Corn pan

Five-minute-recipe of the day:

1 can of corn (ca. 300g)
1 teaspoon butter
1 teaspoon tomato purée
soup cube
salt
pepper
paprika powder

Throw everything into a hot frying pan and wait a few minutes (while stirring a little).

Left is right

Listening to an older Austrian lady (AUT) who speaks very little English and a young woman from New Zealand (NZ) making conversation about what side of the road cars drive on:
AUT: "You drive on left side."
NZ: "Right."
AUT: "Right? You drive on right side?"
NZ: "No, left. You also drive on the left side, right?"
AUT: "Yes, right."
NZ: "So left."
AUT: "No. Right."

Typing on the way

So yesterday while I was on a trip to a museum I thought that it would be awesome to have some gadget to take notes with. A laptop is of course best, but it's annoying to carry around all day. A smartphone is okayish, but typing on it does suck a fair bit. A good old pen & paper notebook is hard to digitize later, not to mention that it's also somewhat bulky.

So here's my wacky idea for a much better device: It basically looks like a watch and you wear it on your wrist, but it has the ability to project a keyboard into thin air right in front of your hands. Gyrosensors inside it adjust the position of the projected keyboard to compensate for your wrist movements. In addition, it projects just a very low resolution screen with two or three lines; Just enough to see the text you enter.

Then it allows you to start typing on that projected keyboard. It tracks the movement of your fingers using a camera, and turns the information into key stokes to type your text.

All the calculating power and memory for it is inside a small chip within that watch; Besides the projecting and the video recognition (which aren't small tasks, I admit) you don't need much, only a simple text editor. (Well, you can give the emacsians their shortcuts, if you want.)

The data can later be transmitted to a normal computer using for example Bluetooth or NFC.

Any thoughts on that one?

(Crossposting from Google+.)

On treating your playtesters well

With the kind permission of the original author:

===================
Theory: Finding play testers is hard because most designers don't treat them with respect.

As someone who playtests board/card games, I can say that I'm not willing to play test for most people a second time. They have not done their homework. I have no desire to do it for them.

1) I expect the game designer to have played it solo a few times before bringing it to the group. "Pretend" you don't know what the other person intends to do.
a) Does the game feel like it has interesting choices?
b) Does it feel like the choices matter? (This is often more important than their actually mattering.)
c) Does it play in roughly the right time frame?
d) What happens to players who get behind? (Make a conscious decision.)
If this is too much work for the designer, then why should the playtester spend his time on it? The designer is in effect trading their time for that of the playtesters. I won't playtest for these people again.

2) The designer should know when to stop the playtest.
If the game is clearly broken, what else can they learn right now that is a good payoff per playtester time? It is time to stop.

3) The designer should be open to feedback. For many games, the early feedback can be very negative. Accept that the playtester is trying to help you, even if you don't agree with the comments. Record them anyhow. Looking at the pattern of recorded comments later may help identify the one small change that fixes everything. If, instead, the designer gets defensive or authoritative, they won't test for you again. Clearly you knew better, why did you even ask. Realize that both initial and after significant play opinions can influence how a game is received.

4) When a dimension was identified as broken during game play or in the post mortem, I don't expect to play the game again until it, and any parallel cases in the game, are resolved (fixed, eliminated, etc.). Again, this comes back to respecting the playtesters' time.

5) Realize that playing to break the game IS part of play testing. If there are pathological corner cases, you do want to find them. If you know the game is shaky enough that people should not do this, why are you asking for their help? Either fix the issue first, or be very clear up front. I know X,Y are broken, so we won't use them this game. I'd like to see if Z is working now.

Paranoia

-- Birgit

Lernen lernenLearning to learn

Als ich vor ein paar Jahren begonnen habe zu studieren, habe ich gedacht, lernen bedeutet das:

When I started studying some years ago, I thought that learning meant this:

Ich habe vor ein paar Tagen meine letzte reguläre Prüfung abgeschlossen. Eines der Dinge, die ich in diesen letzten Jahren gelernt habe, ist, dass Lernen in Wirklichkeit das bedeutet:

I finished my last regular exam some days ago. One of the things I've learned in those last years is that learning actually means this:

-- Birgit

Linux vs. Windows (part 2)

-- Birgit

Tux logo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and authors Larry Ewing, Simon Budig, Anja Gerwinski: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tux.svg

Windows logo used in accordance with fair use regulations.