Author Archives: dustinfreeman

First Dungeonmastering Experience

Posted on May 10, 2013 by dustinfreeman

After wanting to do it for many years, and meticulously re-reading DM of the Rings, I DMed a tabletop RPG session for the first time last week, in a setting of my own invention. I had all kinds of concerns … Continue reading →

Posted in commentary, dnd, games, me-news | 1 Comment

Digital Immortality Now!

Posted on March 12, 2013 by dustinfreeman

My friend[1] just sent me this article from the Montreal Gazette, announcing a program called “Live On”, developed by an ad ageny that lets users to tweet after their death. The service doesn’t claim to merely let you schedule tweets … Continue reading →

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Moons of Sallys

Posted on March 4, 2013 by dustinfreeman

Click the image to play Moons of Sallys, inspired by Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad. (More of a toy than a game really – you can just fly rockets around). I’ve nearly finished reading Stanislaw Lems’ The Cyberiad for a second … Continue reading →

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Books Read in 2012

Posted on January 4, 2013 by dustinfreeman

In the theme of life-logging games from yesterday’s post, here’s all the books I read in 2012, and some I recall reading in 2011. The Star Diaries – Stanislaw Lem – Jan 2, 2013 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – … Continue reading →

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Games of Life

Posted on January 3, 2013 by dustinfreeman

I got my first smartphone, a Nexus S, back in early 2010 when I was living in Cambridge, UK. Impressed by the novelty of the beers there, I started snapping photos of taps and bottles: When I uploaded these to … Continue reading →

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Manually Clustering 275 Images For Qualitative Analysis

Posted on November 25, 2012 by dustinfreeman

Grounded Theory is a technique for developing a theory about some empirical data you collected. This is in opposition to having some hypotheses in advance, which you will either verify or not. However, if you’re collecting data in an entirely … Continue reading →

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User Groups and Their Needs

Posted on September 24, 2012 by dustinfreeman

For the course I’m TAing this semester, CSC318: The Design of Interactive Computational Media, the main group project is to develop a contacts/address book application. Part of the design process we get the students to go about is to think … Continue reading →

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The State of Kinect Gaming

Posted on August 13, 2012 by dustinfreeman

I’ve played almost every Kinect game available, and I have to admit, most of them aren’t very good. There are a few exceptions, which I’ll get to below. The “controller-less” aspect of the Kinect was what brought it so much … Continue reading →

Posted in commentary, games, research, technical | 4 Comments

Kinect Body Paint – Kinect Workshop @ Pervasive 2012

Posted on June 21, 2012 by dustinfreeman

Look at what I and my team made in a couple hours at the Kinect Workshop (run by David Kim): There are “buckets” of paint on either side of the space. One can grab paint and draw it all over … Continue reading →

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Your code doesn’t need to be THAT good

Posted on September 28, 2011 by dustinfreeman

I’m currently crunching to finish a software project. It’s my first time collaborating with a large number of non-co-located people with a shared repository. It’s been interesting and frustrating to manage tasks and larger-scale goals across such a group. One … Continue reading →

Posted in technical | 3 Comments