The other night, my flatmate Dan’s car alarm remote died, and we couldn’t find anybody who was open that stocked the right size battery - we needed a 12 volt A27 size battery, the best we could get was an A26, which is too fat to fit in the remote.

So here’s a couple of pics of the scheme that I devised…

An

A blury pic of the external battery

We took the next 12V battery we could get, and cellotaped some wires to it. We then twisted the other ends of the wires around the battery contacts of the remote, and wedged the old battery in to make it snug. Voila, one working car remote with external power-supply.

I’ve pondered, for a while, on the merits of me writing out every lesson I learn on my journey to become a game programmer, and I think that the HOWTO format is not going to be sustainable. So, from now on I’ll be jotting down some notes, and some key points, but I’ll be dispensing with full code listings and blow-by-blow coverage of what’s going on.

So, on to timers and clocks in DirectX.

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In order to make the most simple use of DirectX we must set up the required infrastructure. This is as follows:

• A swap chain (at least two areas of memory, one for drawing into, one for displaying to the screen).
• A RenderTargetView (a reference to the area of memory from the swap chain for drawing into).
• A Depth/Stencil buffer, and a view onto it. (Used to help decided whether any given pixel should be drawn).
• Bind the RT (RenderTarget) and Depth/Stencil views to an Output Merger stage.
• Set the Viewport (a sub-rectangle of the BackBuffer that we will draw to).

Naturally after we have set up this infrastructure we have repeatedly draw some sort of scene; we will get to that after we have discussed the topics above.

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I planned, quite some time ago now, to start writing a series covering my journey, well I’ve finally gotten round to the first bit of it. Hopefully I’ll write a bit more frequently than I have recently, but we’ll see - I’m not making any promises.

I’ve bought some books on C++ and DirectX and have started working through them. The book I am working through at the moment Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 10, has based its demos on a small, bespoke application framework. Whilst this is all well and good, I find that I learn by doing, by writing the programs myself, rather than reviewing demo code. So, I’ll be starting from scratch, writing my own, similar application framework, following the lessons in the book, and blogging about it here. So, onto “Step one, create a window”. Read the rest of this entry »

After spending a bunch of time mucking around with XNA, I’ve decided to learn DirectX and C++. I’m going to write a series of short lessons as I do. Not from the perspective of an expert, but from the perspective of someone teaching themself, with a bit of good Software Engineering knowledge mixed in. Hopefully I should have the first post out sometime today.

Tokyo is now officially the most awesome city in the world.

http://quazen.com/arts/visual-arts/gundam-mecha-monument-towers-over-tokyo/

I recently updated my iPod Touch to the latest version of the OS and I’ve noticed some nice little touches that make the device even more excellent than it used to be.

1. Select / Cut / Copy / Paste - Tap and drag in notes and mail, and you immediately start selecting text, Tap and hold in safari and it selects an entire block of text for you. When you have a selection, a little context ballon comes up to give you options like, Copy, Paste, etc.
2. Advanced audio controls - it used to be hard to scrub through a track, especially if it was long because the precision on the slider was not very good. Now, if you start scrubbing, but move your finger down (away from the slider itself) it makes your scrubbing more precise. Also, in audio books there is a little button which lets you back up by 30 seconds, and a speed control, so that you can slow the audio book down.
3. Landscape keyboard in notes - very nice for those of us with larger fingers / thumbs, who like a bit more spacing between our keys.

Overall my impression of iPhone OS is that it is catching up quickly, in terms of general features that Windows Mobile has had for a while, but as it does, it revolutionises the usability of the feature - selecting text, and positioning the cursor are two such examples, where Apple have really thought about the issues inherent with controlling a small device with a blunt instrument like your thumb.

Here endeth the fanboyesque rhetoric.

I just watched this on TED, its food for thought.

Yesterday, whilst making my daily commute to work, my scooter (the one pictured in the theme of this blog) started making an aweful rattling sound, as if something was about to fall of. Something had, in fact, fallen off: the heat-guard from the muffler, and was now rattling around amongst the under-carriage. So, naturally I took my scooter to my scooter people (scootling) and asked them to give it a thorough once over while they were at it.

As it turns out it needed a bit of work, but boy did they do a good job! The scooter used to struggle to hit 55km/h on the flat, now it exceeds 60km/h with ease; there is a lot more power up in the top end so that I can power up hills a lot faster, and down hill I can push the speedo as far round as it will go (~70km/h, but I can’t be sure because the numbers only go up to 60). The brakes have also been replaced and tightened, so they work a lot better, and don’t jam on any more, and with a new rear tyre I have more confidence in the wet and around corners. It is like riding a new scooter and it has definitely been a highlight of my week.

I just read this and it seems like Tom has a point. I still have to go over it a few times more and put it into practice before I make judgement.