Second episode of series, I comment some sites that I stumbled upon.

ArtStation

https://www.artstation.com

Simply an amazing community and portfolio website service for professional AAA artists. Many of these artists already work on a company and probably will not accept a freelancer job. My bad 🙁

Soundrown

edit 2023-04-23: Defunct

Relaxing sounds, used to help focus during work, is something that I like a lot. The main differentiation from other similar services is the ability of mix dozen different sounds types like rain, fire, train, thunder, etc. They are all very balanced. My favorites are coffee shop and fire, that do not have much treble sounds that tend to increase anxiety, at least for me. I generally combine them with others, to experiment.

Google Academy

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/

A mini central repository of Google Analytics courses. Very good. I am doing some to increase my knowledge of game analytics.

The very first entry of what is going to be — hopefully – a routine: a list of interesting materials that I found. Blog posts, sites, documents. Everything that I believe is worthy mention here.

Productive Flourishing

https://www.productiveflourishing.com/

It is the paradise of people that will start a new life. They present very sheets to make your personal and professional life more organized. There are an one for everything: monthly planning, blogging routine, todo tasks, GTD related. But seriously, there is no productivity guru that do not stress the “make this a habit” mantra. So force yourself to use them for a while. In the blogging organization tag, I found the following site:

Editorial Calendars and Professional Blogging

https://www.problogger.net/archives07/editorial-calendars-and-professional-blogging/

This post is gives very quick view about the benefits of scheduling blog posts based on theme. It is not new by any means, but it I mentioned here because is the reason I am writing this very post! I will adopt some of the suggested themes:

• Link round-ups – put together a list of the best posts you’ve read within the week (always good for Fridays)
• Interviews with other bloggers in your niche
• Reviews of products/services/websites in your niche
• Tutorials or how-to articles – pick a day where you’ll share your expertise with your readers
• Ask Me – create a post where you answer open questions from your readers in the comments section.
• Blog Carnivals – host a blog carnival on a regular basis.

The Art of Animation

https://theartofanimation.tumblr.com/

A stunning blog that gathers amazing artists. I found it when looking for an artist to draw character concept art for my next game. There are many concept art in general. Really inspiring.

Starting today, the blog will be now maintained using Google Blogger service.

It was 4 years using Drupal for my personal site. I still like it very much, but for a such small and simple mission, there is absolutely no reason to maintain the whole infrastructure for this site. Installing updates, maintaining versions and fighting for the correct configuration is no easy task.

I already struggle to write new posts. while I write a personal (really personal, only for myself) log quite regularly, writing for other people is a totally different endeavor The text requires a much more logical and careful writing

The final and decisive blow was the problems I was having with Bluehost that was not possible to use the Clean URL feature in Drupal. All the pages needed a weird “?q=” in order to function. I was not able to correct it properly. So I decided to change.

For the next few weeks I hope to be able to move everything to this new place. The theme will be changed as well. A lot of experimentation will be done.

My new game, Picubic, is now released under the Alpha flag.

Mechanics

Picubic is puzzle game inspired on the Japanese Picross, or Nonogram.

The objective of Picross is to discover what image is hidden, using the hints. That’s why the name is a mix of picture and crosswords. But there is a fundamental difference between Picross and Picubic: Picubic is a 3D puzzle! It uses the same general logic, but with a great twist. The final pictures are, in fact, 3D objects: TV, Sofa, sportsman, truck, trees…

There are hints for each of the axis (X, Y and Z), which might create interesting challenges.

Graphics

Because the game is essentially an abstract game, it was a challenge to decide a theme for the game. The first and obvious choice was a black/white theme. But I was not happy about it. I wanted to give it a personality, a distinctive face.

After some attempts, I decided for a general look and feel of wood. It is something not usual for games, so it would be somewhat unique. It’s beautiful.

The graphics were created using 3 sources: myself, free stuff from internet and outsourcing. I’m not an artist, so the current version have a lot of temporary material. Later I will replace it for the definitive versions.

Development and Road map

It’s an one-man game for now. I personally did the whole programming. Done entirely as C# code using Unity3D and Monodevelop. I’m really happy about the IDE.

There will be an editor for players create their own puzzles, send to friends (an Facebook and Google+ integration planned). The editor is the same used by myself. It’s not in the current alpha because of some bugs.

The final version is planned to be by October. Each 15 days I plan to release a new version. The lite version will have about 10 puzzles, besides the tutorial.

Where to Find it?

The game will be launched for Android and iOS phones/tablets, Windows/Linux/Mac as well web version, playable in any modern browser. The Alpha and beta versions will be probably only deployed as the web version.

See picubic.com for furthers news.

Passwords are the new era plague. They are everywhere. Every system relies on passwords. People, unfortunately, are not designed to memorize all of them. The most common solution? Use one password for everything. If you ask one to create a password, one will use the very same password.

Passwords have some intrinsic problems:

• difficult to create
• difficult to remember
• spread across several systems

Jeff Atwood wrote about the advantages of passphrases over passwords, but I’m still not convinced that it correctly addresses the problem. Using more robust brute force techniques, it will be, in fact, easier to break it, even if has several digits.

But when the person uses the same password over and over, there are some extra problems:

• cross site vulnerability when one is hacked

Some use password wallets; programs that stores all your passwords in one place. However, you are putting all the eggs in a single basket. If this program gets hacked, all your passwords are exposed. Also, you have to keep a record of all sites you use, which facilitates even more the job a malicious hacker.

PasswordMaker

Suddenly I found about PasswordMaker on the FLOSS Weekly 84 on Twit, which opened my mind for a nice solution. The idea is to create a password generator using a central password combined with a unique id for each site, which can be its actual address! So, your job relies only on remembering one single password, and it will recalculate the actual password each time. One password to rule them all.

It solves some problems.

complex password generation

It can automatically generate very, very, very strong passwords using a several possible characters. the default 8 digits and 99 characters possible, generate 1 password in 9 227 446 944 279 201, much better than 110 075 314 176 passwords possible using a simple lowercase letters only. I personally use very long passwords. Configuring it to create a 20 digits password, it will be one in 8 179 069 375 972 310 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000! much safer!

cross site safety

If Facebook is hacked, your Gmail account wont be compromised. If Flickr is invaded, your bank account will still be intact. Because each site uses a different password, you will be protected on all the others. And believe me, it’s site invasion and password leakage very common.

multiple profiles

Some sites have different password policies. Some require using letters and numers, some forbids special characters. Some require at least 8 digits, others restrict to 20. Using thie tool, you can change easily the different profiles and generate, each time, a password for each situation.

browser extensions

In their site, there are several plugins for all major browsers. They facilitates a lot the tool usage. I personally created a Chrome extension that uses the same algorithm. I hope people like it.

no central repository

Nothing is stored in the computer nor the internet. You don’t have to keep track which sites you have accounts. It still require non-software measures to make it work. You have to change your password in a regular basis (yearly maybe), among other atitutes. It is not a silver bullet solution, but it addresses several problems.