Chronotron
Posted by Peter | Filed under Games
There have been a few of time-travel related games in recent years, but here’s a nice casual Flash game that uses the concept: it is a platformer called Chronotron. You play as white and red robot, with a damaged time machine (which looks suspiciously like Doctor Who’s Tardis!). In each level, the objective is to find a time circuit, and get back to your time machine. Easy… right?
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Array of Checkboxes in LimeSurvey
Posted by Peter | Filed under Software
I’m using LimeSurvey to setup and conduct a survey as part of my PhD, and it’s working very well. (Great work, LimeSurvey developers!) It’s free and open source, and since I have my own server I can host the survey myself at no additional expense (which wouldn’t be the case if I used something like SurveyMonkey).
However, after discussion with a very helpful statistics guru here at UWS, I found that I needed a question type LimeSurvey didn’t seem to support: an array of checkboxes.
Here’s the kind of question I was hoping to display:
Q: Which of these features have you used as a student and/or as a teacher?
Student Teacher
1. Forum [] []
2. Chatroom [] []
3. Wiki [] []
4. Quiz [] []
It’s like the “array” question type, but each [] is a checkbox (instead of a radio button), so I’m basically tracking two independent boolean variables for each category, instead of a single variable on a scale.
After some very helpful (and very prompt) support on the LimeSurvey forums, it turns out that this question type is possible, but I had to upgrade to LimeSurvey v1.81. (I had previously been running v1.72). With the new version, here’s how it’s done:
- Create a label set for your columns of checkboxes
- Add a new question (fill in the usual Code and Question boxes)
- For Question Type, select “Array (Multi Flexible) (Numbers)
- Select the label set you created above
- Under Question Attributes, select “Checkbox layout”, and enter 1 in the box besides it
- Click “Add question”
And that’s it! It’s not immediately obvious at first, but pretty easy once you know how. You might find that the checkboxes take up a lot of room if you only have a few. For 2 columns of checkboxes, I found that an “answer_width” of 50 (under the question attributes) made the layout a little better.
Totem Destroyer
Posted by Peter | Filed under Games
This is a wonderfully addictive Flash game: Totem Destroyer. Like all good games, it’s simple to learn, but more difficult to master. The premise is that there is a tower of blocks, with an idol at the top. You have to destroy a certain number of blocks, bringing the idol down near ground level, without letting it actually touch the ground.
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2d Audio Mixer
Posted by Peter | Filed under Interface and Usability, Software
While Stumbling around the web, I encountered an impressive user interface concept: the 2d Audio Mixer.
When I first loaded the web-page, I was expecting it to be something involving stereo or even binaural sound mixing. However, it is in fact only for producing mono sound. The “2d” aspect refers to the rather interesting way in which you mix the sounds.
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