I walked a path through the snow. I was followed.

#alpacas. #Vermont

There is a waste-clearance company in Brighton called ‘Lord of the Bins’ with the slogan ‘One ring to remove it all’.

@lobrien Yep 🙂 There were stars and planets and in some versions I believe you could send landing parties and visit the planets even. It seemed all magical back then to explore strange new worlds, though I’m not sure the game was advanced enough to have new civilizations 😛

I’m really tempted to try to re-create the experience in a modern context but I guess most people shy away from doing something like that because they know they’ll run into IP issues in using the Star Trek name. I guess you could always keep the game play but rename everything?

Ah, to have the time to do all this!

So … DOSBox …

On Friday, once work was done, I kind of started thinking about “SimLife”.

I’d posted about it a week or two ago and I thought it might be fun to try it out again and see if it was as bad as I remembered.

I went and installed DOSBox (https://www.dosbox.com/) but discovered that Boxer (http://boxerapp.com/) no longer worked for my version of macOS since it has not been updated in ages — shows how long it’s been since I tried DOSBox I guess 😛

That sent me down all sorts of byways and alleyways trying out various alternatives to Boxer and even setting up MS-DOS 6.22 on a VM but I eventually came back to DOSBox since it was the easiest/simplest way to get going.

I tried out “SimLife” again and was pleasantly surprised to find that I actually kind of liked the game. I probably hadn’t tried out the tutorial back in the day and probably just tried clicking around and it’s the kind of game where you really need to know the mechanics. So I might try playing it again over the next few weeks …

But that opening graphic, so gorgeous even for that time period — just so lovely 🙂

#Games #DOS #Memories #Sim #History
“SimLife” opening graphic / spl…
“SimLife” game start showing th…

@dantemercurio Thank you 🙂 I think this was the original “Trek73” (or a variation). I do remember this, but unfortunately, this isn’t the one I’m looking for 😞

The one I remember had color graphics and instead of using ASCII characters for the map, it had slightly more refined graphics — that might be why I think it might have been Turbo Pascal. No idea …

But on the other hand, this was over 30 years ago. So who knows? Maybe I’m just re-imagining things as my memory cells break down? 😛

@virtualbri I’ve played it on an IBM System 36 (if I recall correctly) but that had monitors and didn’t print out to paper 🙂

Getting the output on paper would certainly be good way to preserve a game and since it was all turn based, I guess it wouldn’t really detract much from the gameplay ….

I saw a couple of versions which were real-time on GitHub and I hated those …. There was just so many enemy attacks before I’d even had a chance to think! I really liked the turn-based gameplay because it gave me time to think and figure out what I wanted to do 😛

Anyone have good leads on Mid-Senior level iOS roles?

A good friend and former coworker is looking for a new job. They've been working with SwiftUI a lot lately, but really interested in doing anything with iOS. I can share more detail and a shining reference on request!

Does anybody remember the classic “Star Trek” game from the 70’s? Or was that way before anybody’s time? 😛

I was playing around with DOSBox (more on that in a separate post) and was reminded of the game suddenly.

I recall playing a version on DOS back in 1990 (or 91) which had color graphics and more graphical controls than “Trek73” or “Super Trek”. The closest one I can find now is “EGA Trek” (see first screenshot) but I’m fairly certain that that wasn’t the one I played because the Main Viewer area in “EGA Trek” cycles through different graphics and I don’t remember that.

Also the game I played had long range and short range scanners which used up energy and that doesn’t seem to be a feature of “EGA Trek”.

Now that I’ve remembered the game, I really want to play that exact version again 😛

I’ve played “EGA Trek”, “VTrek” (second screenshot) and gone through a bunch of newer variations that people created on GitHub. But none of them have the same feel as the game I remember. If anybody knows of the game I’m talking of, please let me know?

I think part of the trouble is that back then they were all called “Star Trek” and that was it. So many variations by so many people.

In fact, I thought the one I liked might have been created in Turbo Pascal (for no reason I could think of) and almost went down another rabbit hole setting up Turbo Pascal just to re-create the game for DOS 😛

Then I realized that if I were to re-create it that I might as well do it in Swift or Flutter so that I can have it avaialbe on more platforms. Will I do it? I don’t know … I guess it depends on how badly I want to play the version I remember again 🙂

#Games #StarTrek #DOS #Memories #History
“EGA Trek” game screen showing …
“VTrek” game screen showing a b…

@jynersolives Yep. I’m constantly amazed that the simplistic story-telling that the Star Wars TV shows do just passes muster and nobody seems to bat an eyelid. Why did Mando have to wander all over the place looking for a robot? Can’t he just call ahead and check? What is Bo-Katan doing all alone in that castle/moon? Is there nobody else there at all and does she simply spend every day sitting indolently on that throne?

So many questions I really don’t want answers for 😛

#introduction

Hi, I'm Justin. I am a software engineer living in #SanFrancisco's #innerrichmond. I'm married, have two kids, and enjoy spending time with them.

Right now, I am working on personal projects and would like to work someday in #MachineLearning or #VirtualReality #VR. I wish both were more open like the web was in the early 00's.

To keep fit I mostly enjoy #Cycling around #sfbay

I enjoy #3dprinting, #gaming, #SciFi and #GeekCulture #Goth #Cyberpunk.

I've fallen behind on my #MarshMadness posts, so here's Thursday's marsh critter for you you. This is a greater yellowlegs (Tringa melanoleuca). Probably. The greater yellowlegs actually looks remarkably like the lesser yellowlegs, but the lesser yellowlegs is more closely related to the willet. Try to keep up here.

#birds #BirdsOfMastodon #photos #photography

Enchanted
By Jennifer Lommers

#trees #mastoart #painting #flowers

Dark Sky

2023-02-20/21 day 248/249 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off). 

I followed a Joel Create tutorial. It’s a bit different from the usual, which is its charm.

For more info, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/dark-sky/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A sunset image in pinks and pur…

Psychoticat

2023-02-18/19 day 246/247 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off). 

I loosely followed a Tatyworks tutorial. Emphasis on loosely.

Her tutorial is for a bear. I did one of a cat.

So my quick sketching skills need work and my cat looks a little bit crazy. And yes, I see the things that could be improved, alas. And yes, that is a blep.

For more info, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/psychoticat/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A peach coloured cat standing o…

"Inversion-Based Style Transfer with Diffusion Models. (arXiv:2211.13203v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)" — Accurately transfer the style attributes such as semantics, material, object shape, brushstrokes and colors of an input image to the target image.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.13203
Code: https://github.com/zyxelsa/InST

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

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Style transfer results by using…

"Scaling up GANs for Text-to-Image Synthesis. (arXiv:2303.05511v1 [cs.CV])" — Adapting the GAN architecture for generating images via text prompts to work with large datasets, offering faster generation times and higher resolutions.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05511

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

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Some sample images generated by…

"Mark My Words: Dangers of Watermarked Images in ImageNet. (arXiv:2303.05498v1 [cs.LG])" — A look at the potential risks of watermarked images present in
ImageNet and their impact on popular Deep Neural Networks (DNN) trained on this dataset.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05498

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

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Multiple images with watermarks…

"3DGen: Triplane Latent Diffusion for Textured Mesh Generation. (arXiv:2303.05371v1 [cs.CV])" — Generating 3D meshes using diffusion models.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05371

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

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Single category unconditional m…

"BaDLAD: A Large Multi-Domain Bengali Document Layout Analysis Dataset. (arXiv:2303.05325v1 [cs.CV])" — A dataset to help with Bengali document layout analysis, containing 33,695 human annotated document samples from six domains.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05325
Code: https://github.com/anon-user-for-web/badlad

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

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A sample of the different layou…

"Detecting Images Generated by Diffusers. (arXiv:2303.05275v1 [cs.CV])" — Detecting if given images were generated by diffusion models or not. Appears to be limited to detecting images only if images generated by a particular diffusion model were in the training set.

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05275

#AI #CV #NewPaper #DeepLearning #MachineLearning

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The two different network setup…