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July 31, 2008

BoxCAD 2.0 Alpha

Filed under: BoxCAD — Anthony @ 2:53 am

BoxCAD 2 has officially dethroned BoxCAD 1.  It is still very alpha, but there are so many cool new features, and I have so little time to work on it, I didn’t want to wait to post it. :D

New Features:

  • Springs (“Soft Joints”)
  • Body Controllers
  • Particle Engines
  • Gravity Objects (with negative gravity capability)
  • Parameter flexability with many tools (Motor Joint, Gravity Object, Spring Joint, etc)
  • Notepad (leave notes for whoever opens your file)
  • Full screen mode, fluid layout
  • World Snapshot & Restore
  • Revert to previous edit (when  you hit “play” and your world blows up – usually recovers from a physics engine crash)
  • Radial Array
  • True Metric Scaling
  • Auto Quality-Degrade when FPS drops too low
  • Idle Mode, so you don’t blow up your computer

Please Note! – This is alpha. Things are broken. Things may behave unexpectedly. Things are sometimes disabled when I find they are broken, but don’t have time to fix them. But 95% of it is beautiful and addictive.

And…

I need help! If you know AS3.0 and

  • C++
  • C#
  • Visual Basic
  • Java
  • Python
  • Any other language with a 2D physics engine

and ANY physics engine, I need translator classes for code dumps.
What’s Next?

After 2.0 is final, this is the current feature set planned for 3.0.

  • Multiple Shapes per Object 
  • Inclusion of advanced objects (i.e. gravity, particle engine) in code dump
  • Annotation Objects
  • Generic Properties Panel for EVERY object
  • Inclusion of joints with copy and copy derivatives
  • Library Object Import / Scene Merge
  • Adobe AIR file viewer
  • Image Import & Polygon Extraction
  • Polygon Decomposition OR Convex Polygon Type
  • FX – Gas, Wind, Force Wave, Liquid, ?
  • Breakable Joints
  • Deformable Bodies
  • Advanded Soft-Body Tools
  • Exhaustive Undo

Want to Help? Sponser It! Contact me if you find BoxCAD useful, inspiring, addictive, etc – and have some extra money burning a hole in your pocket. ; )

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Raving Blogger Slams Media, Jilts Blogosphere

Filed under: Blogorrhoea — Anthony @ 2:25 am

If you’re reading this, you have just unwittingly partaken in a demonstration of excellent headline-writing.

Or you stumbled randomly across this blog and read the first thing you saw.

 I’ll assume the former, because the latter is not very inspiring.

ANYway, to follow up with my 8 Important Lessons for becoming Popular on the Interweb post, I would like to talk about another important factor: The Headline.

Let me demonstrate. Which would you rather read?
1. “Rice says talks with Israel, Palestinians ‘fruitful’”
2. “Vicious Politician Plays with Middle Eastern Fire”

No brainer, right?

It’s simple really. Use at least two words that are one of the following:
1. Aesthetically Pleasing (i.e. “Trifecta“)
2. Intense, Snappy, Awesome (i.e. “Gouges”, “Slams” (media favorite),  ”Mourned”, “Ripped”, etc)
3. Inherently Interesting (Everyone loves fire, and ALMOST everyone loves reading about other people’s misery).

 For further reading, I found this post amusing.

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July 30, 2008

8 Important Lessons for becoming Popular on the Interweb

Filed under: Blogorrhoea — Tags: , , , — Anthony @ 9:15 am

I like del.icio.us. It’s usually the first place I go when google fails me after 2 or 3 pages of search results. But the most valuable thing I’ve taken away from del.icio.us is not the content itself.

See, I’ve been coming to a very slow realization. A product of countless front-page delicious skims. And that realization is…

The Best Information Comes In Groups of between 8 and 430.

For example, at this very moment, skimming delicious:
 11 iPhone Apps That Will Clean Out Your Junk Drawer
 11 Things You Shouldn’t Leave For School Without | @ Dumb Little Man
 40 Places for College Students to Find Free Unabridged Books Online — Education-Portal.com
 25 Internet Startups That Bombed Miserably | Business Pundit

Whoops… just refreshed. A new entry appeared at the top:
 Neatorama » Blog Archive » 10 Things You Should Know About the Internet

Two more just caught my eye over on the right column, but I digress.

See, people today need their factoids. I don’t want the whole darn research paper… just give me the summary. I don’t want to know how you did the problem, I just want the answer. If it cannot be consummed within 30 seconds per chunk (be it a TV commercial, news article, factoid, etc), it’s not worth knowing about.

….

Hmm.

I was hoping to come up with 7 more great ideas for increasing internet popularity before I got to the end of the post, but seeing as I AM at the end of the post, and have no more great ideas, an apology will have to suffice. I’m sorry.

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July 9, 2008

Adderall Holiday

Filed under: Adderall — Tags: , , — Anthony @ 7:21 pm

Currently in day two of a break from Adderall.

I’ve never had a difficult time concentrating – unless it was at a boring job for an 8 hour day (who doesn’t?), but right now, it takes an enourmous amount of mental strain to do things that normally I find very interesting and easy. Even forming written sentences is – not difficult – but labored. The inside of my head might as well be filled with thick smoke. I have to mentally squint to nail down a thought, then force myself to type it out.

Even literal vision seems affected. If you’ve ever had migraine aura in the form of blindspots – it’s similiar to that. Much more vague of course – but similiar in that I have the sensation that part of my vision is missing, making it difficult to read. (I don’t actually have blindspots).

 I’m going to be off of Adderall for about two weeks minimum. Why? I’m starting to like to it too much, to the point where I’m actually getting sick of thinking about it. And I am far to dependant on it – when I have no reason to be. I have always been productive, with or without Adderall. Adderall simply gave me more time in the day to be productive. Not an excessive amount of time – a normal amount of time.

 I’ll probably post an update in a couple of days – hopefully the “withdrawel” symptoms will have diminished by then. From what I’ve read though, I can expect anywhere from a couple of days to two weeks for the brain to return to pre-Adderall baselines. We’ll see….

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