haven't decided what yet), and make an automatic web page categoriser based on string matching of page structure, as I did when I used to work for an analytics platform.

Entertainment-wise, I finished marathoning most of the Star Trek (all series) episodes ever. I thought that series 3 of Enterprise was total gobshite. 4 was alright though.

I'm marathoning Doctor Who. It's fantastic stuff, I haven't yet gotten past the lost episodes, but there are plenty of clever reconstructions from photos, occasional surviving clips and the existing (I think?) audio. At least it sounds like the real Doctor (I've gotten up to Troughton, if you're interested). Maybe he's got an impersonator? Who knows.

I play computer games more than usual (which I know is an important life skill). My favourite at the moment is Skyrim. Let me know if you want more on that.

I research my family history. I've gone back about 500 years, I'm sure I could even find you. I use Ancestry for that kind of thing and have almost 1000 people in my tree. It's very interesting to me and one discovers pretty crazy things about one's own heritage!

I'm going to see if I can blog a bit more, as it gives me a bit of free reign. Maybe I should do regular segments like discoveries of the week. Yes, I'm definitely a podcast. In fact, I'd rather like to do a tech-related podcast with someone. Any takers?

Ta-ta.

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Features I'd like to see in Sauerbraten

Permalink | Author: Dan Dart | Published: 2010-02-08 00:38:00 UTC | Tags: 3d games linux mac os x open opengl sauerbraten windows

I love the game Sauerbraten. But I can think of lots of ways I think it could be improved. I'll of course try to help this happen, and might update this list (and add suggestions!).

Proper gravity (including flying objects, perhaps toggle gravity of objects)
Fire hurts
Gunge/Poison
Circles/spheres easy creation
Saving of objects/big stuff for later
Admin coop AKA Play God - in which only the master can use editmode - great fun for "playing god" and wreaking havoc when no one else can.
Heightmaps in multiplayer (H key)
Breath (eg you die underwater after a while, like in Quake)
More ambient soundtracks, ambient noises.
Button triggers (eg you press or shoot something and something happens).
Proper doors that open or swing
Moving objects (automatic or manual via button/trigger) - eg trains.
Large walls of teleport material, for e.g. trains, yourselves.
Materials that change to others after a certain time, e.g. noclip slowly to air
Door keys
Liquid viscosity
No glitching when you try to put a hole in a pyramid
More human models
Gun reloading sequences
Auto getmap/sendmap (Getmap when you join, sendmap when someone else joins)
Master newmap restriction
Grappling hook
Item capture - person who captures most items without being killed wins.
Marks on walls from chainsaw
Flamethrower
Gravity gun
Physics gun
Time/space warping (global/local/gun) (haha)
Shield/Disarming field
Turrets
Vehicles
Flammable items/materials (e.g. wood) with degrading.
M/F Voices (inc. player), not just "captured" but also "lacerated" etc.
Female models?
Customisable music
Panic mode (Fuzzy/red view when player has too much adrenaline)

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Unknown (URL) said on 2010-07-19T16:23:24.239Z:

burning things and vehicles can be realized/simulated by scaling flames. In Sauerbraten you can change colours and scale of particles, including flames by pressing PERIOD. the door script isnt so difficult . If game mode is singleplayer it can be done by pressing ESC/options/ents/trigger and choosing the right triggers for switch and door. So it can be realized for examplethat a door opens if you walk towards it. But i miss some other things in sauerbraten,too: - *.tga as a texture file -breakabe things, e.g. glass -triggers for cubes and not only mapmodels (define a number of cubes as a model..) -more trigger options: ×trigger move(move sth to a position when u go through trigger) ×trigger movie (yes, I think, then a story will be created) ×trigger hurt(i dont like it to be death immedatley) ×trigger say(a text is displayed on screen when walking through it(e.g. for map-tutorials or quests)) ×ladderclip(i know that ladders are possible, but clip is better) -smaller grid(yes, i like to have very detailed things) -better gameplay(reloading nessecary, not so high jumps, not so fast running, more weapons, crouching instead of having small playermodels -monsters in Mp(all players fight together against monsters) -vis optimizing(you don't load what u don't see) -teleports/jumppads without sound(or custom sound) -... I think n general that triggers like doors should be realized with material(like clip,lava and so one)so that the trigger shows which cubes/objects should be the action of the trigger So you dont have to create own models( and animations(difficult)

Unknown (URL) said on 2010-02-24T14:18:16.006Z:

for fire hurting just add the death material over the fire a few of the things that you want are already in there they are just single player exclusively. there are buttons and triggers in sp. for how to make one check out the sauerbraten docs that came with the game. (its under the mapmodal entrie in the editing reference). the doors opening thing is just because no one has made a modal with an animation that swings. you can achieve the telewall by making teleports with the tag /newent teleport [the teledest number] -1, this creates an invisable teleport of which you can create mutiple to cover said wall with. moving objects are also only in sp. use the ent type elevator to go up/down and the type platform to go any other direction. for door keys you just need to setup a script for your map that requires you to get one trigger before the other will do anything. (im a little weak on cubescript but ive seen it done) the rest would make awesome additions to the game (burning things and vehicles would be my favorites here)

General update on the current state of my life

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Features I'd like to see in Sauerbraten

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