Browser Load of Coolness
Welcome to Browser Load of Coolness. This site is the product of Pizzasgood. Pizzaswho, you ask? Well, the short answer is that I'm a hyperactive guy who likes a little bit of everything. I program, draw, snowboard, read, bike, camp, build computers, and make websites. I can even cook chicken cordon bleu in a campfire (yummy). This place is where I put any cool stuff I make, do, or find. It's also kind of a portfolio. If you feel like hiring me to do something, feel free to drop me a line. I could always use a little more dough. :)

Updates
These are the last 5 updates. To see the rest, visit the archive.
Friday, May 06, 2016
The first chapter of Wheels is now online! Yee-haw! That part of the site isn't really integrated with the rest at the moment (mainly because I'm intending to majorly overhaul this stuff), but it's working, I've provisionally set up Disqus powered comments, and now I really need to go eat some lunch. For those of you who don't like the yellow-on-black colorscheme, I do intend to add an option for black-on-white. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. For now, you'll just have to cope (worst case, you can always use your browser to override it).
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Don't you just hate it when somebody says, "Things are changing. I'm going to be super productive now!" and then they fall off the face of the earth for four years? Good thing it hasn't been four years yet; that's next week. :P Anyway, I've been busy doing the whole "start a project, get 10%-40% done, then drop it and start something new" routine. Which is getting old. So far there have been three games and a book. Well, anyway, that ends now. Okay, actually it ends next week. On Friday, May 6th, I will begin posting weekly chapters of the rough draft of a story I'm writing. I won't guarantee that I'll keep the updates weekly the whole way through, but I guarantee that the story will finish in a timely manner.

Now, I don't know if anybody actually still visits this dusty old site; I see no reason why they'd bother. So maybe nobody will be reading this update. But just in case, be warned that I'm probably going to be overhauling things in the near future and eliminating a lot of old content. There's a lot of stuff on here that I thought was pretty cool when I was 17 which is just embarrassing now. So, things may be strange, ugly, and broken over the next week, and I may or may not have everything fully operational again by the time I start posting my story on the 6th. Most of my time is being eaten by actually writing.
Tuesday, May 5, 2012
Not much happened since the last post. That will be changing. I'd been working two jobs for the last year so that I could pay off my loans and build up a safety buffer. Well, I've done that, and now I quit the second job so I can spend 20+ hours a week on game development. Today was my first day of the new schedule. I spent the freed up time transferring this site to a new host, because the one I've been using has been annoying lately. Unfortunately the process of moving my site (and two unrelated forums I run) took a lot longer than I expected, so I haven't really manage to get any actual game development done. There are still a few hours left in this day, so after I make some supper I'll get on it. :) As for what exactly I'm making, I'll talk more about that in another post, once I actually have something to show. I will say that this first game is going to be single-player, probably not extremely deep, and is totally unrelated to that "Void" deal I was working on last summer. (Still intend to continue working on that eventually, and perhaps as a change of pace when I get bored with this one.)
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Been busy with boring life stuff, haven't really done anything worth mentioning here. I have however made a very nice discovery. SMath. It's a freeware program that is like Mathcad. Freeware, but not open source (which might be why I didn't find it back when I was searching for a Linux equivalent to Mathcad). I just found out about it tonight. Haven't really used it other than a quick test, but it seems pretty slick. It will definitely be useful to me in the very near future. Oh, and as you may have guessed by the fact that I'm talking about this program at all, it does have a Linux version.

So, as far as I'm concerned, this means I can remove the MATHoLantern project from my todo list, as it would just be redundant. I might still extend it enough to handle simple graphs, just for fun.

Like I said though, I've been busy with boring life stuff. Been doing some extra contract work lately so that I could afford to start buying the computer engineering equipment and supplies that I have missed since graduating from college. The oscilloscope is still in transit, but the func generator and the power supply are already here. Ordered a whole mess of misc. components from surplus stores the other day as well, so when those arrive I'll be able to populate my parts bins. I'm also going to start building a workbench tomorrow, since I don't actually have anywhere to work on this stuff at the moment (other than my computer desk, which is already too crowded). That will be fun.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Achievement unlocked: Create Music!
confident_cruise-0.2.ogg
You can copy that file all you want, play it in public, etc., so long as you don't use it for commercial things.

It's pretty rough still, and a bit shorter than I'd like, but it's the first original music I've ever created, so I'd say it's pretty decent. As I learn more I'll make it better.

I've flirted with making music for years, but never really found a method that fits with me, other than just humming and such. Until now!

Enter musagi.

It's similar to a midi sequencer, but rather than midi it is a synth, and is oriented toward retro music (though it can do more modern stuff as well). The guy who made it, DrPetter, also makes retro games. The program has this down-to-earth feel compared to all the midi-sequencers I've played with, probably as a result of being created by a game developer rather than a musician.

It was originally a Windows program, but there is now a Linux port with most of the functionality. That isn't published on the website though, but if you poke around a little in the forum you find the link:

https://bitbucket.org/stqn/musagi-stqn

There is a pkgbuild for it in the AUR already, so I was able to get it compiled, installed, and running very quickly.


DrPetter has a tutorial on his website for using musagi, so I went through that to get a feel for using it, and then I started over from scratch and created the file I linked to above. It's fairly similar to the tutorial song in terms of techniques used (no big surprise), but has a pretty different feel to it I think. Lots of rough edges of course, and like I said, it's shorter than I'd like. The end just sort of happens. But it's a great start for somebody with no musical training beyond one year in band in elementary school and one year in choir in middle school. And one helpful tutorial.

So I figure I'll play with musagi some more, and poke around online reading more about music theory and composing, and I could probably become pretty decent. Certainly I can become good enough to create my own music for any games I want to make. Don't know if I'd be interested in a career in music if I managed to become good enough - more likely I'd spend part of my time programming and part of my time making music. But that's getting way ahead of myself! Dream big, dream early, but stay awake, I say. Right now, it's just a fun hobby that I finally managed to break into, so I'm just excited. And I'm a DIY guy, so being able to make my own music gives me that DIY buzz. Anybody who gets a kick out of building their own stuff instead of paying the man knows what I'm talking about.


DrPetter has made some other neat programs as well. The only one I've actually used is sfxr, which is actually how I found out about him and musagi in the first place. Sfxr is a simple little tool for creating sound effects, like the pew-pew of a blaster.


Regarding Void, I can shoot stuff now. I can't hit anything yet, because there is still no collision detection (I'm working on it). Before I could do collision detection I had to rewrite some chunks of the code, to create a Mesh class, and update the Model, Model-OBJ, and VBO classes to reflect that. Now that that's done, I can start on collision detection proper. I'm going to start with just bounding spheres so that I can get some collision-handling code into the Projectile class, so that I'll be able to tell whether I'm "hitting" things. Then I can work toward collision meshes.

At some point I will probably take a break to add music and sound effect support :)


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