Clouds and Video

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=AjtYzrshje4

Finally, after around 3 months of hacking away late at nights, throwing up my hands in frustration and throwing away the first 3 implementations, I've finally made the volumetric cloud + atmosphere shader that I've dreamt about ever since starting this project.
The shader uses raymarching to render a volumetric noise field, and a rayleigh and mie scattering simulation to provide the lighting.   Everything is unified - the atmosphere, clouds and planet lighting - so reddening sun at sunset will light the terrain as well as the clouds, clouds cast shadows on objects flying beneath them, the atmosphere and clouds also...

2019 Progress Retrospective

Happy 2020!
Games take a lot of work, especially ones like Pegwars with the enormous scope of being a universal sandbox.  Although I haven't made any blog posts in quite a while, I have indeed been working hard throughout 2019 on fixing many bugs and implementing various new features.
Highlights for the year are :
- A beautiful procedural volumetric cloud system, fully integrated into the atmosphere shading - that unfortunately is still way too slow and so has been removed for now.  These clouds just have to go in one day, they add so much to the game and I really must...

Social Media Behemoths will be broken up!

I typically don't stick my neck out to be separated from my body but here I go! I think that the trend is that the social media giants will be broken up, not because of the Sherman Antitrust Act but by the Clayton Act regarding mergers and acquisitions. But in order to understand my belief some history is in order.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the FTC and Justice Department reached a new agreement, with the FTC gaining authority to review Amazon and Facebook, while the Justice Department is able to look into Apple and Google. This...

Автостопом по Исландии: шторм вулканического яйца

Смонтировал фильм про неделю путешествий автостопом по Исландии с палаткой. Рейкьявик, кемпинг, водопады, тайный бассейн. Знакомлюсь с паффинами и варю яйцо в вулкане. В конце мы попадаем в шторм и спасаемся бегством.

Приятного просмотра!

★ Дополнение: выпуск Иммигранткаста, где я подробно рассказываю о путешествии.

2019-09-23 inner spiral spiky

bioajp has added a photo to the pool:

2019-09-24 laser engraved clothing

bioajp has added a photo to the pool:

Laser engraved cotton and laser cut paper microscope slides for a FoldScope

Tribes, Polls, and Politics...

Every four years we go into a presidential election. The year 2020 will continue a very long term trend that hopefully will last a long time. And this run-up to the event has some of the same features as usual. Political speeches, polls, and the talk of division which is now called tribal. The various factions will be intractable in their allegiance to one party or another. But this cycle shows something new in that there is extreme polarization and irrational zeal for one side or the other.
But consider for a moment that early Neanderthals formed tribes for mutual...

a home for pino

We left Shimizu on a sunny morning, pushing off the dock at 6am. Early. We wanted to make sure we'd arrive at our destination on time. There was 126nm between us and Shima Yacht harbor, a distance we needed to do in part at night. This wasn't ideal. We knew that. Many people warned us about sailing at night in these waters, but as the Japanese say: 'Shoganai' (it is what it is!). We needed to cross a big stretch of water called Enshu Nada, an area with a lot of traffic. In truth, the entire coastline is full of...

2019-06-09-DNA-SNP-workshop-09-running-the-PCR

bioajp has added a photo to the pool:

tools ecosystem

How did the Hundredrabbits ecosystem come into being? It's a long story, but here's a summary.

In 2016, we left Canada, armed with our two iPhones and 2 MacBooks Pros. We didn't know the wattage of any of the devices we owned, and even less about the amount of solar needed to power them. When living on land we didn't pay attention to how many amps our devices required daily. Electricity felt limitless.

When we started sailing in BC, we had no dinghy and so we'd go from dock to dock. When we purchased Iggy in Nanaimo, we spent more days...