Recent news at the Software Bin

I like QR codes; they can store a fair amount of data, and the Android Barcode Scanner application has some support for special codes (calendar events, phonebook events etc.).

I couldn't find any native QR encoder for Emacs, so Emacs users had to rely on external programs... until now :-). I took a CommonLISP encoder and adapted it to Emacs, some basic testing shows it works, even with Japanese text.

If you are an Emacs user you might appreciate it, download it from here: https://github.com/thesoftwarebin/el-qrencode.

I updated my MSX game I.N.E.R.T.I.A. so that now it compiles again with recent SDCC versions. I also extended the input logic a bit: now P1=joystick1, P2=(joystick2 or arrowkeys+space). Read more at the I.N.E.R.T.I.A. for MSX page.

I ported to SVI-318 a tiny MSX game called I.N.E.R.T.I.A. that I wrote some years ago. It's 2-players only, and you'll need at least one joystick to play (the 2nd player can use joystick2 or keyboard). Read the full story, download the ROM game and C sources.

Yesterday I received an email from France that was referring to my 5-years-old cdialog port attempt (read full story). I was surprised that my old experiment is still noticed by someone around the world.

Thanks for your feedback French guy! I can't promise for a short-term fix, but I'd like to do it in the future.

I've had my 3 minutes of Emacs celebrity time: I'm in the Emacs Git log! :-)

All in all, the whole process of reporting a bug and crafting your patch for Emacs is a (somewhat bureaucratic but) highly educational experience.

• the initial bug report #17768
• the patch entry

My interest in Emacs, Org mode and Babel is growing day by day, and so does my elisp repository the-emacs-software-bin.

Have a look at README.org for the list of published scripts up to now. More are on the way!

Two new repositories are available at my GitHub page, hope you enjoy!

• github.com/thesoftwarebin/the-lisp-software-bin: some LISP functions and packages

• github.com/thesoftwarebin/the-emacs-software-bin: some Emacs snippets

Looks like the right moment for open source development has eventually arrived :) ... a GitHub account for The Software Bin has been opened; it will host some sources of software creations, projects and experiments.

At the moment there's just a couple of things, but in the (hopefully near) future I could add more stuff there, so stay tuned.

I made a short Javascript example to make use of the Google Books API search capabilities. Provide some ISBN codes and you will get title, author and publisher of that book (provided that Google Books knows the code).