Tag: programming

A couple of days ago I sumbled upon this video by Luke Smith where he presented a couple of scripts to display CPU, memory and temperature information in i3blocks. Since I use polybar due to it working much better in tandem with my dual-monitor setup with different DPIs, I decided I’d adapt and change the scripts to work in polybar. Polybar already comes with memory, CPU and temperature modules by default, but they don’t include a popup showing the top-consuming processes, which is a nice feature to have.

This is just a quick post to share my .dotfiles project. It contains the configuration files for most of the essential utils and tools I use in all my machines. These include the tiling window manager i3wm, the info bar polybar, the awesome qutebrowser, the text editor vim or the file manager ranger. Also, in the bin/ folder there are lots of scripts (most of them hacked together quickly) to do various tasks, like converting garimin fit files to the open gpx format or switching off the monitor in systems without a hardware switch.

I’ll shortly be moving the Gaia Sky repository from GitHub to GitLab (link here) due to the former being acquired by Microsoft. If you have cloned the repository and wonder how to update your remote reference, here’s what to do: $ cd path/to/gaiasky $ git remote set-url origin https://gitlab.com/langurmonkey/gaiasky That’s all it takes. All pulls from now on should be directed to the gitlab repo.

The idea of ditching both my web hosting provider and Drupal has been at the back of my mind for a few months.

Bear with me. Since about 2011 I have been maintaining this website using the cheapest hosting tier my hosting offers – At least it was the cheapest at the time I got it. They call it The Essential and it costs over 300 bucks for 2 years. It is not a lot, but it is definitely too much for my purposes of hosting a small blog where I provide occasional updates on my projects, my portfolio and my CV.

Also, loading times are horribly long and the complexity of managing the Drupal installation (upgrades/updates) and also the database takes way too much of my time. Only the thought of updating to Drupal 8 sends shivers down my spine and ultimately got me searching for better options.

Turns out the German physics educational journal Physik in unserer Zeit (Physics in our time) published a thorough review of one of my Android apps, the Particle Physics Simulator back in January 2014. One of the authors of the article, Jan-Philipp Burde, contacted me a while back to let me know that he was preparing the article and to ask some information on how the code works, which I gladly provided. Then, he kindly contacted me again when the article was published in the January 2014 issue of the journal.

For what I could understand with my still basic German, the article talks about how the app can aid in the teaching of gas dynamics, providing some hints on the configuration set-up (no gravity, elastic collisions, etc.) in order to simulate a gas. For example, it teaches how to illustrate the concept of Brownian motion, removing the gravity and creating several small-sized particles along with one or two big-sized particles.

A couple of posts ago I mentioned I would write a few lines about my experience with the migration of my RTS engine from Slick to Libgdx and that’s what I’ll do in this post. I’ll be talking very lightly on some issues such as the code structure, the rendering process, the camera, etc. If you need a starting tutorial please refer to the official documentation, this is not what you are looking for. I’m just trying to give my impressions in the migration process I had to undertake. But first I want to back up a little and give a quick overview of both libraries.