I’ve finally updated the descriptions and screens for both Nice Dice and Side of Dice.

Sea world on the Gold Coast, taken in Feb 2009. I just love this photo from the barrier reef habitat!

I’ve been searching he web all evening looking into whether it’s possible to use a different font from those provided in cocoa touch for iPhone OS. Anway, the short answer is yes, although it is quite difficult. To show you how, I have this great example from UIHacker:

UI Hacker - Code for Fun: iPhone: Custom font loading : complete example

And another solution from Zynga Games, shade on GitHub:

http://github.com/zynga/FontLabel

As I understand it, you need to create a subclass of UILabel that has the font information built in.

a great tutorial about skinning UITables in cocoa touch

Here’s a really helpful post about how to get started with NSNotifications. It covers all the basics to get you going and add it to your app.

Side of Dice is now available on the iTunes app store! It got approved this week while I was on vacation (yay!).

This is your digital bag of dice for RPG and table-top games like Dungeons and Dragons. All the commonly used dice are included (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20) with a choice of 1 to 4 rolled at a time. Side of Dice also keeps a history of all the rolls you make while the app is open and totals multiple rolls for you.

Riding the ferry to Circular Quay today to see the Star Princess. Luckily, we got one of the nice Rivercat ferries. Twice!!

a recent screenshot. It’s been so ling since I posted one, so here’s WoW in snow leopard. btw, the dock is so empty because I use Quicksilver to launch my apps now.

For anyone trying to use a little less mouse in their work or those of you kickin it oldschool - here’s a great list of all the ways you can use XCode from the keyboard.

Hmm I’m new to tumblr so here’s a flower. To a long blogging friendship!

You can now meet your tech reference book needs on the iPhone! O’Reilly media has published over a hundred of their books on the iPhone in cooperation with Lexcycle. And they’re way cheaper than their paper counterparts!! Check the App store for the cookbooks and pocket references we love.

Is this a sign of things to come? Hopefully well be seeing more reference and textbooks soon on the app store.

After an intense night of coding, I have finished the first release of my dice game, Nice Dice. Check it out!
http://sites.google.com/site/amysnicedice/news

Last week I posted my ZSphere quick notecard. With the help of iWork I have revised and fancy-publified (yes, a new word) it and added a new ZBrush Hotkey notecard. As with everything else on this site, these are protected by a Creative Commons License, so please only distribute with credit!

This has been working very well for me with Arch Linux on my netbook. Check that your flavor uses Grub before proceeding. This example tutorial uses a system with the following partition scheme:

• sda1: /boot


• sda2: /


• sda3: swap


• sda4: /home

Before backing up, it’s a good idea to put any relevant dotfiles into /etc/skel
also check that the system does not use uuid’s for rc.conf or menu.lst. If it does, you’ll have to correct those files manually (I leave it to you.)

• boot on a live-usb-disk


• mount the partitions of the HD each in separate folders in /mnt/


• plugin an external drive


• in each partition:


• # tar cvfp partitionname.tar . —exlude=partitionname.tar


• copy it to the external


• backup mbr and partition table


• # dd if=/dev/sda of=MBR-backup bs=512 count=1

now when you do this last step, remember that the mbr backup also backed up the partition table.

Restore a system

• boot on a live-usb-disk


• restore mbr and partition table


• # dd if=MBR-backup of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1


• write the partition table


• # cfdisk


• format the partitions like this:


• / ext3


• /boot ext2


• /home ext3


• mkswap swap


• mount the / partition in /mnt/sys/


• # tar xvf root.tar -C /mnt/sys


• mount the /boot partition in /mnt/sys/boot


• # tar xvf boot.tar -C /mnt/sys/boot


• reinstall grub


• # umount /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2


• # reinstall grub to the harddrive


• # mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt


• # mount -t proc proc /mnt/proc


• # mount -t sysfs sys /mnt/sys


• # mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev


• # chroot /mnt /bin/bash


• # mount -t ext2 /dev/sda2 /boot


• # grub-install /dev/sda


• unmount everything and reboot

NOTE.1: i have duplicated effort by both restoring the mbr and then writing it with grub-install. this is not a mistake.

NOTE.2: how to format

ext2: mke2fs /dev/sdXX
ext3: mke2fs -j /dev/sdXX
swap: mkswap /dev/sdXX
fat16: mkdosfs -F 16 /dev/sdXX
fat32: mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sdXX

I like notecards a lot. I’ve even started making them digitally now that i’m using a wacom tablet so much.

Here’s a card for using Zspheres inside of ZBrush. Hope it helps someone else.

(hint: click for full notecard image.)