Mark Damon Hughes

Minecraft setup

kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 01:44:43 -0700

Minecraft 1.5.1 just came out and broke my local setup, so I made a few changes, thought it might be useful for others.

Make a Minecraft folder, and a mods folder in that.
Download MagicLauncher to the Minecraft folder.
Download Minecraft Forge, Rei's Minimap, and OptiFine to mods folder.
Run MagicLauncher, go to Setup, remove ModLoader, and add each of the mods in order: minecraftforge, ReiMinimap, OptiFine.
I use a texture pack made with Painterly Pack, drop it in the Minecraft texture folder.
Once launched, go to Options, Video Settings, Details, change Grass to Fancy. This forces OptiFine to use biome grass colors even if graphics are set to Fast, which mine usually are.

More mods are easy to add, just make sure minecraftforge is first, OptiFine is last. I also play some Feed the Beast, but vanilla Minecraft requires less wiki reading and research. I may start adding some of the less difficult mods for variety.

Happy caving!

Tog says "Apple needs to get these kids off my lawn!"

kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:24:09 -0700

Tog says "Apple needs to get these kids off my lawn!"

Like what? The Dock does an excellent job for even power users, as a launcher for the most commonly used tasks and assigning apps to spaces. For intermediate users, Cmd-Space to open Spotlight and type 2-4 letters will instantly find almost any app or document you want. For expert users, Terminal is always open, and there you have the Unix power user interface. Some people find Alfred or Quicksilver preferable to Spotlight and Terminal; I don't agree but the Mac's capable of supporting different interfaces if you're that concerned.

Apple's Lion-era scrolling behavior is correct, and it's shocking it took 30 years for them to fix this design flaw of the Xerox interface. Scroll bars being hidden except when in use reclaims space for content, not a useless bit of UI chrome; your trackpad or magic mouse can scroll by stroking, no need to find and grab a little widget and drag it around like it's 1984. And making scrolling work like iOS, in the direction of the content instead of the direction of the widget, further emphasizes the content over chrome.

Patently untrue. The "Apple faithful" had little or no influence on growing the Mac market; if anything they repelled anyone who got close to the Mac for years. The iPod, iPhone, and iPad were sold to non-Mac users who then bought Macs because they liked their new object with a minimal interface that just worked. Some are disappointed by how complex the Mac is, but compared to Windows or Linux it's still Jobs' proverbial "glass of ice water to somebody in Hell".

1984: Macintosh: the computer for the rest of us.

2013: Together, Alive.

29 years apart, and those could've been made by the same people, for the same product. Both show amateurs and power users getting things done easily, though the pseudo-calypso in the 1984 ads is a bit embarassing.

Don't use Photos app for that, put the photos in Dropbox or a pro photo management tool. Apps devoted to text editing like Nebulous Notes and Textastic have on-screen arrow controls, there are custom keyboard libraries developers can license, and you can use an external keyboard from Apple, Zagg, or Logitech.

Apple's model has been consistent: The default apps are kept as simple and painless as possible for novices and light users. If you want more, you buy an app from someone else. And this seems to work, since the iPad sells hundreds of millions. It was designed not by old-school "UX experts" who advocated increasingly complex UIs, but by people willing to toss out everything extraneous to the content, and let third-party developers handle power users. If this drives off people who can't adapt or look for a third-party tool, that's irrelevant collateral damage.

Apple doesn't need to do anything.

State of the Fucking Art, App.net!

kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 04:16:53 -0800

App.net is now freemium, you need an invite from someone on there, and you're limited to 40 follows and not enough file space for many photos, but it's a good taste test. I broke my Twitter EOL to rescue a few people.

Since Dalton's audacious proposal in July 2012, ADN has grown enormously, and now it's going to enter a bit of a hockey-stick growth. That'll be interesting to see, may or may not work with the community it has now.

ADN is a lot more than "Twitter with 256 characters", but even that is interesting. In 256, I can write a full thesis/antithesis lemma as I so often do in my paragraphs (much to the annoyance of unary people).
MMMercury, Reposted.me, and App.net stats provide the kind of analytics I want, and there are many more.
#MondayNightDanceParty is one of the more clever uses of ADN. It's a chat room where you can request and comment on Youtube videos which auto-play in a jukebox. It's interactive MTV. I always get a few good new (or old) bands to listen to. It can whipsaw from a Russian orchestra playing/dancing "Kalenka" to Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds singing "Jubilee Street", to Usher yapping whatever.
Patter turns public (but hidden from the main timeline) channels and private rooms into a series of chat rooms. You can drop in, read the history, post, get notified.
Global is just everyone's public posts. On Twitter, they killed the global stream when it became unusable, but it was amazing. ADN's is just barely possible to follow for a while now, great for discovering people at random. It's like wandering through a block party and hearing passerby, and then you can introduce yourself and flirt with the cute nerd chick (they're all nerds on ADN). As ADN becomes too large for Global, some kind of filtering/automated content search should take its place, so the block party rocks on.
App.net API lets developers put App.net in anything. Think of using it for single sign-on to comments and apps instead of Twitter or Facebook. Storing user data in file storage instead of on Dropbox/iCloud/Mega, and then enabling sharing. There's a million interesting uses. I've got a few apps in design notes stage.

Writing With MultiMarkdown 3

kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 13:26:47 -0800

I recently upgraded from Markdown 2.0 (old, slow, Perl-based) to Markdown 3.7 (new, 100x faster, C-based). For the most part this went fine, run the Mac Installer and Mac Support Installer. The QuickLook plugin is sans instructions, you have to:

$ mkdir ~/Library/QuickLook
$ mv MultiMarkdownQuickLook.qlgenerator ~/Library/QuickLook

BBEdit can now support alternative processing in Preview, so:

$ mkdir "~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Preview Filters"
$ cd "~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Preview Filters"
$ ln -s `which mmd` DefaultFilter_Markdown

Now when you hit "Markup|Preview in BBEdit", you see MultiMarkdown, not dowdy old Markdown without tables or definition lists. Yay!

Minor aggrievances:

The line separator must now be ----, because --- is an M-dash, and there's no way to turn that shit off. I can type my own goddamned — character with ⇑⌥– on Mac or hold down - on iOS. So hey, every document has wrong separators because Windows sucks at typing non-ASCII!

There's no default way to turn off “smart” quotes, but you can use mmd --nosmart to fix it. If I wanted curly quotes, I would have typed them myself (⌥[ and ⇑⌥[, ⌥] and ⇑⌥]). Is there a more noxious bit of effete typographic wankery than curly quotes? No.

There's still no way to underline except by xxx.

However, I'll put up with this petty crap for a major boost in speed.

The big problem was that my old xslt filter for table of contents stopped working, it was slow as hell anyway, and I couldn't find a reasonable fix, so I just did a Javascript hack. The top of my document is:

Title: Foo
Author: Me
Date: 1970-01-01
CSS: style.css
HTML header: 

**Table of Contents**
[NOTE: You must have Javascript enabled]

style.css:

body {
    font: 12pt Palatino, serif;
}
tr {
    vertical-align: top;
}
th {
    text-align: left;
    text-decoration: underline;
}
tr > td:first-child {
    white-space: nowrap;
}
dt {
    font-weight: bold;
}
pre {
    font: 10pt Courier, monospace;
}
.toclink {
    text-decoration: none;
}

toc.js:

function tocNode(nodes) {
    var text = "";
    for (var i = 0; i < nodes.length; ++i) {
        var node = nodes[i];
        if (node.nodeType != 1) {
            continue;
        }
        var tn = node.tagName;
        if (tn == "H2" || tn == "H3" || tn == "H4" || tn == "H5" || tn == "H6") {
            var id = node.getAttribute("id");
            if (id) {
                var depth = parseInt(tn.substring(1, 2), 10);
                var value = node.innerHTML;
                var line = "";
                for (var t = 0; t < depth - 1; ++t) {
                    line += "  ";
                }
                line += ""+value+"<\/a>\n";
                text += line;
            }
        }
        text += tocNode(node.childNodes);
    }
    return text;
}

function tocInit() {
    var tocText = tocNode(document.body.childNodes);
    document.getElementById("toc").innerHTML = tocText;
}

Note that my toc.js does not include H1 elements, as I use that for the document title. Only H2-H6 are in the TOC.

I couldn't figure out any reasonable way to make tocInit() run in body onLoad, since I don't control that HTML generation, so at the end of the document I append:

It would be nice to have an index, because one of my major turn-offs with even a small book is No Fucking Index, but I'm still thinking about that. There is a LaTeX glossary option, but I'd rather not touch LaTeX again.

Finally, I want to be able to "compile" my document, so I use a dumb shell script, build.sh:

#!/bin/bash
rm -rf build
mkdir build
echo foo.md
mmd --nosmart build/foo.html
cp style.css toc.js build
# copy other resources to build
open build/foo.html

It's interesting to see how my writing process has cycled around. Long ago, I used crappy word processors. Then I started using troff, with inline markup and a build script. Then I wrote raw HTML for a very long time. Then I started using less shitty word processors. Then I went to Markdown, inline markup, and a build script.

I think the tension here is between how smart I have to be to set up my tools, vs. how much attention I have to pay while writing. The markup tools take far more setup work, but they let me just write. Word processors take no initial effort, but every little change, every table, is a pain in the ass. Raw HTML was the worst of both worlds, since nothing was easy.

(And yes, this writing about writing means I've been making progress again on the fantasy RPG I've been working on for a couple years… Something is coming on that front soonish.)

Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition

kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 23:46:31 -0800

Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition out for the iPad! Adventuring party like it's 1998!

I made a Half-Elf Fighter/Thief, Chaotic "Good" (ha ha as if); you're going to be using thieving skills pretty much all the time, and the main character needs to be able to fight. I'm not a fan of Fighter/Magic-User/Thief, they advance too slowly. I have no love for AD&D's bloated yet stifling rules on the tabletop, but for a computer game with limited options it works fine. The game lets you rest and recover spells almost any time, so Magic-Users aren't as limited as in the tabletop game.

So, I've looted the castle, got all the sidequests. Looted the training NPCs, too, but the game took their items back. On the road. No worries or obligations, a world to pillage. Town watchmen are TOUGH at 1st level, but I will be back for them.

On the down side, the UI is full of tiny confusingly vague or similar icons; if players have to read a help screen to understand the icons, you blew it. A lot of controls are not really touch-optimized, they're teeny little things. Seeing item details requires a long press and release, but sometimes it just registers as a single press which picks it up. Dialogues are especially dangerous, since picking the wrong item could kill you, but the links are a single line of text tall, half the size they should be.

Single character play is pretty good; you can pause, look around, pick an action, then unpause and it plays out. Mass combat is crap. Did I get my guy clicked on the right enemy? Next guy, try to move into position and nothing happens, why? Augh. I think I won't have a big party, I'll just get two sidekicks (mage, cleric) and tough it out.

I'm going to try to keep my play to an hour or two per day. We'll see how well that lasts.

What I'm Reading, Comic Book Edition

kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 11:38:11 -0800

I got tired of spandex. Tightly muscled superhumans wearing skin-tight costumes and beating each other up can only amuse for so long. So my comics buying has dropped to just a few, and I'm happier with all of them:

Garth Ennis, Carlos Ezquerra, Russ Braun, Darick Robertson

The Boys, the guys who kill superheroes when they get out of line. It's the end of spandex. It's Garth Ennis at almost his foulest and most violent and depraved, and that's saying a lot. Everything that I HATE about spandex, the preposterous backstories, costumes, self-marketing, pompous bullshit, that's what The Boys mocks and ruins. It'll be over soon, but it's been a fantastic run, and if you read comics, you must read it and think about what you've been reading.

Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips

Criminal, film noir, former con & military Tracy Lawless comes home to find out why his little brother Ricky was killed. Bloody sagas of revenge and treachery.

Fatale, Raymond Chandler by way of H.P. Lovecraft. If you meet a dame who's too good to be true, she ain't so good or true.

Incognito, based on the pulp heroes, like Doc Savage and The Shadow and The Phantom. This verges on spandex, but it's in Brubaker's hard-boiled style.

Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples

Saga, science fantasy about aliens who look an awful lot like angels and demons, with a baby, robot assassins, planets with rocketship forests. It's mad and beautifully drawn.

Scott Snyder, Stephen King, Rafael Albuquerque

American Vampire, the fight of a few American-strain vampires immune to sunlight, against the ancient European vampires. Early on, it's great horror and period piece. There's some great stories in here, and great art. But later it gets a bit too much professional monster hunters, and Hellboy and BPRD already did that. Why isn't this still horror? I'm still buying it, but maybe reaching the end.

Carlos Trillo, Eduardo Risso

Borderline, an Italian comic (by an Argentine writer), set post-apocalypse, in a city controlled by two drug gangs, the Council selling Hope, the Commune selling The Great Astral High. Two psychologically damaged mercenary assassins who used to be in love try to survive on opposite sides. It's one of the most melancholy and violent comics I've ever read, I love it.

Daniel Way, Filipe Andrade

Deadpool, the funniest comic ever about an amoral immortal assassin with uncontrollable motormouth. Supposedly set in Marvel's spandex universe, but really you won't see much of that, it's just Deadpool killing Skrull invaders.

Bryan Lee O'Malley

Scott Pilgrim IN COLOR. Long ago, I liked the comic a lot, but the vague character designs and repetitive landscapes in black & white were a flaw. Scott's a dick, and Ramona's a manipulative bitch, but they both get better through trial and tribulation. I haven't been to Toronto, but the grim frozen post-suburban wasteland environment really does make a great setting for urban fantasy.

Other Media Aside: The PS3 retro fighting game Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is excellent and old-school hard and long and grinding, with a great chiptune soundtrack by Anamanaguchi; you should also buy all of their music.

The movie was a wafer-thin retelling of parts of the book, with a terrible, whiny, pathetic lead actor for Scott, and totally misses the point of Ramona. It is a pretty movie, and hearing Sex Bob-Omb play is… special.

I did read a few of the Before Watchmen comics; I'm kind of stopped at present, but I might finish up the lines I liked. Nite Owl (J. Michael Straczynski, Andy Kubert, Joe Kubert) is excellent. Minutemen (Darwyn Cooke) is excellent, very pulp vigilante. Comedian (Brian Azarello, J.G. Jones) is a great comic in its own terms, but has massive continuity and character errors with Watchmen, so I'm kind of upset. Ozymandias and Silk Spectre were OK, but didn't grab me. Alan Moore does not own the Charlton comics characters (or the victorian characters he stole for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), he doesn't want to cooperate with the people who DO own those characters, so I don't care what his opinion is now. I only care if the comics are well-written and interesting.

Almost all of my comics now are from Comixology, because physical comics are a pain to collect and store; the iPad is always with me, and it's easy to buy, download, and read; and the retina screen and HD comics look AMAZING, better than even the good paper comics ever did.

Longer, Deeper, Harder Thoughts

kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 10:28:35 -0800

Quitting Twitter has driven me to an unusual state, without the constant noise even when I was filtering with my lists. I've been, uh, what's the word? "Reading". Books, blog posts, packets of Splenda.

In the old days of 2008, which now seems as distant as the Fall of Troy, I had hundreds of blog feeds in NetNewsWire. With Twitter, they atrophied, and I dumped almost everything, only kept some webcomics.

I've spent some time this morning running through my old RSS feeds, and almost all of the old tech blogs I read are defunct; a few of the authors still rarely write articles, and I run across them in App.net or nerd news sites, so no need to refollow any of them.

My current newsreader of choice, Pulse, lets you import feeds from the hateful Google Reader, but does not have any way to export. Bastards!

Tech News

Daring Fireball
Ars Technica
Loop Insight
Pando Daily (not at all technical, and often it's complete shit, but gossip about startups is useful intel for me)
The Verge (90% of the reviews and such are junk, but there's actual content here in the 10%)
Parislemon
Asymco
Monday Note (I just read Jean-Louis Gassée's articles, I have no interest in FF's chronicling of the death of newspapers)
AllThingsD (Alas, about half the articles are stubs for Wall Street Journal, which is paywalled and not worth paying for)
TUAW
GigaOm
NSFW Corp (primarily the War Nerd articles, but those are worth the price of admission)

Webcomics OPML

Suppressed Transmissions

I used to read many more RPG blogs, but most of the good ones are defunct, and the rest are waffling on about stuff I don't care about. I need to spend more time writing games again, and less time reading about others' games.

So now I need some advice. What's new and good in science fiction, futurism, science, technology (not software), weird stuff? Turn-offs: Hipsters, steampunk (shit, when will the '90s die?).

Minecraft Superflat Hardcore

kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 03:00:05 -0800

Today, I wanted a more serious challenge from Minecraft. In any normal survival game, even hardcore, I can't really die. I get iron, I get geared up, I get diamond, enchanting, I'm invincible. I get bored.

So I started playing with the Superflat worlds, making presets that would be harder. Soon I discovered /r/flatcore, and got more ideas from them, though these four should be unique:

Apeman:: The jungles are dense and endless, overrunning the ruins of ancient peoples. The sky is bright, but you rarely catch a glimpse of it through the tree canopy.
2;7,16x3,2;22;biome_1,decoration,dungeon,lake,mineshaft(chance=0.02),stronghold(count=1)
Fimbulwinter:: The ice giants have defeated the gods, leaving only ruins and snow in their wake. Pine trees and a handful of animals still survive around the few lakes which have not frozen. Monsters roam the land freely.
2;7,18x3,2,78,227x0,8x30;5;biome_1,decoration,dungeon,lake,mineshaft(chance=0.02),stronghold(count=1)
Mantle:: A harsh and unforgiving desert at the end of time, the sun is dim and the very surface of the world is unstable. Keep moving.
2;7,2x1,32x11,24x0,1x18,6x12,182x0,8x30;2;biome_1,decoration,lava_lake,village
Sheol:: A prison world (as Cordwainer Smith wrote) for criminals so damned, they could not be allowed to die once, but must rise and suffer again and again. The villages have the supplies you need to survive, but also an ambush which will only bring you pain.
2;7,16x87,3x24,1x9,227x0,8x30;2;biome_1,decoration,stronghold(count=1),village(size=1 distance=1)

To use these, pick Single Player, Create New World, More World Options, World Type: Superflat, Customize, Presets, paste the preset into the text box at top (ctrl-A, ctrl-V even on Mac), Use Preset, Done, Create New World. Most of them will be extremely laggy at first, pause the game and give them a minute to create chunks.

See the wiki for details on the format. I used the following blocks:

1: Stone
2: Grass
3: Dirt
7: Bedrock
9: Water
11: Lava
12: Sand
18: Leaves
20: Glass
24: Sandstone
30: Cobweb
78: Snow
87: Netherrack

Goodnight, Twitter, wherever you are.

kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 21:11:58 -0700

As I wrote in On App.net, I've quit Twitter. You can find me as @mdhughes on App.net. As of today, I stopped my crossposting, and made my account private. It's still there, but please don't bug me through it, I'm not likely to see mentions.

I use ADN in much the same way as Twitter, but with 256 characters I can actually complete a sentence in my usual loquacious manner, rather than scrimping and saving a letter here or there, or just giving up. It's not quite USENET again, but I can let my breath out a bit.

My drinks & movie nights are going to be much more of a thing on ADN, typical content:

If you're familiar to me from Twitter, and you follow me on ADN, I usually follow back; I'm trying to keep my follows down to a dull roar, but I'm happy to see the same friends in the new bar, too. (Likewise, if you've insulted or pissed me off on Twitter, I'm still pissed at you on ADN. Apologize, mute me, or suck on it, don't expect it's a magical fairyland where everyone loves you.)

There's a few updates to the clients:

Felix ★★★★☆

Felix now has a font size preference. It can load up to 100 messages at a time, which is sufficient for lower-traffic ADN. It fills gaps in the direction you last scrolled; I'm sometimes roll past and back and screw it up, but mostly this Just Works™. Still wishing for more media sharing options, and would love to have an iPad version, but for the iPhone it's the best client, hands down.

Netbot ★★★☆☆

If you've seen Tweetbot, you've seen Netbot, except it works on ADN.

Pro: Netbot is the only competent iPad client at present. It works, it updates your timeline well, it has notifications (though the initial release did not). Media upload options are Cloudapp, Droplr, and Mobypicture, and the latter lets you browse user galleries (see Ugh, politics and television again tonight).

Con: Does not have a unified timeline; people I don't follow don't appear in my main timeline when they mention me, and they SHOULD. They MUST. There are no badges on the mentions tab, so you have no idea anything's happened. The terrifying Tweetbot duck blowjob robot icon is in grey instead of blue, but it is still a terrifying and awful icon. The app is overdesigned, on the iPad it has tons of extra gray space, and it has a big stompy machine anti-aesthetic to it.

The MacBook screen is the Retina of the Mind's Eye

kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 08:25:23 -0700

I've been eagerly awaiting the MacBook Pro retina 13", as a replacement for my 2010 MacBook Air; the CPU is slow, but it has a real video card, so it's usable for 3D games like Minecraft. I really want a faster CPU, more RAM, and a retina screen so I can work on iOS software at full size.

I figured I'd hit the Apple Store and test it with Minecraft, it's not the only benchmark that matters, but it's the most CPU and graphics demanding thing I do. Making and drawing millions of tiny textured cubes is hard work! With far draw distance, max particles, opengl, smooth lighting, fancy leaves, and no vsync, you see what a computer's made of.

2010 MacBook Air: 30-40 fps, terrible bursts of lag, can easily outfly chunk generation. I play on much lower settings.

MacBook Pro retina 15": 80-120 fps, mild lag on new chunks.

MacBook Pro retina 13": 40-60 fps, mild to no lag on new chunks. The Intel integrated graphics are faster than expected, but not enough to replace a 2-year-old Air. Macworld got similar disappointing results.

I really don't want to lug around a huge, heavy MBP 15" again, I'll wait for the next gen 13" with a video card.