time-trialled with the south central wheelers

learnt about my anatomical snuffbox and monocular haematomas first hand (right hand, actually)

gigs: saw oval wig out at cafe oto; welled up got to maurizio pollini at rfh; bugged out to de la soul and blackstar at the apollo; got freaky to laurel halo at the shacklewell arms; clapped steve reich at my first prom; saw the thing rock out like only a good jazz trio can; got pulverized by oneohtrix point never in a church (glitch has a new bed-fellow, only this time it is artefact rather than error that is being fetishised); and realised that 2 hours of b-boying was probably my natural capacity (during the 5 hour world b-boy championship in brixton)

talks: knelt at john gray and tom mccarthy's feet, less impressed with steve pinker's over-reliance on powerpoint qualified as a solicitor

thought the nt's cherry orchard played up the tragedy at the expense of the comedy

giggled at tim & eric live

played a lot of boggle in iona

art: chose my own advernture at ryan gander's locked room scenario, while discussing the merits of radio four over rinse fm with the participants; discovered john stezaker's unnerving, oneric collages

acted as legal observer at a trial in turkey

--

claimed housing benefit

go-karting first time

furthest north ever - visited the highlands of Scotland

bought a golf

started living alone

got a new job

replaced a head gasket myself

saw mini racing and banger racing for the first time

released WarPath - first iPad game

saw Serafinowicz at Tim & Eric

heard one of my own on IFM3

My mac at work is left on all the time, and I kept forgetting to log in and out of iChat at the start and end of the day. I wanted to continue using iChat for it's simplicity, OS integration and stability, so I looked into how to schedule iChat to go online at the start of each weekday and offline again at the end.

Luckily this is pretty easy on OSX thanks to the power of Applescript and the good old-fashioned cron scheduler.

The first step is to fire up Applescript Editor from Applications > Utilities and make two scripts. Applescript is pretty readable and self explanatory:

tell application "iChat"
	set the status to available
end tell

Save this to your home folder as iChat_available.scpt

tell application "iChat"
	set the status to offline
end tell

Save this to your home folder as iChat_offline.scpt

Now to test that they work, open Terminal and type

osascript ~/iChat_offline.scpt

...which should take you offline.

Now you need to add this to cron by running:

crontab -e

and adding the following lines:

30  8 * * 1-5 osascript ~/iChat_available.scpt
30 17 * * 1-5 osascript ~/iChat_offline.scpt

This will put you in vi, so to edit the file press i to get in insert mode, type or paste the lines, then press Esc to get out of insert mode, followed by :x (colon then x), then Enter to save and close the file.

These cron directives will set iChat to available at 30 minutes past 8, every day of every month on days 1 to 5 of the week, then offline on the same days at five thirty. If you want, you could add lines to take you offline or 'away' over lunch. Or annoy your friends by going online and offline every five minutes over the weekend.

I completed my first playable sketch for the Experimental Gameplay Project ASCII in February challenge. After reading the short brief, the most obvious idea seemed to be to make a game using ASCII to recreate graphics, but given my recent conversion to loving scrabble, I chose to think about word games. A double-switchback of obviousness.

I also wanted to get into Processing a bit more, so this first sketch is a java applet.

Like with Rectangulous I have chosen to make a contemplative toy free of time-limits but with a specific goal.

Performance is not very efficient, but this is the point of the rapid-prototyping methods of the Experimental Gameplay Project. I did improve word lookup speed a bit by splitting the wordlists into separate arrays by initial letter and sorting them by word length offline. I admit it's not graphically advanced or pretty at this point either. However, I think it has some interesting gameplay points, like zero-tolerance of mistakes. It seems to be quite good for practicing certain scrabble skills, especially learning the valid two-letter words and making use of minimal vowels once you start to run out.

Play it here.

Most of this was covered on twitter but not here.

• First ever Skiing! (Arinsal, Andorra, Big Snow Festival 2010)
• Went through two rounds on redundancy - survived the first one.
• first niece born
• released Rectangulous and Rectangulous Free for iPhone and Flash
• saw Stewart Lee twice - one of which was walking distance from my house - Kim Noble, Jonathan Meades
• first theme park: Chessington World of Adventure, for free thanks to a Wii Party promo.
• visited Dorset County Show, Biggin Hill Air Show, London Olympics site, Reigate Caves
• blissfully holidayed in Bordeaux - enjoyed first vineyard visit
• live: beardyman, autechre, russell haswell, prodigy, egyptian lover
• house dressing for halloween party: http://twitpic.com/32c0ni http://twitpic.com/32c08m http://twitpic.com/32c08k http://twitpic.com/32c08x
  http://twitpic.com/32bzv2 http://twitpic.com/329b2g
• "Destroydon" at the Croydon Clocktower http://twitpic.com/38ncgg http://twitpic.com/38lty4
• worked on iPad game "WarPath" graphics, music and sound effects.
• Won tickets to Thick Of It Q&A
• mostly switched to Chrome

We've put together some sweet merch in the Apfrod Zazzle Store [UK | USA]

Because the idea amused me, I decided to make a jQuery bookmarklet to add the word "fucking" to online texts. Bookmarklets (Buttons) are links you add to your browser's Bookmarks Toolbar.

Drag this link to your bookmarks and click to add a bit of colour to any page: Fuckinator

If you're using Internet Explorer or don't have a Bookmarks Toolbar, right-click on the button and click "Add to Favorites"

As a javascript experiment, I made a form that turns a tweet into a sound: http://www.apfrod.com/tweetsound.html

I was interviewed for disquiet.com about my iPhone app ShapeSeq. It's a great retrospective and summary of the whole development and aims of the Shape Sequencer. Read the whole interview here.

In this longer piece I will outline the history and process of making Rectangulous, a puzzle game for Flash and iPhone. I will talk about the creative and design decisions as well as the technical implementation details in chronological order.

Inspiration and concept

After seeing the Van Doesberg exhibition at the Tate Modern I was thrilled by the persistence of the De Stijl movement in their investigations of such simple elements
and strict rules. Having recently got into the Rubik's cube again, I had an idea to devise a puzzle game based on the patterns and dynamism of really basic
geometry explored in the paintings of Van Doesberg and Sophie Taeuber.

Counter-Composition V by Theo van Doesburg

I am a fan of simple puzzle games on the iPhone like Trism, reMovem, Flood-it!, Unify, Bejeweled and LineUp. I like them best of all when I can play as quickly as possible. SameGame is perhaps the grandfather of many of the games mentioned. I prefer the games that are more like toys, the way the Rubik's cube is. There may be a goal, there may be scoring, and you may choose to play competitively, but there are no penalties built into the Rubik's cube. I like that I can spend as long as I want thinking about a move, be that very short or very long. I like games in general that I can enjoy thoughtfully, exploratively and playfully without the stress of impending imperatives - perhaps the very opposite of twitch gaming. I'm also very attracted to the way these games have simple, visual mechanisms that satisfyingly slot together in their consistent internal logic.

I wanted to make a puzzle game that combined all of these values: utterly simple, with a limited colour palette; a rigorous, clean visual logic; very quick to launch; no time limits, no penalties. Ideally I wanted to capture the feeling of the minimal De Stijl paintings - the feeling that I wanted to manipulate those shapes - push around those adjacent rectangles held in mutual tension. Ideally the game would equally be a kind of interactive painting, and the user would want to take a screenshot when the composition was particularly attractive.

Some months later, after playing a lot of these games and reclining to dream, I came up with the basic idea for Rectangulous: a grid of colours, where the user can move coloured squares into empty squares, and so combine "joined" areas into larger shapes. The working title was "Stijl".

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