Coding on jono shields

Tiny News

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Inspiration

About 6 months ago I stumbled across the Guten, a tiny newspaper printer. This discovery blew my mind and introduced me to the world of thermal printing - some of which I will explore here.

Immediately I jumped on a local auction site and started watching thermal printers. I think a lot of people’s intuition here might be to buy new (and there is nothing wrong with that), but there is a world of commercial thermal printers that are miles better than the hobbyist ones you will find on electronics websites. These commercial ones are built reliable, they print quickly and many have additional features like an auto-cutter, USB connectivity, etc.

Thinking about json differently

Sat, 31 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I had a somewhat philosophical conversation with a co-worker regarding the role of json outside of the web - and in fact outside of software development entirely.

JSON - Javascript Object Notation - a structured data format that makes up a good portion of communication on the internet

e.g.

{
    "latitude": 52.52,
    "longitude": 13.419998,
    "timezone": "GMT",
    "precipitation_sum": [0.00, 11.70, 0.90, 0.00, 1.70, 2.80, 0.30]
}

Tabular data once began its life in accounting (probably) and has become a ubiquitous part of many parts of life, whether it is in the form of spreadsheets at work, some stats in a video game or your fitness tracker’s dashboard.

Learning usereducer live on stream

Sat, 02 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Note: If you want to watch it for your self you can find the link here.

Recently I had fun streaming myself making a simple habit tracking app. The intention was to go in with some basic wireframes and see what happens.

And wow, did I learn a lot!

The App

I made a quick mock-up of the habit tracker app in Miro (highly recommend for whiteboarding and wireframing - not sponsored).

Procedural Dungeon Generation in Godot

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome back!

Today we are going to be using an algorithm called Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) to create a dungeon in Godot. We won’t be going into as many of the basics in Godot as we did last time.

If you haven’t already, have a look at my tutorial for cellular automata in Godot here.

Before we hop into coding. Let’s have a look at what BSP is and how we can use it to generate maps for a video game.

Making Conway's Game of Life in Godot

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I saw a great question on Reddit recently about how someone can get started with procedural generation in Godot. And as a fan of both, I thought it would be fun to give it a go and maybe make a bit of a tutorial.

Note: This will be done in Godot 4.1. If using an earlier version, the code might be a little different.

We will be making Conway’s Game of Life.

Making a boids simulation on the GBA

Mon, 24 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I have had an idea for a game that needs to use a boids algorithm for a while now.

Boids Algorithm

To put it simply Boids as a algorithm works fairly similarly to cellular automata and conways game of life. There are a few simple rules that all parties action each frame. Then positions are updated.

Have a look at the original creator of Boids explanation of it if you are curious.