GRG's Miscellany

I am not an artist. I enjoy playing around painting miniatures and I bumble along creating some functional 3D models and 2D art for my play programming projects. Using Inkscape and Gimp (because they are free-free), and Paint.NET (because it is free) has got me where I am today.  Which, to be honest, is a fair way.  Inkscape and GIMP are really powerful tools, and Paint.NET is much more powerful than it looks at first glance. For me, the niggle has always been that I want to combine vector operations (because I cannot draw the shapes I want freehand), with pixel operations (because I want to hide my horrible lack of vector skills behind big, fat pixels), and I've always found the interfaces and workflow for doing that to be really clunky. This could easily be a lack of knowledge/skill on my part.  If I invested some time in learning how Inkscape and Gimp do these things, maybe I'd find better, easier ways to do them. And that's where my situation has stayed f...

DAMN, this has been a total pain in the backside. I wanted to record a video of my latest game writing developments with commentary.   (Ubuntu 12.0.3 LTS, with KDE desktop) The normal desktop recording applications failed to cope with OpenGL, which is understandable, really.  So then I found glc . glc looked like it would do everything I wanted, and after a couple of frustrating hours, it turns out it actually will.  This is good. The bad is that the documentation is non-existent, and figuring it out has got me VERY CROSS, with quite a tension-headache to boot. Command line which finally worked: glc-capture -o blah.glc -j -a 'sysdefault:CARD=camera,48000,1' java -jar MyGame.jar Gotcha 1: It doesn't tell you how to specify the application part (java -jar MyGame.jar).  It took me ages to realise that it cannot deal with quotes .  Just put the application in as you would type it normally in the command line. Gotcha 2: Finding the ALSA device nam...

When I code at home, I get about an hour tops before I'm ready to either fall asleep on my keyboard or chuck it through the window. When coding in such small chunks, I've found it difficult to maintain the direction of effort - getting sidetracked, or concentrating too much effort on inconsequential things. It's also easy to forget quite how much I've achieved. There's sometimes a nice surprise when I look at my code and realise I've already solved a problem I thought might prove tricky, but I think it'd be nicer to know I've already solved it. With this in mind, I decided to search for a free/open source task management app. That way, I can spend some time building out a skeleton plan for my project, and when I want to code something, I can easily see what the next step should be. My searching turned up Task Coach , which is available under GPL v3 for Windows, Mac OS X and various flavours of Linux. I'm trying to keep my development Linux/...