Following on from my earlier post with useful tools for geeks here are some more free online resources I find handy. Click on the titles to go to the sites.
Online Programming
Online GDB
Originally an online C compiler, but this site now offers a slew of language options from a top right drop down. It has a super accessible bare bones online Python compiler that you can use without even logging in. (Is Python a compiled or interpreted language? It kinda depends how you ask the question.)
Collaboratory
Google’s Python notebook offering. Pretty competent, and you can share your creations with others if you wish but if you want some thing that looks more like Jupyter notebooks you may want ….
Azure Notebooks
Azure Notebooks gives you access to the standard Jupyter Notebook environment in the cloud. Still in early preview and has a few rough edges.
Two tips. First, some of the libraries seem to be outdated (eg Pandas is only 0.23) but can be updated in a given notebook with:
!pip install pandas --upgrade
Secondly if you get a strange issue where notebooks refuse to run saying the kernel is not ready, try clearing your cookie cache. Then restart your browser and reload Azure Notebooks and things should run fine. This instability does make frequent saving advisable currently.
Databricks Community Edition
The clusters available are rather small for anything heavy duty, but if you want to learn PySpark (or any other flavour of Spark) or do a little light prototyping, this is a great resource.
MIT App Inventor
Possibly the simplest way to get building apps for android. I wrote a simple character sheet application for the FATE Accelerated RPG in no time with this a few years back.
Tabletop Game Creation Resources
Last time I mentioned Pixabay.com for images and Game-Icons.net both of which are useful for rapid prototyping or even producing finished items. Here are some other useful resources for creating role playing games or boardgames
1001 Fonts
Very wide selection of fonts. Be aware that not all are CC0. If you want CC0 fonts then ensure that you have clicked the little price tag icon so that it has turned green, as shown in the picture above. When you do the top of the page will read “Free Commercial Use Fonts”
National Library of Scotland Maps
Very high quality scans of a lot of old UK maps available either to screen grab for free (their terms and conditions say this is OK where maps are out of copyright) or buy
FreeSound
A useful source of sound effects and noises, many of them CC0. Handy if you like sound effects in your role playing games.
The Game Crafter
A commercial print on demand game maker in the US. They can produce single copies of games making them ideal for prototyping games and they also have an online marketplace to sell the games too. Unfortunately cost of shipping and import taxes means that they are far more competitive selling into the US market than into the European games market. I got them to produce a prototype for a game I made a few years ago called TLA: Three Letter Agencies
Computer Game Resources
I’ve not been so active in this area of late but I tend to keep an eye on new resources
Godot
I made my last 3D game project FlingFactory VR in Unity, however these days I would be tempted to give Godot a go as it is open source and will soon have support for Vulkan.
Blender
A simply brilliant 3D editor. One very useful and little known fact is that it has a well featured video editor hidden inside it. A simple visualisation I produced for a project a while back used Blender for both modelling and editing.
GIMP
My go to for 2D image editing. Useful for texturing and has a filter for seamless textures. One tip is that its well worth
Inkscape
Useful for vector art but not so user friendly as GIMP in my opinion though that may be partly familiarity
Audacity
A simple free sound editor
Other Stuff I Use
Crontab Guru
Useful for telling you what CRON codes mean (if you don’t know what a CRON is, lucky you)
RegExr
A handy online Regular Expression builder (if you don’t know what Regular Expressions are even luckier you!)
StackOverflow
If you have ever Googled a technical problem then you already know about this place but I felt it deserved a mention for being awesome
GitHub
A place to store your code. Once again if you are a coder you know this place but it so deserves a shout out.
On a final note, the video conferencing site Appear.in from the earlier list is now known as Whereby.com but still offers a free video conferencing tier
