This post is a little off the normal beaten track for my blog. I have been so super busy of late on a project that I havent really had any time for technical personal projects.

I have however had time to do a little home-brewing so I thought I would share a little tip I had picked up. A little white back a friend lent me his kit for homebrewing. Its so simple all you have to do is fill a two litre bottle with juice and sugar, add a little yeast and cap it off with a simple valve-cap. Leave it for a few weeks and you have a ‘tastey’ strong beverage.

The problem however is knowing how long to leave it. The instructions say 2-3weeks but that is heavily dependant on a number of factors such as the ambient temperature of the room. At first what I was doing was putting the juice, yeast and sugar in at the same time then giving it a good shake so all the sugar was disolved.

I have discovered a better way of doing things however. If you put the sugar in the bottom then put the yeast on top then gently pour in the juice over it then you get a rough indicator of when the fermentation process has completed. As the yeast grows and respirates it burns its way down through the sugar slowly converting the sucrose to alcohol. What this results in is a slowly shifting yeast layer as it works it way down. When the layer hits the bottom, no more sugar left and the brew is ready for drinking

Its the first time I have had hosting on a windows machine and I must say I really like it. I feel much more at home on a windows machine, I know where everything is and im more familiar in a graphical OS. I had a couple of permissions problems related to uploading new images on wordpress but a quick Google turned up this post:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/weird-permissions-with-iis7-and-uploaded-images

Apparently WordPress sticks new uploads in the c:\windows\temp directory, before it moves them to the usual \wp-content\ folder, so you have to ensure that temporary folder has the correct permissions for IIS_IUSRS too else it wont work correctly when the file is moved to the content folder.

You may also notice that I have decided to give the blog a little face-lift too with a new theme. I decided this time to go for a paid theme, as they aren’t that expensive (compared to hosting costs) and the quality and customization with paid themes are go much better than their free counterparts. I found it on the excellent themeforest site, the theme is called PixelPower.

Anyways if you find any broken links or anything off with the site then let me know!

I have just returned from a little trip to Germany.

While I was there I made extensive use of the Instagram app for iPhone. Its a great way to make normal pictures taken on your phone look semi good.

The only problem is that there is currently no web interface for the app, so all those great pictures you take cannot be shown off in a gallery format unless you “share” the image to a stream such as flickr or tumbr or something.

Third-party-apps to the rescue! Instagrid is one of many web apps designed to plug this gaping hole in Instagram. Its quick and easy to setup so I have done so:

http://instagrid.me/mikeysee/

Now all my instagram pics are easy to get at, splendid!

Just thought I would report on a project my friend Michael Lindholm has been working on for a while now. Its Liero but in 3D! As some of you may know I have dabbled with making a remake of Liero several times in the past.

Anyways, it looks like its coming along nicely. He’s gone for a voxel-like engine, with screen space ambient occlusion for shading. Personally I think the effect works really well for the game. Check it out:

If you are interested you should follow his blog for the project: http://liero3d.blogspot.com/

Well as it has now hit the media I guess I can blog about it.

Last week it was announced that my current employer Playdemic was acquired by the much larger Redwood City based company RockYou.

This is obviously great news for all concerned and can only lead to further greatness as we expand and grow under our American overlordsÂ

Forgive me if you already know this but I just discovered it by accident and think its pretty neat.

Open a windows explorer window (windows & e) then click on Organise > Folder and Search Options:

Inside here is a nifty little option called “Automatically Expand To Current Folder”:

Now you can easily get a view where you are in a folder structure and jump to the sub-folder of your choice!

Whats clever about it:

1. It uses my name, and my nickname at that to make it sound more personal
2. It comes from a real sounding name “Bruce Thomas”
3. It looks exactly like a standard forward email
4. The attachment contains the name PDF
5. It contains the “No virus found in the incoming message” text from AVG

In short it almost got me, when you are short of time and briefly glance at a mail you may look over things and download and open an attachment without thinking about it.

Anyways, thought I would share

First time I have ever had anything stolen, all they left me were a few tattered remains of my bike lock as souvenirs of happier times. Looks like my journey to work got that bit longer

They are upping my gmail, picassa, whatever, storage from 10gb to 80!

Happy days!

I have always been into the scene but from a distance, some of the stuff is ameturish, some is a programming marvel (the 4k,32k,64k comps) but this is just plain beautiful. Its a demo (all code) from ASD (look them up on youtube if you want more from them) called Lifeforce, enjoy!