A year and a half ago I discovered meditation. One evening it was not going really good, I was a bit in a bad mental condition and thinking how I could fix this. I typed the word “meditation” in youtube which brought me to this video:

an American with Russian roots, who explains very well how to meditate, possible pitfalls and what benefits you get by meditating. Since that day I’ve been meditating 20 minutes every day, I am convinced about what he says and experience the benefits. My plan is to keep doing this every day, no matter what.

One of the things you need to meditate, like he explains, is a timer. I have android phones. The system always has a timer included next to the clock, but there’s mostly something that is not ideal. The time the phone vibrates to short, vibration OR alarm sound. I checked some free apps, but same story. First I was thinking about using Godot Engine for building a timer myself, but apparently you have to compile Godot yourself to get a phone to vibrate, for now. Mobile phone vibration is something I’ve already got done in a flash game, Micro Star Fighter so I decided to just use flash with the Starling framework and Feathers components, which are still moving forward. The development went pretty quick, it’s a very simple app, but during testing I noticed the alarm was going off 20, 30 seconds to even a minute over time. This was caused by the app being pushed to the background apparently. I googled it and found a solution: https://juankproblog.wordpress.com/2012/06/17/using-the-local-notification-ane-on-ios/
An, open source, native extension for flash, works on iOS and Android, that can send and receive special notifications. This does the trick, when the sent, timed notification is received again, the app is being pushed to the foreground or something and my code, that checks the timing on an Enterframe, is executed.
Important, this works good when the phone is not being used, when you meditate for example, but when the phone is used heavily, the timer is running in the background, the app can get killed and does not restart.

The special notifications can be sent and received with a device reboot in between. That works, but the app does not start automatically with that notification, only when you push the notification.
I was hoping it would start the app and have made it ready, so it can resume the countdown on schedule. This works, but you need to start the application again yourself after the reboot. That’s alright enough, for now , I guess.
Several tests on a few devices proved to me that it works properly, so my simple Timer application is finished.
It’s in the google play store for free.

Because the app asks for a lot of permissions and I love using open source software, like Blender and Godot, I’ve made it open source on github
A lot of the asked permissions, I use, to enable (almost all optional through settings) vibration, notifications, keeping the screen from sleeping, but I actually did not need or ask network permissions, I was planning not to do this, but it is something ADT adds when compiling Adobe Air with a captive runtime.

Greetings, I’m back off to learning Godot.

Normally, drawing zentangles, is done on little pieces of paper, but since I am a digital guy, who likes animation and has a wacom drawing tablet at hand, I tried a little experiment with drawing tangles on that and make an animation with it in Flash.
I have chosen 3 really simple patterns, made an easy composition on a frame and did a slightly different redraw on the next frame.
There are just a few frames and I put some code on it, to move frames on mouse move after click or touch move. The swf output from flash was converted to javascript with Google Swiffy so it can be used on mobile devices. A bit of animation is seen while swiping the drawing.
The result is on ictbram.be/zentangle

It’s just a simple experiment I did at the end of a few days, one frame a day. While doing this, I felt the good effect for clearing your mind again.
Zentangle is something you can do, to meditate and do something artistic as well I’ll remember.

** Update 03/04/2016

From now on I’m going to post my zentangle animation experiments at https://ictbram.com/ZentangleAni. I’ve tried creating gif files, also javascript and WebGL, that gives much better results on most devices.

The app is also made in flash with adobe air  and the Starling game engine. It is compatible with the webversion where it is possible to add computer players. They play by the rules, but just choose random cards. You can test or learn the game with the computer players, but you should play against real players.

The game uses the server software and library, union wich is installed on a raspberry pi at my home. The language of the game is Dutch.
There are some screenshots on http://ictbram.be/wiezen/android.html

I’ve also made a little promotion video with friends and family playing the game:

The video is created with the great free software package blender. This software is mainly for making 3D movies and images, but has a nice build in video editor as well.

The little star animation and credits were too made with blender.

http://ictbram.be/bugs

https://ictbram.com/starfighter/

Blender, Gimp and Adobe Flash were used to create the graphics.
Flixel as the game engine, As3sfxr for the sound effects and the free version of FDT for coding.

This one does play on mobile devices:

There is more information about this on the following website: http://ictbram.be/wiezen
Everything is written in Dutch.

I made this little movie with blender about how the cards are distributed: