Congratulations to the Cincinnati Reds and the Chicago White Sox, who have defeated the Pirates and Yankees respectively, to advance to the World Series in this, the strangest Divergent League season yet.
That means the World Series starts Tuesday, October 6th, and 4:30pm. Join us live for every game on https://divergentleague.com/tv
Having run the $1,350,000 campaign for OpenCV AI Kit, I am now stepping away from that project while they focus on computer vision development, manufacturing and fulfillment. They’ve got a big job ahead of them and I wish them the best of luck.
This means I’m available for freelance again, after several months of that project taking all my time.
My dance card is filling up rapidly, I guess that happens when you raise a million dollars, but I still have space for projects in the realm of 1-2 weeks of work. If you need video production and editing, voiceovers, UI/UX design, web development and infrastructure consulting, or have some other wacky idea- hit me up by emailing phil @ this domain name.
I haven’t talked about much about Divergent League (What is Divergent League?), the atemporal fantasy sports thing I run, here. My Patreon is usually kept up to date, but let’s get some cross-posting going on. Marketing 101.
The 1977 postseason has begun, and the White Sox, Yankees, Reds, and Pirates are vying for the coveted Bip Roberts Memorial Cup Even Though He’s Still Alive. We’re streaming games live every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday at 3:30pm PDT on Twitch. Join us!
6,564 backers pledged $1,358,318 to close out the OAK campaign at just a little over the pledge total of the other massive 3D sensor campaign I worked on in 2015… and 2x the number of backers.
For the last several months I’ve been helping OpenCV ready their biggest launch ever, and today it’s here. The OpenCV AI Kit is now available on Kickstarter.
A Spatial AI platform so small, it’s going to be huge.
The best press mention so far has been Devin Coldewey’s piece for TechCrunch: OpenCV AI Kit aims to do for computer vision what Raspberry Pi did for hobbyist hardware
The campaign has been up for a little over 4 hours, and we’ve passed 500 backers, smashed our goal, and are about to cross the $100,000 mark.
The last month or so I’ve been working with a new computer vision / AI startup, Luxonis. megaAI is the first project we’ve worked on together. I named it, designed the logo, wrote a lot of the copy, and wrote/shot/edited/narrated the launched video. It’s a tiny but powerful camera built for Raspberry Pi and other embedded / low power situations.
Get one: You can get your own megaAI on CrowdSupply right now for $169.
I’ve been laid off by Occipital after 7 years and 2 months of 8:30am to 6:30pm days. I didn’t see it coming and it genuinely hurts. I’ve got a little money, but not much. Until the next thing comes around, let’s do some of the stuff we used to:
You can find me streaming RimWorld, Fire Pro, and other stuff on Twitch
I’m still posting too much on Twitter
If you’d like to help me directly, you can join my Patreon for a buck and help me pay my rent / eat food while I work on my indie games, apps, etc.
You can, of course, also hire me to design beautiful, usable, apps, websites, and games for you. Hit me up on LinkedIn or send me an email.
Occipital has posted a new teaser video I worked on, .
This is the first big animated render I’ve ever produced and shown to the public, so far. It was created using Modo 13 on macOS, Final Cut Pro, and Compressor.
How do you make sure your annoying popup is shown on top of every other element in the page, when you don’t know how many there are, who wrote them, and how bad they wanted their elements to be on top? That’s when you set your z-index to 100, or maybe 999, or maybe, just maybe 99999 to be really sure yours will win.
That, at least, is how I write my CSS. In the rest of this post, we will look at millions of z indices to see what everyone else does.
Of course, if you make websites for a living you’ll find this interesting. Like most things available here.
Catnip for the doomed gamer generation:
In 2010, an obsessed gamer designed the perfect game of Sim City. Achieved through a repeating pattern of clustered high rises, “Magnasanti” exposes the hellish consequences of top-down civic design. In his new documentary, John Wilson explores how New York City is creeping closer and closer to realizing this fictional metropolis.
Release 13 of my doomed video game project, Rassler, is now available for download. The dev log has more details:
First and most notably: The Rassler title screen and wrestler / territory select screens have music now! I made it. It’s probably fine? I also created and added a little punch sound effect when you start a new game. You can stream / download the new theme on SoundCloud
Rassler is a pay-what-you-can game. Pay-what-you-can means you can download Rassler for free, or if you’ve got the money, you can buy it.
Works great with Love2d, and so I am using it in a new (surprise!) wrestling-based project.
Download: astray on github
Just in case you needed more reasons that Facebook is a morally corrupt drain on our entire society, Gizmodo went deep and forced FB to admit to this practice (after they denied it several times).
If you’re still working at Facebook…. why? Is the money that good?
Release 12 brings a snazzy new launch screen, and an new territory select/generation screen. We’re getting closer to have a fully tracked career, with persistent opponents and all.
More details are in the release notes. You can download it, or even buy it (if you can afford to do so) on the Rassler site.
Galencia, the 2017 Commodore 64 Game of the Year, is now available on Steam.
That’s right, a brand-new honest-to-goodness Commodore 64 game in all its 1980s glory ported to your PC (Mac coming soon). Full disclosure: Developer is a friend of my co-worker.
While looking for ways to activate the developer menus left over in Animal Crossing, including the NES emulator game selection menu, I found an interesting feature that exists in the original game that was always active, but never used by Nintendo. In addition to the NES/Famicom games that can be obtained in-game, it was possible to load new NES games from the memory card. I was also able to find a way to exploit this ROM loader to patch custom code and data into the game, allowing for code execution via the memory card.
Incredibly detailed and well-written article, goes super deep into reverse-engineering the technology.
Neat tool for drawing cutesy vector shapes:
Rough.js is a light weight (~9kB gzipped) graphics library that lets you draw in a sketchy, hand-drawn-like, style. The library defines primitives to draw lines, curves, arcs, polygons, circles, and ellipses. It also supports drawing SVG paths.
There’s a lot of nuance to this, too. For example, there are 5 distinct fill styles (hachure, solid, zigzag, cross-hatch, or dots) and it supports Web Workers with the optional Workly library.
Unnaturally tempted by this project, which has created a common platform for cartridge dumping w/ standard adapters for the major consoles. It auto-recognizes which type of cart you connect, too!
The Universal Mega Dumper (UMD) is a game catridge read/writer project designed around a Teensy++ microcontroller. The universality comes from the UMD’s ability to support many different types of catridge connectors by having general purpose 16 bit data and 24 bit address paths along with a dozen control signals – all of which can be customized for each game cartridge mode.
More on the project page.
In a post on MetaTalk, cortex lays it out for us. The site is currently running at about an $8,000/mo. The vast majority of their operating costs go to pay for kind, thoughtful, moderators and the folks who keep the servers running. If you can afford to support Metafilter, do it. The internet needs independent spaces like Metafilter.
Looks like a heck of a swiss-army-knife of a tool. It’s node-based, supports CoreML image classification and sorting, and yep… it supports AppleScript. FM’s suggestions for new use cases contain fun, weird, stuff like “Read an image from the clipboard, apply a drop shadow, and write it right back to the clipboard to paste into another app.”
Retrobatch is available as a 14 day free trial, and licenses start at $29.99. Props to Flying Meat for being one of those third-party Mac development houses that just keeps going.
Phil Nelson