Tag: Girl Versus Computer

Using tech skills for hobbyist stuff

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Before I started on the TechUP course, I was already into a lot of hobbyist tech stuff, as I’ve always found it interesting – and given that I spend pretty much my whole life in front of computer screens, I like to be able to solve problems myself when things don’t work as expected. This is part of the reason I jumped at the chance to do a proper software dev course.

Nevertheless, you would think that after five months of studying, I would be ready to run screaming away from tech stuff for a while. However, this is not at all the case. I am desperate to get back to my techy hobbies, as I’ve had absolutely no time to work on them for months! I won’t jump into anything with a deadline such as game comps and jams, as I do need a month or two off from *stress* after the course is finished, but I’m so excited to get back to playing with both hardware and software in a purely fun way – especially as I’m keen to utilise my new skills learnt on the course for some of my hobby projects.

This is also partly inspired by the fact that Dad arrived with some tools to revitalise my old dead laptop this morning (he and Mum are in town for his birthday today). Dad’s laptop-revitalising tools almost always consist of a Linux installation disk and a flash drive, and today was no exception. We were able to access my files as they were left when Windows stopped booting, so I have been able to back them up in their less jumbled state. This will be really helpful when getting everything properly organised on the new laptop.

I don’t need Windows on the old laptop any more, so once I’ve copied all my files, I’ll be installing Linux instead. However, I am developing quite a pile of old laptops upstairs with various builds of Linux put on them by Dad after they died as Windows machines, and I’m never going to need absolutely all of them as spare laptops. As such, I want to have a think about how they can be better repurposed. One of the many possibilities for the magical month of March (something I never thought I’d say about March) that will be here very soon.

All present and correct…

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…if not necessarily in the right order.

I had a bit of spare time today so I finished transferring all my files to my new laptop. It took a while to locate everything because I’ve been backing it up on various different external drives and USB sticks over the last few months and years, but I have now found it all. It’s all jumbled up and it’s going to take a long time to get it all organised, but at least it’s all there, so I won’t have lost anything if my old laptop does turn out to be unrecoverable!

I’m tempted to take this opportunity to reorganise everything completely. Maybe that’s what I’ll do post-TechUP.

Good hours and bad hours

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That is the way I think about coding and programming, generally. Good hours are hours where I know what I’m doing. Bad hours are more numerous, and generally feature lots of frustrating dead-end Googling to try and fix problems I’m having, meaning that I feel like I’m wasting my time to some extent.

We’re in the sharp end of the TechUP course, and I’m spending lots of bad hours trying to work out how to do things that I feel should be straightforward. This has mostly been caused by the laptop-hopping I’ve been doing over the last couple of weeks, as I’m having to keep reinstalling things and dealing with different computers’ idiosyncrasies. It doesn’t feel like time is on my side as a result.

Nevertheless, this current hour is a good hour, because all the problems I’ve been having with my work today have been solved. It’s nice to finish the day with no outstanding issues! It’s also an important part of the learning process, frustrating as it can be sometimes.

‘Moving day’

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Geth was able to pick up my new laptop on Friday. I’m spending the weekend setting it up and getting settled with it, which really does feel like moving house (I spend 90% of my waking life on my laptop so it sort of is where I ‘live’!). I’ve still not decided what to call it though.

I’ve got to the stage of my treatment course for Zombie Eye IV where I don’t have to take dilating eye drops anymore, so I’m looking forward to being able to enjoy the shiny new screen properly!

We muddled through somehow!

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It’s been another challenging week in our house – between our heavy loads of work/studying/running, the saga of my laptop replacement, dealing with Zombie Eye IV, and a bit of a shock yesterday when we received a letter telling us the company scheduled to do our front garden this year had gone bankrupt (resulting in us needing to find some way of getting our rather large deposit back), it has been extremely eventful and it feels like last weekend was months ago!

Other than a bit of admin relating to some of the above – and finding a parkrun near us that will actually be going ahead tomorrow morning – I expect I will be spending a lot of the weekend staring into space on the sofa. If I do find some energy from somewhere, I may try and get some of my less-taxing course modules done so that I’m not panicking so much at the end of February.

Tonight, though, I most definitely need a couple of hours of Not Doing Anything At AllTM!

RIP laptop

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My laptop has died. RIP Rio* (2017-2022). I spent all day today trying to recover it, but unfortunately it seems the situation was terminal. Despite its tendency to shut down suddenly without warning when I was in the middle of an important Word document, I will miss it and its quirks.

I am really glad I’m in the habit of backing up all my files to memory stick every night, meaning I didn’t lose anything important. Unfortunately, I am also the type of person who has approximately 1,537 tabs open at any one time in Chrome, all carefully organised into groups. I rely very heavily on the setup of these tabs as I’m always doing thousands of different things, and I have realised too late that on Rio I did not have Chrome set up to sync tabs to other devices. I will not make that mistake again.

Until I manage to get a new laptop, I will be on Geth’s spare one. He doesn’t use it much so hopefully it will hold out for the interim!

*It was named after the Duran Duran song. Obviously. Don’t know what I’ll call my next one!

One Last Thing…

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I released my newest text adventure game last night (and submitted it to the Adventuron game jam, making it four Adventuron jams in a row for which I have managed to cobble together a game!). I’ve put a lot of work into this one over the last month, so I’m really pleased that it’s all finished and out there in the world at last.

One Last Thing...
Adventuron version.

The main reason that this game required quite a bit of extra work was that I accepted the optional jam challenge of porting the Adventuron game to Spectrum +3 and Spectrum Next using DAAD Ready (I talked about this process at length in the video I linked to in my Barry Basic post the other day). The DAAD conversion process works really well, but there are a few things that come up slightly differently in the Spectrum port and so they needed to be tweaked and refined to make sure that they worked in the same way across the versions. There’s still a bit of improvement that could be made to the ported versions, but I’m happy enough with them for now.

One Last Thing...
Spectrum Next version.

I also made two sets of graphics – one for the Adventuron and Spectrum Next versions, and one Spectrum-compatible set for the Spectrum +3 version. The Spectrum-compatible graphics were a lot of fun to make, but I’m going to need a lot more practice in that style before I do another +3 port! The Adventuron/Next graphics, meanwhile, are probably my favourites that I’ve made yet – I used the hept32 palette suggested in the jam rules, rather than just picking random colours like I usually do, and I think it’s made everything look a lot nicer and more pulled-together.

One Last Thing...
Spectrum +3 version.

For the actual game and story, I tried to keep everything fairly short and simple, as I knew there wouldn’t be much memory space when porting to Spectrum +3 (as it happened, I did have to sacrifice one graphical change in a location on the +3 version because the original amount of graphics was too much for the conversion!). I decided on my setting (a single five-room building) for this reason, but I ended up making a short prequel* to the game I originally planned out, as the first game plan was getting a bit too big.**

* It’s also a sequel to my first game from last year, The Cave of Hoarding. It’s complicated.
** This always happens. The only time I actually made the game that I originally planned (Hallowe’en: Night of the Misty Manor), it ended up being 10,000 lines of code and required a lot of all-nighters in the week leading up to the jam deadline. At least it means I’ve got a lot of semi-finished games that I can work on in my own time!

After making a fairly contained game (albeit with a lot of interesting complications), I am quite keen to do a project with a big, sprawling map again. However, I am going to take a few days (at least) off from game creation – apart from anything else, I want to play all the other jam entries now!

Pulling everything together

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I went out for my four-mile midweek run this morning…

…and it was a bit of a struggle to force myself out of the door! I need to do nine miles on Sunday, and I’m already slightly dreading it… it’s just one of those weeks where I’m lacking a bit of running motivation. One day at a time, like everything else.

My game is really getting into the final stages now. I got the second set of graphics implemented today (they were a lot more straightforward than the first set!) and have started to sort out the final non-8-bit touches for the Adventuron version of the game, as well as the eventual presentation aspects such as the Itch page design. Hoping to run it past my first playtester (i.e. Geth) tomorrow evening!

The laptop stack did not pull its weight as planned today – laptop number one turned out to be about six Linux versions out of date and needs a complete reinstall, while laptop number two needs a day or so to recharge its battery. Laptop number three is tiny and struggles to do anything complicated, so I don’t think it could manage more than a small test game in an Adventuron editor (if that), and laptop number four is still on Windows 7, so I wouldn’t want to connect it to the web (it’s another one that needs overhauling with Linux). Hopefully number two will be ready to go tomorrow! I need to remember to plug them all in for a recharge every so often…

Just a short run again tomorrow, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a productive game creation day 🙂

Pixel calendar
Something different today – this graphic is from a mini side project that I’ll hopefully be able to update you about tomorrow.

Today’s earworm playlist:

Nobuo Uematsu – ‘Chaos Shrine’
Spandau Ballet – ‘Gold’
Regard – ‘Ride It’

Cleaner, cosier, comfier

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Just a mile for this morning’s run…

…as I had various other things to do. Looking forward to some longer runs later in the week.

It was a bit of an odd weekend as I was trying to keep myself from feeling too down about the fact that if not for the coronavirus situation, I would have been in London running the marathon. By and large, I managed to distract myself with videogames, and I did a couple of short, fast runs to test out my pace a bit. I also spent most of yesterday trying to solve technical issues, as our SteamLink box was playing up again. I’ve told Geth that we have to keep an eye on it by turning it on every day, which provides lots of excuses for videogaming this week!

I’ve also managed to get a really good clean of the house done. I’d been neglecting it a bit, because I usually base my cleaning schedule around when we’re expecting company… and obviously we’ve not had any recently. However, I’ve spent the last couple of days getting on with it, and the house feels a lot nicer now.

I’ve got a small amount of day job work lined up for this week, which is great, and I’ve got several more housework-type tasks to get on with as well. I also want to finish my graphics for my next adventure game before the end of Camp NaNo on Thursday, so I’ve got plenty things to be getting on with! It’s nice, though, because it provides a bit of structure to the day. I’d obviously love it if I could just sit and play videogames the whole time, but I think I’d probably lose track of days and nights as a result! Oh, for those student summers when I’d regularly be playing until 7am and it didn’t matter…

I’m still getting a good few hours in every evening though, and I find I’ve got time for lots of reading and TV-watching too, so if I ignore the general world situation, life is quite relaxed at the moment!

Tikiboo Run London tights
Yesterday, I wore what should have been my race kit. I’m looking forward to taking these special London-themed Tikiboos out for some longer runs to make sure that they will hold up during the marathon.

Today’s earworm playlist:

Tomohito Nishiura – ‘Froenborg’
Yasunori Mitsuda – ‘Elysium, In The Blue Sky’
Abba – ‘I Have A Dream’

Technical difficulties

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I went for a slower recovery run today…

…because I did a longer run yesterday, and am planning to do another one tomorrow, so I needed a sort-of ‘rest’ day today. It was really sunny, and the blossom round here is beautiful at the moment, so I stopped to take a lot of pictures.

I’ve spent most of today updating my gaming PC and trying to set up the SteamLink Hardware that my friend Sharpy got me as a birthday gift a few years back. We’ve just about got it working but not quite – we need an extra keyboard and mouse so that the PC doesn’t get disgruntled about its lack of input controls while we’re using the peripherals for the SteamLink box. Geth has ordered a set to be delivered tomorrow (he is extremely keen to play XCOM 2 on the big TV screen), so fingers crossed it should all be running smoothly by tomorrow evening.

A blog admin note: I’m going to be trying something different this week. I’ll be doing my usual diary posts on Monday to Friday (along with my usual Phone Box Thursday post), but for next weekend’s posts, I’m going to catch up with some of the review posts I’ve been meaning to do for months, post a couple of links to my running videos over the weekend, and then do a big diary update on the Monday. This serves a twofold purpose: it enables me to get my main weekend posts done in advance; and it means that I can finally start doing my review posts again (I’ve only really had the time to do one post per day recently, which is why my reviews haven’t been getting done). I’m looking forward to getting some posts out about gigs and parkruns and races again!

I’ll be videogaming as usual this evening, though obviously not on the SteamLink box just yet.

Dark blossom
The ‘second’ blossom tree in our garden (the one that blossoms later, with darker blossom) is doing really nicely now.

Today’s earworm playlist:

Cast of The Little Mermaid – ‘Daughters Of Triton’
Kylie Minogue – ‘I Should Be So Lucky’
Nobuo Uematsu – ‘Mako Reactor’
Nobuo Uematsu – ‘Let The Battles Begin!’