zsmb's prog site

New project: GLocTagger

  2016.08.06.
New project: GLocTagger

Do you have a camera that doesn't have a built in GPS? Do you have Google location reporting enabled on your phone? Do you like having GPS tags in your image files? Probably not. But I do. And here's my solution for the described situation that adds location taken from your Google account to your JPEG images' EXIF data. Read more...

How to download your location data from Google

  2016.07.27.
How to download your location data from Google

If you're an active user of Google services and a smartphone, chances are that Google is tracking your movements. You can access the data they've collected on you in a couple of ways. Please excuse the repeated use of the words "data", "download", "location", and "service" in this article. Read more...

New project: Mosaic

  2016.07.16.
New project: Mosaic

This one's been a long time coming. Yes, colourful squares in yet another project. Not even sorry. Anyhow, here's a mosaic generator, originally inspired by LEGO. Read more...

New project: Match

  2015.12.27.
New project: Match

I've released a match 3 game on PC that has no mouse support.  I've released a match 3 game on PC that has no mouse support. That's really the best I can explain it. If you need more than that, there's  this video you can check out to learn more about the original game. Read more...

New project: Zed KeyPress

  2015.12.03.
New project: Zed KeyPress

It's been a long time, and quite a busy semester. Thankfully it didn't go all without programming: here's my homework for this semester, written in Java this time. It's a rather shameless clone of  Z-Type. I've had this game bookmarked for a long time, I'm not sure how well-known it actually is. Here's the  blog post from the author when they've published it back in the January of 2011. Read more...

New project: Tetris

  2015.10.08.
New project: Tetris

It's a classic. Everybody has to write a Tetris at some point, right? So here it is. It's Tetris. There's music. There's even a sound effect when you clear rows. It's pretty cool. Read more...

New project: Langton's Ant

  2015.09.15.
New project: Langton's Ant

Here's the next one in a seemingly never-ending series of grids that I've written. Similarly to my previous project,  Queens, it was inspired by a recent  Numberphile video, this time featuring  Katie Steckles (and  Audrey). You probably haven't heard of this one yet, but it's a grid being manipulated by a very simple set of rules just like in  Game of Life. This one has an ant though. Read more...

Podcasts #1 - You Should Try Them!

  2015.09.13.
Podcasts #1 - You Should Try Them!

This article is about what podcasts are, how you can get started with them, and why you should care in the first place. I'll try to briefly tell you what I've learned about podcasts in general since I first came across them, as well as share just a bit of my personal experiences of listening to podcasts. I'm writing this because I kinda fell in love with them, and I'm hoping that you will too, if you give them a chance. Read more...

My CodeLite and SDL2 setup

  2015.08.30.
My CodeLite and SDL2 setup

A while back I switched from CodeBlocks to CodeLite, which made setting up my programming environment a bit more complicated. While CodeBlocks came with a compiler and I could get an easy to install SDL1.2 package and even a project template from my first semester programming subject's  website, I couldn't use the same in my new IDE. I spent some time figuring out how to get everything I needed set up: a compiler with C++11 and regular expression support, a working debugger, and the ability to compile SDL2. Here's how you can set it up too. Be warned: it's a long read. Read more...

New project: Queens

  2015.08.28.
New project: Queens

The  eight queens puzzle is a classic mathematical puzzle on a chessboard - your goal is to place 8 queens on the 8x8 board so that no two of them can attack each other (i.e. no two are in the same row, column, or diagonal). It was also  featured around the end of my second semester programming course as an example of backtrack algorithms. After the recent  Numberphile video, I felt like making a quick program for solving the problem. Read more...