making apps, making webs.

A new language learning website has come out, called Ba Ba Dum (build 128, version 1.1.1).  This is my review. tl dr; don't use it for learning languages where the gender of the words matter - like in German. I first heard about the website through some UI/UX/js/css/web people (thanks Leigh and Paul !).  Not only is this interesting to me from a web app perspective (that's what I do for my day job), but I'm also very interested in making games, as well as learning languages.  So, naturally I checked it out. It's a great start, and very well made!  Not only did they draw all the illustrations, but made the fonts!  It's also, I think, a great example of content marketing, ie making something useful for people showing off your skills.  This project shows that these people can produce a quality product (see making of , and the credits ).  Reviewing a project fairly without knowing the brief is always impossible.  So I'm reviewing i...

Read a bunch of this book this morning whilst I lay in bed drinking coffee and laughing. Really enjoying the blend of wine critic style with the struggling writer buddy road trip genres. Was even reading it on the train on the way home... so engrossed I missed my stop! I give it 7 stars. Out of 5.

This is for the beta release, and most(I think all) of these bugs have been reported in the bug tracker. (Note the bug tracker is currently reporting errors... so I can not link to bugs). I do like a lot of things about the release... these are mainly things I don't like. So please don't take this as a bad view of Ubuntu 9.10 overall... just some criticism. Hibernation seems to not work correctly all the time(for me)... when I close the lid, and open it later it does not seem restore properly. It shows the screen, but does not respond to input on the keyboard/trackpad. Then after a bit the screen goes black. Then I need to press the power button, and then the login box comes back up - and I can log in again. This has worked for the last two ubuntu releases, so it's annoying. Booting seems slower... and is actually slower(timed it) for me. Perhaps I need to install from scratch for it to be faster or something. Pete Shinners has some benchmarks on his blog of ubuntu ...

Tonk Tanks is a really small, and fun game. All game play is on one screen, and the controls are simple. You have arrow keys to move your tank around, and a button to shoot the other tanks. It's like one of those old atari 2600 tank games, but a more modern version. Once you die, you teleport to a different respawn positions around the map. The game is quite playable single player - but the author is working on a networked multiplayer version. Another nice addition would be multiplayer on one machine - especially with joysticks or mice support (since keyboards are evil ). The tank AI seems different and varied enough, that I have not worked it out from playing it ten times or so. Usually my games only last about five minutes before I move onto something else. It's one of those games I can play for little while when I want a short break. Tonk Tanks works well on linux, windows and Mac (and probably other platforms supported by python+pygame). There's a windows .exe...

Ardentryst is a really fun open source game made with python, and pygame . What stands out are the goodness of the graphics, music and sound. With the feel of the control you have of the characters being another highlight. It's a platformer/RPG type of game, and there are a bunch of different combo moves you can make as your characters in the game gain more experience. Think tapping different buttons at the right time to do special moves. You run, and jump across things in the levels destroying baddies as you go. Currently you can choose from two characters in the game. One is a male warrior, and the other a female wizzard. The feel of the characters seems quite different. Each one gets different abilities, weapons, and spells. Ardentryst is still being developed, but is already highly playable. I played it for a few hours to complete it with both characters - but there's a bunch of things which can be fun to replay. Like an online high score table, where you can subm...

Plague is a game I've been playing for a while now... downloading a new version each time its author Benedict Carter does a new release. It's not a finished game, the author still has lots of plans for its future, but it is quite playable and fun. It's an overhead game, which limits your line of site on a very large map. You play in a team of survivors against zombies! It has randomly generated maps, so each game is slightly different. You need to run around to try and kill all of the zombies, and zombie hives(which create new zombies). You start off with no weapon, amongst a group of other survivors. All of you run off trying to grab weapons and ammo (which are conveniently lying around), as the zombies move in to try and eat your brains. There's a selection of weapons, from a pistol, to a mini gun... as well as different grenade types. Which you can use to burn things -- trees, zombies, or even your self. If you burn yourself, ricochet bullets off walls into y...