James Roeder

If you have not yet heard of Artemis, the fantastic Spaceship Bridge Simulation game by Thom Robertson, then you should check it out right now.

Chances are you’re here because you HAVE heard of it, though. According to the developer, an iOS app is in the works, but it still isn’t out. We had a need for an extra station at a party the other night, so I spent one of my days off figuring out a way to play Artemis using an iPad.

It turns out I’m not the only one to have struggled with this. Artemis forum member troy has posted a write-up of how he accomplished the same goal using some different equipment than me. My method is similar – the short of it is that you use a virtual machine or machines running Artemis, and connect to those from an iPad using some sort of remote desktop functionality.

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I created this little webapp for the 2012 election with the help of a student taking Post-AP Computer Science. She worked on a desktop application to display the results throughout the day on the big screen TVs throughout the school.

Source code: https://github.com/jamesmallen/hbvoting

I had a bunch of large files backed up on my pogoplug that I wanted to get onto my iPad and iPhone. Long story short, I decided that the best way would be to use Dropbox. Unfortunately, you can’t install Dropbox on an ARM machine!

Luckily, I found this great script by andreafabrizi: Dropbox-Uploader. This is a simple bash script that only relies upon cURL being available on the system it’s running, which is available pretty much everywhere. The setup process was a little weird, but the first time you run the script, it guides you through the process. Now I’m able to put things in my Dropbox using a simple ssh connection to my pogoplug!

Yesterday, my Freedom Spot – Photon arrived in the mail, and I just thought I’d post a quick review.

FreedomPop is a new-ish service focused on providing free (as in beer) internet access anywhere in their coverage areas. No more hunting down coffeeshops or McDonalds – just bring your hotspot, and you’re good to go! They offer 500 MB free per month, with the ability to pay by the MB after that or upgrade to a bigger plan.

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I received an e-mail the other day about a Konfabulator project that I hadn’t even thought about since 2007: over five years ago! The widget in question was one developed for a “4k contest,” one in which coders try to make something interesting with a minimal amount of code. One of my submissions was a pseudo-3D rubik’s cube widget.

The person who contacted me had the submitted version of my code and was trying to use it as a basis for another project of his. Unfortunately, the submitted version was not designed to be human-readable, and was a bit annoying to work with.

Now, a lot has changed for me in five years. Back then, I was in a different career – freelance web development. Now I’m a computer science teacher. Back then, I used SVN to store and track changes for my work. Now, I use GitHub.Continue reading →

I decided it’s finally time that I learn to properly use a terminal-based editor other than nano, since nano is rather limited when it comes to editing source code. vim seemed like a good choice, but I was so daunted by it. Then I discovered vimtutor – it’s a tutorial that takes place entirely in vim, and it’s nicely paced!

If you’ve got vim installed on your machine, just run vimtutor at a command prompt and follow the instructions from there. Hello, cursor movement using letter keys!