Kubuntu Lover

10 Worlds of Tux (aka TuxWorld) Alpha Launch!

noreply@blogger.com (Bugs Bane) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:01:00 -0400

Well, the time has finally come to reveal a project I've secretly been beavering away on for a while now....

10 Worlds of Tux!

Erm... what exactly is "10 Worlds of Tux"? It's a new 3D side-scrolling platform game inspired by the easy to learn, fun to play game mechanics of the 90's, with a 2000's shot in the arm for graphics (or at least that's what the press release will say! ;-)

From a gamers perspective 10W.o.T will feature 10 worlds (surprise, surprise!), fluid controls, a freedom inspired plot that doesn't take itself seriously at all and stays out of the way of the gameplay :), homages to many icons of the FOSS world, hidden secrets and bonus galore and... an easy level designer to let you customise the game further.

From a development point of view, everything is being designed from the ground up to make it as easy as possible for beginners to contribute and add to the game. It's developed on the rapidly advancing Blender Game Engine, using resolution independent vector image based textures, and will be available on at least Linux and Windows. Mac versions will follow, too if Blender can get it's mac sound issues sorted out... hopefully for v2.5 late this year!

Anyway, enough talk! The pre-pre-pre-pre-alpha (featureing bugs akimbo!) can be downloaded here:

The Download Link!

The .blend file needs Blender installed on your system to play currently (sudo apt-get install blender). Just open the file with Blender and hit P to play (and Esc to quit). Binaries will be made available soonish, hopefully with debs following if I can wrap my head arround the horrors of packaging.

Viva Freedom Gaming!

A couple of options for Linux and DRM free Commercial Music

noreply@blogger.com (Bugs Bane) — Sat, 16 May 2009 02:39:00 -0400

OK, if you've been in the open source scene for a while, you've likely come across creative commons style music sites such as Jamendo.org that let you browse thousands of artists releasing their music for free download. But what happens when you want access to music that's a bit more commercial? Of course there's always the option of buying the CD and ripping it (making sure you keep the original). If like me, you prefer your music collection all digital (save space, plastic, the environment, hassle, earchability etc) then you may want to look at these other *legal* and DRM free options to break free of your musical iCaptivity:

1. Amazon.com mp3 store - USA and UK only:

Yes it sucks that they don't distribute outside these two countries (at the time of writing), but a huge music catalogue, DRM free mp3's, cheaper songs than iCaptive and a linux based download assistant make these a great option if you live somewhere you can access it. If not, start filling out those "customer satisfaction" forms and complain people! They'll go to the effort wherever the demand is, and remember, it's always assumed that for everyone who contacts them that theres a few thousand more who couldn't be bothered. Speak up for your few thousand!

Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk.

2. Rhapsody Unlimited - USA only.

"Rhapsody, not iTunes, in my opinion, is the future of music" ~ Fortune Magazine

6 million songs. Over 80 commercial free radio stations. Just about everything you could ever hear on the radio and much more. Better yet, they support Linux (see here) and can be accessed via the web.

Rhapsody

3. eMusic - worldwide

OK, they hide the price better than easy exits from Alcatraz, but at only around $10 (at time of writing) per month, you get access to a wide range of high quality independant music to download and keep in a DRM free format. They've also managed to grab a huge back catalogue of music no longer available anywhere else and one or two fairly large acts, rebelling against the DRM lockin demanded by the four major commercial labels. eMusic is also well known for having an excellent engine for finding you *new* music you'll love either by your previous preferences or by entering other performers you love. They also have very generous introductory offers like 45 free downloads. The only thing to watch out for is that credits don't roll over from one month to the next. All the more incentive to get in there and discover new music every month! On the upside, redownloading something you've previously downloaded (say if your harddrive crashes) is completely free. Another great music provider providing their software on the free and open source Linux desktop. :)

PS Their music catalogue is also rather craftily hidden away, but can be seen here!

eMusic.com

[IDEA] Easy, Beautiful Progress Notifications in KDE's Task Bar

noreply@blogger.com (Bugs Bane) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 21:01:00 -0400

NOTE: Please vote on this idea here!

At the moment, apps can let us see how far through a task they are, such as Dolphin with it's file copy progress bar. The problem is that:

There's no obvious link between the different programs and where their progress is shown (in a small, minimised, generic system tray applet marked "i")
The systray applet either hides that anything is happening if minimised, or covers a pretty large section of screen to show only a small amount of information if maximised.
Strangely it is currently set to show for the first few seconds and then "dissapear" (minimise to the system tray). More than one user I know has pulled a flash drive still being written to thinking the copy was finished. Even if you understand it you're stuck with point 2 above.

If you're copying in Dolphin or burning a CD in K3B, wouldn't you prefer to have a beautiful looking progress bar that is economical with screen space, needs no big pop up windows, looks great and always gives you feedback, right on the application's taskbar entry?

This mockup is designed to show mainly the TaskBar (although I've included a tooltip in the mockup, too). This is just Dolphins, flash drive capacity bar, scaled and set to 80% opacity. If needed it could be used in addition to the current system. If you're copying three things at once it could show the progress of the combined tasks and still let people click on the "i" only if they want a more detailed breakdown. The bar could just fade in when used, and once finished could fade out once that app is given focus.

NOTE: Please vote on this idea here!

QBBT: Which Logic Bricks Get Used First?

noreply@blogger.com (Bugs Bane) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:32:00 -0400

You'd never expect a programmer to write code without any idea of which line was going to be executed first. Blender's Game Engine Logic blocks are a brilliant way to let visual artists "code" by connecting visual blocks together to create logic and AI in games. The funny thing is that almost no one learning the Blender Game Engine comes across anything that tells you which logic bricks will actually be executed in what order. This can make figuring out complex setups far more difficult than it should be. In a nutshell heres how it seems to work from my tests:

Basically it seems that blender starts with the list of actuators (the ones that make changes on the right) and works it's way down. In this case Blender tests to see whether to play the armature action first... then the message actuator, the state actuator and the end object actuator.

This is especially important to know if you're using the state actuator which switches which controllers (and thus which other actators) will be used from this point on. Obviously if your state controller switches an object to use a different set of actuators, the actuator you had set up just after it isn't going to be run. Also worth remembering is that an actuator hooked up to a delay sensor, while it may be examined first, won't actually be executed until the delay sensor has counted to the end of it's time delay. What happens if a delay sensor is still counting up when a state actuator triggers it? Good question.... to be answered in a future QBBT!

Open Source Search Has Arrived

noreply@blogger.com (Bugs Bane) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 01:00:00 -0500

Do you love open source? Do you remember a time before when using locked off, proprietry systems that gave you little control seemed so normal because you'd never found anything else? Are you using an open-source search engine?

Huh?

"Open-source search engine?! I can hear many of you gasp. But... doesn't Google use Linux? Yep. But can you look at the code for how they control what information you see (and don't see)? Nope. Are they legally bound to show you the best results possible? Nope. Are they legally bound to do whatever it legally takes to make the most money even if it means not giving you the best search results? Surprisingly, yes. (For fairness sake, this also applies to Microsoft's Live search, Yahoo search or *any* search run by a publicly listed company).

In fact *every* common-law country based public company is legally bound to do *whatever it takes* within the law to get the most money for their shareholders. (Note: No, I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Look it up for yourself, and also go watch "The Corporation" while you're at it.)

So if we want human knowledge to be truly free (as in beer *and* speech) what's our best option:

Wikia Search.

Hmmm... It's still in beta (at time of writing), howver: It's open-source. Everyone has access to the index (in-fact you can even automatically help build it yourself). Everyone can see how the index is ranked, but the trick is, that like Wikipedia (which was founded by the same guy) it relies on mass numbers of human users to make it relevant. It worked there. It works here, too. Before you gasp that that must lead to people gaming the system remember that human entered data is most likely what Google is using as well. Think about it. Do you really think that all that data they have when you "vote up" a result in their search rankings does nothing? And that marking that (Google owned blogspot) blogpost in your (Google) RSS reader is just ignored? And of course they would never track the number of click throughs you do on different links... oh, except for where we know they do already like Adwords.

The difference here is that Wikia lets you know what they do, has it community monitored and lets you much more comprehensively improve your own (and others) results. There's combinations of commenting, annotations, adding alternative key-phrases, giving (1-5 star) ratings of search results and even seeing which (logged in) users contributions added to the results you're seeing.

That's not to say that Google is evil. Personally I feel that in some areas we need proprietry software just to "fill the gaps" until a great open-source option comes along.

My feeling is "just" that the great open-source search option has arrived...

How I learned to stop worrying and love KBlogger

noreply@blogger.com (Bugs Bane) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

At the time of writing, Kblogger is in Alpha2 (read NOT released yet!) and has some... well.. need of love to get it going.

When you do get it going though, it's a beautiful, lightweight app that integrates nicely with KDE4 and makes blogging easy.

So how do you get past those "getting it up and running blues"? I can't offer tech support on every situation, however here's what worked for me with a blogger account and Kubuntu Jaunty (Alpha 4).

There are two main issues:

1. When trying to create an account I always got "Could not get blogs".
a. Visit your blogspot site (ie http://yourusername.blogspot.com) and log-in.
b. Click on any link (such as Create or Edit Posts) that ends in ?blog-id= and a long number. Copy that number from your browsers url bar.
c. In the "Create account" section of kblogger, click the advanced tab. Paste the number from step b above and click ok. You're ready to go! However, you'll now notice that...

2. None of the buttons appear (you know, unimportant stuff like, well, add a blog post)

Temporarily this can be worked around by adding shortcuts (settings -> Configure shortcuts) for New, Upload and Synch. Use them instead.

You're now well on your way to becoming a Web 2.0(tm) journalistic superstar! Go forth and make the mainstream media tremble!

QBBT: Copy logic bricks (and other properties, too!)

noreply@blogger.com (Bugs Bane) — Sun, 18 May 2008 01:03:00 -0400

I love to block out movement and logic in the game engine before adding complex graphics. It's so quick and gratifying. Once you've got everything working how you want on a cube/dummy though, how do you replace it with your final character / mesh? Easy! Just copy the logic bricks over by:

1. Selecting every object you want to copy the logic **TO**.
2. Select the object you want to copy the logic **FROM**.
3. Ctrl+C brings up the copy menu and just select "Logic Bricks" (you can also copy all kinds of other attributes here).

Why the weird order of selecting the "paste" object before the "copy object"? Because this way you can select a bunch of objects to paste to first and copy logic from one object to a whole bunch of others in one go... Sweet!

Launching "Quick, Basic Blender Tips"

noreply@blogger.com (Bugs Bane) — Sun, 18 May 2008 00:35:00 -0400

One of the great things about Blender is the wealth of in depth tutorials for it that abound all over the web. Unfortunately being more of the "jump in and learn it by doing, then search/ask when I run into trouble" kind of person, I've found that often when you need a simple answer to a simple problem that you can end up having to read through many 15 page long tutorials before you find your answer. How I wish that I had some source of simple tips that told me all the basic, but not obvious tricks in blender to learn as I went.

Well, in true open source I realised that "if it is to be it's up to me" so now I present a new section "Quick Basic Blender Tips". What are these tips? As I'm new and learning Blender, these are all the basic problems I've run into and then found a solution for, hopefully saving you the pain of making them as well! Feel free to let me know if there are better ways, or if I'm just flat out wrong!

These will be short and to the point (usually less than a paragraph), a great place for googlers to get answers and hopefully a valuable regular education for anyone who cares to subscribe.

All tips will be tagged "Quick Basic Blender Tips".

Let the tips begin!

I Love You, But...

noreply@blogger.com (Bugs Bane) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 01:45:00 -0500

Dear Google:

I love you, I really do. You give Microsoft a run for their money along with their (increasingly) underling Yahoo. You pay wads of students and hackers to spiff up many of my favourite applications each summer and you host this blog. You're even hosting the release party for my favourite project of the year, the very delicious KDE4. All accounts so far are that your food at the release event was equally delicious, which is why I feel a little uncomfortable mentioning something that's been leaving a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth lately...

If you really want to support us, how about officially supporting our venerable, standards based browser Konqueror?

I understand that there are a million browsers and it doesn't make good sense to support all of them. If you're wanting to support open source though, there's really only two dominant desktop environments though and that's Gnome and KDE. Your support for Gnome's Firefox is exemplary. Heck you even pay people to pimp it for you! (cheers!) But how many people are able to use KDE's official browser to use your services (particularly maps, reader, earth etc)? I don't know, and I'm betting that you don't either because anyone stubborn enough to try and plough through on your sites with our beloved Konqi soon has to change their browser identification to either Safari or Mozilla to get most things to work.

Don't get me wrong, like a needy lover I keep coming back to you even when you treat Konqi bad. You're still smart, sexy and generally do a lot of good imho. I also don't expect Firefox levels of support. Plain old Safari levels would be nice. But then, maybe, just maybe, you knew if you gave enough good food at GoogleHQ, that the community would just do it ourselves.

So Google, I do love you (please don't disable my Adsense account). Now, how about giving Konqi a bit of that love back...

PS If you feel the same (and aren't Google!) I highly recommend passing the message on to Google by clicking here and choosing "No" under "Was this information helpful". You can then enter a short message about this! Go gettem! :-D

Kubuntu Lover

10 Worlds of Tux (aka TuxWorld) Alpha Launch!

A couple of options for Linux and DRM free Commercial Music

[IDEA] Easy, Beautiful Progress Notifications in KDE's Task Bar

NOTE: Please *vote* on this idea here!

NOTE: Please *vote* on this idea here!

QBBT: Which Logic Bricks Get Used First?

Open Source Search Has Arrived

How I learned to stop worrying and love KBlogger

QBBT: Copy logic bricks (and other properties, too!)

Launching "Quick, Basic Blender Tips"

I Love You, But...

NOTE: Please vote on this idea here!

NOTE: Please vote on this idea here!