The ball lifter now has a track to go with it: The track screws onto the ball lifter mechanism frame. It can all be disassembled if maintenance is needed on the mechanism. A little oil is all that the mechanism might ever need, but building this as a…
Continue readingThe Linkage program is showing a really weird bug. Bug In the picture, it is obvious that the dotted line that is the arc between two connectors A & C, is not passing through the sliding connector D. This gets worse with time until the triangle shaped link…
Continue readingI love computer games. I try to deny it, but I love them. In a computer game, you can do things that are impossible in real life or even in any non-computer game. In a computer game, you can build an empire, kill lots of bad guys, explore…
Continue readingThe above image is part of a patent. I found this while searching for kinetic sculpture images. It never occurred to me that a person could patent a kinetic sculpture, or any art for that matter. I wonder if my ball lifting mechanism (below) could be patented. I…
Continue readingUPDATE December 30, 2015: I made a new and improved version of the progress ring control. The code is not shown below – that is older code – but you can get a complete Visual Studio project by downloading this zip file: http://www.rectorsquid.com/CircleprogressRing.zip Here’s a picture of the…
Continue readingI don’t often write about computer games, but two iPad games that I recently player seemed outstanding to me. DEVICE 6 by Simogo This was one of the most unusual games that I’ve ever played. The “game” consists of a small number of puzzles wrapped up in an…
Continue readingI remembered seeing a clock app in the Petzold book, and I needed to make a spinning “I’m working…” indicator. It’s a fairly good book, although I’ve only read a small bit of it. So I looked back in it and found the clock app. It’s a nice…
Continue readingIn my last post, I ranted about the SmartScreen filter. Since then, I discovered that SS is one word with word capitals. I also discovered that it took about one day for my app to download without the SS filter warning from Windows 8.1. Apparently, my new certificate…
Continue readingMicrosoft does some really nice work sometimes. The half-assed Smart Screen filter is not one of those nice pieces of work. It is shit. I’ve posted about this before, but there have been no changes to this filter over the last few years and it still has some…
Continue readingI lost some old emails from people who wanted to use the Linkage program on Windows XP. This post is my only way of letting anyone know that I recently built the program for XP. I have not yet tested it. I don’t have a Windows XP system…
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