If I made a Christmas wish-list, the SNES Classic would be on it.
I finally found one on the store shelf. When I got it home I played me some Star Fox and Super Metroid, and then of course I took the poor thing apart.
I’ve waited many years for a console-quality PC gamepad, and finally 8Bitdo may have made it happen. The SN30 and SF30 look a whole lot like SNES controllers, but how much like SNES controllers are they? Are they precise? Are they well-built? Let’s have a look-see.
I’ve got a program called Twist Flux. It features an array of twisty, bendy… thingies.
I found a way to render twisty shapes which appear to have volume without going so far as to use 3D models of twisted rods.
Magnetic storage + strong permanent magnets = bad. I’ve never really tempted fate on that, but I happened to be disposing of an old MiniDV camcorder, I had a couple of tapes, and I saw a chance to get the straight truth.
Generating random numbers which fit a normal distribution is essential for stochastic optimization, especially for continuous evolutionary algorithms.
For high-quality results the weapon of choice is the Box–Muller transform. It’s a little expensive; it involves exponents and trigonometry and such. Recently I was working on an EA written in JavaScript, and I wanted to avoid using those functions. There’s actually a damn simple alternate method.
