Josh On Design

Now that we've got a little toolkit from part 1, let's draw a simple sin wave. As you may recall from your trigonometry, the sin function goes from -1 to 1. It also loops forever. That's going to be very handy.

Thanks to a project I'm doing at work I started reading a book on procedural content generation. ProcGen (as apparently the cool kids call it) is all about creating interesting systems with randomness, which inevitably brings up texture generation, which brings up Perlin Noise, one of the most useful sources of randomness.

Or rather, re-introducing. I created AMX a few years ago when I needed to run some crash prone node processes on my server. AMX originally stood for something, but I can't remember anymore. I looked at existing tools and found them all overly complicated. In my mind a process manager is pretty simple. There's a list of programs that should keep running. If one stops, start it again. That's it.

It's not a secret that I am unimpressed by most VR games. While I am excited about the potential of VR & AR for education and enhancing human cognition, games simply bore me. Or the did. Now I stand corrected. Beat Saber rawks!

I tried to use my sparkling new Oculus Go on an airplane yesterday, since it seems like the obvious place to use it. The number one thing I think people will want to do with this device is download some Netflix movies for a plane. I mean, who wouldn't want to leave the cramped loud environment of an airplane for the calm of their favorite movie over a fun moonscape background. Sadly, Netflix doesn't support downloads in their VR app, even though they do in their mobile ones. Hey Netflix! Turn it on!

Holy carp, we've been busy.

I have always loved The Beatles, even when I was little. I'm too young to have known about The Beatles in a cultural sense. I was 5 when John Lennon was murdered, far too young to remember, so to me The Beatles were always just music that existed. While I love their entire catalog I've always felt the White Album was their weakest effort due to lack of editing. Today we're going to fix that.

This is the first 360 video test with Jesse. It might make you dizzy.

I'm annoyed that we don't have something like the Amiga anymore. A computer that doesn't give you apps, but instead gives you primitives that you can combine in different ways to be creative and make art. Okay, the Amiga wasn't quite like that, but it had the spirit and desire to become that.

I purchased an Oculus Go on launch day, but due to other commitments I wasn't able to play with it until today. These are my initial uncensored thoughts. First off, for 200 bucks it's pretty good. You get a standalone device that boots up and lets you do things. It's preloaded with a few apps, and the catalog features a bunch of free demos, videos, and games. I haven't dug very far into the catalog yet, but so far I'm impressed.

Well, I've continued working on my React Native music app and everything is going smooth. I already like using it much better than Amazon's iOS Music App for the simple reason it uses less memory.

Today I received a note from our local recycling company that they can no longer take any plastics except for washed milk jugs. Even the many kinds of hard plastic that claim to be fully recyclable they are unable to take. They say it's because of the international recycling crisis currently affecting the world. I'm a curious fellow, so I did some reading.

Following Blair MacIntyre's lead, I've accepted that the only way to write more is to write more. No more waiting for the perfect topic at the perfect time with perfect editing. It's better to publish something unpolished than to not publish at all.

Yesterday I ran across a post on Hacker News about a new phone. From the website it appears to be a brand new OS with features to help you keep focused and clear away the distractions. While the site was pretty, the lack of good UI screenshots was a red flag. What did this OS look like? How can a new OS possibly be built by a small company and be any good?

Or: The state of Linux Graphics with Raspberry Pi and Rust

I have long wanted to create my own desktop operating system targeting the Raspberry Pi. I believe we should have a hackable desktop environment that is both powerful and lightweight, similar to BeOS and the Amiga. To build this desktop we really need full control over how apps draw to the screen, but still have hardware acceleration. That means we'll need to use real graphics drivers and real graphics APIs from existing Linux desktops. When I last looked at all things Linux graphics five years ago everything was a mess but with some promising signs. Over the past couple of days I've been researching the current state. Here is my report, with both good and bad news.

Creating a great webtool that you want to share with the world is easy. Just follow these simple steps for success.

A question for the ages.

Is there anything which uses the word nog that is not eggnog? Are there other types of nog? Where did the word even come from? Is it derived from grog or something else? And is there any connection with nogging?

Twitter user ekse has graciously translated this blog to Chinese. Thanks! TL;DR: By the end of this essay I hope to convince you of the following facts. First, that modern desktop operating systems are anything but. They are bloated, slow, and layered with legacy cruft that still functions only thanks to Moore's Law. Second, that innovation in desktop operating systems stopped about 15 years ago and the major players are unlikely to heavily invest in them again. And finally, I hope to convince you that we can and should start over from scratch, learning the lessons of the past.

I've spent the last week diving into A-Frame, a toolkit from Mozilla for quickly building VR experiences on the Web. Unlike most other Javascript libraries, A-Frame is centered around declarative markup rather than functions and callbacks. This makes it much easier to get started and learn. Throughout the week I've written down a few notes to share with you.

You should hire an old programmer. It’s true! Sure.. older programmers are not going to work as many hours as someone fresh out of college. They have kids and spouses and mortgages and softball games to attend. They won't hang out at the office playing Xbox and ping-pong all night. They will not work 80 hour weeks and they will actually use their vacation time. And of course they cost more than young programmers. Despite all of those reasons not to hire an older programmer, you still should. For one simple reason: they are worth it. I know this, because I am one.