Jacob Salmela - Jacob Salmela

Jacob Salmela

LaTeX for Board Game Design

LaTeX for Board Game Design

After spending three months designing my second board game, LaGulch--I am documenting my experience and knowledge to a book. The software I developed for the game works very well. It needs some polish before it may be ready for others to use, but while I'm working on that, I want

Play My Procedurally-generated Print-and-play Game

Play My Procedurally-generated Print-and-play Game

It's still available for free while the BGG contest is under way. Links to the files can be found on the thread below: 12th ROLL & WRITE GAME DESIGN CONTEST | BGGcenter][imageid=6861034 large][/center] [b]12th ROLL & WRITE GAME DESIGN CONTEST[/b] After the great success in the 11th contest,

Live stream coding: Ebitengine game and a LaTeX print-and-play game

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Live stream coding: Ebitengine game and a LaTeX print-and-play game

Come watch, learn, or collaborate as I write code to develop an Ebitengine video game about managing an inventory; or writing LaTeX to develop a print-and-play video game. I'm toggling between the two--when I'm sick of one project, I jump to the other. Jacob SalmelaI work in High Performance Computing

Kdump in an hour provides instant relief

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Kdump in an hour provides instant relief

I have created my first bite size course. It's actually less than an hour long, but if you need to learn about kdump, this is the place to do it [https://www.udemy.com/course/kdump-in-an-hour/?referralCode=75E1389ADBDDD7E5184B] . I cover how to: * install and configure kdump * test crashing a system

Ebiten Space Game Progress Continues...

Ebiten Space Game Progress Continues...

I'm still hooked on Ebiten for 2D games. My game is progressing and the code is becoming more maintainable, which is my real goal--so I can quickly scale, fix, or enhance the game. My latest struggle was with ebitenui [https://github.com/blizzy78/ebitenui], which is a framework for creating

Progress on My Ebiten Game Made in Two Months

Progress on My Ebiten Game Made in Two Months

Pictures speak volumes, so I'll add those and little captions to each one. I was able to get a new screen drawn when a user clicked on a planet. I added some asteroids, but as you can see, the animations were not working.I did get the animations to settle,

2D Game Development Log with Ebiten--now on Twitch

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2D Game Development Log with Ebiten--now on Twitch

I'm moving my development live streams over to Twitch. It seems like a better fit for it (and no one is watching on YouTube). You can find it here: jacobsalmela - TwitchI’m a software engineer who loves software.Twitch [https://www.twitch.tv/jacobsalmela]I have made good progress

Ebiten 2D Game Development Live Stream - Procedural and Randomly Generated

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Ebiten 2D Game Development Live Stream - Procedural and Randomly Generated

My latest obsession is Ebiten [https://ebiten.org]. It's a great framework for developing games in Go. I have always wanted to write and design a game, but every time I have tried, I fell short until I started working with Ebiten. There are so many components to a game

Print-and-play LaTeX game in a foldable, 8-page booklet

Print-and-play LaTeX game in a foldable, 8-page booklet

I recently back Humans. [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/travisdhill/humans-1] on Kickstarter. It's this nifty little game you can print on a single sheet of paper and then fold it into an 8 page booklet like this: I really liked the idea and I have experimented making my own

Live stream coding session: watch me write shell code

Live stream coding session: watch me write shell code

update: cancelled for now due to a sick child I'm going to start doing some live streaming this Saturday morning as I write shell code to do things. Come watch and we can learn and collaborate together. Just check out my channel below. Jacob SalmelaI work in High Performance Computing

Shell Scripting For Humans, Now Free On YouTube

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Shell Scripting For Humans, Now Free On YouTube

Interested in learning shell scripting? I'm making my first course available on YouTube, and I'll be posting a new video each day. Subscribe to get notified when each new video is made available and you can learn shell scripting in 98 days with just a few minutes a day. Shell

Upcoming Udemy Courses

Upcoming Udemy Courses

In addition to my shell scripting series, I am creating several highly-focused topics relating to Linux. These will be $5-$10 courses that focus on some things like dracut, kdump, cloud-init, etc. I often find myself needing certain knowledge in focused areas. so instead of a giant course on "Linux,

Hosting Tabletop Game Nights During COVID Complete With Sound Effects

Hosting Tabletop Game Nights During COVID Complete With Sound Effects

As we approach a year of the virus, I missed having my monthly game nights. I have done a few virtual sessions of Cartographers [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/263918/cartographers], in which I used my phone as a camera for the components, and then each participant was able to use

Try My Udemy Course For Free

Try My Udemy Course For Free

Feedback on my shell scripting course has been positive so far. I have a college student taking who's new to computer programming, so I think that will serve as a great test of the target audience. I also had a seasoned IT pro take the course and learn a thing

Udemy Course Open For Real This Time

Udemy Course Open For Real This Time

I published my Udemy course where you can learn shell scripting in three hours yesterday, but some technical troubles meant people could not enroll. If you're interested still, you can use COWSAY_THANKS as your coupon code for a better price as a thank you for reading my blog page.

Learn Shell Scripting In 3 Hours

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Learn Shell Scripting In 3 Hours

UPDATE 3: It's working now [https://jacobsalmela.com/2021/01/08/udemy-course-open-for-real-this-time/]. UPDATE 2: Just wait a while if you want to enroll. Udemy support is doing things. UPDATE: Udemy kidney punched me and you may not be able to enroll. I'm working on fixing that now. This won't make

RFP: Design A Simple But Fun Game That Makes Calls To My API

RFP: Design A Simple But Fun Game That Makes Calls To My API

I have thought about this type of project for a long time and was wondering if anyone out there already has or wants to create a game in Construct 3 [https://www.construct.net/en], which I can collaborate on to make calls to an API that I am developing.

Four Years Later: Running Your Own Anonymous Email System

Four Years Later: Running Your Own Anonymous Email System

> This post is in reference to a procedure I developed to anonymize your email address [https://jacobsalmela.com/2016/10/20/roll-your-own-anonymizing-email-server/], similiar to what Abine offers with their Blur product. I originally thought of this because of all the data breaches that were happening. Those certainly have not waned

Four Years Later: Symlinks and Dropbox for Backup and Restore

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Four Years Later: Symlinks and Dropbox for Backup and Restore

> Note: This post is about is a homegrown solution to backups/restores I developed four years ago [https://jacobsalmela.com/2016/12/15/using-dropbox-for-an-easy-restore-of-all-your-computers-settings/] , not the newly-announced Dropbox Backup [https://www.dropbox.com/features/cloud-storage/computer-backup]. I originally developed this method for four reasons: * restoring from backups was never a

Coming Soon and Paying Respects

Coming Soon and Paying Respects

The image is my only clue.

ASCII Planets: An Open Source Board Game Written In LaTeX

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ASCII Planets: An Open Source Board Game Written In LaTeX

I designed my first board game. Really, I just built off of the fantastic work Topi Turunen [https://ae.tptrnn.fi/] did with ASCII Empires [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/307670/ascii-empires]. It's essentially a re-theme of that game, but I spent a lot of time writing it in LaTeX so

Introducing Sampo: A Bash API Server For Running Shell Scripts

Introducing Sampo: A Bash API Server For Running Shell Scripts

v1.0 of Sampo [https://github.com/jacobsalmela/sampo] is an MVP [https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/mvp/#q=~(infinite~false~filters~(tags~(~'mvp))~searchTerm~'~sort~false~sortDirection~'asc~page~1)] . Written in bash, it is a shell script API server you can run directly in your terminal or

Would You Be Interested In A Shell Scripting Course?

Would You Be Interested In A Shell Scripting Course?

I have been writing shell scripts for over a decade now, and I have learned a lot. Would you be interested in a Udemy course [https://www.udemy.com/share/100F3uAEcbc1dVR3g=/?xref=E0IfcVxbQn4FSWUuAAcqP1kSWSRM] on learning shell scripting from the very basics to some advanced features? Please let me know directly

Git Rebase Struggles Conceptualized With Pikmin

Git Rebase Struggles Conceptualized With Pikmin

If you haven’t already, take a look at my first git rebase / Pikmin blog post [https://jacobsalmela.com/2019/09/22/git-rebase-is-the-pikmin-of-source-control/] about how to learn and use git rebase. That post covers the basics, while this one will conceptualize how to use git rebase when things go bad:

Git Rebase Is The Pikmin Of Source Control

Git Rebase Is The Pikmin Of Source Control

git isn’t easy to learn, and once you do, the git rebase command seems to invoke fear and confusion in many people. But once you learn how to use it effectively, you’ll wish you had learned it sooner–both for your solo projects and while working on a