Absolutely nothing happened in Sector 83 by 9 by 12 today.
I repeat, nothing happened in Sector 83 by 9 by 12.

Sunday, May 19

Geek

It's Like A Suspension Bridge

It has high points at either end, but sags a bit in the middle.

Season 7.2 of Doctor Who, that is.  I really wish that the 2012 Olympics had gone to Ulan Bator or some place like that, so we'd got two full seasons of Doctor Who instead of two half seasons (five episodes in 2012, and eight now in 2013).*

But The Bells of Saint John and The Name of the Doctor do at least serve as very capable bookends to a somewhat wobbly second half of the season.**

It would have been a dynamite season ending if but there was more than enough to hold fans' attention as it was.

All in all, it's the best kind of ending, one that retroactively improves everything that came before.  We get all too much of the other kind, so Steven Moffat should be applauded for pulling this trick off here.

As a side note: The BBC accidentally shipped out a couple of hundred copies of the season box set on Blu-Ray a week before the finale was set to air.  And still there were no leaks of the surprises in store.

* Doctor Who was cut, apparently, because so much of the BBC was tied up in the Olympics.  Meh, I say.  Meh!  There's another Olympics every four years; there's only one Doctor Who.

** Neil Gaiman's The Doctor's Wife was brilliant; his Nightmare in Silver this season...  Less so.

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Geek

/etc/cron.weekly/raid-check

WFT?

Linux now rescans all your (software) RAID arrays every week.  I thought it was a hardware problem.

This is possibly a good thing, maybe.

It is proceeding at an aggregate of 700MB/s, which is nice to see.

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Thursday, May 16

Geek

No Nexus 7+ / 7.2 / 8 / Whatever

Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.

But HP have announced their SlateBook10 x2, a 10.1" Android convertible with a Tegra 4 CPU and a 1920x1200 display.

/images/hero-slatebook-x2_tcm_245_1410169.jpg


It's similar to the Asus Transformer Infinity, but significantly faster, and a good bit cheaper at $480 including the dock.  2GB RAM and 64GB of flash storage plus a full-size SD slot in the keyboard dock, and maybe a microSD slot in the tablet itself.  (HP's site doesn't list one, but the various blurbs on the tech news sites do.)

Specs aren't perfect - it's not quite "retina class" - but definitely interesting.

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Geek

Blah

Well, I'm still up, might as well watch the Google I/O keynote.  Just need to occupy myself for a few minutes 'til it starts...


Okay, now it's started.  Blah blah blah...

Blah blah blah...

Oh yeah, that's why I never watch these things, much less go to them.

Blah blah blah...

The music video at the start wasn't bad, but this is better:


Blah blah Android blah blah Chrome blah.

Okay, yeah, they're okay-ish.  Android is Linux, Chrome is KHTML.

Blah blah blah...

Blah 900 million activations blah...  

Blah 48 billion app installs blah...

Using Play as an end-run around manufacturers and carriers who are slack about updating devices. i.e. all of them.  Good thinking.

Location.  Well, people who actually get a chance to leave the house might care about that, so okay.

Cross-platform single-sign on.  Sounds good, until you realise that it leads to cross-platform single irrevocable account suspension, like my situation with Youtube.

Their messaging platform now allows you to send as well as receive.  Well, there's a huge breakthrough. roll eyes

I hate live broadcasts.  You can't fast-forward through the crap.

Okay, here's something good: A new Android IDE called Android Studio, based on JetBrains IntelliJ Idea.  I don't use IntelliJ, because Java sucks, but it's the basis for PyCharm, which I use every day.  It's a nice IDE.  And Android Studio looks really good.

Red boots.  Makes a change from the blah outfits the rest of the presenters are wearing.

Better developer metrics.  Fine.  Not exciting for me, but fine.

Blah blah...

The Play Store on the Nexus 10, huh?  Have you fixed the insane flickering during app downloads yet?  Didn't think so.

"Do you guys want to hear about music?"  <crickets>  "Well, I'm going to talk about it anyway."

Wow, this is stupefying.  They have a music service, just like the other ninety-odd music services that already exist.

Blardly blardly bleep...

Google Samsung Galaxy Nexus S4 $649 unlocked.  Hardly a new device, and they're only selling the 16GB version.  But it's the only Android device sold by Google with expandable storage.  Does this signify anything?  Who knows.

Oh gawd, now they're going to talk about Chrome.  I'm outta here.

Chromebooks.  They've sold dozens of them!  You can just feel the lack of enthusiasm when the presenter pauses at applause moments.

They're porting Chrome to Android.  "Let's dive in deeper."  Let's not.  Next!

WebP and VP9.  Okay, good, get this stuff out there.  Support is pretty much absent outside Chrome right now.

Blah blah....

They're giving away Chromebook Pixels to all attendees, instantly tripling the install base.  That got some applause, because no-one in their right mind would actually buy one.

Gah.  Google Apps.  Bletch.  I mean, fine, if you don't actually care about functionality or productivity.

Oh great, it's the music guy again.

Google get-em-while-they're-young Play for Education.

Something about Malaysia.  Okay, getting 4G internet access in every school in the country and giving the students Chromebooks (though not Pixels).  That's good stuff.

Google+, Search, Maps.  Bleen.  Polite applause.  No-one cares about Google+.  It's not that it's bad, it's just that it's bleh.  Now they've Pinterested it.  Yeah, that's an improvement.

Like Apple moving developers off MacOS to try to get iOS 7 out the door, it's a reminder that you can be one of the biggest, most technologically advanced corporations in history and still flounder helplessly in the face of not having any idea what you are supposed to be doing.

I work for a little startup.  My problems all stem from lack of resources.  The vision part is easy.  But when you have all the resources you could ask for (and Apple could hire another ten thousand developers tomorrow if that would help) you still have to somehow focus those resources on executing your vision.  That's hard.  In fact, it's basically insoluble, which is why we see an unending cycle of boom and bust in hi-tech companies.

Has he stopped talking about Google+ yet?

No.

Oh, now he's talking about photos.  I'm not actually watching the stream any more; it escalated from stupefying to stultifying.  Next year, Google, your keynote is 30 minutes.  Anything that doesn't fit in that 30 minutes isn't worth having in the keynote.  This is ridiculous.

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Tuesday, May 14

Geek

Pudding

It's never that simple.

I downloaded and installed Julia Studio and started tinkering, and things were going pretty smoothly, and I ran some simple benchmarks, and the best case was nearly as fast as Python.

Wait, what?

Hrm.

Python has a remarkably efficient core of functions, but its code execution is rather sluggish.  That is, Python itself is fast, but code written in Python is slow.  So, for example, splitting sentences into words in Python runs about five times faster than in Julia, according to my little benchmark.  But the more complicated your code gets, the more that should tilt in Julia's favour.

Indeed, Julia's standard library is written mostly in Julia, so the performance you get for built-in functions is the same as for your own code, where with Python there can be orders of magnitude between the two.

Still, /5 performance on early tests when you're seeking *20 is not encouraging.

Next week: Pixy investigates Numba.

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Sunday, May 12

Geek

Why Does Julia Use * For String Concatenation?

I quote:
I think the main reason is that algebras over fields are commutative with respect to + but not necessarily for *. String concatenation is definitely not commutative. I can't remember whether this was part of the original motivation, but I also tend to think of this in the terms that string concatenation is a lot like taking the outer product, you're getting an object with the combined dimensionality of both factors.
This is difficult to argue with, but the answer is still not what I'd prefer.

I was writing a longer post on Julia last night, but the editor ate it.

Julia is an interesting new programming language (it first appeared last year) that attempts to provide the mathematical power and sheer computational efficiency of Fortran while offering programmers the expressiveness, flexibility, and clarity of Ruby. The result is 70% awesome, 10% odd, and 20% not there yet (since it's so new).

Here's a snippet:

cd("data") do
    open("outfile", "w") do f 
        write(f, data)
    end 
end

In these five short lines we already see two important things:
  1. Readable code. Neither curly brackets and semicolons, those codependent blights on programmer productivity, nor bizarre unfamiliar syntax like Smalltalk.

  2. Something like Ruby's blocks or Python's with - the cd function creates a context, as does the open function, and those contexts apply to the enclosed statements and are automatically cleaned up at the end. So the program changes its working directory to the data only for the code within the do...end block, without the programmer needing to worry about any details.
While Julia's syntax closely resembles sane, healthy, modern languages like Ruby and Python, it veers off in some details because it was designed by mathematicians rather than computer scientists. Thus you get the self-consistent if somewhat weird decision to use * for string concatenation.

More significantly, while Julia is object-oriented, it is not class-based (as most object-oriented languages are). It uses multiple dispatch based on the arguments to a function rather than binding functions to an object.

That is, where in Python you might define an image object and a resize method, and call it like this:

im = image("kitty-ears.jpg")
im.resize(x=500)

In Julia you'd define the data structure of the object, and then define a set of functions that act upon that object. There might already be a resize function that acts on arrays or vectors or memory-mapped files (or a hundred other things), but when you call

resize(im; x=500)

Julia knows that you mean the image resize function, because it knows that the variable im is an image. Values cannot change their type, so the Julia compiler can bind to the right version of the function at compile time, unlike Python or Ruby, where dispatch is always dynamic.

And that matters because it means that Julia is about 20x faster than Python.*

What Julia doesn't (currently) provide is multi-threaded programming. It's supports coroutines, called tasks, that allow you to write your code in a logically multi-threaded way. And it supports message-passing multi-processing, so you can spin up multiple instances of your application on different CPUs and easily dispatch tasks to other workers and receive the results when they're done. But you can't have multiple processes sharing a common native data structure.

But then, neither (really) can Python or Ruby. Both support threading, but both have global interpreter locks - the infamous GIL in Python - that means that only one thread is working on native code or data structures at a time. Threads get unlocked when they are doing I/O, and in some C libraries, so you do get a speedup in real-world applications. So if all three languages are effectively still single-threaded, with threads largely a programming convenience, you'd go with the one that's 20x faster, yes?

Yes, except that Python has a huge and wonderful standard library and an even huger and wonderfuller ecosystem of third-party packages.

Except except:
  1. You can embed Python in Julia, with two-way transfer of data and functions, using PyCall. You can just plain import your Python modules into a Julia program and use them:

    @pyimport pylab
    x = linspace(0,2*pi,1000); y = sin(3*x + 4*cos(2*x));
    pylab.plot(x, y; color="red", linewidth=2.0, linestyle="--")
    pylab.show()

    It's almost-but-not-quite Python on the Julia side (see the ; between the positional and named arguments in the pylab.plot call) but calling existing Python code from Julia is almost perfectly transparent.

  2. You can access MongoDB from Julia. MongoDB isn't perfect** but it's the swiss-army chainsaw*** of NoSQL, at least since they fixed it so that it doesn't crash and destroy all your data every time a gnat sneezes.****

  3. You can pretend it's Ruby and slap together web apps like there's no tomorrow using Morsel:

    using Morsel

    app = Morsel.app()

    route(app, GET | POST | PUT, "/") do req, res
        "This is the root"
    end

    get(app, "/about") do req, res
        "This app is running on Morsel"
    end

    start(app, 8000)

  4. There's support for ZeroMQ, the lightweight queueing... Thing.

  5. Also, Curl.

That's important, because those five items cover everything I need for both my day job and my off hour programming. If I can still use all my existing code and write new code that runs 10-20x faster (I use Psyco, the precursor to PyPy, here at mee.nu, which delivers a real-world speedup of very close to 2x, so only 10x there) in a language that doesn't make me want to shoot myself, that makes me a happy bunny.

Full support for multi-threaded programming would make it even better, but since I don't really have that now, it's not a show-stopper. For mee.nu, I run five instances of Minx behind a load-balancing proxy, though we rarely need the performance. Julia provides plenty of ways to use multi-processor machines, just not that particular way.

And if it really delivers 10x the performance in practice, that's like getting 10-way multi-threading with zero software overheads and zero extra hardware.

So a cautious thumbs up so far from me.

* Or about 4x faster than PyPy, the Python JIT compiler. But since you can easily embed Python code in Julia (the PyCall package provides this) and PyPy still has a number of incompatibilities with common Python packages, there's an argument that Julia is a better way to go even for Python programmers.

** Indeed, while it supports atomic updates, it doesn't support transactions across multiple records, so some would argue that it's not a database at all. My definition of a database is that it lets you find what you want in better than linear time even if you don't know what you're looking for - i.e. it provides some sort of secondary index. By that definition, MongoDB is a database. And Redis and RethinkDB and Aerospike aren't. Which doesn't mean they're not useful - Redis is bleedin' wonderful! - it just means they're not databases. They're datathingies.

*** Joke stolen shamelessly.

**** Which to their credit they fixed four major releases ago. These day's it's pretty robust.

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Friday, May 10

Cool

Oh My Stars, There's Another One

Amid all the random craziness and angst that makes up my life these days, there's a steady drip of light in the form of brick-based role-playing-strategy-gamey-things.


The aptly named Cube World.  No idea when it's coming out.

Fifteen months ago, I was looking forward to only two games - Mass Effect 3 (which EA managed to fuck up, though not irredeemably), and Torchlight II, which was pretty good, though I remember the first more fondly.

Since then, we've had a new XCOM game, EA has announced, launched, and irrevocably ruined SimCity - to the point where the major feature announced for The Sims 4 is that it will be single player - I've discovered KairoSoft, and Kickstarter has exploded onto the indie gaming landscape like a big bomb made of money.  Starbound is on its way, and Terraria has been revivified.  Kerbal Space Program is amazing, but requires more time than I have (which is zero) to really get anywhere.  We've got four major new isometric party-based single-player role-playing games on the way, with the first (Shadowrun) due next month.

And now we have these voxel-based games like Stonehearth and Cube World which take a fascinating tack, using the absurd amounts of graphics power that we have at our disposal today (you can get 1.8 TFLOPS for less than $150) to make games that manage to look endearingly retro and fluid and engaging at the same time.  I can't wait for them to come out so that I can not have time to play them either.

Oh, and here's the gameplay trailer for Stonehearth, without the talky bits.


Bunny!

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Tuesday, May 07

Rant

Intercourse The Penguin: A Critique Of Artificial Scarcity In A Post-Scarcity Economy

If you subscribe to a magazine electronically on Amazon, they will delete your back issues after six months "for your convenience".

Yes, they actually say that.  They delete your property for your convenience.  If you go searching for why your back issues - THAT YOU HAVE PAID FOR - seem to be missing, you find that in the fine print on "How magazine subscriptions work".  A shorter and more accurate explanation would have been "They don't."

And if you think that smacks of doublespeak, don't forget that this is the company that made news by deleting unauthorised copies of 1984 off customer's devices. 

I've sent a complaint to Amazon; it's hard enough to even find how to do that these days.  I was very good and didn't swear...  Much at all.

But, frankly, FUCK DRM in all its forms.

I may expand on this subject once I have calmed down a little.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:20 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sunday, May 05

Geek

Voxeloid

Reading the comments on the Stonehearth Kickstarter, I learned that the developers are using a product called Qubicle for the graphics.  It's a voxel-based design and rendering system built on Unity.

Unity itself is quite impressive: It's a comprehensive game engine (covering rendering, animation, graphics effects, sound, UI, AI, networking, mapping, and more) that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, Xbox, Playstation, Wii, and even most browsers, and costs $1500 for the professional desktop development kit - and the basic edition is free.  Most of the games I've been backing on Kickstarter are using it, which is how they're able to offer Mac and Linux ports on a shoestring budget.

Not that I have time to play any of these games, of course; the last game I spent any time with was Kairosoft's Pocket Stables.  Well, and BvS.  But that's a responsibility - I have a ninja village to look after!

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Friday, May 03

Cool

Wombat!

4:09



The game is apparently in a very early state (despite appearances); the developers estimate there's a good 16 months of work before release.  With any luck the millions of dollars they raise over the next few days will help speed things along.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:58 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wednesday, May 01

Cool

Meelions And Meelions

Good news, everyone!
  • The Starbound pre-order has passed the meelion-dollar mark and bagged all three stretch goals set so far (a new alien race, alien fossils, and alien starter pets).  No telling yet what else may be in store, but the development team - some of whom had taken second jobs in order to keep things going - are apparently still slightly dizzy from their unexpected success.

  • The Torment2: Tidy Numerology Kickstarter Drive Bonus Paypal Round hasn't quite tipped the project over the $4.5 meelion dollar mark for the final stretch goal - an in-game Fortress of Tormentitude player stronghold.  But it got pretty darn close, and with (apparently, significantly) lower than average payment failure rates, inXile have deemed their fundedness sufficient to add that particular fig to the pudding anyway.
Since these are two of the games I'm most looking forward to, this news is most welcome.

Oh, and Futurama got cancelled again.  But it had a decent run in the end.

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Saturday, April 27

Geek

XCOM Thingy

You remember how there was that XCOM shooter under development, and how relieved we all were when that faded into the background and we got a new real XCOM strategy game instead?  (Even if I haven't had a chance to play it yet, I was as relieved as anyone.)

Well, it seems the shooter didn't go away, it quietly soldiered on towards a launch this year, and - here's the thing - judging by the trailer, there's a chance, just a chance, that it might not suck.

more...

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Thursday, April 25

Rant

Just My Opinion

Web and app designers who employ grey text on a grey background for copy should be shot.*

Right now, looking at you, new Google Play app.

It keeps happening because it looks great. It's a miserable experience to actually read, but it looks stylish and elegant.

* For grey-on-grey headings, they should merely be slapped with a dead sturgeon.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:26 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Life

Honi Soit Qui Salle Blanche

Just dropped a jar of honey-soy sauce on the kitchen floor.

Observations:
  1. Honey-soy sauce is as sticky as honey and as apt to stain everything within 20 feet as soy sauce.
  2. Cutting your foot on a stray shard of glass and bleeding all over the place doesn't help.
  3. Bleach does.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:25 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Wednesday, April 24

Geek

Start8

Start8 from Stardock turns Windows 8 into a fairly sensible (if artistically inept) update to Windows 7.  It makes the start screen, charms bar, and hot corners go away.  If that's what you want - each item is independently configurable.

And it gives you back a nice, clean, functional - and very configurable - start menu.

For just $4.99 it turns Windows 8 back from a screaming heap of garbage into a practical, useful operating system.  Highly recommended if you find yourself in a situation where that might apply.

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Tuesday, April 23

Cool

And While We're At It I Want Aliens

And werewolves too and I wanna be a beta tester!

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Geek

Sasami

Apart from the Windows 8 stuff - you shouldn't have to fight your operating system, much less your user interface - Sasami is pretty good for the price.  Definitely needs more memory - it ships with 2GB, and it has integrated graphics which eats a good chunk of that right away, about 400MB by default, and I'm running Chrome (which can easily eat over 1GB), PyCharm (which can use several hundred MB on even modest projects), and Xshell (which can also use several hundred MB if you have lots of sessions with lots of history).  So right away I'm using all the memory and then some.

So I'm thinking I'll add another 4GB, and give it the old SSD out of Lina (my Linux box; it has a 300GB Intel 320, but I have a new Samsung 840 Pro to replace that).

That should do for starters.

Also, according to the manual it does have USB 3, which is great news.  My experience with USB 3 thus far consists of plugging drives in and having them work perfectly at speeds well over 100MB/s.  That's not something you want to give up.  

Also also, the GPU apparently delivers 80GFLOPS, not 48.  Still a long way short of any decent desktop card, though - my faithful passively-cooled 4850 is my benchmark card, at exactly 1TFLOP, and my 7950 is nearly triple that.  It should be just fine for playing Terraria or Starbound, but forget KSP - that runs slow even on the 4850 when I launch a complex rocket.

Battery life looks to be in the 5 hour+ range for normal active use (neither leaving it idle nor pounding on it constantly), which is fine for such a cheap notebook.  The only essential upgrade then is the memory, which right now is kind of expensive - the DRAM spot market is going through one of its seasonal conniption fits, with prices up about 60% since the start of the year.  4GB of RAM will cost me nearly $40!  (I can remember paying $500 for 4MB of RAM, for my Amiga 3000.)

Oh, and it comes with a trial version of Norton Anti-virus.  I downloaded Start8 to give me back my start menu.  Norton deleted it.  I deleted Norton.  Problem solved.

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Rant

Windows 8 Sucks

There are some good bits.  The Task Manager is a solid improvement.  And the file copy activity dialog is what it always should have been.  Those are a couple of minor items, though.  Overall, it sucks.

Needlessly, because there's a perfectly functional operating system underneath; they've simply layered a whole bunch of crapware and crippling and blatantly idiotic configuration choices on top and broken it.

I give it zero out of ten, as in, there is zero reason to use it.  If you want to run Windows, stick with 7; if you want a touch-enabled device, use Android.

It might be redeemable with something like Classic Shell; I'll find out.  Of course, again, there is no reason why you should need to do that, but if you're stuck with a Windows 8 laptop (like me) and (unlike me) no spare Windows 7 keys, there's potentially a way to fix the most egregious of Microsoft's fuckups.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:14 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Cool

Conents May Settle During Shipping

Your mileage may vary.  Barooina brand Puppy Chow may not contain actual puppies.  Do not taunt happy fun Kerbal.

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Sunday, April 21

Geek

Age Of Miracles And Wonders And Budget Notebooks

I bought a Windows 8 computer today - an HP Pavilion DM1-4306AU.

/images/Nwannot.png?size=720x&q=95
Looks like this.

One the one hand, it's woefully underpowered - a mere dual-core 1.4GHz, only 80 graphics shaders delivering a pathetic 48GFLOPS, just 2GB of RAM, and only 320GB of disk. The screen is a tiny 11.6" at a lowly 1366x768.

On the other hand, I haven't bought a new notebook in more than three years, haven't tried Windows 8 at all, and it cost $298 at the local hi-fi store.

And for a little perspective, it has four times the memory and four times the clock speed of the amazing Digital AlphaServer 8400 TurboLaser that I ran an entire phone company on back in 1995. It's not so long ago that this would have been a dream machine; it has 8 times the memory, 4 times the bandwidth, and 16 times the CPU performance of my SGI O2 - and that cost $25,000.

I don't think it has USB 3, or even gigabit ethernet  (Update: Looks like it has gigabit ethernet but not USB 3; the higher-spec but more expensive US version has both.) but it's small, light, has a decent screen (if rather sensitive to viewing angle), is surprisingly responsive (I played with it in the store), and supports up to 8GB of RAM and a full-size notebook drive.

Now all it needs is a name.  (Interim name is Sasami.)

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Saturday, April 20

Cool

Shiny Things Weekly


  1. Toshiba's Kirabook: It's a 13.3" Windows 8 (but let's not hold that against it) ultrabook, with a Core i5 or i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, a 2560x1440 display, and weighs 2.6lbs (or 2.9lbs with the touch screen option). That makes it a Macbook Pro competitor that's lighter than the Macbook Air. It's not cheap - starting at $1599 for the i5 model without touchscreen - but if you're sick of bargain-bin 1366x768 displays, it may be quite literally a sight for sore eyes.

  2. Australia's NBN to roll out gigabit speeds. The NBN rollout has been pathetically, miserably slow; they don't even have a plan to deploy it where I live yet. But at least the speeds where it has been deployed are good. And if it actually rolls out at 1Gbps on schedule, I will move to it rather than waiting for it to come to me. (I work from home most of the time now, so fast and reliable internet access matters more than location.)

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Thursday, April 18

Geek

Mega Phone Or Micro Tablet?

Samsung recently announced a couple of new additions to their Galaxy of Android phones (a statement that can be safely made without details because it will be as true next month or next year as it is today): The Galaxy Mega 5.8 and 6.3.

The 5.8 is of only moderate interest; it's a cheap(-ish) phone with a large (5.8") but low-resolution screen ("qHD", or 960x540), good for media consumption or people with poor eyesight (a huge market, that, not to be underestimated).

The 6.3, though, offers a 1280x720 6.3" display, 90% of the resolution of my Nexus 7 at 90% of the size.  The phone itself, though, is markedly smaller than the Nexus 7 - 168x88x8mm and 199g vs. 199x120x10.5mm and 340g. - so 25% narrower and 40% lighter.  It has almost no bezel (the Nexus 7 has quite a wide bezel on all sides), but is small enough to hold by the edges, so that shouldn't matter.  (Actually, the Nexus 7 is too, barely, at least for my hands.)


/images/nexus7-mega63.jpg

A quick mockup I made of the relative sizes of the Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 and the Asus/Google Nexus 7.  It only approximate, but it should be pretty close.

That image is Photoshopped  - well, actually, Fireworksed, as I do most of my image work in that instead - using cropped and rescaled images of the two devices.  It should be fairly accurate; the screen on the Mega has a slightly higher pixel density so it's a little smaller vertically, plus noticeably narrower as it has 720 pixels vs. 800.  The really dramatic difference comes from the near-elimination of the surrounding bezel.

Other hardware includes a 1.7GHz Exynos 5250 CPU (a dual-core A15), the exact same chip that powers the Nexus 10, which is much zippier in everyday use than the quad-core 1.2GHz A9 in the Nexus 7; 1.5GB RAM vs. 1GB in the 7; 8MP rear and 1.9MP front cameras vs. none and 1.2MP; but only 8GB or 16GB storage vs. 16GB or 32GB for the current Nexus 7.  It also has a microSD slot supporting cards up to 64GB, which helps make up for the disappointing shortage of on-board space.

So while it's maybe an inch too far for a phone, as a small, take-anywhere tablet that has 3G/4G phone capability as a bonus, it's rather intriguing.

I'd like it even more if it had a 1080p screen and a bit more storage - even 32GB - but as it is, I'm already interested.  Samsung haven't announced pricing or distribution details yet, so I'll be watching for that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:13 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 435 words, total size 3 kb.

Sunday, April 14

Cool

Good News, Side-Scrolling 2D Science Fiction Multiplayer Sandbox Platformer Fans Edition

  • Starbound has opened up pre-orders!  That's usually not that big a deal, but in this case (a) it's a successor to the much-loved Terraria, being put together on a tight budget by a tiny studio, and extra money now could really help make the game better, and (b) they're running with Kickstarter-style stretch goals - when they reach $500,000, for example, they'll add a new alien race.  At the time of writing, they've been going for a little over a day - on a weekend, too - and have reached $370,000, so it's looking good.  Update: $500,000 reached, new race - Novakids - are in, next goal is alien fossils at $750,000.

  • Darkout.  It's on Desura, GamersGate and Steam Greenlight.  It's not pixel-art (the style of Terraria and Starbound), but it's still a little cartoonish; I think the art style works well for a slightly more serious game.  Take a look at the trailer and see what you think.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:46 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 170 words, total size 1 kb.

Monday, April 08

Cool

Kerbal Space Program

Sorry little green dude, I haven't worked out how to attach parachutes yet.  But your epic journey 440km above the surface of planet Kerbin will not be forgotten, even if we never find your scattered remains.

Update: My improved Up Goer 2B reached 680km and is equipped with a parachute.  I just need to remember to open it around 23km of altitude....



Update: Patience and practice and lots of solid-fuel boosters, and I can now make a stable orbit fairly reliably even if my primary stage goes flaky on me.  Right now I have a Munar flyby lined up - my orbit will take me close enough that I'll be pulled to within 500km of the Munar surface, before being slingshotted back into a Kerbin orbit.  From there I should even have enough fuel left to deorbit and land.  Here I go!

Update: A little careful nudging and I'll be coming to within 50km 5km of the Munar surface...  As long as nothing goes wrong.  If something does go wrong, Cmdr. Dudsen Kerman will be the first Kerbal on the Mun.  Or bits of him, anyway.

Update: Success!  Munar flyby and return landing accomplished!  I guess the next step will be to make Munar orbit, then break orbit and return.  I want to refine my vehicle first, though, so its a bit less fally-aparty.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:07 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 230 words, total size 2 kb.

Sunday, April 07

Cool

Free To Good Home

Would anyone like a copy of Civilization V, Torchlight, or Trine on Steam? I just noticed that I acquired free bonus copies somehow.  Also Serious Sam HD, Frozen Synapse, Cthulhu Saves the World, and Breath of Death VII.

Update: Civ V goes to GreyDuck, Trine to Wonderduck.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:13 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 51 words, total size 1 kb.

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