Word Drift - an exciting new kind of word puzzle game for Android

Word Drift is my newest project for Android.  It combines the game play of the classic puzzle game called 15 puzzle with some elements from modern puzzle games such as Jewel.

Unlike other word games that ask you to find the words on static board, Word Drift lets you shift the letters around to form the words that you want.  There are some sticky letters and some block that can't be moved just to make the game more challenging.  Sometimes the bomb will appear that you can use it to destroy the letters around it.  Useful when you have a letter that you can't seem to find the word for it.  However, there are levels that bombs must be placed in a way that causes chain-reaction to destroy to block that can't be reached otherwise, so you will need to plan how to use the bombs a little bit.

The game was designed to be a time killer.  Each level will win or lost in a couple of minutes.  If you are getting bored of the old word puzzle games, give Word Drift a try.

Design PCB with KiCad and edge it at home

KiCad is an open source cuircuit design and PCB layout program.  At busy.in.th you will see that using KiCad and a well know method for edging PCB (the laser printer method) lets you easily create a PCB prototype at home.

VMPlayer 5.0 Unity mode

I have been running Linux on VMWare products for years.  At work I have WMWare Workstation on my notebook.  At home, it is VMPlayer.

Just a few days ago, VMPlayer notified me that version 5.0, the newest one, is out.  Once I downloaded and installed, I saw new option in the menu called  'Unity'.  When clicked, the windows inside VMWare magically appeared on my Windows desktop.  Nice!

Before VMPlayer 5.0, I would start Xserver on my Windows and export display from Linux within VMPlayer to it.  This mean I have to start X that comes with cygwin, or lately, Xming.  It is working OK, but it is two steps process.  With VMPlayer Unity, it just easier.

It is not without problem though.  When you moving or resizing Unity windows, they will be a bit jumpy.  Sometimes it just won't follow your mouse at all.  Also, VMPlayer Unity does not suport all Window Manager.  While it works fine with Xfce, it refuses to work with Ubuntu Unity, which is a bit disappointing, if you ask me.

open 2 text files side-by-side using notepad++

Notepad++ has been mentioned here before, but one feature not talked about is the ability to open text file side-by-side.

This is great feature now that every bod has wide screen displays and notebooks.  I'm considering buying notebook with 1600x900 display, possibly Samsung Series 9 or Lenovo X1 Carbon, this feature would be very useful...or I can just use emacs for Windows, I guess.  However, I found that synchronize scrolling in Notepad++ is very nice.  Consider that using track pad on the notebooks is not that precise, having two related text to scroll at the same time can save lots of effort and possibly wrist strain. 

JOE text editor

JOE (Joe's Own Editor) takes me to the time when word processor mean Word Star, and writing program is Turbo Pascal 3.

JOE is a text editor that modeled after Word Start in term of short-cut and the way you move cursor around. It is a very small program and waste very little on your server.  If vi is too hard to user, emacs is too big, pico is too simple, give JOE a try

WinSCP, scp client for Windows

scp is the one of the easiest methods to securely transfer data on unix systems.  If the unix host let you ssh into it, then it has scp.

However, if you are on Windows trying to transfer files to your unix host, you will need to find scp clients.  One way is to install cygwin, it cygwin is pretty big.  If you just want scp, try WinSCP.  It is easy to use with the fancy GUI that lets you drag-and-drop files to/from window explorer directly.  WinSCP can be downloaded from its website, here.

Design application icon using Inkscape

Here's the tutorial on the easy way to make icon (Android App icon in this case).

We programmers suck at graphic design, which is why in Google Play you can find lots of icons drawn with MS Paint or something like that :)

While we will never be good at this thing, it doesn't mean we have to settle with sub-par icons. In this post I will show you how I made this icon in Inkscape using only a few basic drawing tools, all in about 15 minutes.  It's not that good compared to the professionally-made ones, but I think it looks better that a lots of icons on Google Play.

There are 7 steps to go from nothing to the image above. 

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