Google Advertising
2025-08-30
I received one or two emails from users of my Vintage Weight Watchers calculator complaining about advertising that was either blocking form input or just annoying.
I use the Vintage Weight Watchers part of this site myself and, well, I'm in agreement. So advertising has been removed from the core WW pages for anyone that is signed in.
You may still find it on less frequently used pages but for general use, it's gone.
Vintage Points Calculator
2025-08-25
I've been doing some research into points values for common foods as I've been a little worried that my Vintage Points calculator had gone awry.
I always remember that a 100g portion of pasta (dry, not cooked) was around 10PTS (UK). Note: dry pasta has a far denser concentration of calories than cooked and drained pasta.
When I look at Calories and Saturated Fat on common pasta such as Linguine from Sainsbury's, I see it marked up as:
Calories: 328Kcal, Saturated Fat: 0.4g per 200g
This equates to just 5 points not the 20 points I would have expected for so much pasta!
There's a couple of reasons for this.
Manufacturers have genuinely reduced energy density in a lot of staple carbs (lower-protein wheats, less fat added, better extrusion/drying). And WW itself shifted the goalposts over time — newer systems (PointsPlus, SmartPoints, Freestyle, etc.) punish sugar and reward protein, so a “plain carb” like pasta may look even cheaper in points than it once did.
This has been a real sanity check for me. It means I can still use the Calorie-based dieting system I'd become accustomed to and also means that my calculator is providing the correct results!
Happy pointing :)
Sprite Magic
2025-08-11
Implemented Paint and Mirror modes. Pressing P toggles Paint mode and M toggles Mirror mode.
When in paint mode there is no need to click and pixel each cell. Just move your mouse around. This works for Draw or Erase mode.
Mirror mode draws the corresponding pixel to the left or right as if the sprite is mirrored down the centre.
2025-08-10
I've been working on a browser based sprite editor as a small side project.
I typically use Photoshop for pixelling but have always felt that it's just a real heavyweight app for doing such things.
My goal for SpriteMagic is to be able to create a palette, derive colours from source art, pixel / paint / erase and to export the art to a .png file.
So far, so good, though there are many other features I want to implement:
- Saving / importing palettes
- Saving / loading sprite art
- Mirrored drawing
- Varying brush sizes
Vintage Points Calculator
2025-08-09
Made a small modification to the daily points calculator to allow for selecting Stones and Pounds rather than the default American version of just pounds.
No more 14 times tables :)
2025-08-08
Small modifications:
- allow for saving and editing your saved food (the drop down menu of saved food items)
- bank now resets on Monday morning
- tightened up the calculation process to avoid hitting refresh and losing unwanted points from your daily allowance and bank
As always, please email me with any issues / suggestions.
JavaScript Raycasting Engine
I've been looking into the technology that drove Wolfenstein 3D
and have become fascinated by John Carmack's use of Ray Casting to
achieve the 3D appearance.
In JavaScript, I have managed to recreate something similar
though it is still a way off.
I've had a go at mapping a texture to the wall but don't fully understand it yet so it's a bit clumsy.
You can see some progress
here. Arrow keys will move you around.
Vintage Points Calculator
Now supports saving food and points value which appear in a
drop-down list for easy selection.
Handy for those regular meal values such as bread, cereal, wine
:)
Check it out
JavaScript Arcade Games
You can now play a couple of my JavaScript arcade games online.
Take a look at Eternal
Dungeon. It's still a work in progress but you should get a
feel for how the game plays.
In short, look for the sword and kill the baddie that's holding
the key to the exit door.
En route, you'll find health and loot to help you.
Some other games to play:
- Neogun (work in progress)
- Akari (has an awful performance problem likely related to calculating context specific operations, such as alpha blending - Update: hopefully fixed this)
- Defender 2095
- Invaders 2095
Have fun!
DOOM Palette as a Photoshop .act file
I've been developing a couple of JavaScript games with a
distinctly retro feel and wanted to adopt a palette for the colour
scheme.
This is by no means a programmatic effort, I just wanted to use
the palette to help draw the sprites in Photoshop. I let the game
scale the artwork and maintain nearest neighbour.
I found the DOOM palette online and crafted the .act file.
Old links
- Generate SSH key pair from the command line
- Some very basic thoughts on Artificial General Intelligence
- Invaders 2095 - JavaScript game in development
- Turning coarse dirt into luscious green grass in Minecraft
- Intelligent dinosaurs?
- Thoughts on writing a DOOM movie script
- Why do we always see the same side of the moon?
- Are humans descended from apes?
- Directory traversal
- http referer not capturing the query string from search engines
- Reverse IP lookup
- JavaScript Promises
- Vintage Weight Watchers Update Log
- My illustrated children's books
- Filling my skills gap
- St. Wystan's church, Repton Derbyshire
- Updates to the Vintage Points Calculator
- Massively improving database INSERTs
- Vintage Points Calculator
- What is the difference between bcrypt and Argon2 in PHP's password_hash?
- Defender 2095 - JavaScript game in development