GitHub The Download, 20 May 2022

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From YouTube: The Download: Math Support in Markdown, Playdate Dev Resources, 3D Movie Maker Forever and More

Description

On this episode of The Download, Christina is back with the latest developer news and coolest projects of the week, including:

00:00 Intro
0:46 Math Support in Markdown on GitHub https://github.blog/2022-05-19-math-support-in-markdown/
2:00 Devcontainer CLI https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2022/05/18/dev-container-cli and GitHub repo https://github.com/devcontainers/cli
3:06 Modern Cyberdecks from penk https://github.com/penk/MainboardTerminal and brickbots https://github.com/brickbots/framedeck
3:56 Playdate Dev Resources https://github.com/stars/filmgirl/lists/playdate-stuff
4:50 **Christina's Pick of the Week** 3DMMForever https://github.com/foone/3DMMForever from @foone https://twitter.com/Foone

Presented by: @ChristinaWarren

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Math support and markdown a dev container cli some retro games projects and the open sourcing of one of the greatest apps of all time. All that and more on this episode of the download.

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Welcome back to another episode of the download, I'm your host, christina warren senior developer, advocate at github, and this is a show where we cover the latest developer news of the week. I'm reaping my github colors this week with a newish logo, shirt that I really like, and if you like it, you can get your own at githubshop.com, because that's what youtube people do right like they tell you where to go, get their merch.

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Another thing that youtubers do is they tell you to like and subscribe the channel so go ahead and do that right now, right now, all right! So the first piece of news that I want to talk about is something from the github side, and this is actually pretty huge. You can now insert math expressions in your markdown documents on github, and this has been a hugely requested feature with the first request, going back something like eight years and it's finally here and mathematical.

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Expressions are an important way that data scientists and engineers and programmers and folks like that that are better at math than me frequently used to share information, but the process of inserting those expressions into github documentation hasn't really been very easy and if you're curious, what I mean by mathematical expressions, I'm going to ask matt to insert the confused math lady jiff. Yes, I say jiff on the screen so that you can see what I mean.

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I'm also like me mean her now all right. So if you want to insert these expressions into your documents, you can use the dollar sign, delimiters to insert using tech or latex in github markdown, and this is all powered by the mathjax library and because it is using the standard syntax that math people use. It should be super simple to implement. I've got details in the show notes and the description about how all this works, but I know this is going to please so many people congrats to the team on making this happen.

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Next up. I want to give a shout out to the github and vs code teams for releasing a new open source cli for the new development container spec and if you're, not familiar development, containers or dev containers are a really easy way for users to get onboarded with a new dev environment, using a docker container and using dev containers in either vs code or using the remote desktop extension or in github code spaces.

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You can clone a repo and then have a docker container set up in your ide with all the dependencies that you need for that project ready to go, so you don't have to install anything. It's just going to set itself up for you automatically, and this is all done by a devcontainer.json file that sits inside your project. It's very slick and it's totally changed the way that I play around with new stuff. But the team has now opened up the cli as a reference implementation, so that individuals or other tools can read the metadata.

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That's inside that dev container.json file and create dev containers from it. In other words, we could see even more types of tools adopting the dev container ecosystem, which frankly, is great for everyone, so I've got more details linked below, but I love this moving on to some fun hardware, hacks that I found on github this week.

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A couple of members of the community have created incredible cyber decks using modern computer guts, and the first is from github user pink and it is called the main board terminal and its design, which is just incredible, features a five inch round 1080 by 1080 screen and it's compatible with the okay, olkb uh prionic mechanical keyboard, which is super special and I'm not really familiar with, but it looks great.

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The second is from github user brickbot and it's called the frame deck and it's a cyber deck that takes cues from the classic trash 80 model 100.. Now both of these use, the framework main board, which we discussed a couple of weeks back as its base and both github repos, which are linked below, include the parts that these makers used files for 3d printing and build instructions.

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Well done both of you speaking of retro-inspired hardware. I don't want to brag or anything, but I finally got my play date now, if you're not familiar the play date, which is this is a new little retro console from my pals at panic and it's designed to play retro inspired games and it's also adorable and it's yellow, and it has like this little crank on the side, um but beyond just the games from the indie game developers that are delivered to the play date on a weekly basis.

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There's this whole indie dev scene around the play date uh too, and so in the show notes in the description. I've got a special list that I've created in my github stars that highlight some of my favorite projects and resources around the play date now. Fortunately, the play date is not available for new buyers until sometime in 2023 yeah.

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I'm sorry, you know how the supply chain can be, but you can start building stuff for the play date now without even having one and if you do have one on order, you can indulge in the cool stuff, that's coming out and now it's time for my pick of the week.

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So when I was a kid, I was obsessed with two primary things: movies and the idea of making movies and computers and video games so way back in 1995, microsoft had a cd-rom for kids, just like me, called 3d movie maker, which was an application that let you create your own 3d worlds and movie sets, and you could then animate these worlds. You could control the lighting. You could add your own props, even background music.

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It was the metaverse, but you know like not cringe, so the application actually inspired a lot of future game developers and computer animators, and it was also the first application to give comic sans to the world.

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So thanks for that, I guess, but like so many classic pieces of software, it's been lost a time and it doesn't work well on modern hardware, so twitter user and hardware software necromancer foontouring, decided to ask if microsoft would release the source code for the 3d movie maker, so the community could play with it and maybe get it building working on modern machines. Well, thanks to everyone's favorite developer, scott hanselman and jeff wilcox huwan's request was answered.

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I felt that this was a really great uh use of social media by phone to say that you know I bet you, you can't do that microsoft just give it to me, like you, you know, and I'm like, okay, well, why? Why can't we.

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And even better the author of the rendering engine, that's used in the software that microsoft had like originally licensed, agreed to release the source code under the mit license, which is just so cool. So earlier this month, microsoft put the 3d movie maker source code on github in a cleanup, but archived form and fun as well as members of the community have taken that code. They forked it to get it building on modern machines. The fork is called 3d mm forever and um the first out of the box build was released this week.

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So I want to thank you fuan. Thank you, scott, thank you, jeff, and thank you to the entire 3d movie maker team from the 90s for making my childhood something special. What classic software projects would you like to see resurrected? Let me know in the comments down below and also let me know your thoughts on any of our other stories. Quick programming note both editor matt and I will be out next week. So there won't be another episode for two weeks go ahead and give this video a like.

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If you liked it and be sure to subscribe to the github youtube channel for more great content, see you next time.