RT @shanghaiist: Listen: Take On Me by A-ha performed by young North Korean accordion players

“@EvanRamstad: Here's the story behind that video of the North Korea accordion troupe playing a-ha's "Take On Me" ”

Phantom of the Flopera (YouTube) -- Bach's Tocata and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 565) as performed by floppy drives. Creative intimacy with one's tools is a sign of mastery. (via Andy Baio)
Save Entire BBC Archive (Ben Goldacre) -- I pointed earlier to the questionable BBC closure of scores of websites in the name of cost-cutting. It's a torrent of an archive of spidered BBC websites. (via Andy Baio)
Android Hidden NFC Capabilities Unlocked -- Gibraltar Software Factory, based in Argentina, went through the source code of Android 2.3 and found that Google has purposefully hidden several NFC related API calls, most likely due to the fact that they’re not quite stable enough for public release. Some minor tweaking of the source code, and boom, they’ve enabled write support for NFC tags. This means mobile phones will not just read RFID tags, but also act like RFID tags. (via Chris Heathcote on Delicious)
Pinboard Creator Maciej Ceglowski (ReadWriteWeb) -- I think many developers (myself included) are easily seduced by new technology and are willing to burn a lot of time rigging it together just for the joy of tinkering. So nowadays we see a lot of fairly uninteresting web apps with very technically sweet implementations. In designing Pinboard, I tried to steer clear of this temptation by picking very familiar, vanilla tools wherever possible so I would have no excuse for architectural wank. The other reason I like the approach is that the tried-and-true stuff is extensively debugged and documented. The chances of you finding a bug in MySQL or PHP as the author of a mid-sized website are microscopic. That's not the case for newer infrastructure like NoSQL or the various web frameworks.

What the Hex? Guess the color....

For some months I’ve been playing around with HTML 5′s Canvas element because I was curious about it, especially after seeing it run Flash.  I hacked at it for a while then realized I had produced an Asteroids game.

Play It!
 

The source code is up on GitHub!

The Canvas element is super cool.  Basically all of the sprites in the game are simple paths defined by an array of points.  These points are translated, rotated and scaled based on their state at any given point in the game using the standard Canvas transformations.  Plus it gives it a nice retro feel.

Let me know what you think!

Here’s some cool links to things that helped me out with the game:

Determining Whether A Point Is Inside A Complex Polygon.  Firefox does the wrong thing when it comes to isPointInPath(), the main Canvas method I used for collision detection; It doesn’t apply the current transformations before determining if there’s been a collision (and they won’t fix it for some reason).  I implemented this method to get around the problem but it works fast enough it could be used on all browsers.
Metanet Software, the makers of the awesome flash game N, have made a couple of extremely useful tutorials on collision detection.  These describe some of the techniques I used in the game, in particular the grid based broad-phase they describe in their second tutorial.
I used typeface.js ‘s convert tool to convert the awesome Vector Battle font into some JSON point data that could be easily used in the canvas.  Typeface.js is a neat library for easily embedding arbitrary fonts in the page.  On supported browsers it creates small canvas elements and renders the font inside based on the CSS.  I borrowed bits from the library to get the font rendering.