Surface Tension
Last updated: 19 Apr 2023 - 21:43
Just less than a year ago I decided it would be interesting to try out a Microsoft Surface as an alternative to an Android tablet and maybe more portable than my venerable ThinkPad T430. I got a cheap unit from eBay to try it out, it's a Surface Pro 5 so pretty old now. Of course I didn't want to use Windows on it and I was thrilled with how easy getting a nice Linux install was on this very Microsoft hardware. I didn't do anything particularly special to get it running, just followed the instructions on GitHub.
For the most part my experience with the platform was good. Performance was pretty good. The pen and touch screen worked pretty well. I used it for coding, PCB layout, lots of FreeCAD work and even a bit of gaming via Steam. I only had 8GB of RAM which would probably have been okay but the ultra high definition display meant that apps were taking a lot more RAM than I'd expected and it very easily ran out of memory.
PySnakes
Last updated: 15 Dec 2009 - 22:03
pysnakes: Screenshot of a simple snake like game
Pysnakes is a one or two player game of snake written in python using the pygame SDL bindings. It was originally written for a competition in the British made Linux Format magazine. It should work on any platform with a pygame release. It's been tested on Ubuntu and Windows. The design of the levels and the game in general are heavily inspired by the "nibbles.bas" demo program that used to ship with Microsoft Quick Basic.