Got myself an Arduino starter kit from kjell.com. A fun and intuitive reading with some good and really useful gadgets. You get the best of two worlds, programming and tinkering with electronics.
Arduino fun
Let’s see what this new adventure will take me…
I’ve lately wanted to do something completely different and have picked up an interest for 2d and 3d game development.
A long time ago I used to create games for myself mostly because I wanted to learn more about graphics and test what was possible with the CPU and hardware of that time. Now, this was 80286 Intel based processors mostly, and yeah, it was hard. The games were simple and in the style of ‘snake’, ‘chaser’, ‘breakout’, etc.
Both Lynda.com (nowadays owned by LinkedIn), and Udemy.com, offer great courses in game programming. So I have now completed some Udemy courses (by the great DevSlopes Game Academy team), and the official Unity3d tutorial, Space Shooter.
So, I’ve set up some small goals for myself. One was to familiarize myself with the Unity3d Game Engine.
Unity (at unity3d.com) is a great development environment. It doesn’t matter if you develop with Windows, Mac or Linux. Me, I’m on a Mac and it is quite easy to create games these days. You can create games targeted to run on up to an impressive 21 target platforms with Unity3d.
This game engine offers a fantastic world of things for real time editing, scripting, graphics, rendering, physics and more, you just have to know what you want to dream up and what the game engine can offer. For Unity I opted for C# programming, but you can code in JavaScript or Boo.
Well, that goal is now reached. I will of course do more when I find the time.
Next up is the Unreal Game Engine, and that will be C++ based programming which is something I’ve done for many years, prior to when I decided to focus on Java.
Here’s a list of courses I’ve taken so far:
So, say you’ve had your raspberry pi running for a while and for some reason your current time on the device is off by an hour due to daylight savings not being updated, what do you do?
It appears this happened to my RASPI where I’ve had a NetHomeServer installation running for a long time. I started noticing the lamp timer didn’t work as expected, the timing was not quite right… finally, I had to do something about it.
Logging on to the device via ssh and checking the date revealed it was off by one hour.
I suspected the network connection must have failed at some point (maybe around the time going from winter to summer time – the DST or daylight savings time) and the pi must have lost its actual time somehow.
The simple fix? Log in via SSH and issue the following:
pi@middlelake ~ $ sudo service ntp restart [....] Stopping NTP server: ntpdstart-stop-daemon: warning: failed to kill 1922: No such process . ok [ ok ] Starting NTP server: ntpd. pi@middlelake ~ $ date Mon Oct 17 20:31:52 CEST 2016 pi@middlelake ~ $ sudo service ntp restart [ ok ] Stopping NTP server: ntpd. [ ok ] Starting NTP server: ntpd. pi@middlelake ~ $ date Mon Oct 17 21:43:42 CEST 2016
Problem solved!
Symbolizing lots of stuff
A while ago, I set out to package the NetHomeServer in a Docker container.
The result of that is available here.
If you haven’t already, head over to my friend Stefan’s pet project NetHomeServer. It’s a clever little server that runs on several hardware as long as there is Java on the device. So, for example, if you have a Raspberry Pi laying around, you could quite easily set up your own home automation system to control your appliances.
I’ve contributed to this project and plan to do so even more.
If you are in the Java world and like to tinker with toys and code, this might be something for you too.