Monthly Archives: July 2009

Open Softwear, a Free E-book to Get Started With Wearable Computing

By Peter Backx | Published: July 31, 2009

Now is the time, if you ever wanted to get into wearable computing, such jackets that control your iPod, trousers that measure the distance you’ve run, and other general coolness like that. The guys at softwear.cc have compiled an e-book to get you started immediately. This beautifully illustrated and completely free e-book will give you insight [...]

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Exporting Models From Blender to Flash Sandy 3D, Experiments in 3D

By Peter Backx | Published: July 28, 2009

Last week, reader rafbaf asked how to use Blender models in Sandy 3D. There are a few options, for instance Sandy 3D can import the Collada format that Blender exports. But there is also an easier way. A Python script for Blender allows you to export models straight to ActionScript code. However, as you will [...]

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Hacking Music APIs

By Peter Backx | Published: July 24, 2009

Via the excellent ProgrammableWeb blog, I discovered Music Hack Day. Two days filled with information, workshops and hacking of music APIs. It must have been some interesting days, because the resulting hacks are all great. Hacking and programming all night long. It reminds me of the demoparties I used to attend. Maybe we should hold another [...]

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Tweet-Tweet: Backup Your Twitter Account Into Your WordPress Database

By Peter Backx | Published: July 21, 2009

One thing that has been bothering me with social services is the difficulty of creating a backup. What would happen if Twitter suddenly dissapeared, or even worse, what would you do without your Delicious bookmarks? It has happened a few times before, services like Geocities and Stick-it were closed almost over night (I’m exagerating, but [...]

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Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars FAQ on Squidoo

By Peter Backx | Published: July 17, 2009

I’ve been continuing my pursuit for GTA Chinatown Wars completion. The game has really drawn me in and it gets better every time I play. I also tend to loose more and more time, which is a good thing. If you happen to have the game, but have put it aside, I must urge: give [...]

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JLayer, Java MP3 decoder

By Peter Backx | Published: July 14, 2009

For a hobby project, I wanted to play and analyze MP3 files from a Java program. It turns out that’s not as easy as you might think. Probably due to licensing issues MP3 playback is not included with the standard Java development kit. Luckily there are some great people at JZoom (formerly JavaZoom) have created [...]

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Tweetcoding Demonstrates That 140 Characters is Enough for Every One

By Peter Backx | Published: July 10, 2009

If you’re an ActionScript programmer and you haven’t checked up on #tweetcoding, you owe it to yourself to take the rest of the day off and look it up. #tweetcoding is an ActionScript coding competition, organised by Grant Skinner, where you have exactly 140 characters (a tweet) to program something interesting. You might think that this [...]

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GTA Chinatown Wars Will Keep You Busy for the Rest of the Year

By Peter Backx | Published: July 7, 2009

To deal with my growing pile of shame, I decided to focus my efforts on one thing at a time. So for the last two weeks, I’ve been trying to put all my spare time into completing just one thing. To choose my single point of attention, I simply picked the first thing I came [...]

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The 960 Grid System Boosts Your Web Design Productivity

By Peter Backx | Published: July 3, 2009

If you’re designing a website, or especially if you are programming it. You want to quickly layout the different components of your application. Or you might be tired of always implementing a nice column layout and even be tempted to reach back to those tables of yore. Fear not, there is now an easy ways to [...]