Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Here's a quick review of The Game Maker's Apprentice for The Register:

Subtitled "Game Development for Beginners", The Game Maker's Apprentice is just that, a guide to developing your own games using the free Game Maker games development software (available for download here, if you don’t buy the book).

Everything you need to build the games described in the book is on its companion CD, including the Game Maker software and all the images and sounds needed, as well as the final versions of the example games, ready for you to extend with your own levels and actions. There's plenty of installation help in the book, with the first section a quick introduction to Game Maker.

Game Maker is a visual development tool, with drag and drop visual programming for most game elements, and a GML language to extend object actions. Perhaps best thought of as an OO tool for creating games, it uses events and actions to tie objects together.

Read the rest here.

In other news, the cooker is dead, killed by the man who came to fix it. Take out 'til Tuesday then...

Now, this cool little device from Sony is a simple GPS position logger that will capture your location and time, and then sync this with the timestamp in a photo's EXIF data, adding location information. Just clip it to your camera bag when you set out on a shoot.

Using time and location recordings from Sony’s GPS-CS1 GPS device and the time stamp from a Sony digital still camera or camcorder, photo buffs can plot their digital images to a map and pinpoint exactly where they’ve been.

The 12-channel GPS unit is 3-½ inches long, weighs two ounces, and is sold with a carabineer to easily attach to a backpack or a belt loop.

[...]

To arrange your pictures geographically, import the logged data from the GPS device, using the supplied USB cable, and then download the digital images to a computer. The supplied GPS Image Tracker software synchronizes the images on your digital camera with the latitude, longitude and time readings from the GPS-CS1 device.

While Sony says it's for their cameras, I suspect it should work with any image with EXIF information...

Want!

Link from DPreview