I did a Google+ Hangout on Air Q&A session with MathJax’s Peter Krautzberger and cnx.org’s Phil Schatz last Friday. We spent about an hour and a half answering questions and talking about the way we use MathJax.

It was a bit awkward, since I couldn’t see who was watching, and it wasn’t very clear how to interact with the audience apart from them submitting questions, but some people seem to have found it worthwhile.

For your entertainment, here’s the recording:

Peter wants to run more of these Q&As in the future. I’ll make sure to attend!

Quite a few months ago, I posted on The Aperiodical about my search for art to decorate the university maths department I work at. The upshot of that was that we commissioned six pieces from Edmund Harriss, who has made some very nice things to do with geometry and tilings in the past.

The pieces he delivered were all constructed from layers of cut card laid on top of each other, with the idea that patterns appear as you change your viewing angle. It took a frankly ridiculous amount of time to get the pieces out of UK customs after Edmund shipped them from the US, and then they sat in our building manager’s office for a month or so while the university estates people got their act together.

Anyway, I really like the pieces. Now they’re finally up on the walls, I’ve taken some pictures and put them on Flickr.

I finally got fed up enough with WordPress.com’s blurry image-based maths rendering to write a bookmarklet which goes through the page replacing them with the equivalent MathJax code. I’ve added it to my MathJax bookmarklet installation page. Drag the “image replacement bookmarklet” to your bookmarks bar, go to a WordPress.com blog (I recommend Gowers’s Weblog), then click the “Replace image maths with MathJax” bookmarklet.

Update 19/09/2013: Following a suggestion by Peter Krautzberger, I’ve updated the bookmarklet to do the image replacement differently, so the images don’t disappear while MathJax is working. I’ve also made it work on Wikipedia.

When I was in school I used to spend a lot of my time making games in Blitz Basic (and later BlitzMax). Eventually, as I got older and more boring, I ran out of ideas and started doing other things. I haven’t sat down and made a satisfying game in years. I used to really enjoy it though, and I made some things that I really liked. I used to think that maybe I would be a trendy game designer one day.

I was thinking about that this morning, so I decided to go through and play a few of my old games. I feel just as much a need to show them off now as I did when I made them, so I’ve recorded a few screencasts. Camtasia broke for Unknown Reasons and it turns out Jing is sort of terrible at recording games, so they’re really jerky and the volume’s quite low, but I’m not going to not share them now I’ve made them.

Here they are:

• Bubble worlds
• Poption
• Trenchant
• Others

I’m quite disappointed that a few of my favourites didn’t run. I’m sure if I recompiled them they’d work. All of my code is in a repository on github, and compiled versions of everything are on my original homepage, somethingorotherwhatever.com. Here’s a list of links to the ones that work at least a little bit:

Trenchant, Poption, Fencing, Bubble worlds, Trader, Schroedinger’s Ghost, Beards, Rowing, Surroundemup, Clockwork Shooter, Schizophrenic Pacman, Museum, Horsey (browser version), Kleinsteroids