Now that the snow is gone, I noticed some large piles of wood chips at Remic Rapids. Are they for smoothing out the @wintertrail.bsky.social ski trails running through the woods? There are several clusters of piles; someone is going to have to do a lot of work spreading around wood chips!

Interesting that John Felice Ceprano’s balanced rock sculptures at Remic Rapids are still up. They’ll likely disappear in the next few weeks when the spring flood starts.

The @wintertrail.bsky.social is looking good this morning. Crunchy snow, and only a slight west wind. Lots of sun! And the snow bear lady is feeding birds at the Kitchissippi loop.

I've added tutorial levels to #NthPongWars. Easy, except that I needed walls to separate the new players, and that meant perfecting the physics simulation so players couldn't get through the walls. Longer story with video tours of the new levels is on my blog at web.ncf.ca/au829/Weeken...

I finally got my #BeOS virtual machine working on my new AMD Zen 5 system. AMD is missing some Intel secret sauce, so using a hardware VM doesn't work (Guru Meditation errors in VirtualBox, abrupt reboots in KVM). But QEMU's software emulation does! Story in my blog... web.ncf.ca/au829/Weeken...

Had fun adding the first power-ups to #NthPongWars, a game for the Z80 #NabuPC. Of course, got many more ideas. The challenge is fitting them in 64K of memory, and making overall game-play coherent. Details, discussion and video script in the longer blog post at web.ncf.ca/au829/Weeken...

More #NthPongWars progress - now with AI players. One is trying to draw "N" while the others bounce around the sides, until they spot a Human player. Blog post about it at web.ncf.ca/au829/Weeken...

Back to basics, added collisions to #NthPongWars. There was some trouble with players getting stuck together, but after a few attempts, got the good version shown here. Blog post about it at: www.agmsmith.ca/WeekendRepor...

Yay, made it to 54 unique shows at the #OttFringe Ottawa Fringe Theatre Festival this year! That’s a new high count for me, beating 2014’s 53. Whew! Now it’s time for an actual meal, sleep, laundry…

Mobile game idea: Real World Multiplayer Throw & Catch Saw Kitsune at #OttFringe, story about Japanese fox spirit, played catch with audience using its glowing soul gem. I got the idea of "throwing" light between phones, old news? See change log 1.9 at bottom of www.agmsmith.ca/FFVSO/Ottawa...

I've updated my #FFVSO scheduling program with actual 2025 #OttFringe Ottawa Fringe Theatre Festival show run times, for the shows I've seen (now 25 shows!). That means you can schedule more accurately and not unexpectedly have to run between LabO and Nouvelle Scène theatres in 7 minutes.

More Ottawa Fringe Theatre Festival #OttFringe updates to my scheduling app, with show durations for the ones I've seen (shows listed at bottom). Some of them run over because of standing ovations! Let me know your durations (time when you can get up & out is best) www.agmsmith.ca/FFVSO/Ottawa...

After some fiddling and rearranging, I've finished my first draft of a schedule to see maybe 53 shows at the 2025 #OttFringe Ottawa Fringe Theatre Festival. As usual, I used #FFVSO to try out different options, web.ncf.ca/au829/FFVSO/... if you want to try it out on your schedule or edit mine.

I finally had time to type in this season's #OttFringe Theatre Festival show times into #FFVSO, my scheduling app for Fringe Bingers. Pack in dozens of shows into as short a time as you can fit them. My record is something like seeing 53 shows in one Fringe. web.ncf.ca/au829/FFVSO/...

Now it's time to integrate the CHIPNSFX Z80 CPU music player for the AY-3-8910 sound chip into my #NthPongWars game code. Fairly straightforward, except the composing part. Even had time to test game-play super speed while harvesting tiles. Blog with details at web.ncf.ca/au829/Weeken...

I finally got CHIPNSFX (a Z80 music player and separate Tracker that works in Linux and Windows) assembling and running in my #NthPongWars project, after a bit of delay to figure out an assembler assert (expression too complex). Longer story on the blog at web.ncf.ca/au829/Weeken...

I spent more time on #NthPongWars today, looking into sound effects on the #NabuPC using the AY-3-8910 sound chip. I also converted some old assembler Pac-man sound code to C to get the hang of it, and found an abandoned sound experiment in the wacka-wacka code. More at web.ncf.ca/au829/Weeken...

The #KichiSibiWT has lots of snow, perhaps too much on this huge snow drift at Remic Rapids, in Ottawa Canada. But never fear, the team has it under control! Which means a freshly groomed winter trail for me to walk on, in really good weather too.

Just a #introduction, I'm a games programmer from Ottawa Canada, between jobs, currently doing #NthPongWars for the circa 1982 Z80 #NabuPC. Also working on a modern Ruby on Rails less evil social media site (has a forget and forgive feature) and totally outside the box #StoryPointsEC ethics system.