Posted on

Chicken cam

As part of my CCTV installation at home, a cam is placed in the chicken coop. This has very little direct purpose although it is fun to watch chicken behaviors with no humans around. And I guess it is nice to check if we have eggs or if everything is all right.

Really, this is an experiment towards what our future farm will be like. We’d like for people to be able to watch how their food is grown. Maybe even interact remotely with the animals.

It’s a little slow due to my 3Mbps connection and the proxying but have fun with it:

The chicken cam has been disabled as we get ready to move to a new state.

A year a and half after our big jump, it has been re-enabled 🙂

Posted on

And Minecraft for all

With video games becoming ever more realistic, one game stands out and defies the pursuit of polygons: Minecraft. With the charm of old video games, big fat pixels and a very square geometry. It stands to remind us of a time when video games left room for imagination.

This is a pig

It has the charm of an old Ultima and sandbox spirit of Legos. Indeed, there is no purpose in the game other than just build random stuff. And to get the material needed to create, it will take some serious world exploration. The world generator is very well tuned and will leave you in awe of the majestic landscapes & mystical caves it comes up with.

Can you feel the wind on your cheeks?

As with Legos, the possibilities are endless ranging from basic fort construction to advanced engineering.


A slight downside is in the choice of technology: Java. Which as always sucks the everliving crap out of all the resources your machine has, both on the client and the server. Which is ironic given the simplistic nature of the game, it should have a very low footprint on the system.

I’m running a server on Akrin, feel free to ask for a whitelist if you feel like building cool things with cool people.

Posted on

Markov chains based random text generation

We’ve already seen how to use Markov chains to generate random words that are based on the essence of a previously analyzed corpus. Well the exact same algorithm can be applied to text. The base entities become words instead of letters. I make punctuation be part of the entities, this way, sentence flow becomes part of the extracted statistical essence.

Feel free to send me ideas of cool corpora to analyze.

You can play with it here: