Category66Days

Day 12

Hey Rubén,

I Woke up at 5 after going to bed at 23ish again. Yea seems kinda stabilized for the time being. Apart from being everything dark and my eyes taking some time to get accustom to light everything is fine.

Glad I could help your friend with her moving yesterday. And thanks for showing me your progress and how you used regression models. I’ll be using this in the future for sure. :) About the game jam. How about we create an actual playable out of your game with a win and lose screen, some audio and exchange the model with a real player model. Also about the leveling system sounds quite interesting to design. How do you plan on balancing it?

I also would love to create a particel laser beam. But I have no application for it yet haha.

Another nice misconception video. This time about falling objects.

As always have an amazing day!

Day 11

Hey Rubén,

Yesterday I’ve been tutoring a friend in programming. And in on of the past exams the prof basically requested the algorythm for a Sierpinkski Triangle. Considering the other tasks were rather basic programming this tasks kind of jumps out of bounds by a huge marging. What was the prof thinking?

How much do you know about fractals?

Oh well whatever it’s a fascinating topic therefore I implemented the triangle and the carpet while I was at it.

The other topics were rather easy and she’ll be fine I think. We’ll meet up one more time comming week just to make sure though.

How did the week go for you?

Ah right, I almost forgot, yesterday Stefan Lindauer released a new version of the CriticalMass App on the google play store where I contributed the twitter feature.

And here is another interesting video on my favorite topic: Waves vs Particles!

As always have an amazing day!

Day 10

Hey Rubén,

Sleeping time again between 23-ish and 5:15. So all is good.

Yesterday I’ve prepared a little for the upcomming tutoring today and after that I visited Mendel and his girlfriend Sebo. We also went to karaoke in the evening which was so much fun. ^_^

By the way do you like karaoke?

and another interesting video from veritasium. Which a lot of people seem to get wrong actually (including me).

As always enjoy your day!

Day 9

Tiredness Level: 4/10

Dear Rubén,

Todays sleep time was between 23:30-ish and 5:15.

Inspired by your generated tunnel I played a bit with procedural mesh generation myself. So I learned about Perlin Noise and set up a test project consisting out of cubes that would change their height over time.

Then I tried voronoi graph which is based on this javascript implementation.

Also for dungeon generation I stumpled upon this nice dungeon generator:

There is also this interesting gamasutra article about it cave generations and this very nice approach for procedurally generation of animations:

Apparently you can do a lot procedurally.

What were your experiences with this yet?

And as always have an amazing day!

Day 8

Tiredness Level: 1/10

Dear Rubén,

I’ve sleept from 23-ish to 5 am.

The yoga session was quite nice. I’ve been there only once yet and it’s more exhaustive than I thought but it’s apparently free for woogas every thuesday with lunch afterwards. I plan on joining them frequently. I truely believe doing these kind of exercises makes me feel more focused and refreshed. Not so sure about the spirital part of it though which I can not relate to. Also doing some secret stretchings at home helped haha. have you tried it yoga yet?

Haha the beer currancy. :D Good luck, at least one person will be happy at the end of the day.

It’s true I also feel like learning slower paced. However the quality of what we learn is far superior now imho. Yea playing games really eats up time. But I wouldn’t call it wasted since you’ve enjoyed yourself and there is nothing wrong with that. Just make sure to timebox it. :P

About your demo project how about releasing demo versions no github.io? :) So you can show off even if it is not done yet. Also gives you some sort of way to share your project and get some feedback. I started to do that at my proof of concept page.

Regarding the best science universitys in Berlin, the Humbold and the TU are supposedly good, however I have no clue about their books coverage.

By the way how about a subway run challange? :D I wonder if there are spots like that in Berlin.

Have an amazing day.

Day 7

Tiredness Level: 1/10

Dear Rubén,

Not much to report today except I slept from 1 to 8. Yesterday I joined the yoga session at lunch time and we had sushi afterwards. Ah yea and as3 + rsa is a bitch.

Well on my ‘main’ blog I’ve been working on an article about marketing and finance methods for indies like kickstarter, which is a broad topic and seems like a full time job. So I will release it when I feel more comfortable with it. Other than that I plan on writing something about procedural algorythms which you got me inspired at.

Also you don’t have to restrict yourself towards c++ either. Write about something interesting for yourself. Your blog is for yourself in the first place. ;)

How much do you know about mass? In the following video the question about where mass comes from and why it matters to know where mass comes from will be tackled.

Also relevant: Your Mass is NOT From the Higgs Boson

Have an amazing day!

Rubén’s Answer:

Hello,

So you overslept?

Noooo…!

How was your Yoga session? Does it work for you? How many did you attend to? I was looking forward to watch some youtube tutorials and even asked a friend about it. I’ll probably be taught soon! The only price to pay is a beer, so why not.

I had a quick look at your video. It seems you’re into physics. Did I ever tell you that my second career choice was a combination of the bachelors of Computer Engineering and Math? I some kind of regret not doing it. Did you ever read “A brief history of time” from Stephen Hawking? I enjoyed reading it when I was a kid.

I feel that since I finished the university, I stopped learning in such a fast pace. It’s something that’s worrying me, so I’m going to change this with just one tool: your 66days blog. I also feel that I lose more time than I should playing games, maybe I should uninstall a few of them (LoL for instance). The good news: I can really say that each day I’m more and more motivated towards learning about game programming. Especially the math/physics behind it and Unity itself as well. I’m pretty excited to be working in my personal project; even though if I never release anything, it’s always a worth investment.

Let me beg for your help in one point! Can you tell me what are the best universities in Berlin when it comes to Math/Physics/Computer engineering? I’m looking for information about Masters degrees and for some libraries with English textbooks covering those topics.

Thanks in advance and have a good day.

Day 6

Tiredness Level: 3/10

Dear Rubén,

I slept from 23 to 5:00. How about you? How is your visitor? Does he enjoy Berlin? :D

Also I stumpled upon a quite motivating video series called actualized. It’s a series about personal self-development and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to listen to it.

“The takeaway from this video is very simple: Right now, all the stories, all the excuses, all the blaming, all the whining, all the complaining stops. It stops right fucking now; you decide to take full responsibility for your life, 100%, no more blaming of anybody or any other circumstances, but taking full creative authority over your own life, because in the end the quality of your life is only determened, by you, your thoughts and your actions.” – Leo

Have an awesome day!

Rubén’s answer:

Hi Jan,

It seems that your schedule is stabilizing. From 23h to 5h sounds really reasonable, you’re getting used to it!

He did enjoy Berlin a lot. Well, not many people wouldn’t enjoy it with the right people. The only thing he missed was going to Koma.

I really like this sort of videos. I’ll be hearing it now in the background and in the afternoon I’ll watch it carefully. Thanks for the link! It’s true that many people are complaining about the world; it’s just sometimes an excuse not to react and change the way you live. So, as you said, it’s very important to adopt an active position in this matter. No one else but you is going to change the way you live. And blaming others will not really fix anything, it’s just a slow and painful death to keep living that way.

Really great song you posted. It’s just a shame that it’s not in Spotify so I can listen to it within the app.

What about your main blog? Are you planning on writing something soon? I’m looking for topics for mine. It’s been a few weeks I don’t write!

I think we should meet soon to talk about the overall progress and results. What about Friday/Saturday, have you got time?

Rubén

Things I could do due earlier waking up:

  • exercise
  • read
  • breakfast
  • watch interesting videos
  • write blog entry

Day 5

Tiredness Level: 0/10

Dear Rubén,

I’m glad that you feel better now. However let’s try to reach at least 6h sleep for health purposes though xD this is a marathon and not a sprint afterall :) But look who’s talking: I went to bed at around 1am and well, and ok, I’ve overslept :D and got up at 6:40, buhu~! Maybe I should take a nap like you, too. It’s actually a good idea. On the bright side I’m not the least tired anymore :D I was sort of expecting something like this to happen eventually, since I still can’t bring myself to sleep early enough. Not always anyways.

Looks like you’re utilizing the time with your dad. That’s nice. When will he go back to spain? Hmm what’s stronger? A stone muffin or a stone baquette?

Your Unity project looks awesome! What else do you want to do with it?

And yea keep learning german if you want! I don’t feel like it’s worth the effort but that’s just me, haha. It’s doubtful that there will be many non english speaking people in germany in the future.

About the one plus, it looks awesome, especially for the price. The only thing that could be annyoing is the the only 3100 mAH battery. Maybe you can swap it for a better one at some point.

Yesterday I started helping Stephan with the critical mass app for berlin. I just wanted to add the twitter readonly hashtag feature. But it took a bit longer than anticipated. Twitter restricted the timestamp of the tweets. Basically you get only the past 7-9 days of tweets of a hashtag. Why twitter, why??? I mean it’s not that hard to freaking send a list of tweets if asked. Like seriously.

Anyways that’s when I realized that my life needs major timeboxing. I happen to sacrefice things I want to do for a bigger chunky thing that I want to finish. But it might be better to do all kinds of stuff instead and return to the bigger chunks on a later time, instead of pushing it through.

And now something completelly unrelated. In the show Inside the Actors Studio Show James Lipton always asks 10 proust questions:

What is your favorite word?
What is your least favorite word?
What turns you on?
What turns you off?
What sound or noise do you love?
What sound or noise do you hate?
What is your favorite curse word?
What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
What profession would you not like to do?
If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?

Would you mind answering them please?

I’ll be ending the letter with another interesting video I’ve found on TED:

As always have an amazing day!

Day 4

Tiredness Level: 6/10

Dear Rubén,

Yesterday came out a new episode of Doctor Who. So let’s start with the theme song ^_^

What did you learn from ‘El Gran Juego’ so far?

About Cyanogenmod, well the ui nicer imho. However for me it’s more about rooting the device which has a lot of advantages. For instance, you’re able to install Adbblock, use a propper unix terminal, have a propper firewall and being able to delete thumbstones and several cache folders from your internal memory.

The alarm clock idea would be cool imho because I could actually tell stories to myself that I could not think of while being half asleep. For instance “Hey do you remember that guy who gave up? neither does anybody else!”. I could also motivate myself by saying “good morning sunshine, don’t you think a coffee would be a good idea now?” :D i can’t imagine how annoying that would be to hear it more than once though. But you could always record something new every evening.

Oh come to think of it do you know this video?

It got me thinking that the human mind perceives the order of the correlation between feelings and actions backwards. What do I mean by that? People usually believe that they act according to the way they feel when in fact it is the other way around. People feel according to how they act. If you listen to depressive emotional music you might end up feeling depressed. If you play couch potatoe at the weekend you might feel lazy. When however you do some exercises you feel more refreshed.

Do you know the Quote “Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny.” by Ghandi?

So my conclusion is, that conciously changing the way think and therefore acting on it will change the way you feel eventually. Especially the way one thinks is highly underestimated.

There is also this TED Talk that tackles this topic.

Oh right totally forgot, I slept from around midnight-ish till 6am. Ah yea and watching TED Talks while exercising works for most of the time. Sometimes there are videos that require you to watch when they show something off. You could always take a small break in between for that.

Have an amazing day!

ps: The rage-one-star-rating against hacking for Diamond Dash made my day! Brilliant. :D

Ruben’s Answer:

Hello Sir!

I’ve to admit it: yesterday I took a nap (30m) in the afternoon. It was going to be either at home or in the streets. I was really tired but you know what? It really worked for me and paid off. Today, even though I slept 5 hours on the couch, I feel much better. It feels odd still, to wake up so early on Sunday. I looked through the window and the only stuff I see in the street are broken bottles of vodka and some people throwing up. I just hope they clean the streets before my father wakes up

Yesterday I went to have breakfast with my father to Westberlin but it happened to be closed until 10AM. That means thirty minutes of waiting. Sorry to say that we were so hungry that we went for the worst muffin I ever tried in my life. Its crunchiness reached the level of a stone. Let’s see if we make it today to Westberlin.

I continued working on my Unity project and refactored the tunnel creating algorithm. Now it uses a much less amount of vertices and it even generates UV coordinates, though there’s a little issue because I can’t set two UV coordinates in the first/last vertex so as to close the loop. I got it running in my nexus 7 (though it looks like shit) and I’m quite happy with the results, especially after adding height variations. Again: thank you for helping me the other day! I’m not sure what to do next; I guess I’ll give the player something to play with.

Here’s an amateur capture I uploaded:

I’ll start in some minutes studying some German. I feel like I need to improve my productivity in the morning, I guess I’ll cut some corners and leave Facebook closed (though it’s supposed to be my free time).

What about your progress? I found it pretty cool that you called me the other day to go shopping. Let’s see if the next week works out of both. How many anime episodes did you watch this week?

Did you have a chance to have a look at this Android device? What do you think about it?

It already comes with cyagenmod and wow, I’m quite impressed with its features for the price. I was thinking about getting either that one or the nexus 6 since my iPhone got its lock button broken and it really sucks that way.

Have a good Sunday.

 

Things I could do due earlier waking up:

  • exercise
  • read
  • watch interesting videos
  • write blog entry

Day 3

Tiredness Level: 4/10

Dear Rubén,

Good morning :) Black Bullet finally released its osts. Only 3 months late, but hey rather late than never. So here it goes:

This is the most epic scene in the anime:

I’m glad that you’re having a good time with your visitor even though your sleeping environment has slightly changed. For these purposes I own a self-inflating bed.

And yea I’ve added a tiredness level and a list of things that I could do in those 2-3 additional hours in the morning. Although I feel like it’s a bit unprecise at this point. (Work in progress.)

As for the progress itself I went to bed at 23ish and woke up at 4:31 because I’ve tried the ‘smart rise’ feature of an android app that is based on ‘advanced sleep cycle theory’ which basically wakes you up 30 minutes before the actual time in a slowly fading kind of way. However my sleep usually isn’t that deep to the begin with and I woke up instantaneously. Oh well now I know for sure. Did you try such a thing before? Some people wake themself up multiple times each morning which is a terrible idea imho.

Which reminds me. Do you know an alarm app where you could wake yourself up with your own recording? :D I see a serious app idea here haha.

For the sbs team event we went to The Fichtebunker time capsule. It was a brick-covered gasholder to supply street lanterns between 1884 and 1937. And later it was transformed into a bunker to hold 6500 mothers and children to survive the bombings in berlin in the 2nd word war. Another interesting part is that people are actually living on top of that bunker now o.O

Other than that I feel like I need to change the order on what I do in the morning. For instance taking a shower first helps waking up. And then do some exercises before I check my e-mails and facebook. What is your current order?

Also for me it feels stretchings to be most effective to feel fresh more than doing exercises right away. What do you think?

Have an amazing day!

Ruben’s Answer:

Hey Jan,

So this time I’m definitely even more tired. Sleeping on the couch didn’t really help my back, but I’m still rocking here. I’ve managed to have a good breakfast (which always includes a warm coffee), read some pages of a spanish book that has some really good learnings about life (El Gran Juego de Carlos Martín Pérez).

It’s been written by a person who’s been in the army for more than 35 years and offers a great dose of sarcasm to explain common scenarios and solutions. It’s a shame you don’t speak Spanish!

When reading your previous blog entries a question came to my mind. How useful is to install cyanogenmod? In Apple products I do see a great advantage, as everything is pretty clearly restricted, but for Android? Can you also revert it so it looks like you never rooted it? The only scenario where I really found it useful was when trying to hack DiamondDash in order to implement safety mechanisms which, by the way, worked like a charm as some people rated us with one star complaining that they couldn’t hack it anymore. Pretty funny stuff!

I’m glad to see you enjoying anime! I’ll take your advice and start watching no game no life and tell you about it.

About the alarm clock app you mentioned, I guess you can find a niche market if you manage to avoid the issues of Android limiting your app while the phone is locked. It’d be fun to play a video of my mother shouting at me “Rubén wake up you lazy bastard, go to school”. I don’t forecast a good start of the day, though.

My current order is: chaotic. Normally I grab myself a coffee and start doing stuff in my computer right away with some music, since I take showers at night. Should I try doing exercise? Okay, I’ll try it soon and tell you how it went. Do you think it’s a great thing to do some exercise while watching some ted talks?

Have a good day!

Things I could do due earlier waking up: