Behold the Duplo Cube! From my earlier calculations, I figured it was theoretically possible to create a perfect cube made out of Duplo bricks.
Theory turned out to be easier than practice what with the baby thwarting me at every step but I eventually prevailed and created a single interlocking structure that is six units in each dimension.
One of the delightful / terrifying things about the internet is that things don’t just die on there. Long after a web page is gone, there is often some record of it elsewhere.
Take, for example, the very first web page I ever made. (Warning: do not click on the link unless you are prepared to have your eyes assaulted from the visual mores of the 1990s.)
I made that web page back in the days when I was a grad student at UBC (The University of British Columbia) and the web was relatively new. In those heady days, we were unfettered by concerns of readability and aesthetics. Instead, it was all about staking a claim and saying, “This, this is my color scheme! I defy anyone else to try and take it from me!”. I think I won.
Happy Independence Day, America! (Or as one of my English friends jokingly referred to it, “Happy Good Riddance Day”.) And to my Canadian visitors, Happy Belated Canada Day!
As a kid, I always loved the Fourth of July because, hey, fireworks. It wasn’t until I went to grad school in Canada that I learned that Canadians have a similar holiday on July 1st, except with less fireworks and more poutine.
But one thing we can all agree on is that it’s a great time of year to take a break from work and have a BBQ!
Here’s a couple weeks worth of data on my iAd revenue. I only have one app, Starfield 3D, that uses it.
To give you some context, about 20-40 people download my free app per day. Over the past two weeks, I got about $9.59 in ad revenue. In the same time period, I got about $5.60 from people buying the in-app purchase to remove ads.
I don’t have a lot of data points, but that seems to imply that ads and in-app purchases are fairly comparable with ads generating a little more. The interesting thing is that someone clicking on an ad generates somewhere around 25 cents of revenue for me. So theoretically, that person could generate me more money than someone who paid for the app if they were like really bored and enjoyed looking at ads.
If you’ve got an iPhone, download my Starfield 3D app today and check out the iAds! (The app was originally written for the iPad but for some reason, iAds doesn’t show up on there.) If you see something interesting, tap the ad. In the next post, I’ll post my stats.
One of the features in Mach Dice is the ability to count different dice values (go into the settings and tap “Bottom Button Shows” for all the options). For example, you could roll “20d6” and have it count the number of 4s that you rolled.
This turned out to be pretty useful. But more often, you’ll want to count the number of dice that are greater than or equal to a particular value. So I’m starting to implement that feature as well.
I also discovered that the iPhone can display numbers in circles, like “➀” (“Dingbat Circled Sans-Serif Digit One”, or “Unicode 2780” for short). So I’ve tweaked the bottom bar display to make it a bit more readable.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQDF-MFk6AE
Here’s that short film project I mentioned before. It was another 48-hour film project and this time, the ingredients were:
We brainstormed on Friday night, starting with a list of assets that our group had (motorcycle, a bunch of computers, a baby, etc.). For some reason, Shion really fixated on the idea of using the baby in the short. I was a little skeptical because, hey, I’ve worked with that baby and I’ll tell you … working with babies is hard. They don’t take direction and you can’t get them to do more than a couple takes. On the other hand, they are super cute. So Emma and Shion wrote a beat sheet (it’s like a simplified script) and we went from there in the morning.
I make a brief appearance in the short so my main role was to wrangle the baby. But Emma, Shion, and Brett worked almost non-stop from early Saturday morning to late Sunday afternoon. Things went pretty smoothly except at the end when we nearly didn’t make the deadline because we couldn’t get the movie to export from Final Cut Pro. So we made the desperate decision to just film the computer screen of our movie playing in Final Cut Pro instead. As always, it was a ton of fun and a big learning experience. Specifically:
One of the challenges of taking care of a baby (besides sleep deprivation, constant lower back pains, stress over trying to preserve the life of someone with no innate sense of self-preservation, etc.) is that frankly, babies and their toys offer very little in the way of mental stimulation.
I get a some mental challenge from attempting to read the Japanese childrens books that various people have given us. But now he’s more into Duplos than books. So I experimented a bit and worked out that the dimensions of a standard Duplo block is 2 x 2 x 1.2 units cubed and that the nubs are 0.3 units in height. Here, I show an example of the Pythagorean theorem that x² + y² = z² for a right triangle.
At work, we recently had a bone marrow donor match drive. One of my co-workers’ sons was recently diagnosed with leukemia. It’s unlikely that any one of us at work are a match, but the hope is that a drive like this will help find a match for someone else and that similar drives around the world will increase the chance of him finding a match.
It’s a very simple process. It just takes ten minutes to fill out the form and then a few cotton swabs rubbed in your cheeks. Only about 1 in 20,000 registrants ever gets called upon to subsequently donate (and even then, it is now mostly done with a simple non-surgical procedure). Please consider joining the bone marrow registry. It’s just a few minutes of your time and could possibly save someone’s life.
Over the weekend, I participated in another 48-hour film project.
You may recall the last times I did something like this with Agent Pepper and Rollin’ 3. Like then, this was a ton of fun working intensely with friends and a chance to make a couple new ones.
But this is the first time I’ve done something like this since having a baby and he got involved as well. (Surprisingly, it wasn’t my idea to have him in there, but I think it worked out well in the end.)
They still want to work out some of the technical issues before posting it online. But when it’s up, I’ll link the final project and talk about some of the experiences in that post. In the meantime, I’d like to thank the nice lady at the park who let us film her grandson.
Check it out, I’ve got an official online badge and everything!
