iamcal.com Since May 2000

Jul 5th: An aseprite plugin for making easy isometric sprites? It looks amazing

Jul 5th: Scientific American did a podcast episode about Cleo, the Math StackExchange user who posted incredible answers with zero explanation and then disappeared in 2015. I would love to know who they were and why. Terence Tao confirmed that he was not Cleo. Some people thought it was Hawking, or Ramanujan reborn. Just excellent work.

Mar 25th: Lego have just released their own Minifig builder, including custom piece printing (although only on the body). This has been a long time coming and is pretty disruptive to all the businesses who have been doing this for a while. But in usual Lego-fashion, they are somehow already "sold-out" (of an on-demand product??) and so they're not available

Mar 25th: More Minecraft - the article on Quasi-Connectivity is a great illustration of the knock-on effect that accidental bugs can have on complex interacting gameplay mechanics.

Mar 25th: I had been wondering for a while about what was special about the dead coral fan in Minecraft that allowed it to be used for TNT duping. The answer is enlightening:

The coral is unique in that it behaves like a block that breaks when slime it's attached to is pushed (like buttons, torches, and so on) playing the breaking animation and sending updates like any broken block, but does not actually break - continues to be affixed to the slime, pushed by it so it can pretend to break in the next cycle.

Jan 2nd: A history of early Lego and the first sets they produced. The first Lego I played with was 725-3 LEGO Samsonite Town Plan, which my grandparents had bought in 1961. This was from the era when Samsonite distributed Lego in the Americas and when bricks were still made from cellulose acetate, before the switch to ABS.

Jan 2nd: WikiNav does some really nice visualizations of wiki navigation that I might adapt for WikiCamp