Engagement in the Family

My brother-in-law Rowan Barton is engaged to Elpida Savvidou. This is awesome news (even if not recent :-). Their engagement party is movie themed, and we've got some western style props, so I've created custom wanted posters! Here they are:

Once printed we are going to brown the edges with the heat from a fire.

The SVG files were created with Inkscape (Trace Bitmap is fantastic) and are available for use if you'd like. I put them in the public domain (but I'd be thrilled to hear from you if you use these). They make use of the Playbill font.

I'm interested to see what other people have created. Enjoy :-)

Minecraft vs Real Life

I have been digging a hole in the ground. It is just a bit more than one and a half metres deep, and around a metre in diameter. Here is the hole:

Here is the hole with the dirt I have emptied out of the hole in view:

Here is an equivalent sized hole in Minecraft:

Apart from the Minecraft hole being digital, it was also a lot neater. And it took less time to dig. The real hole above has taken several weekends of digging - probably close to 20 hours of digging. The Minecraft hole took around 20 seconds, that's including deciding where to dig. Perhaps that's one reason why games like Minecraft are enjoyable to play - they let you do mundane things really quickly.

Bits of Minecraft

Minecraft has sunk a lot of my time over the few years it's been around. Here are some of the things I've done in it (in order of construction):

Rainbow! ... and cake

Triple helix near an overworld plate

Home, satellite dish and "Craft"

The rainbow, triple helix and satellite dish were all planned using Lisp. Here's some Lisp code you can use to plan rainbows:

(loop with freq = (list)
       and reach = (1+ 20)
       and width = 8
      for j from reach downto 0
    do (loop for i from (- reach) to reach
             for r = (round (sqrt (+ (square i) (square j))))
             for c = (cond ((= i j 0) #\+)
                           ((< r (- reach width)) #\-)
                           ((<= r (1- reach)) (- r (- reach width)))
                           (t #\Space))
        when (not (eql #\Space c))
        do (aif (cdr (assoc c freq))
            (incf (car it))
            (push (list c 1) freq))
        when (or (minusp i) (not (eql #\Space c))) do (princ c))
    do (terpri)
    finally (return freq))

It produces output like this (this one's a small version to fit in the width of the blog):

                 777777777
              777666666666777
            7766655555555566677
          77665554444444445556677
         7665544433333333344455667
        766544433322222223334445667
       76554433222111111122233445567
      7655433221110000000111223345567
     7655433211000-------0001123345567
    766543321100-----------001123345667
    7654332100---------------0012334567
   7654432100-----------------0012344567
   765432110-------------------011234567
  765443210---------------------012344567
  765432100---------------------001234567
  76543210-----------------------01234567
 765433210-----------------------012334567
 76543210-------------------------01234567
 76543210-------------------------01234567
 76543210-------------------------01234567
 76543210------------+------------01234567
((#\+ 1) (#\- 256) (0 45) (1 45) (2 43) (3 57) (4 57) (5 57) (6 59) (7 57))

The last bit is a count of each block type so you know how much to gather of each type. Three dimensional objects like the dish and triple helix use more code which I can post if people are interested.

P.S. Don't spend too much time playing computer games.