Spare Time Stuff

Here you can find info on the various projects I've undertaken or want to in my free time...

Fun Hacks

Links to some fun little things I've done that you might find entertaining or useful.

• Parody text generator. Create nonsense text in parody of your favourite author.
• E-book to audiobook converter. Create machine read audiobooks, based from sources in various file formats.
• Youtube video conversion, and concatenation. Create divx/xvid AVI episodes from more than one Youtube URL source.

Useful Code Snippets

Links to useful code I have developed, either for this site, or for various other projects.

• Code-box CSS. CSS source and HTML examples of how to use the code boxes from this site.
• pdfistext Discover if a PDF contains plain text content or not.

Cool Ideas

The following are some ideas I have, that I want to implement or see implemented... If you want to go ahead and beat me to it, that's great! If you know of something similar that already exists I'd really like to know about it.

• Using a helmet mounted camera, my EEE PC and a GPS logger create a video that has each frame georeferenced so that from a map the seek in the video can be selected by geographical location. Should be really good for videos when mountain biking, allowing people to view the specific portion of a video to do with a particular single track section.

• Program a Galaxian like scrolling shooting/space game. The difference being that my idea is to use a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to develop enemies of ever increasing difficulty and complex behaviors as the game progresses. When an enemy is shot down a bundle of attributes are left behind that adapt your ship to have similar characteristics and stats. Simple gradient colours and geometric shapes will be used to represent all game objects, the hue and shape being wholly dependent on the variables of the GA. Enemies that survive the longest in a round or get past you all together go on to make the next generation of the GA, allowing the game to "evolve" a defense against your playing style.

  I adapted this idea for my final year dissertation, at some point I might make a game from it.