Still upgrading the blog and trying to drag it until the next year so I can just send blog posts to it via the Surface Pro.  

• Removed the Social plugin in favor of the Jetpack equivalent, Publicize.  Slowly downgrading all old plugins in favor of Jetpack equivalents.  This hopefully removes the twitter double-post.
• Installed Disqus comments.  I know ( Read more... )

Hey look!  A return to blogging!  The blog is getting a slow but certain face lift.  But this isn’t about blogging, but about my new blogging device, a 128GB Surface Pro 2, which showed up under the tree on Christmas.  After 48 hours of heavy use of the device I’ve come to some nuanced conclusions about it and how it fits into the technological ( Read more... )

I was one of those people who were affected by This American Life Episode #454, Mike Daisey and the Apple Factory, adapted from his show, “The Agony and Ecstacy of Steve Jobs.” It was enough that it gave me mild pause over acquiring the new iPad3. If the device is made in slave-labor-like conditions, regardless what Apple says, do I really want to ( Read more... )

I added ~15 pages to the Nephilim FATE Conversion CMS on the site.  Most of these are cut and paste jobs although some are cut-and-paste-2-or-more-together jobs.  I’m pondering one of those fancy edit-right-in-the-page buttons for when I come through and clean things up.  All the links in the main index page and in the table of contents included on ( Read more... )

I fell over last night so no long lists of Alchemical Formulae to round out Alchemy until tomorrow. This is a quick purely technology post.

I looked at adding a Wiki to the site to support static pages and then I looked at the WordPress CMS (content management system) add-ons. The WordPress CMS add-ons only make WP about half a CMS but, on the face ( Read more... )

I am getting near to the end of my conversion and I will go back to posting normal stuff with the occasionally interesting Nephilim RPG seed on my blog, probably to the relief of most everyone.  I’ve been thinking about what to do with the conversion that all two of you are reading and decided to a four step process - so complex it is almost a ( Read more... )

I meant to work on this post earlier this week but my week got real busy and I lost my time to write up posts.

I spent some time thinking about how pen-and-paper RPGs are best represented in an electronic medium. I don’t mean writing a full game like Neverwinter Nights; I mean representing the actual experience of the books, rules and dice in an ( Read more... )

Friday I had a spirited conversation about what sort of widgets and toys I need to really make game-based iPad apps. I came up with a list that looked like:

• Handle Playing Cards (backs, fronts, turn, flip over, etc.)
• Handle Game Tokens (rotate, pass around with a gesture, etc)
• Handle Dice (roll dice, move dice around, support pools)
• Handle Game Play ( Read more... )

Having finished reading Cocoa Programming by Daniel Steinberg and worked through all 27 (!) chapters with the hands-on projects, and now starting to delve heavily into specific topics (UIKit, CoreGraphics, Core Data and the network tools) I feel I have officially leveled up and gained a new feat: ability to craft small applications and possibly, ( Read more... )

This is a tech blurble.  If you’re not interested in tech blurbles, you can skip this one.  Sometimes it reaches peak blurble and it flows out over my blog and then the tide recedes for a while.

I really love Ruby.  Something about Ruby does it for me. I’m not clear what it is - the readability, the list comprehensions and lamda functions, the ( Read more... )