## Card Collecting There’s something unsettling about watching a child flip through a Pokémon card collection, only to see each card reduced to a dollar amount scribbled on a Post-it note attached to the sleeve of that card. The magic of those cards, the strategy of building a deck and the joy of battling friends seems to vanish when the only metric that matters is market value. Of course, the

This year my side project of choice was to create a brand new game for Palm OS, it started out as something that I thought I would finish in a month but ended up taking more than half a year in the end. Let me present you with StarGrid, a space themed strategy game played on a hexagonal grid: =>images/20251021_stargrid.mp4 Video of StarGrid in action StarGrid is a turn-based strategy game for Pal

Growing up in the 90s, television was a different experience. You turned on the TV, and whatever was playing at that moment would become your entertainment. =>images/20250920-mwc.jpg Married with Children on a CRT TV Nowadays you yourself are in control, you choose what you want to see, whenever you want. Strangely enough, I miss that feeling of having something selected for me, something I canno

I built a lightweight command-line tool that lets you quickly browse a directory of plain text snippets, select one using fuzzy search, and instantly copy its contents to your clipboard. ## Before I used to rely on a Firefox snippet manager for email replies and various IDE-specific tools for code snippets. The downside? Exporting and sharing those snippets across different applications was cumber

StarGrid started in January of this year as a tiny proof-of-concept that I would certainly finish in a month. Eight months later and .... we're almost ready for release. ## How it started =>images/20250104_stargrid.png How it started ## How it's going =>images/20250814_stargridbeta.mp4 How it's going Last year I made a minigolf game for Palm OS, and while that took me only a month or two to mak

I started developing StarGrid in January of this year, after many intermittent evenings of planning and working on the game, I'm happy to say that a playable alpha version is now available for download! =>images/20250506_stargridalpha.mp4 Video of StarGrid in action ## Download =>https://github.com/captaintouch/Captains_StarGrid_PalmOS/releases/tag/v0.2.0-alpha StarGrid v0.2.0-alpha download You

For my game StarGrid, I need to add some CPU opponents (note that I'm avoiding using any AI related wording here, since this gets a different connotation nowadays). The game is divided into multiple factions, each faction have their own ships and one homebase. The objective of the game is to either: - Capture the flag of another base and return it to your homebase - Destroy all enemies and bases

All of these are just out of the top of my head, there's so much more that I'm probably leaving out now and this generally happens everytime I do a multi-day cycling tour. I'll try to keep this post updated in the future. ## Beer From fellow campers. Sometimes just because you're both on an adventure, other times as a simple thank-you for lending someone a hammer to pitch their tent. ## Eggs No

As a side project this year I'm going to be creating another game for Palm OS. Seeing the positive remarks I got on creating Captain's MiniGolf last summer, I thought why not give it another shot. =>https://quarters.captaintouch.com/captainsminigolf.html Captain's MiniGolf ## What is StarGrid? StarGrid is a turn-based strategy game played on a hexagonal grid, designed for Palm OS. Players comman

Browsing the web can become a very tiring experience when each website or even section of each website is sporting a different font. It sure as hell looks nice, but is it optimal for reading? Not really. I prefer to read the web the same way I read and write code: with a fixed-width font. This type of font lets your eyes move smoothly across the text, allowing you to almost anticipate where the

## History In the late 90's my SlackWare Linux distribution came bundled with a neat little game called xBill. The goal of the game is to prevent the 'Bills' from spreading Windows to other computing devices. This game was addressing a very relevant topic in the 90's, where Microsoft's antitrust behavior was pushing out competitors on the market. =>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._M

# Foreword On a rainy Sunday, I decided to dive into some Palm OS games I had missed back in the day. Being a fan of strategy games, I was drawn to a demo of PalmPulus. It took a bit of time to get the hang of it, but the excellent manual (remember when those were a thing?) helped me through the basics. It's an incredible fun game: Colonizing, conquering and building, until you are the last one s

This is a follow up to my previous post: =>2024-07-18-retro-coding-journey-into-creating-a-palmos-minigolf-game.gmi Retro Coding Like It's 1999: My Journey into creating a Palm OS MiniGolf Game This summer, I embarked on a side project to create a brand-new Palm OS game, and after less than two months of intermittent coding, I'm excited to announce that it's ready to be released to the public!

Twenty years ago, during my college days, I dabbled in developing games for Palm OS. The best result of my efforts was a strategy game. => https://palmdb.net/app/mankinds-conquest Mankind's Conquest, free download on PalmDB If you are unfamiliar with Palm OS, it was a hugely popular mobile operating system for PDA's back in the 90's and early 00's. Since I've been restoring some Palm PDA devices

I've always felt that the way we kept track of things around the house could be improved. Very often I found myself searching and scrolling through the family chat history to find back things like recipes and contacts. It was just a cluttered mess. Some important data resides on a chat, some was kept in Google Keep and others were just written on a piece of paper that you never seem to find when y

I recently described how I got my hands on a 20 year old Palm Zire 72s with a dead battery that I managed to bring back to life. You can read about that here: => ./2024-05-23-the-resurrection-ritual-breathing-life-into-a-palm-zire-72s.gmi Resurrection of a Palm Zire 72s I took it along some trips in the past few weeks to see how the camera would live up to 2024 expectations. All-in-all, the end r

As some of you know, I'm a sucker for PDA's. They would let you be productive on the go, I could write texts, e-mails, read rss feeds, play games and so much more on a small device that you could carry around in your pocket. Seems very mundane now that everyone has a smartphone but in the 90's and early 00's, this was the bee's knees! I'm always on the hunt for PDA's, especially when they run Palm

I remember getting hold of a shareware cd containing Caesar II and playing the demo endlessly. It's one of the few games out of the 90's that I still fire up on a regular basis, time as an adult does seem to fly by faster and faster, so regular in my case seems to indicate every 2 months or so. I came across a local listing selling the complete boxed copy of the game for only €5! So I jumped on

If you watched Office Space, you might have a clue where the title of this post came from. Remember websites in the 90's? Those had flair. Flair being a website packed full of tiny 88x31 gif buttons. As I was in the process of writing a script to automatically convert my gemlog to html, I just felt something was missing when viewing the output. Later that night, I woke up out of a fever dream a

In this post I'm going over all the automations I've set up on my home server to notify me of a couple of things that are important to me. The server itself is just a simple Pine 64 SBC that lives in the basement, hardly drawing any power. Personally I've turned off automatic notifications on my phone for pretty much anything (Pull over Push messaging is a big life improvement). However I do lik

Once again a new package arrived with one of my favorite bits of computing history: it's another trackball! This time, the trackball dates back from 1994, made by A4 Tech and has a very distinct button placement. Oh, and the ball is GREEN! It's a serial device, so once again I call upon my vintage Thinkpad to test it out. ## Looks =>./images/20240224_trackball.jpg Trackball connected to the T

Some colleagues of mine had the wild idea to try saying no to any added sugar for a month. Seeing my competitive nature, I ofcourse went for it as well. No added sugar means you'll be checking the composition of everything you eat. ## Withdrawal symptoms These start already after a day, I felt an urge to just get something sweet to chew on. I managed to plow through it by consuming an obscene a

My take on: => gemini://rawtext.club/~winter/gemlog/2024/1-13.gmi Things I Miss About The Old Internet (Incomplete) by Winter # Time period For me the old Internet started in the mid-90's when I occasionally got access to the internet through: a) the 'one' computer connected to the net on my mothers workplace b) at the library c) at a cybercafé I would mark it's end as a couple years after the

Since my young boy loves to mash keyboard buttons, I thought it would be a good idea to get him something of his own. Many new toys have lcd screens in them and I'm trying to avoid getting him addicted to screens as much as possible. So why not have a look into what we used to play with a couple of decades ago. Off I went on the hunt for some retro toys. I found and ordered 2 Tomy toys: # Tomy

I often enjoy looking through adverts and product reviews in old computer magazines. They are filled to the brim with products that I had no hope on scoring as a broke 15 year old living under my parents roof. Luckily, 20 years later, I have some disposible income to the rescue! Here's what peaked my interest today: ## Found in magazines dating from 2001 to 2002: ### Casio Wrist camera WQV3D

Sometimes I get bitten by a nostalgia bug, usually this results in me gathering old tech-relics or playing DOS games, but this time I want to focus on 90's TV. For some it's already hard to comprehend the feeling of looking forward for your favorite show to air (or at least ensure your VCR is set up to record it). While you did have a choice between a select number of channels, you were limited t

My morning routine consists of getting out of bed and having a tea. All urgent matters must wait until I've had my first cup, it's a ritual helping me to clear my mind for the day ahead, a quick mind reboot let's say. Tea belongs in a mug and choosing which mug to use for the day is a fun, yet important part of that morning ritual. To each mug I associate different characteristics and selecting

5:00 AM Awake in bed 5:05 AM Let's get up 5:06 AM Noticing the clear night sky 5:07 AM Getting my telescope out! I did not have much time, but I did manage to capture the moon quite nicely: => images/20230908_moon.jpg It's the moon, silly Also shot in tonight's sky: => images/20230908_jupiter.jpg Jupiter => images/20230908_venus.jpg Crescent Venus ## Tags Astronomy, Photography You can get

In my previous post I wrote about my aquisition of a 90's trackball: => 2023-08-30-90s-kids-trackball.gmi 90's Kids Trackball While it still worked, it did not feel smooth to roll the ball around. After some investigating I came across a faq, by trackball manufacturer Kensington, describing the process of maintaining your trackball. I was really surprised to read that they recommend slathering y

Without further ado, today I got a first edition Microsoft EasyBall in the mail (first edition came with a serial connection, later editions have those fancy new PS/2 type of connectors). => images/20230830_microsoft_easyball.jpg Microsoft EasyBall This was a trackball aimed at kids, it's very easy to use and only has one button. The ball itself is a bit squeaky but I'll open it up and have a lo