Mining Monero on Geforce 210: an exercise in futility
I have these old Nvidia graphics cards, namely a Geforce 210 and a GT 240M sitting around doing nothing, and I wondered if I could put them to work mining Monero. The short answer is yes; the long answer is that it’s probably not worthwhile unless you have a much more powerful card like maybe […]
How to install NetBeans 8.1 on Ubuntu 16.04 with OpenJDK 8
I recently tried to install NetBeans 8.1 on my fresh installation of Ubuntu 16.04, and I ran in to some difficulties. The first of which is that OpenJDK cannot be easily found in the new Ubuntu Software application. To install OpenJDK 8, you will need to open terminal and use the command “sudo apt-get install […]
Game of Life: multi-threaded code analysis and review
Some months ago I began experimenting with multi-threading and OpenGL. I decided that a Game of Life simulator would be a good target for my pet project, being ripe for parallel processing and requiring little graphics know-how. I’ve met my goals, so here I’ll be describing how I implemented the various features and some of […]
Game of Life: my tour of multi-threading and OpenGL
It’s long overdue that I try my hand at writing a multi-threaded program. Being a wanna-be game technology developer, it’s past time for me to learn to use OpenGL for graphics as well. So why not roll both of these learning exercises in to one? If you’re not familiar with Conways Game of Life, [see […]
Example using OpenGL 3.0+ with SDL2 and GLEW
I decided to port one of my simple for-learning-purposes OpenGL applications over to SDL2 from GLFW last night. I ran in to a few problems along the way, I’ll share my solutions with you here. The main problem was that SDL2 doesn’t handle extension loading for you like GLFW does. Easy enough to solve, just […]
Seamless multi-machine workflow with a Git repo and Dropbox
I use Git for version tracking in my software projects, but I also move around frequently and use different computers. Of course I could commit when I am leaving and fetch the updates when I arrive at my next computer, but this requires conscious effort and remembering to do so. I’m sure there are fancy […]
Compile GLFW on Ubuntu and fix “libglfw.so: cannot open” error
The usual method for building GLFW on Ubuntu from source is like so: make x11 sudo make x11-dist-install Assuming you’ve got the proper libraries installed for compiling, everything should go smoothly and the compiled libraries will be put in system directories. If you’re missing libraries needed to compile, try installing them with this command: sudo […]
Teensy Development Setup Script for Ubuntu/Debian
It’s not exactly a challenge to set up your Linux box for developing on the Teensy, but it takes a precious few minutes that I’m sure anyone would like to save. So, I wrote a short script that takes care of the basic setup for you. This includes installing the gcc-avr package and associated C […]
Hex string to binary bytes conversion function
I’ve been working on an assembler for the byte-code to a virtual machine for a few days. During this process, I encountered the need to convert hex strings such as “AFEE5C” to their binary equivalent, each 8-bit hex value (eg. “FF”) being single bytes equivalent to a single char in C. So I wrote a […]