nick.recoil.org

May 10, 2007 Comments Off

Wordwrap – A fantastic NDS homebrew game

I’ve spent much of my recent commuting time hunched over my NDS, playing Wordwrap

wordwrap_startup_screen

It’s a very simple game which presents you with a number of letters, and you have to construct as many words out of them as possible, with or without a time limit, depending on your chosen game type. Simple, but very very engrossing.

Nov 18, 2005 Comments Off

First post!

Whilst engaged in a bit of post-lunch Google vanity browsing, I came across what must be my first post to Usenet from my old Demon Internet account.

Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.misc
From: Polomint@turing.demon.co.uk (Nick Ludlam)
Path: bga.com!news.sprintlink.net!
  howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!demon!
  turing.demon.co.uk!Polo
Subject: Starwars?
Organization: None
Reply-To: Polomint@turing.demon.co.uk
X-Newsreader: Demon Internet Simple News v1.29
Lines: 7
Date: Sun, 18 Sep 1994 21:38:34 +0000
Message-ID: <779924314snz@turing.demon.co.uk>
Sender: use...@demon.co.uk

Hi! I just wondered if there was a
MUD/MUSH/whatever related to the Starwars trilogy?

Thanks in advance,
Nick.

--
Nick Ludlam  -*- polomint@turing.demon.co.uk

This was around the time that I was really into MUDs and MUSHes, and was casting around for engaging ones, before I settled on Elephant MUD through which I met some very very good friends. As I remember it, this is when Demon also packaged the KA9Q software, which was a DOS implementation of a TCP/IP stack that was used to access all the various services, before Win95.

UPDATE:

I’ve also spotted the first bit of code that my brother Dominic posted to the internet in AMOS basic for the Commodore Amiga. In his words, ‘That was, like, before the internet was popular!’

Nov 2, 2005 Comments Off

Upgrading, 64bit style

In other news, I’ve hauled my home PC out of the 32bit stone age into the gleaming 64bit bronze age, with a reasonably priced Athlon64 3200+. This is in an effort to get reasonable framerates out of X3 Reunion, but unfortunately I’ve found out that the bottleneck sits more with the graphics card than it did with the CPU.

With modern games, it seems that having a decent GPU and a reasonable CPU is a much better situation than a decent CPU and an average graphics card. My GeForce 6600 GT simply doesn’t cut it with Black and White 2, X3 or Valve’s ‘The Lost Coast’, which is doing a nice job of demonstrating what it’s like to have a decent optical physics model in games.

Now I’m left wondering at exactly what point I can buy a top-end graphics card without paying too much of a premium, taking into account that my gaming experience gets worse with each new game purchase.

Flickr photostream

Nick Ludlam posted a photo: From the Android supplement from The Guardian on 29/08/2010. I was interviewed for a piece on the future trends in Mobile apps. www.guardian.co.uk/lg-talking-technology/the-future-of-apps Nick Ludlam posted a photo: My wonderful colleagues at BERG bought lots of cake for my birthday. And not just any old cake! This was from Konditor and Cook. It was delicious!We get bonus points for having to cut it with a craft knife, since it was either that or a scalpel. Nick Ludlam posted a photo: I've set up a custom Ruby script to scrape my balance information from the Three.co.uk website, and a custom app to receive the notifications. I've set it up to tell me my balance every day, since there is no automatic notification on Three as there is with O2. Nick Ludlam posted a photo: Just up the road from BRIG. Lovely coffee, and nice people serving it. The map shows you where it is! Nick Ludlam posted a photo: An image of an advertisement in the Sun Newspaper for Android phones sold by Carphone Warehouse here in the UK.Underneath is a section which lists 10 apps that "you need to get through the day". 8 are free, 1 is £1, and the last one did not even seem to be listed when I searched. "Where's The Train", the only non-free app, is listed as having "100 - 500 downloads"This is very typical of my experience with the Android Market. Unless your business model can support free applications, with your revenue coming from advertising, a website or service you sell, then you are unlikely to be able to recoup the time spent developing quality applications. Nick Ludlam posted a photo: I love their spoons. As you pull the spoon out of your mouth, you can feel the texture of the detailing on your top lip Nick Ludlam posted a photo: The girls pose for a quick picture before heading off to the race start line Nick Ludlam posted a photo: That 'Touch here if bicycle is damaged' button will be too tempting Nick Ludlam posted a photo: The new bike stands have just appeared on Shoreditch High St.

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