Over on the Springshare Lounge, I was asked for some detail about how our new augmented reality game works, so I posted the text below. I thought it might also be useful to share this here… This [AR game] was built on a new Group Homepage, starting with a completely empty Homepage Template. Starting with […]
Author Archives: Mark Eaton
AR, part 2
This was the first week of the fall semester, so our augmented reality (AR) game went live to students for the first time. Prof. Carrie Jedlicka did a ton of work to make this happen. The game worked on more phones than I thought it would (>90%?), which was a nice surprise. The students seemed […]
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Tildegit
I’ve set up an account on tildegit to mirror some of our library’s most important GitHub repos. On the one hand, this is simply a backup: another way to get at our code should something go particularly awry. On the other hand, this may point to a new direction for our library. I have been […]
Posted in git, smol, tilde
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Limits
One thing I’ve come to recognize over my time as a programmer is where my limits lie. I’m not a super talented programmer: I started too late in life; and I have a job as a librarian, which prevents me from learning about code full time. So I do what I can. The problem with […]
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The smol internet
I’ve been interested in gemini for quite a while now. It’s a protocol that serves up plain text with hyperlinks, and that’s about it. It’s pretty much the most minimal experience of the internet that you can imagine. I think people like gemini for (1) its obscurity. From what I can tell, your odds of […]
Posted in gemini, smol
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On using a fading JavaScript library
I’ve been building some web stuff recently with a JavaScript library that seems to be well past its prime. A couple of years is a long time in JS-land. I deliberately won’t name the library, because my intention here isn’t to criticize; rather I want to point out some of the challenges of working with […]
Posted in javascript, libraries, software
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AR
I’ve been working on an augmented reality (AR) tour game for our Fall library orientation. Basically, you wander around the library with your phone camera turned on, and you’ll find some shapes floating in the virtual space, by the reference desk, the circulation desk, and so on. When you collect all the shapes you get […]
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Vim
I am a long-time user of vim. Vim is a terminal-based text editor. It can be expanded through all sorts of plug-ins to give you something similar to an IDE. I have tried other coding environments: fancy IDEs, with lots of features. Even when I apply the vim key-bindings in those environments, I still don’t […]
Posted in old, vim
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In praise of buying low quality books
I buy a lot of really bad books on Amazon. They’re minor books, on fringe topics, and they’re usually well out of date. They’re also usually incredibly cheap, like two or three dollars, or some such. And while they’re generally pretty uninteresting, they can often offer a citation to support a minor point in a […]
Posted in books, research
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Copilot
So I set up Copilot last night. Copilot is GitHub’s AI that helps with writing code. I don’t think I’d pay the list price of $10/month for this type of service, but it is free to anyone with a GitHub educator account, which was enough to prompt me to try it. Needless to say I […]
