Feeling that I felt better.

It is nearly 5 am and I have spent literally hours working on Unity. I am revisiting an older game I made that was fully working bar some bells and whistles. Well I am revisiting the idea but building a while new game. There were alot of things that I did not like about the other game I made. The graphics sucked. Sound sucked. Movement sucked. Amount of game play sucked. But you know what did not suck? It was a working game. It worked! You could fly around the level. Collect coins. Have a timer that timed your lap. Then I speed working on it for some reason, I have no idea. Me stopping working on it, THAT sucked. Then the version of unity that I was making the game on got updated and my game got kinda busted up. So I loaded a new version of unity and I have begun a new game from the ground up.

Uhhhh. That also sucks.

Or at least at almost 5 am as I said. Now I have begun working on a new game. I can make a block move around the place which is 101 really. I got Wyck with loads of things I feel I should know at this point. Uhhhh.

Everything might seem better tomorrow. 

So my wife is like...

Something that bothers my wife is when I keep on interrupting her say "Hey Linda look at this! Look at this... hey Linda look at this..."

Wait I have made this too personal...

I have this friend, he has a wife and when he is trying to tell her something that he thinks is interesting he is like "hey linda... Martha, I have set up Google Adsense."

And she is like "aahahahahahahhahaha I am a dragon...."

And I am like... "ohh I will be your Khaleesi". Then we smile and everything is okay. Oh wait, I mean that I am sure this friends wife looks at him and that everything is okay.

(but she corrects all my spelling first)

And she is like "hahahahahahahha I am a dragon!" and on we they go...

Next doors dog...

It's pouring rain. It's cold and damp and miserable. It is nearing the end of October and the sky is already beginning to darken and it is only half five. An outdoor event, a Zombie walk, that I was meant to go to tonight has been cancelled because of the oncoming horrible windy wet weather that is promised tonight. I am sitting in my car staring at a poor dog that is sitting patiently in the muddy filthy field next door that boarders the fence of my driveway. The poor thing, he or she is waiting for me to come out of the car. In her mind I guess she is thinking I might feed her this time. Or I might talk to her this time. Or I might, and I am sure that this would be the best thing of all, I might play with her. Interact with her and treat her like a living being. Of course I never do any of these. I never interact with the poor what so ever. It is only a dog. An animal that is chained up outside a house, lonely, wet and probably pretty cold. It is bitterly cold this evening so I run into my house and glance at the poor canine one last time for the evening. She is standing up expectantly in the field, gleefully gazing at me, her tail wagging.

Good article on the death of the universe...

...spoiler alert. We are not going to die for billions of years.

http://www.sciencealert.com/don-t-panic-but-the-universe-is-slowly-dying

3 old counter strike maps

I just came across three old Counter Strike Source maps that I made. Sadly there is actually a 4th but it is not working, and i was really looking forward to seeing it working, but what do you do. It is a bummer. I am going to record me playing them, and well load them up on YouTube of course. Can't wait.

Making A Game! - Part 2

So today I went over to a friends house and we looked at some Unity 5 stuff. I have made a main menu screen that is going to go with the main game that another person has made. More on that later on in the weeks to follow. I am looking forward to this other person to finish the bit he is working on so that I can finally just something on the Google Play Store at last. It will cost $25... around €20 I think.

So on my own game, the teddy bear game I think that I have a clearer picture of what I want to do. It is becoming clearer in my mind what has to happen. I must do some drawings and post them up here so we can see if my vision right now matches the finished version.

In Unity 5 there are sample bits of code available in the form of Sample Projects. One of them is a side scroller. I will have a look carefully at the code and simply copy as much as I possibly can. My aim here is not to reinvent the wheel at all, or to come up with beautiful code at all. No, my aim is to make a game, get it out there. If things go as planned with my friend that I am working with, I should have that game up on the Google Play store in around 2 weeks.

That would be progress.

Making A Game! - Part 1

I am going to make a game in Unity, a simple game. Really simple! I have to have something done and finished. I will make this game on the PC only, I am not worried about phone or pads or Linux or anything. I will get it finished on my PC.

AND I will set a time limit. Lets say... 2 weeks? That is reasonable. Two weeks. So today is the 2 June 2015. I have to have it finished on 16 June.

How many parts will be in this? I do not know but I do know what I want to from the game and they are as follows:

1. Game must have at least 3 levels. Why? Well it will give me practice moving from one level to the other and there is a whole progression etc etc for the player. 
2. Game must have pretty graphics... but all graphics that I have made myself. Why? This will give me practice in using blender. 
3. Game must have sound... like various well placed sounds and a sound track. I am not doing this myself, why? Because working with sound is a whole other thing. For this thing I have a person who is going to help me, even if he does know it! (ahem brother in law Mark Smith). I will also use the plethora of websites out there that offer free sound mp3's. 
4. Game must have some kind of story, you have to care about what is happening in the game! I am not even going to ask why in this one. It is obvious. 

So the question is now, what kinda game will I make? A vertical side scrolled? A top down game? A first person shooter? A car racing game? If I do not pick out the type of game I want to make literally nothing will happen. I like the whole side scroller idea. Wouldn't it be cute if I had a teddy bear trying to get home! Fantastic! It is cute, touching (who hasn't loved and lost a teddy bear) and there is definitely a story there. 

Okay, side scrolling teddy bear adventure it is then... 

My Arduino

A few days ago I bought myself an Arduino. When I say myself, it is because I like the idea of it being my personal toy. I don't really want to talk to other people about it. Well for now anyway. The reason for this is that for the lay person I could tell them "so today I wrote my first Arduino program on my own and I got an LED to flash on and off - one second on and one second off".

If you know a little about electronics and a little bit about programming you might say "well done!", but if you know nothing about the whole thing you simply might not find it interesting. So I have learnt after years and years, don't go blabbing on about things that I find interesting to other people that might not find it interesting. If you are interested then, get a cup and tea my friend and sit down and lets discuss some Arduino!

This is the very simply little program that turns on my LED and then one second later turns it off, and then one second later turns it on... and then... you know one second later turns it off. It is an infinite loop actually so this could go on for a while!

Arduino coding environment. Simple and clean.

and this is the result. Look at that little baby shine! :)

This is my little Arduino Uno board. 

What do I want?

Wow 4 words.

What do I want? I was listening to a motivational video today on youtube. One of the things that the totally positive voice asked was what I wanted.

"What do you want?" he said. And then I realized I do not know. What exactly do I want? My god. I actually do not know. Sure I want the rest of the things that everyone else wants. I want to be better looking, fitter, I want my kids to be healthy, my wife to be healthy and all of them to be happy. I want food on the table. I want to do well in my job. I want a better car. I want all my friends and family to be happy and healthy.

But then yeah. Of course I do! What am I going to want? A worse car? My friends to be less happy and healthy... of course not. So it is one of those things that I realize I simply say. But am I going to be happy with all this? I can only control the world so much and I can only control the fate of my friends and family so much. So the real question is... what do I want?

And then... Why am I not chasing what I want? Why am I not dreaming of what I want?

What am I going to do about all this? Where is my hard work? Where can I fail at so that I can learn from that thing? But this is the first step... I have realized this. I am standing still.

I am moving again.

Homemade soup recipe.

Today I made a soup and everyone liked it! What is even more surprising is that I made it in a blind panic because Sophie and Lucy were in the other room playing Minecraft and I wanted to join them as soon as possible.

This is our basil plant.. we named it Fawlty :)

So anyway, here are the ingredients of the soup:

• 1.7 litres of boiling water.
• 2 Knorr vegetable stock pot. 
• 7 large carrots
• 6 small potatoes
• 1 full courgette.
• 2 cloves of garlic (fried on the pan first)
• 2 peppers (bell peppers?). A green and red one for the record.
• 1/2 of one leak.

You will need also:

• Cream (or double cream).
• Basil (we grow our own! la de da!)

I had boiled the kettle before hand, so there was a full kettle in there, so thats like 1.5 litres right? I had put that in a big enough pot and turned on the heat to being it to the boil as quick as possible. I threw all of the ingredients into the pot. There was not order, no letting one thing go in before the other. I just want to get everything ready to blend.

When it had boiled to the point where everything was soft enough to easily cut a knife through everything I blended the whole lot.Because there was not too much water in it, the soup had a nice thick consistency.

We chopped up some basil leaves. Put in some cream and sprinkled the finely diced basil on top.

We all two bowls :) And all from a stone! 

Learning Guitar - Again...

Ouch Ouch Ouch Ouch Ouch

That is what the tips of my fingers on my left hand feel like. I spent a few moments cranking out Kenny Rogers' Lucille. What made me finish however was not the fact that I had the song perfect, but rather that my finger tips felt like I had held them over a candle flame too long and the instant searing pain has attacked and killed my will to do anything else with the strings. I used to be able to play a few songs on our guitar but I kinda stopped practicing all together for some reason. Why do people do that?

Ouch Ouch

So now with my thumb I rub my fingers... it feels as if I am touching someone else's fingers. I can barely get any sensation from them.

So what does all this tell me? Yep, I am doing it just about right. Roll on tomorrows lesson.

Ouch!

Google to big to fail?

I did something today that I found very interesting. Interesting to me I am sure, but I do measure by bemusement against my own experiences and expectations and now against what others might generally accept.

Having recovered from an operation I am well enough now to only need be seen by the fine doctors that saw to me twice a year. So last Friday I set the appointment for 6 months hence. Today I got the letter, proving that the top heavy administration that is crippling our healthcare system is at least doing its job.

Then I set about the task of reminding myself. This is where my fascination set in. I was about to set my appointment in Google Calendar. Six months time. Interesting really isn't it. I had conversation about a week ago about a company that is too big to fail. Funnily, I can't even remember what I argued! Did I argue that Google is too big to fail? Or did I argue that Google was bound to eventually fall from grace like every other big company before it, lets face it - Microsoft is not what is once was. Apple fell and came back - but it fell. IBM once owned the market. Dell had a good byte (lols) of the cherry. But all these companies are clearly still here. What about Commodore, Atari, Amstrad.

Now someone could come back at me with every example I give and argue the toss. Excellent go on.

But think also of Yahoo! who fell (big time) and is back. Blackberry, Nokia. There clearly are examples of what I am talking about. And this is why it is good what I can't remember what I argued. It makes the conversation objective. It helps me remember that a lot of big, and I am really only talking about the BIG companies here, do at least fall. And when they fall the next giant either fumbles or falls strategically into its place.

The interesting example here is IBM who lost their superpower status to Microsoft in the eighties with the operating system wars and Yahoo who lost their superpower status to Google in the search market in the 90's.

All things come and go, all things. Period. Everything is in a constant state of flux. Mountains, time, physics, even Google. So when will Google change, and how suddenly and how much and for how long? Well, I hope they around for the next six months so I can remember my appointment!

:)

Ubuntu Linux and my family

We have a Dell laptop... a Latitude E5420. It has a regular hard drive in it, that is, platters, slowness, not being an SSD (Solid Sate Drive). It was good in its day, and is by all mean still a great laptop it needed a rebuild. I wanted to make a dedicated laptop espiceally for the television, you know for things like Steam TV, Netflix, Youtube etc. A million reasons exist why I would want a good laptop plugged up with a HMDI cable to our TV.

Now on purpose I have NOT researched Linux. I say this because there are two other huge parameters the family laptop beside the TV has to meet. It HAS to be able to very easily play movies. This will be done with previously mentioned Netflix, but it also has to be able to torrent films! We torrent alot of stuff. So I have to be able to look up a torrent, download it, and watch it - easily. Very very easily. I have done this on my phone yesterday. On my Samsung S5 I torrented an episode of Modern Family on my mobile phone. It was extremely handy and clear and obvious what I had to do.

The second parameter that the Ubuntu Linux laptop has to meet is to be able to play Minecraft! Not some older hacked version that is made to fix Linux, I mean version 8.2 comes out on the PC (Windows) and I want to be able to play it straight away. It would also be great if I could play Minecraft on the little LAN my kids set up on the two Windows 7 computers and be a third computer, but Linux.

So why did I not research any of this, I could have of course, but if Linux is going to be taken seriously but the average home user it simply has to be able to do everything that Windows can do.

So here I go.... first step is to get a laptop that I will install Linux onto. As I said, I have a Latitude E5420 but I also had a 60 gigabyte SSD hard drive laying around. So I installed the hard drive instead of the regular one that was in Dell in the first place, albeit the HD in the Dell was around 160 gig I think, basically, I am loosing alot of real estate.

So I downloaded a program from http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/#button and that will make an installer for me so I can make my USB stick into a bootable device.

I don't know what a persistent file size is so I left it alone

Still learning Git, but getting there

Ahh git! It is strangely nice to get something working in computers. Git is one of them. Still slowly getting my head around it.

Share and share alike...

Gordon Gekko said "The point is ladies and gentlemen that greed, for lack of a better word, is good". So all my life, well the last 20 years anyway, I have always wanted to deal in shares. Not that I wanted to become Gordon Gekko. I just know that there is money out there. Floating around. I believe that all I have to do is reach out and take it. Money is a flowing river, I just wanted to have a drink. 

Greed is good.

So I think I am going to do that now. I am by no means going to jump into the river. I don't have enough money to dive into the river.

So in that light I have got two stock exchange emails. One is Goodbody Stockbrokers and the other is Davy Stockbrokers. I am going to look into the whole thing and see if I can make money. I should be able to in theory. The problem is that there is a fee on transactions usually. So if I buy 100 shares "Company X" @ 1.50 a share then my shares will cost me:

100 * 1.50 is 150 euro. 

So lets say that the shares gains some value. It gains .04 cent so now my shares are worth 1.54 euro. 

100 * 1.54 is 154 euro. 

Great I have just made 4 euro. 

But now for the trading fees. Hmm, if the trading fees are 15 euro, then I have just lost 11 euro. Great. However, lets say I bought 1000 shares of Company X.

1000 * 1.50 is 1500 euro. 

So lets say that the shares gains some value. It gains .04 cent so now my shares are worth 1.54 euro. 

1000 * 1.54 is 1540 euro. 

Great I have just made 40 euro! So okay, lets say that I have my 15 euro fees, I have just made 25 euro. So that is the secret. If I have a trickle of water it will barely move a leaf sitting aloft its meager course. But if I have a gushing river I have move mountains with it. Money is a force. Money is alot of things. but when it comes to shares and if you want to have alot of money, you have to MOVE it. Force it. Work it. 

The Pretty Reckless

So I am starting to work more and more at the computer, and when I sit down to work properly I usually get something done.

The Pretty Reckless - Good to drown the world out to. 

But the best way to work is to block out the rest of the world, put on my Hesh 2 Skullcandy headphones and look for some music on Youtube.

I started listening to this band called The Pretty Reckless. I like them, nice to listen to. The chick on vocals is nice and screamy. That is all I look for in music sometimes.

The morning after git.

It was something like 4am when I went to bed last night and then I had to get up this morning and take my daughter to mass. I ended up getting around 5 hours sleep. I am not complaining at all however. It was cool working out how git worked.

So this morning I sat down to my computer and looked over what I had done last night (becuase you know the way it is, last night it seemed brilliant but in the cold light of day and what have you). It turns out that I had not done everything correctly. One of the repositories were working perfect but the repository for my Oscars 2015 website was not.

It turned out that when I was setting up the repository that I navigated to C:/wamp/www/oscars and then told git to start there and I named the repository OscarWebsite. I was meant to have navigated to c:/wamp/www and then named the repository oscars and then git would realize that the directory was already there and would add its gitignore and gitattributes files there.

So I did that and boom, the whole thing works. I needed git to simply accept that the folder already existed because I use the c:/wamp/www folder setup for wamp.  Wamp creates a web server on your computer and you can use it to test code as you go.

It is all brilliant, and of course...

all free!

Git Hub

So I created a git account today.

No, I created a git account long time ago, years ago to be precise. However it is today that I have actually used git in any meaningful way at all which makes me personally think that it is today that I have FIRST used git.

ergo... I might as well have just set it up for the first time today.

Github - where I plan on making a lot of mistakes, safely!

I was a long day today, we were in Galway nice and early, did some shopping with the kids, looked at Tinkerbell and the legend of the Neverbeast. Then had food in Milanos. Now, wow, did we have food in Milanos. I got a calzone. My god it was goooood.

Seriously tasty. When it was finished I was thinking that I could have easily eaten another one. But when around 5 minutes was gone I was feeling satisfied.

But what does this all have to do with git. Nothing of course, just thought I would tell ya'll about that tasty pizza. So git. I am working on a little project with a friend. It is a game that we will eventually put up on the google Play store for free. But I want to be able to work on certain aspect of the game while my friend is doing his part of the game. Now we could email files together definitely but why bother. I have git.

I have a copy of the games project on my computer. I also, through git have a replica on github.com. This service is, like most of the best things on the Internet, free. So if my friend want to get a file that i have in the project all he needs to do is copy the file down from git and upload it again when he is finished. To tell the truth I do not know how he is going to upload it exactly when he is finished but I presume that it is not all a one way traffic system. I might have to give him some admin privileges or something.

I have just realised that I have run out of info on git now actually, I will keep you posted on my git knowledge as the game goes on and we delete and remove files and all other things by mistake.

Talk later.