Saturday, 28 February 2015

Arch linux

I recently switched from Ubuntu to Arch linux, and I have to say that Arch is the largest waste of time I have ever invested in- but you should try it! It offers negligible performance gain and marginal control over basic system resources. If you switch to Arch linux today, you also have to set up your wifi via a clunky obtuse command line interface. There are many benefits, most notably that the package manager is called "pacman"! How cute is that?

Monday, 23 February 2015

I'm making a tetris

Making tetris is a standard beginners computer science exercise. Doing the basic layout for the game is pretty straightforward, but getting the game to handle well is another issue entirely. I've been playing a number of online tetris games as research, but many of them have serious control problems, e.g. no fast drop or awkward left/right shfting. This tetris clone looks very nice, (The DEMO screen in particular is reminiscent of old-school arcade games) but actually playing the game is awful! Here is the pen in its current state.

Tuesday, 3 February 2015

Computin

Last week we set up the other computer that was sitting in the teachers lounge. There was a lot of difficulty getting an install of any OS running (at first it wouldn't recognize bootable flashdrives etc.) but now we have a clean install of Arch Linux! Woo! We (me and ryan) also added RAM to the other computer and tried to add graphics cards/capability, but it caused strange screen issues. We also organized wires so it's not a jumbled mess and set up the new monitor for the "new" computer. That computer has a liquid cooling system which no one knows how it works, that somehow needs  to be refilled, so that might be part of what we're doing next week. It was pretty productive although unrelated to anything else. Hopefully I can get accustomed to Arch soon.