Tag: Programming

What originally started as an April Fools joke by programmer community help forum Stack Overflow, the Key Macropad (aka copy-paste keyboard) is now a real product you can buy from Drop for $29. I can already feel my programming workload getting infinitely lighter.

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the Game Boy’s release in Japan. The old portable brings back memories for many of us, even if we’ve come a long way since then. In fact, these days we can even create our own Game Boy games.

Google is always looking for new technical talent. So teaching kids how to code makes sense. That is why the company announced that they’d teamed with Wonder Woman to inspire teen girls to learn coding. Made with Code is a Google initiative that encourages teen girls to pursue coding, and has released a new Wonder Woman-themed coding project.

The Game Creators’ AppGameKit is an affordable cross-platform development software that lets you make games and other programs for both desktop computers and mobile devices. Now the company is lowering the barrier to software development even further with the free AppGameKit for Raspberry Pi.

Some games have hacking or programming mini-games, and there are a couple of ones where programming is the game. But Screeps is the first game I’ve seen that requires knowledge and even expertise of JavaScript. Launched last May, Screeps is a real-time strategy game where you grow a military colony using JavaScript (or a programming language that can be compiled to JavaScript).

Kids these days seem to be getting smarter earlier. But how soon is too soon to start your child on the path to a career as a developer? The answer, apparently, is preschool age. Fisher-Price thinks preschoolers should be taught to code and they have a toy to help.

Last year we saw The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening partially ported to Microsoft Excel using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Redditor crruzi is also using VBA and Excel to make his own XCOM game. Crruzi says he just learned to use VBA for work and is making EXLCOM to sharpen his skills.

We’ve seen a couple of electronics kits with graphical programming interfaces for beginners. There’s also a similar environment for Arduino. The Everything Machine is a graphical programming sandbox for hardware that many people already have: a mobile device.

Sometimes I see the kinds of toys being sold in stores today and I worry. Baby dolls that come with a diapered monkey pet, pole dancer dolls (apparently, these really do exist!), shopping spree board games… Don’t get me wrong, these toys are probably fun and your kid will most likely love them.

There’s nothing worse when you learn that your job is about to be outsourced to another country. Apparently, one U.S. software developer took matters into his own hands and outsourced not just his own job, but a couple of his jobs to China – raking in the profits.

Days before CES 2013, a mysterious new tablet computer has emerged, along with a short film that gives us a brief look at the device. Apparently, the enchantMOON is some sort of “hypertext authoring tablet” designed for the creation of HTML5 content.

A programmer named Darius Kazemi made Random Shopper, a software ‘bot that buys random items from Amazon. Why? Kazemi wanted to replicate the feeling of receiving an item that you already forgot you bought. It’s like a surprise gift from yourself to you!

First Person Shooters generally don’t teach you much, aside from maybe how to kill other players and get trophies. What if you could play an FPS that actually taught you how to make video games? Code Hero is an FPS that does just that.

There are huge advantages to having standardized hardware, but the obvious trade-off is that people with specialized needs will find them wanting for more. In the case of keyboards for example, certain tasks will require more frequent use of some keys, which may not be placed at the optimum position in the standard keyboard layout.

Punching bags can be a lot of things to people. For boxers, it’s something they usually beat the pulp out of when they train. For people working out, it’s something that will help them lose weight or burn calories while developing a whole host of other skills.

The web has been buzzing about this wonder device for a while now, but I think it’s still worth sharing here on our blog because it will allow you to replicate some of the hacks that we’ve featured.