
Turn any page into Katamari Damacy - pinguar
http://kathack.com
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axylone
Woo - nice to see this on HN (I'm one of the creators).

EDIT: We're serving this off ec2 + apache. It's all static html + js. Any
quick tips for speeding things up?

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risotto
If it's static, serve it directly from S3, and turn on cloudfront for even
better delivery.

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axylone
ok, I think we managed to switch <http://www.kathack.com> over to S3. Thanks
for the tip!

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risotto
No problem. Love the script.

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joshes
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for helping me fall into a haze for
about 45 minutes. That was remarkably ingenious.

Rolling around on a huge page like the Wikipedia article for World War II
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_war_II>) caused a pretty significant
slowdown. Interestingly, once the ball got to the size to pick up larger
images, the rest of the ball would clear and there would be a noticeable boost
in speed. It was intriguing to observe the dynamics of the ball rolling on
different sized pages.

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iamdave
I loved this a lot more than I probably should have.

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mckoss
Awesome! Even works on an iPad.

And if you like this, check out this other amazing bookmarklet game:

<http://erkie.github.com/>

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kenkam
This thing is hilarious! I love how this renders the picked up objects so
well; it really shows if you try to pick up images! Nice work!

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hammock
I didn't think it picked up images. I guess I needed to roll my ball a bit
bigger before trying that!

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Gatsky
If you uncheck realistic pickups, images stick much better.

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IChrisI
This is amazing. I'm definitely going to keep this in my bookmarklets
collection! That said, can you give us a way to re-generate the grid data? I
want to roll up everything in Google Reader. (Maybe when the bookmarklet is
run, if it's already active, re-generate the grid. It currently creates a
second Katamari, which is also awesome.)

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axylone
New update out: Now you can select controls (left/right click, or touch). Try
running it twice, once with right-click, and again with left-click.

Also for dynamic pages, run the script after the content changes and click the
"x", and the new content should be pick-uppable.

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Inviz
Very entertaining, especially when it picks up images. Too bad it loses them
too fast. Can you please add an option to keep images for longer? I love
Hitler spinning around.

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Gatsky
Multiball works!

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sh1mmer
I helped teach and judge at about 10 of the Hack-U competitions while I was at
Yahoo and it always amazed me how ingenius the students are.

Congratulations to the team on a great project and it's really nice to see how
savvy about web technology the students at Wash-U are.

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Banekin
Is there any way to play this on a Macbook trackpad without connecting a USB
mouse?

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_frog
On the multi-touch trackpad you can just click with two fingers.

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BrianHV
To elaborate, I got it to work this way:

    
    
      * Hold two fingers on middle of track pad
      * Click thumb on bottom of track pad; katamari should start to move at this point
      * Release two fingers on middle of track pad
      * Use single finger to move cursor while still holding down thumb

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Banekin
Oh awesome, that worked beautifully. Thank you!

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sscheper
#winning

