phees' dissections - free & open source

The Powder Toy

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 14:07:05 +0200

The Powder Toy is an awesome goal-less, creativity toy, originally created by Stanislaw K Skowronek and now taken to the next level by Simon Robertshaw. It reminds a bit of the classing falling sands games (1, 2), but much more evolved (much, much more). It basically equips the player with a huge set of materials (elements), building blocks and a virtual 2D laboratory in which it simulates a simple approach to electricity, pressure, heat, wind and fire.

The player may save creations on a server or just in a 'stamp' library, to reuse certain design elements. Creations can also be proudly published to the community, which will rate it and eventually develop it further. All of that is solved in-game, without any browser being involved.

Standard creations in powder toy are nuclear bombs, flamethrowers, and basically all stuff that blows up. It is good for a start to get a rough idea. But advanced users build clocks, calculators, collections of logical gates and pixel-by-pixel creations of sub-miniature logics and electronics.

There are currently only videos of the old version like the one below, which will give you a first glance of what this is about, but if you keep looking for 'The Powder Toy' on youtube, the new version should show up pretty soon.

The powder toy includes an auto-update to new versions, which currently show up on a near-daily basis. The development process is fast and open to suggestions of users. There is a forum, that is closely reviewed by the main developer himself.

You can download The Powder Toy from the website http://powder.hardwired.org.uk. While you are there, create an account to enable saving from The Powder Toy. It is all free and the forum and development is very active. The powder toy is available for Mac, Windows and Linux!

I should issue a warning, though: The Powder Game is a serious health threat, it is highly addictive. Once your first creations get mostly-green ratings, you will find yourself worrying over single pixels/particles for serious amounts of time, just to improve your creations.

Edit: The Powder Toy recently opened its gates to other developers.

Edit: The Powder Toy's website is now: http://powdertoy.co.uk

XBMC - The Media Center for everyone

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:07:00 +0100

In the last weeks I stumbled over one of my new favourite applications:

The XBMC Media Center.

The name comes from XBox Media Center. It was first developed for the Xbox and is now also available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. XBMC is best described as a media hub, and it is free!

I usually tend to more spartanic software like MPlayer without GUI, but this one is great. It is simply built for your comfort. You can view Pictures and Movies, listen to your Music and all that over your home network or you can use plugins and scripts to view YouTube videos, read your favourite RSS feeds, get the weatherforecast etc. And all that with a fluid and sexy interface that is even skinnable!
Since XBMC comes from the Xbox, a great way to use XBMC is a gamepad or nearly any other input device. You have a wireless gamepad? That's perfect. Even the integrated filemanager works with it.

You have to look at it yourself. Start or download it at the XBMC homepage, or go directly to the XBMC flickr page to get an impression.

Read for Free - Project Gutenberg

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:03:00 +0200

Reading for free?

With Project Gutenberg that's possible with over 25.000 books. You can download classic books, ranging from Homer's Iliad to Bram Stoker's Dracula, Edgar Allan Poe's Raven, or H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds in a variety of formats. Usually plain text format and HTML-versions are available, but often even additional formats like the plucker e-book reader format or even audio books in mp3 format are available.
The main languages are Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish and Tagalog, but alltogether there are books in over 40 languages between Afrikaans and Yiddish.

Allmost all Project Gutenberg ebooks are free of charge and free as in freedom. How is that possible?
Copyright for most of these books has expired in the United States. (But they may still be copyrighted in other countries!) So anybody may make verbatim or non-verbatim copies of those works.

If you enjoy reading, you should definetely browse the online catalogue, everybody I persuaded to have a look found at least a few titles. If you own an eBook reader (on a PDA you should definitely use the afore mentioned plucker), I'm most confident, Project Gutenberg will become your number one site for free books.

Give it a try and spread the word about Project Gutenberg. It's free, so you can't lose, anyways.

Movies & Open Source

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:51:00 +0200

While the media world whines about it's loss of sales, the open source movement produces more and more excellent content. Using up-to-date open source 3D tools, two beautifully rendered movies went public:

The 10 minute animated movie Big Buck Bunny is a must see. It is available on its own homepage in a variety of formats and sizes and completely open source.

Another, older open source movie you should have a look at is elephants dream ( (c) copyright 2006, Blender Foundation / Netherlands Media Art Institute / www.elephantsdream.org), released under the creative commons licence.

Portable Workplace

nospam@example.com (dr.phees) — Fri, 23 May 2008 08:02:00 +0200

PortableApps is a very nice software suite for the ultra mobile windows user. You can download many applications that have been made portable, which means they can be run from a USB pen drive or similar devices, storing their data on the stick and (ideally) leaving no traces behind on the host machine.
The available applications range from IM applications like Pidgin or Miranda over CD burner applications, pdf readers, a portable OpenOffice, the mozilla firefox, thunderbird and FTP clients to system tools like virus scanners. The software collection is huge and mainly open source. All the applications are integrated into the PortableApps.com Suite, which provides a seperate start menu for all the portable apps in your taskbar. It allows to easily install new portable applications and to search and backup your portable files.

Portable Apps does not create a portable user space or virtual machine. The project provides customised applications and the directory structure to manage applications and files. While you may add your own, not customised programs to the portableapps suite (which is essentially done by adding a directory and putting your software there) it is not said it will be easy on the read/write cycles, which might reduce the life of your USB drive significantly. The application might even write to the host's disk and leave data, or might not work at all without a full installation on the host.
But, as said before, a lot of applications are available as portable versions and should fulfil many needs.

Since you can use the portable applications without the suite, there are some additional uses. I tend to have a directory with the extracted portable VLC player, which I regularly add to CDs or DVDs containing media, so that I have a media player at hand on every (windows) PC I put the disc in. You could use portable browsers and pdf readers on discs together with your pdf books and web excerpts.

PortableApps is a thing you can get addicted to. Being able to have one's messanger, browser, to say it short, your whole office essentials on the size of a thumb drive is a great experience. If you are moving around a lot, give it a try!
For myself I have a 2GB thumb drive with the PortableApps suite, OpenOffice, Pidgin, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, VLC, FileZilla, XAMPP, Sumatra PDF, 7-Zip, ClamWin, Eraser, InfraRecorder and GIMP. There is still enough room left for a lot of my documents and some media.

In my opinion, the one thing missing is platform independency, since portableapps is available for windows PCs only. It would be so nice if there was a way to install unix/linux/mac versions together with the windows versions (most of the applications are available on more than one platform anyway) and build a linux version of the suite itself. This way you would be able to run portable apps on nearly any computer you could come to use. I know that it would bring the portableapps project to a whole other level of complexity, but it would be a huge usability gain.