How to Copy a PICO-8 Game From a PocketCHIP

  • November 19, 2016
  • James Skemp
Having recently received my PocketCHIP I decided to start going through PICO-8 Zine #1 and its first tutorial. However, being the person I am, I hadn’t written too many lines before I started wondering how I could source control the games I work on on my new PocketCHIP. Since I’m using a MacBook Pro, here’s how I was able to copy my games off of my PocketCHIP and get them into git.

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Setting up a Raspberry Pi 2 Samba server (in early January 2016)

  • January 9, 2016
  • James Skemp
The following is how I configured a Raspberry Pi 2 as a samba server, using a Seagate Backup Plus Slim, 1TB, drive. For ease I purchased the CanaKit Raspberry Pi 2 Complete Starter Kit. It runs about $70 and includes enough to get up and running with the Raspberry Pi 2, with the Pi itself, a nice case, power supply, HDMI cable, WiFi adapter, and SD card with NOOBS/Raspbian installer.

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Google Services on the Amazon Fire HD 8

  • December 13, 2015
  • James Skemp
xda-developers has a post, Installing Google Framework/Playstore without Root (5th Gen Amazon Fire 2015), that includes a couple different sets of instructions. What worked for me was grabbing the mega.nz zip download and then: Make sure you're a developer and you allow apps from unknown sources. Install ES File Explorer via the Amazon Appstore. It's something I install on all my Android devices. Extract the contents of the zip you downloaded from Mega somewhere.

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Windows 10 touchpad fix for the ASUS X200M

  • August 7, 2015
  • James Skemp
I recently decided to upgrade my ASUS X200M, after successfully upgrading my mom's. Unfortunately, after upgrading my machine I ran into an issue where the touchpad was completely unresponsive, and I was forced to either use the touchscreen or a USB mouse. After a bit of looking around I found a post on CNET's forums that detailed a way to fix unresponsive touchpads in Windows 10. While the original question was about an Asus Transformer T100, this also worked for the X200M.

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Example libGDX orthographic camera controller

  • June 20, 2015
  • James Skemp
The following class can be used in a libGDX project as a framework for your own orthographic camera controller. This has been tested with libGDX 1.6.2, but should work in versions back to at least 1.4.x. View the code snippet on GitHub. OrthographicCameraController.java

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My Video Game Tracker (for Windows Phone 7) on GitHub

  • January 15, 2013
  • James Skemp
Yesterday morning I committed version 1.2 of My Video Game Tracker to a public repository on GitHub. At this time I intend on letting my publishing license lapse on Windows Phone development (which is still a number of months away), and have decided that I probably won't do anything further targeting Windows Phone 7. In the coming weeks I'll probably also post the Madison Metro application that I was working on, warts and all.

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Windows Phone 7: Taking and restoring a SQL database

  • April 22, 2012
  • James Skemp
As I develop my first Windows Phone 7 application, My Video Game Tracker, I want to make sure that the many games I've added won't accidentally be lost (as I'm deploying test versions to my physical phone). The below assumes you're using Windows PowerShell, but they should run on the standard command line. Taking screenshots of the application's data When you install the Windows Phone SDK the Isolated Storage Explorer Tool is also installed.

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Migration from CollabNet Subversion to VisualSVN Server

  • November 18, 2011
  • James Skemp
Since it doesn't seem CollabNet is really going to keep their non-Edge Subversion application, I've decided to migrate to VisualSVN Server. Roughly, here are the steps I went through to migrate, which also includes a 1.6.x upgrade. VisualSVN migration Installed VisualSVN. Repositories saved to C:\Repositories Setup existing users. Import existing repositories. Should already be upgraded, but upgrade to 1.5, just in case. Upgrade TortoiseSVN. Upgrade working copies to 1.7.

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On Web sites that feature Facebook Comments

  • June 24, 2011
  • James Skemp
Over the past few months a number of sites have switched over to Facebook-powered comments. For the most part those sites are ones that I've never commented one, nor will comment on. However, I recently discovered that a former co-worker, Rob Lumley, switched his site over to Facebook, and recently wrote an article about it titled Add Facebook Comments to WordPress. Since I don't use Facebook comments, I figured I'd post the response I had written and tried to post anonymously, here instead.

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Excellent news - the BlogML project is not dead.

  • February 11, 2011
  • James Skemp
While it seemed to be near death, if not dead, at least as far as new releases, the BlogML project is not dead, and has been undergoing a number of needed changes since the end of January. My StackOverflow question "Is the BlogML project dead, and what are some alternatives?" was answered yesterday by the project originator (one of the great things about StackOverflow, and the entire network of sites).

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