Sunday 15 January 2017

Saturday 7 January 2017

Slightly buggy twisting and tearing DEM based animation:
(The dynamic colouring bugged out for some reason)


Wednesday 4 January 2017

Useful Chrome browser extensions

A quick list of browser extensions I use on a daily basis:

Google dictionary allows you to instantly look up the definition of any word you run into on a webpage, it even provides the pronunciation if you click on the speaker icon next to the name. Handy dandy.

This sound familiar: You go on a clicking spree on Wikipedia doing super duper important “research”, you end up with so many tabs open that Chrome is hogging your memory like it’s aspiring to be a McAfee product. You still want to read all the super duper interesting links though, so what do you do?
Session Buddy allows you to easily save groups of tabs to restore them at any given time. Problem solved.
Chrome still has a nasty habit of loading each tab into memory when you open the browser or a bunch of tabs though, even if you are obviously not reading all 50 of them at once. Which brings us to:

The Great Suspender not only has a great name, but it’s super handy too. The extension automatically suspends tabs after a predetermined amount of time you set up or if you press ctrl+shift+s for the currently active tab. Thus even if you have tons of tabs open, only the active few you’re actually using at the time are taking up memory.

StayFocusd is fantastic for productivity. It allows you to set a number of blocked sites and then specify how much time you are allowed to spend on these sites each day (you can set working days etc.). Once you reach the threshold of time for the day on say Reddit, it proceeds to block the site and make you feel super bad about being unproductive. Yay guilt based motivation! It totally works though.
Others:
Todoist: This is much more than a extension although it’s extension works very well. Todoist is a great todo app that works cross platform and makes it very easy to share lists and tasks between people. PS. You can currently get a year of premium Todoist in the GameDev Humble Bundle
uBlock Origin: Not much to say about this one beyond saying it is bar none the best ad blocker currently available. I know I know, you’ve got adblock plus or whatever currently but trust me on this, install ublock and get rid of the others.
FlashControl: Flash is bad, it’s old and about as safe as skinny dipping in a piranha tank - you’re just asking to have your bits nipped. FlashControl blocks flash on a site by default but still allows you to activate it if a site really requires it, it’s a nice compromise.