Matthew Consterdine's

Photos of the earth taken today by NASA DSCOVR EPIC. Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) captures images of a sunlit earth to monitor the atmosphere and the environment. View earth

This weekend, I participated in two hackathons. On Friday afternoon I took part in the Bloomberg CodeCon Grand Finals (again). Then in the evening everyone everyone went to Swingers Golf Bar. On Saturday morning I explored the city, swinging by the Tate Modern just before I left. Image courtesy Bloomberg.

Then on Saturday evening and Sunday morning I created a game for the Southampton Game Jam, the theme was transmission. Normally you have 48 hours, but I was lucky to even have 20. So I got to work, and created SnowDrift, a classic 2D platformer, using raw JavaScript no frameworks. Click on the image below to play in your browser. Overall, the weekend was busy, but fascinating. I really enjoyed it.

The Southampton Code Dojo is a monthly event where keen computer science students meet, eat pizza, group up, and make things for a bit over an hour. At the start of the session ideas are proposed and voted on. Then, teams form typically on programming language choice, and everyone gets too work. At the end of the session, each team demonstrates. I have been attending for a while now, I love it. Hope to see you there!

Below is a list of some of the previous things I have worked on:

• Let it Burn! - Using your flamethrower, wrack up points and burn the forest down.
• Firework Simulator - Light up the sky with a fireworks display by dragging your finger or cursor across the screen.
• Tetris - A quick and simple game of Tetris.
• Colours - Enter a colour code, get a nice name.

I’ve put together a HTML5 recreation of several classic games. Play online.

A Jison, DnD-style dice roller. Type then it will automatically roll. Supports arithmetic, keeping high/low dice, and fudge dice.

Usage

npm install fantasy-dice [-g]

roll 4d6h3

echo -e "var dice = require('fantasy-dice');\nconsole.log(dice("4d6h3"));" > dice.js
node dice.js

Despite their simplicity, a spirograph can create complex and visually appealing shapes. Originally designed to help prevent banknote forgeries, the spirograph is now a children’s toy sold worldwide.

Using simple mathematical equations I’ve created a simulation that creates many random Spirographs. Behind the scenes each Spirograph is rendered to a canvas buffer which is then drawn to the main canvas for performance. Why not play, the code is on GitHub.

Click or use +/-/C to create or remove spirographs. Scroll to speed up or slow down time. Press space to play or pause the simulation. Press T to toggle trails.