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Showing posts from June, 2014

New blog domain: kula.blog

It's still work in progress but new posts will be published on  https://kula.blog/ Thanks to 11ty base blog RSS is working from the start so it should be easy to add to your reader if you still use any :) If now then I hope you can sign up to the newsletter where I'll be publishing new posts and interesting articles to it from time to time. Please use  kula.blog  from now on.

Book Review: Sword of Truth: Book 1 Wizard's First Rule (1994) by Terry Goodkind

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I wasn't really into "Sword of Truth". I've seen some episodes of TV Series and it wasn't impressive. Friend gave me this one as he is a big fan and strongly recommended it to me. I gave it a chance and it was much better than I thought. Book isn't perfect or course. I don't know if it's because of my prejudice or it's just how it really is so bear in mind that this is only my opinion. I was confused especially at the beginning how easily main character switched from being the woods guide to being the "Seeker". I was thinking about it all the time. I don't know if I should know from the beginning who is going to betray him, i think not, but I knew it... Still I really like the book and it was gripping :) Rating: 7/10

Book Review: Presentation Zen Design by Garr Reynolds

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I really like this book. Many times I have compared it to  Design for Hackers . I would say they are really similar in way of making design more approachable. Of course "Presentation Zen Design" is more about using design in context of slides but most of the rules are the same in every context. After reading it I have good review-like feeling. It refreshed my knowledge from "Design for Hackers". I really liked Japanese and 'Zen' references in a book. It is really astonishing how 'Zen' art forms and rules can inspire our own presentations and designs. One thing to remember: "Rule of Thirds". Basically in every aspect of art, design or photography if you put your subject in the center it will look boring. If you put main subject in 1/3 on the right or left then it will look much more professional. That's it. Rating: 9/10

Memrise and Duolingo

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Around October last year I started learning:  upper-intermediate-english  course on memrise . It took me a really long time to finish it despite fast progress at first. Course is really long (962 items) and during learning you need to refresh words you have learned. It was really challenging to learn from half of course to the end. There was always something easier to do but finally I have finished it. Of course I still need to refresh those words, especially those I have learned recently but I really feel proud of myself. As of course itself it's obviously long. Good thing that most of words have attached pronunciation and a couple of times I was really surprised so it is useful. Sometimes explanations aren't clear enough so I know without remembering it exactly which from similar words suits which explanation. So I started to think what next. I have practiced bunch of words but they are just words, it's not that I'm using them. Some time ago I have added...

Book Review: Wool by Hugh Howey

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Post-apocalyptic sci-fi. I liked how book is divided into shorter stories and still tell one bigger story at the same time. From time to time it was a little bit away from physics but I would say book is more about sociology and communities. Especially third part of book was less fun. First two stories were great and had unexpected endings. Rating: 6/10

Book Review: Foundation HTML5 Animation with JavaScript by Billy Lamberta and Keith Peters

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When I first asked about it on gamedev.js group . Michal Budzynski  was discouraging me from this book, especially because of code quality but added that there are some good theoretical things to read about. I was brave enough to decide to ignore code quality all the time and only look at animation and theoretical ideas in the code. It took me a couple of months to start reading it, then a couple of months to digest it. Sometimes it was really much more about Math than JavaScript. My edition has many bugs in code samples so it was fortunate all examples are live on github pages:  http://lamberta.github.io/html5-animation/ . You can find even some extras :) After reading this book I can't say I'm right now animator, or that I know 3D. For sure it helped me think about many animation related topics. I found myself using things like easing from time to time in places I wouldn't think of before. For me it was really good reading. I know more about animations, exam...