Descriptor

The Book of GIMP. A Complete Guide to Nearly Everything by Olivier Lecarme and Karine Delvare I have decided to go out a bit from my comfort zone and learn some basics of graphic/drawing/design maybe and I bought this book for this reason. I can say for sure that I was really hard for me, I was surely pushed out of my comfort zone and struggled with this book for really long... I have learn't a lot, not sure if it will be of any use but I still am happy to read it. If you're like me consider not starting with tutorials, especially when it get's complicated and first read more about tool you're supposed to use. If you are interested in editing of images then there is much in a book about it. I was more interested in pixel art and drawing and there wasn't much about it considering content about images. Rating is really hard this time so remember this is highly subjective: 6/10.

Great presentation by Steve Souders about caching behaviour both in standard and in browsers. Must watch for every web developer.

If you are disappointed that Galaxy Nexus is not going to get KitKat 4.4 you may think that CyanogenMod may be for you. First: it's not perfect! You will need to install Google Apps separately and from the start there is nothing like Gmail or Google Account in settings  (it' solvable but remember about it). My tutorial is post-mortem of following this one:  http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_maguro Install Fastboot & ADB as stated here:  http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Doc:_fastboot_intro sudo apt-get install android-tools-fastboot android-tools-adb I have done it long ago and have it installed already so I'm not sure what was needed. If you have problems maybe something from  http://ferrancasanovas.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/adb-install-android-system/  can help: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install android-tools-adb android-tools-fastboot Download If you have adb and fastbo...

Together with Making Waves we have prepared new Meet.js event, first one that would be hackathon with time to try what you learned :) Official event page prepared by Making Waves:  http://hackathon.makingsoftware.pl/ My co-organizer Andrzej Fricze is there as main Meet.js representative so if you want to present something feel free to contact him or me. As always there is also Facebook event:  https://www.facebook.com/events/273134729512566/ See you there! :)

At the last "ReadingClub" I heard really good review of this book and it convinced me to read it right away. It was a really good idea, because there is so much you can learn from that book. One of the most important things that I have learned, was that, success is not happiness, and we are wired to strive for success and not happiness. What is considered success for person, group or humans as a species is not making us happy. It's not that easy to notice it in our culture. Author created the metaphor of elephant and it's rider that is now well-know. I have even stumbled upon it a couple of times, but it was still good to read the full story as there is much more to it that I thought. One of interesting things is that the elephant is not only our body and 'animal' part of our brain. It's also the 'self' part that gives us flow of thoughts, so it's normal to have ridiculous thoughts. This hypothesis fits nicely to "The Power of Hab...

Last week I have read post by Andrzej Mazur about hosting games on github pages and as this post covers things that were new to me I have recently found some nice tricks that can help with while working on these pages more effectively. Source:  http://enclavegames.com/blog/2014/02/02/host-your-html5-games-on-github-pages/ Now, what I mean? To use github pages you must create new branch on github called gh-pages so you have to options: delete master and use only gh-pages push to gh-pages from time to time but work on master Both have it's strong and weak points. 1: Working on gh-pages alone is easier but you will struggle to add any build process so you have to use unoptimized resources in your game. 2: You maintain some kind of optimized version of a site or game in gh-pages branch and use master branch as src. Downside of this approach is that you need two folders cloned from the same repository on disk and force build script to know about external directory ...

Third book from this series. I bought it this Saturday and have finished all 800 pages Sunday night. This mix of s-f and fantasy can take all your attention. I have died in HabitRPG due to reading and ignoring all other tasks but I think it was worth it ;) If you are looking for something good to read then I can recommend this series. Rating: 8/10 There were only 3-4 funny moments in the book but they make me look ridiculous laughing out loud all of a sudden ;) If you like Achaja books then this one is for you too :) I think that this book is maybe a little bit less than it could be, maybe not enough of humour? Still it's really good and much better than "Sezon Burz" by Andrzej Sapkowski.

Next week is going to be great but small event about 3D thanks to Gabriel Habryn who is going to tell us more about his engine/game in 3D. I'm really looking forward to that :) Event will take place in Schibsted Tech Polska, you can read more in Polish on event page:  http://gamedevjs.com/krakow-3d.html If you're going please remember to ask for me at reception, not for Gabriel ;) We started looking for speakers for a upcoming  Meet.js  in Krakow. If you want to see our last event look here:  https://www.facebook.com/events/258720164275519/ Next Meet.js Kraków is going to be in March so there is plenty of time to prepare. We can help you with preparations so just let us know if you want to say something :) Everything form JS and Front-End is ok and we are really open to hearing about interesting things even outside of this field, so just let us know your idea.  So where is call4papers really? You can write to me, at krzychukula with g...

Second book from The Black Company series. I may even like it more that the first one. One thing that was a little off was Shed, one of main characters of this book that wasn't that much convincing to me. As a series The Black Company is great in case if you think about reading it ;) Rating: 7/10

Really good fantasy +first book of the series with the same title so it guarantees many hours of entertainment :)  Rating: 8/10

Really good book. Author gathered stories and scientific data that covers all aspects of habits. If you have bad habit or you want a new one this book can really help, especially by explaining what works, and what not. tldr; rating 9/10 fun to read and I have learnt a lot about habits. First author explains how habits work, why they exists? They are really useful most of the time as you probably know but there is more than you might think. The best thing about habits is that they are not using willpower. Please read more about how willpower is important here:  http://oliveremberton.com/2014/life-is-a-game-this-is-your-strategy-guide/ . It's really our most important asset so using habits to get the job done and at the same time not use willpower is a great thing about habits! Above is true of course if you have a good habit, unfortunately not all habits are like that :/ Turns out that most of our habits are pretty hard to get rid of. You need to be conscious about what you...

For our Express.js Node.js page we started using Gulp.js for building static assets but we needed to run gulp to build them, and it wasn't easy to remember to do that before commit (right now we have min files in repository). For development we are using nodemon to restart the app on every change so I thinked how to integrate nodemon and gulp. First obvious answer I found was gulp-nodemon  but it was really buggy and I had no idea why it's not killing server and trying to run new one all the time. I have even created issue about that, more to seek for help than having any idea what is wrong. // Gulpfile.js var gulp = require ( 'gulp' ) , nodemon = require ( 'gulp-nodemon' ) gulp.task('nodemon', function () { nodemon({ script: 'app.js'}) .on('restart', 'default') }) After a couple of days I started from scratch but I have new idea, I need to ignore files that I'm building with gulp so that I'm...

Recently we started looking for a nice tool for building client-side parts of our project and after looking into couple of projects we find really interesting one called Gulp. There is really nice presentation about it:  http://slid.es/contra/gulp Or you can read getting started guide:  https://github.com/gulpjs/gulp/blob/master/docs/getting-started.md#getting-started I found out that phaser-generator project recently switched to gulp and the same buildfile look much more readable and like code instead of big JSON like in Grunt. I'm not sure yet about it but I like how it look like and I like metaphor of pipes that Gulp is using.