Backing up and Dropbox.

I really need to sort out my backup scheme for files at home. I don’t want anything elaborate, basically just syncing folders between drives and between computers.

I was put on to dropbox a while ago by Jason. It’s basically something like “My Briefcase” but works, and is available on a number of platforms.
You run the client app on multiple machines. Anything in the specified folder is synced between all those computers, assuming they have internet access. It has conflict resolution and change history. You can share parts of the directory structure publicly if you want. It’s great for putting things like wip demos, small codebases/repos etc on so that you automatically have them at other locations, without fiddling with a thumb drive. The other great feature is that it has a web client that can view most content and fetch via http.

The only reason this wouldn’t be great for home backup is that it uses the internet for all traffic. It’s therefore not suitable to backup say gigabytes of photos, art or video heavy projects, music etc between machines on a LAN or between drives within a machine.

Does anyone know of a super simple free software solution? The main requirement I guess is you can tag directories and have them synced up on a LAN (and perhaps certain subdirectories remotely also for offsite backups of important but small data). The other requirement is that it behaves peer to peer and sort of opportunistically. At home we don’t leave our computers on 24/7  and there is no always on filestore pc or anything either. Extra points if it has clients for other OSes.

It wouldn’t be a big project to write something like this, therefore I can’t help but feel it must already exist
(cygwin, rsync and cron don’t count!).

Source engine pwned.

So after the 90th time of going insane from source engine games (tf2 this time) going batshit loco when you alt-tab or a chat window pops up or you have 2 monitors or ANYTHING I actually went looking for an answer, and found it.
Make a shortcut for the game.
Edit the shortcut and add the following command line switches (except your monitor res ofc):

 -window 1920 1200 -noborder

This does as you’d expect and runs the game in a borderless window. It might incur a small performance hit, but alt-tab is now instant.

Praise the gaming gods.

Lua scriptable NES emulator gives Mario a mouse.

Here’s an interesting video of a guy using the mouse to control things in SMB1 using a fancy NES emulator called FCEUX.

Via kotaku.

SHIFT 2

Nice little flash flippy, reversy game. Interesting mechanic for a platform puzzle game.
SHIFT 2 on Newgrounds.

WP theme no longer super generic.

I found and modified a nice theme called Gear by the entity that inhabits www.mymobiles.com.
My contributions were hacking my own icon in, choosing from the decent selection of colours and patterns and replacing the mini icons at top right for some that are larger (and fiddling with their position with margins and padding and stuff.)
I’m a CSS master ><;

Anyway it will do the job, better than what I had before and a good reward to effort ratio

I’ve decided to learn Go

For anyone else wishing to embark a great starting place is this tutorial: The Interactive Way to Go.

Then you can play and spectate games online at: The KGS Go Server. I’m guessing thats one of those trendy recursive acronyms.

Space Arts!

Here is some work I’m currently doing for my friend Paul at Black Lab Games.

About 5 years ago Paul and I made a game called Defiance: Final Strike for PocketPC. I did the artwork and Paul did the code. It was/is a retro arcade space shooter with some objective based missions and lots of enemies as well as friendly ships.
Black Lab are doing a remake of the game for current hardware so I’m redoing the artwork. Basically just taking my original designs from pixel art to much higher resolutions.

The plan is:

1. Minimal redesign. Only where it won’t translate or just plain sucks will I do much redesign.
2. No angled lighting. In game the sprites will be rotated at runtime so any strong side/top/bottom lighting wont work.
3. Make it look cool.

To achieve the plan I went with a really colourful, cartoony style which matches the feel of the original game quite well (some crazy designs). I think they’re turning out pretty slick.

Here are some before and after comparisons:

High resolution remakes of old pixel art.

Greets

So I noticed a couple things in the last few months that influenced me into finally setting up a proper ‘online presence’.

So welcome to beetlefeet.net!
I would have liked monsterworks.com but turns out it’s taken by some crazy academic since 1990. :/

Currently the site is just WordPress, I don’t think I will want to do anything too fancy so I think WP will suffice.
I will do something about the theme at some point though.