Topics

51

Living Room / My new project is now live: Co-op For Two on YouTube

« on: January 01, 2021, 02:56 AM »

You may have noticed that I've been largely absent without leave from the DonationCoder forum for several months now.  As some of you know I've been working on a new project, a YouTube channel with a good friend of mine.

It's a channel where we will be playing and discussing cooperative board games, aptly named "CO-OP FOR TWO".

Finally after several months of filming and editing, it's just gone live today:

• LINK: https://www.youtube....DxIFwwaaeb7nZ4cWA3tw

Here's our little 2 minute patreon teaser:

And a sample playthrough, for your convenience:

And a sample review, for your convenience:

I'm nervous, excited, and proud that it turned out the way it did.  The episodes are long, often rambling, and will *NOT* be bearable to watch by most people. (HA!)
But I feel like they are their own honest thing, and might be appealing to a tiny tiny sliver of people who want to pass the time with some company, and just listen to friends talk in the background.

If you know someone who you think might appreciate the channel, please pass on the word.
My co-host and friend Gregg doesn't think anyone will ever watch it or support us, so if you like what we're doing and want to see more, please consider supporting us on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/coopfortwo

52

DC Website Help and Extras / Server may go down tonight for 30 minutes or so 12/27/20

« on: December 27, 2020, 12:42 AM »

FYI:
Server may go down tonight for 30 minutes or so 12/27/20 for a hard drive replacement.

53

Living Room / Happy xmas, holidays, etc.

« on: December 25, 2020, 03:02 AM »

Happy holidays to everyone.  Because of the state of everything some of you may be spending it alone.. Nothing wrong with that but if you don't want to be along just remember we are in the modern age where there is always a way to connect with others online. Stop by the donationcoder chat room, or post on the forum, etc.  Or just watch a good movie.

However you spend the day and this coming week, I hope you have a wonderful next couple of days. 

ps. It's freezing here in Illinois, I'll be hiding under a blanket today.

54

Living Room / Happy Thanksgiving/Friendsgiving 2020

« on: November 26, 2020, 01:28 PM »

Whether you celebrate Thanksgiving or not, it's always nice to take time regularly to remember what things in this world you are grateful for, and take time to be appreciative of those in your life.

I am grateful for this community.  I've spent the last couple of months working on my little youtube project, and I appreciate being able to take the time to do that and have others here making sure the place doesn't fall apart!

55

Living Room / Web service to let supporters vote rankings

« on: November 05, 2020, 02:07 PM »

As some of you know, a friend and I have started working on a youtube series where we discuss board games.

We were thinking that we'd like to have a giant list of potential games (1000s) and let the audience (or just patreon supporters?), help decide which games we review in which order.

So that requires having a page which lists all the (1000s of) potential items up for consideration, and let's people indicate their top favorites (maybe like rank their top 10 or something), and then lets us see which gets the most votes or shares.

Does anyone know of any web service or wordpress plugin that does this easily?


Maybe this is just something that any easy voting plugin could handle.. Or maybe there are some features that would be especially useful for doing this kind of thing where you are asking people to help rank choices and then striking items off the top of the list as you do them..

I guess that's the thing that makes me think this is somewhat specialized requirement, in that it's not simply a one-time poll, but rather a list that we will over time be taking completed items off of.. where when we take an item off the list, people should be able to re-allocate their vote?  Or maybe we need some way for people who vote on an item that gets completed to then have less weight on subsequent votes?

It's an interesting problem in general -- the best way to let supporters help rank and choose items to do from a list where you are adding and removing items constantly... Ideas welcome..

56

Living Room / When rubber (computer mouse) gets old and sticky, what can you do

« on: October 27, 2020, 08:54 PM »

Have experienced this quite a lot recently, where what was originally some matte rubbery area on a computer mouse or something similar, is starting to deteriorate(?).. it gets sticky and unpleasant.

Is there a solution to this?  Attempting to wash it with soapy water does not help.
Maybe put oil on it?

Maybe there's a preventative way to stop this from happening in the first place?

57

Living Room / Where would you go to hire someone to make a logo and/or video intro for you?

« on: October 07, 2020, 03:26 AM »

As I've posted about elsewhere, I am in the process of putting together a youtube channel to review (cooperative) board games with a friend.

Neither of us are artistically inclined, and we were wondering if anyone had any experience with hiring someone to make a logo, video intro animation, and/or a little musical intro, etc.

Anyone have any experience with sites where they can hire someone for such a thing?  Any advice?

58

N.A.N.Y. 2021 / NANY 2021 Entry - Cahoots Tabletop Simulator Mod

« on: August 18, 2020, 11:43 PM »

My second entry for 2021 is a bit unusual, it's a Tabletop Simulator workshop mod to help you play the one of my favorite cooperative card game fillers "Cahoots".

Screenshots:



Download and play here:

• https://steamcommuni...tails/?id=2201431600

Notes:

• You need to own Tabletop Simulator, which is not free; then you just subscribe to workshop items to add them to your copy.
• Tabletop Simulator is essentially just a 3d world environment for playing games with other people -- you need friends who also install this to play along with you -- you can't play by yourself, or with multiple people sitting in front of the same computer.
• If you like the game, buy a copy of the real physical game -- it's better!

59

DC Website Help and Extras / Testing new DC discord chat server

« on: August 16, 2020, 11:25 AM »

It looks like we are going to be moving our official chat system from irc to discord.
You can find an embedded client on the "Help -> Live Chat" menu of the website here (or if you already have Discord client installed you can join via discord directly: https://www.discord.io/donationcoder)

60

N.A.N.Y. 2021 / NANY 2021 Entry - TheDieCrew Tabletop Simulator Mod

« on: August 04, 2020, 10:06 PM »

My first entry for 2021 is a bit unusual, it's a Tabletop Simulator workshop mod to help you play the awesome new cooperative card game "The Crew" (Die Crew in german).


Screenshots:


Download and play here:

• https://steamcommuni...tails/?id=2184711207

Notes:

• You need to own Tabletop Simulator, which is not free; then you just subscribe to workshop items to add them to your copy.
• Tabletop Simulator is essentially just a 3d world environment for playing games with other people -- you need friends who also install this to play along with you -- you can't play by yourself, or with multiple people sitting in front of the same computer.
• If you like the game, buy a copy of the real physical game -- it's better!

61

Developer's Corner / Tabletop Simulator -- Anyone played with it?

« on: August 02, 2020, 07:21 PM »

As many of you know, I'm a big boardgamer and this pandemic has really but a dent in my real life gaming.

Recently I've been playing a bit with friends on Tabletop Simulator.  It's clunky and a far cry from playing in real life, but on the other hand it's better than nothing..

Anyway I've spent the last couple of days learning how to code/script for it, making custom behaviors and events, etc.  It uses Lua and the Unity engine.  It's pretty kludgey in some ways but it works and I'm having fun.

Anyone else done any Tabletop Simulator coding?

Here's a screenshot of TheCrew mod that I've been working on (there are already a bunch on Tabletop Simulator Workshop that are good, I'm just using it as an excuse to learn the platform):



If you have tabletop simulator on steam, you can find my mod here: https://steamcommuni...tails/?id=2184711207

62

N.A.N.Y. 2021 / Welcome to NANY 2021

« on: July 31, 2020, 04:21 AM »

NANY is "New Apps for the New Year" -- an event we run on DonationCoder where we invite coders who hang out on the forum to release a new free program at the start of the new year -- or celebrate the new apps they've written in the last 12 months.

There are no winners or losers, everyone who participates gets a free mug commemorating the event.

You can find previous year's forums here: https://www.donation...ndex.php?board=329.0



Release a new app for the new year on Jan 1 and get a DC mug as your reward.
Here's the new alternate design from Hamradio.

63

N.A.N.Y. 2020 / MOVED: Nany 2020: FileShell by KodeZwerg

« on: July 31, 2020, 04:19 AM »

This topic has been moved to N.A.N.Y. 2021.

https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=50212.0

64

Living Room / Experimenting with a multi-camera setup for zoom, streaming, board game vlogging

« on: July 23, 2020, 11:00 AM »

Today I decided to experiment a little with configuring a multi-camera setup with a top-down camera, for vlogging board games, etc.
With this setup I can switch between front and top down cameras, or combine them, and then easily disconnect the "boom" when not in use just swing away the boom out of view into the bookshelf when not in use (version 2).



Playing with greenscreened top-down overly:

65

Developer's Corner / Little tip on using ffmpeg to post-process recorded zoom footage for youtube

« on: June 26, 2020, 08:00 PM »

I've been fooling around recently using Zoom to record discussions and remote board game play, and thinking about how to make that video suitable for uploading to a youtube channel.

Here's a little tip for cleaning up the Zoom recorded video and cropping out unnesc. space using the free open source commandline tool ffmpg.

Original video recorded by zoom looks like this:


FFMPEG script:

[Select]

ffmpeg.exe -i zoomin.mp4 -filter_complex "[0:v]crop=iw/2.666666:ih/2:iw/16:ih/4[tl]; [0:v]crop=iw/2.666666:ih/2:iw/1.777777:ih/4[br]; [tl][br]hstack=inputs=2" -codec:a copy zoomout.mp4

Result:


Basically it tells ffmpeg to form a new frame by selecting out each of the two images and then combining them side by side.  You could use similar ffmpeg command to stack them on top of each other, etc.

ffmpg seems super useful and powerful, I'm sure there's other cool stuff you could do with it.

66

Living Room / Taste testing 80% Dark Chocolate

« on: June 21, 2020, 09:15 AM »

I have a wicked sweet tooth and I've always thought that dark chocolate tastes like poison.

Over the last few months I've been drastically cutting down on my consumption of sweets, and decided to see if dark chocolate would taste better to my "recalibrated" tastebuds.

To my delight it does!

So I've been on a quest to try all the dark chocolate bars I can find (locally) that are 80% and above, and see which I prefer.

Anyone have any favorite 80% and above dark chocolate bars?  Shall we share ratings?

67

Living Room / TIP: If having trouble connecting device through USB try different cable

« on: June 17, 2020, 09:17 PM »

This is a reminder to myself if nothing else.  Just spent an hour installing useless software and trying to figure out why my videocamera was not letting me transfer files.
In the end I realized I was using a USB cord that is ONLY meant for charging (one of those with multiple heads of different formats).
UGH what a wasted hour of my life.
As soon as I connected a proper mini usb cable everything worked fine.

68

Finished Programs / SOLVED: Quick toggle some monitors

« on: June 17, 2020, 08:11 AM »

I have a 4-monitor pc setup.  Occasionally when I watch a full screen movie or play a game, I'd like to turn off all but one of my monitors.
I'd love a little system tray utility with a hotkey (and right-click menu?) that could toggle a configurable set of my monitors on and off.

69

Living Room / Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage - Unloading capital cannons on customer acquisition

« on: May 19, 2020, 03:03 PM »

A pizza shop discovers that a 3rd party delivery service has hijacked their google listing to offer deliveries for their pizza, and reselling their pizza at a loss... How is this a business model?

Another mystery of capitalism.

But he brought up another problem - the prices were off. He was frustrated that customers were seeing incorrectly low prices. A pizza that he charged $24 for was listed as $16 by Doordash...
You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It's used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses. The companies unload their capital cannons on customer acquisition, while this week’s Uber-Grubhub news reminds us, the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and increased prices. But is that even viable?

https://themargins.s...-and-pizza-arbitrage

70

Living Room / Distance Board Gaming Guide from BGG

« on: May 14, 2020, 05:39 PM »

Great list of board games in different categories that are suitable for online play.

https://boardgamegee...istance_Gaming_Guide

71

DC Website Help and Extras / Fixed sitemap

« on: May 04, 2020, 04:26 AM »

I fixed the donationcoder sitemap -- didn't notice it was broken until now:
https://www.donation...der.com/help/sitemap

72

DC Website Help and Extras / Forcing https mode on donationcoder

« on: May 02, 2020, 01:04 AM »

I'm trying to make a change that will force https access to donationcoder for better security; let me know if you spot any oddities on the forum or website.

73

Living Room / Mini Papercraft models of Retro Computers to Print and Assemble

« on: April 30, 2020, 08:17 PM »

This is truly wonderful.  A collection of downloadable print-and-assemble paper craft models of retro computers including the Apple II, the IBM PC, the TRS-80 Model 3, by Rocky Bergen.

These look wonderful -- you just download and print them and cut and assemble.  Love it.

http://rockybergen.com/papercraft

74

Living Room / System32 - funny indy web comic about computers

« on: April 30, 2020, 07:23 AM »

I enjoyed this web comic that dc member panzer told us about, System32:

https://www.webtoons...list?title_no=235074

75

Living Room / Pandemic Quarantine DonationCoder Zoom Meet and Greet May 2nd

« on: April 22, 2020, 07:11 PM »

What does everyone think about having a super short 10 minute zoom meeting open to all donationcoder folks?
Just to say hello and put face and voice to forum nickname and do something weird?

We'll just all go around and say our names and say hello and then quickly sign off before we feel too nervous.

• Date: Saturday, May 2nd
• Time: 4pm central standard US time (forum time)

Who's in?