How to make writing clear commit messages easy. — Lately I read this great post on how to structure git commit messages so they are useful, clear and easy to read. But I really don’t want to find the post every time I commit, now do I? For VSCode users The projects I worked on after reading the post were mostly in…

The awesome ease of its use…and more pitfalls — In the previous article, I showed one pitfall waiting for the unwary who start using Unity’s object pool. Here is another, though to be fair, it isn’t actually a pitfall of Unity’s Object pooling but any object pooling. In my space shooter game, I have enemy spaceships. In continuation of…

The awesome ease of its use…and its pitfalls — Like probably everybody, to get started with Unity I decided to create a space shooter game. As every site will tell you, the various bullets are tailor made for using object pools. What are Object Pools? Every time the user presses the Space bar (or mouse click, whatever) the game creates a bullet (laser…

Or How to get user input before showing a setting dialog in Android Some settings are more important than others. Adding a password to a specific setting is a way to make sure that the person changing this setting knows what they are doing. Another method is to show an…

How to create a handler in a bound service that performs an action every 10 seconds. In one of my apps, I needed to perform a Bluetooth communication every 10 seconds when in a particular mode. For most actions, using an Alarm is an excellent solution. However, Bluetooth in Android…

No installation required! Easy, simple and just works, including audio: RecordScreen.io I do a lot of screen recordings with audio as a programmer — as a manual or a bug report or demonstration. And up until now, I either the used the built in Windows 10 recorder, or OBS. But…

I was looking into Android’s Chronometer for an app I’m developing, and I discovered the ultimate feature. It’s not the first time I’ve used Chronometers, and each time I notice the isCountdown() method, described as “whether this view counts down” and the cryptic isTheFinalCountdown() method, which I assumed was a…

This post explains how to create your own ink diffusion* videos, using two regular cellphones, gouache color, and some creativity 😄 You can see the results in my video clip “Clouds”. Take I: One cellphone, one square glass container, one eye dropper My first try was with one cellphone, a large clear square vase, and soy sauce (yup, really). Fill the…

Here we will see how to use Firebase cloud functions without needing an HTTP request, Volley, Retrofit or authentication tokens. Instead, we will use Firebase Callable functions. We have a number of apps that need to send status emails to our account without the user having to press ‘send’. At…