Playing around with flow fields again.

Turns out it's easier to have an image dissolving than to draw the flow field. The code for this effect was surprisingly small.

It's a shame that he video compression destroyed the effect, but I think it's good enough to imagine what it looks like.

#ScreenshotSaturday

I've been playing around with the new multithreading features of Scala Native 0.5.0-RC1.

I already checked that I can get my game jam entries working with a dedicated audio thread, so now I wanted to play with something different.

I picked up my gopher client and made it async (nothing special, just wrapped the calls in Future(blocking(...)) and it works like a charm.

My dumb green phosphorus skin was actually pretty helpful to see that it's working .

It's a bit hard to see on the video, but if you look closely you'll see that there's a scan effect sweeping the screen from the top to the bottom, and it keeps running even while the page is loading.

I've been playing around with Scala Native 0.5.0-RC1 this weekend.

Originally I was hyped for the multithreading, but now I want that sweet compilation speed. Some of my projects are compiling in ~1/4 of a time on a full build.

This is going to make debugging performance issues so much better.

This was quite the Heisenbug: https://github.com/JD557/minart/pull/474

Some sound files were corrupted, but only when loaded from the Java resources on a specific application. When I loaded them on unit tests or Scala CLI scripts they would work fine. Even something as simple as loading them from a file (instead of a Java resource) would work .

Turns out sometimes InputStream.read(bytes) does not read all the bytes (duh, that's why it returns the number of bytes read) and I was not handling that... not sure how I didn't hit this earlier .

A bit of a weird post, but I just got a package in the mail and wanted to give a shout out to DragonBox's customer support.

I messed up a pre-order there (pro-tip: if you are moving countries, don't pre-order stuff to the country you are moving away from ) so I really needed an emergency address change to a different country.

They were not only quick and helpful, but also super nice.

Also, it feels really good to talk straight to a human instead of going through layers of chat bots and FAQs.

10/10 experience.

Not sure if this is a thing on other ActivityPub frontends, but one feature that I really like here (and wish Twitter had something similar) is being able to see my actor inbox as a timeline.

It's pretty much posts from people I follow (including comments) plus comments to their posts. In essence, a timeline with just a bit of serendipity from people I don't know.

It feels like a nice middle point between "new posts of people I know" and "top posts from complete strangers".

Today marks my last day in Berlin.

It was a fun little adventure, but all things must come to an end eventually.

It's never easy to say goodbye, but I can say that I'm excited for what comes next.

Just did a bunch of releases:

• Minart 0.6.0-M2: https://github.com/JD557/minart/releases/tag/v0.6.0-M2
• Interim 0.1.6: https://github.com/JD557/interim/releases/tag/v0.1.6
• Späti 0.1.1: https://github.com/JD557/spaeti/releases/tag/v0.1.1

TIL that you can use Scastie with Scala JS and, if one of the expressions returns an Element, it is rendered on the worksheet:

Quick example: https://scastie.scala-lang.org/toqnawY0QrKKwMDcHcAf2A

I need to work on the Minart APIs to make this use case a bit more ergonomic, but this looks pretty cool for demos.

I've been seeing a lot of discussions in Portugal regarding https://expresso.pt/sociedade/2024-01-11-Exodo-tem-um-impacto-brutal-30-dos-jovens-nascidos-em-Portugal-vivem-fora-do-pais-6b42d39c (article in PT - 30% of Portuguese aged between 15 and 39 are emigrants)

I was a bit curious about this, but apparently the study was not yet released and the closest thing I could find was https://diasporafordevelopment.eu/interactive-map/, which I'm not sure how up to date it is and doesn't seem to provide any tables.

So I just scrapped the data and generated a markdown table, in case someone is curious about this kind of stuff: https://gist.github.com/JD557/22ee5494ce99af696e1fda5747eef18e

That gist also provides the raw JSON data that I used and a #Scala CLI script to generate a CSV, in case you want to do some further analysis.

Just came back to Portugal for the holidays.

It was kind of weird leaving the plane, seeing the blue sky and feeling the Sun's warmth.

The last weeks (maybe months?) in Berlin have been so gray that I kind of forgot how good this feels .

Added some fog, ceiling and sky to my raycaster tests, along with a larger map.

Being able to use Tiled as a map editor really helps for stuff like this.

Sorry for the bad video quality, I think the dark colors really mess up the compression.

Assets used (apart from the ones already mentioned in the previous post):

• https://www.ericteske.com/2014/03/free-creative-commons-moon-photos.htm
• https://opengameart.org/content/grass-texture
• https://opengameart.org/content/dirt-004