Stelabouras.com

2012 Resolutions

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 13:15:00 +0200

I turn 26 today and it’s about time I release my resolutions for 2012.

But first let’s review the last year’s resolutions:

Work out a lot (Kinect && (Walk || Cycle || Gym))
Eat Healthy
Cook more (& healthy)

The first three were a success. I lost 32kg in 2011 (in 5 months) following the advice of Tim Ferriss (4 Hour body) plus I’ve been exercising regularly the last 4 months (gym) and I learned to eat better & healthier.

Travel (outside Greece for first time hopefully)

Happy to report that this one was also a success! After visiting Scotland (and High Lands) this summer, I scored another trip abroad in Berlin, Germany for Google Developers Day in November.

Look into this coffee “business” (Marco inspired me)

I just didn’t pursue this one, I think I will never be a “coffee” guy, but I must admit that lately I really enjoy drinking tea.

Play way less (or quit playing) World of Warcraft

I quit playing WoW! I decided to stop after lots of years, partly due to disappointment from Blizzard’s way of releasing content and due its time-sucking nature of it. Also I stopped playing online games (Call of Duty, Battlefield) in general, although this was not intended. From the other hand I am really active in gaming: I finished two big titles in 2011 (Deus Ex and Skyrim), I keep tabs with everything gaming related and I am really looking forward to play all the other games I have in my library!

Launch my personal projects & update the existing ones

Somewhat of a success: In 2011 I developed (and still developing) Analytiks, I launched some mini projects (HTML5 oriented and a Google Reader one) started a small gaming blog and I begun contributing on what became Soundbeam, the first iOS app of Evil Window Dog studio we “founded” with my buddy Petros.

Look into interesting and new technologies (iOS, Node.js, Python, WebGL/JS 3D frameworks)
Get involved into OS projects (Github FTW)

I can’t say I have met my standards in this one: I was really focused on iOS programming in 2011, which totally overshadowed any other language/technology I wanted to get involved with. Hopefully this will be fixed this year.

Be a better person to everyone around me

That’s an ongoing process :) I will try harder this year, promise!

Now let’s see the new resolutions. I divided the list into to separate sections: Personal stuff and Work related. Those two blend in many ways but I didn’t want to create a huge list and never complete any of my targets.

Personal Stuff

Keep on with the healthy diet / exercise
Try the tea “business” instead
Travel at least in two countries (preferably US + England)
Socialize more

Work Related

Learn new things (WebGL, Python, Unit Testing, Cocos2D, Continuous Integration…and the list goes on)
Make a game using Unity platform
Open source retired projects, upgrade or retire some others
Attend at least two dev conferences

That’s it! They may seem a few but rest assured, they are quite a task!

What’s your resolutions for 2012? :)

Minecraft on the Cloud!

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 15:27:00 +0300

Update: I have found (after posting this guide) that there is already a pretty well written tutorial in Minecraft Wiki, so you might wanna check this out too!

Well, sort of! I mean, title is quite catchy, isn’t it?

The following piece is a quick tutorial of how you can both save and sync through multiple machines, your Minecraft worlds on the cloud (Dropbox). Think of it this way: It will operate almost transparently (except those Dropbox Growl notifications which can be turned off) just like Steam Cloud.

I have tested the following steps and I can assure you that the process I describe below works like charm between two different MacOSX systems, but I guess it can be easily extended to Windows machines too - giving that the save game architecture is the same for both OSes.

So, let’s begin with the prerequisites:

You will need a Minecraft beta account (but I assume you already have one if you are still reading this)
A free Dropbox basic account (2Gb of space are more than enough for your Minecraft adventures) and
A basic understanding of Unix command line

If you are installing Minecraft for the first time

Install Minecraft (drag & drop it in the /Applications/ folder)
Install & Configure Dropbox (Create user, specify the Dropbox directory)
Create a Minecraft folder inside Dropbox folder
Move your “saves” directory which can be found in /Users/[your MacOSX username]/Library/Application Support/minecraft/saves to /[path to your Dropbox directory]/Minecraft/saves
If you have done the above step correctly, the “saves” directory will no longer appear in your original “minecraft” folder (just to be clear)
DON’T OPEN MINECRAFT YET - yeap, we have one more important step
Open the terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and type the following:
Don’t forget to replace [path to your Dropbox directory] and [your MacOSX username] with your information (that’s where your basic understanding of Unix command line is needed)
If terminal won’t respond with any error and you have indeed provided the right paths, you will now see a “saves” directory in your /Users/[your MacOSX username]/Library/Application\ Support/minecraft/ folder but with a different icon! This actually means that the saves directory will point to your Dropbox folder, which is synced with Dropbox cloud service
Open Minecraft and enjoy! You won’t have the fear of losing anything in case your Mac fails, plus you can sync those saves with any other Mac (or Windows) machine, following the same proccess!
There is no step 11, just go explore the caves in your Minecraft world!

If you already have Minecraft installed and you want to move your save games to the cloud

Install & Configure Dropbox (Create user, specify the Dropbox directory)
Create a Minecraft folder inside Dropbox folder
Move your “saves” directory which can be found in /Users/[your MacOSX username]/Library/Application Support/minecraft/saves to /[path to your Dropbox directory]/Minecraft/saves
If you have done the above step correctly, the “saves” directory will no longer appear in your original “minecraft” folder (just to be clear)
DON’T OPEN MINECRAFT YET - yeap, we have one more important step
Open the terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and type the following:
Don’t forget to replace [path to your Dropbox directory] and [your MacOSX username] with your information (that’s where your basic understanding of Unix command line is needed)
If terminal won’t respond with any error and you have indeed provided the right paths, you will now see a “saves” directory in your /Users/[your MacOSX username]/Library/Application\ Support/minecraft/ folder but with a different icon! This actually means that the saves directory will point to your Dropbox folder, which is synced with Dropbox cloud service
Open Minecraft and enjoy! Your worlds will be intact, you won’t lose anything in case your Mac fails, plus you can sync those saves with any other Mac (or Windows) machine, following the same proccess!
There is no step 10, just go explore the caves in your Minecraft world!

[Thanks makrp for the idea ;)]

Canvas Experiments

Tue, 03 May 2011 12:00:00 +0300

Otomata

Otomata was the first canvas experiment I worked on the past weeks and it was the one that made me realize the simplicity and beauty of canvas programming.

Batuhan Bozkurt (@earslap) did a fantastic job with his Otomata Flash demo. The idea of having cellular automata interact with each other in a 9x9 grid producing sounds when colliding with the walls was awesome, along with the ability to share your “sequence” to others using permalinks.

After countless times of experimenting with his Otomata, I decided to build an HTML version of this demo in canvas. I must note though: although ‘Otomata in HTML5’ runs in iOS devices, due to mobile Safari bugs with HTML5 audio (not possible to playback more than one audio file simultaneously) sound has been disabled in iOS.

I decided to do some reverse engineering in Otomata, based on trial & error of the Flash demo and on some Batuhan’s notes and came up with this little demo. It produces nearly the same sounds as the original Otomata tool, it supports permalinks for each sequence, animation can be paused/resumed, canvas can be cleared and the automata work as expected, having four different directions.

I have created a diagonal-friendly version of Otomata too, but it didn’t quite work as expected so I am postponing it till it’s fully fixed.

Listen to some demo songs here: 1 2

Game of Death

Some applets are begging to be ported to canvas. That’s what I thought when I saw Vincent’s “Game of Death Lava” written in Java using Processing library. I was intrigued by the idea, it was simple yet beautiful. Game of Death Lava is essentially a remixed version of the Game of Life algorithm when applied to two different population swarms thriving for dominance. This produces a phenomenal animation, at least in my eyes, which can be easily implemented in any language.

After porting the animation logic to Javascript, I needed a way to take care of the per pixel operations for canvas, so I used ‘createImageData’ and ‘putImageData’ functions of canvas context to gain access to every distinct pixel of the viewport.

You can view the demo here.

Breakout

After watching Richard Davey coding Breakout in Flixel flash library in 20 minutes, I knew I had to do something similar using canvas.

So I started creating the world, using his code as a basis (Actionscript is not so different from Javascript after all) and when I finished the presentation part (not to self: huge mistake, you must always think the other way around) I had two options: implement a simple physics engine from scratch, working only for rectangular objects (ideal for a breakout game) where I had to code up a rather simple yet time consuming algorithm for collision detection and response (solving in a way the square - line hit test), or use an already implemented physics engine to handle the world, the movement, the collisions and all the fancy parts. Guess what, I chose the first one.

Nearly at the end of the engine implementation, I realized that I could in fact learn yet one more thing by using a third party engine, so I started digging. Luckily some days ago I read a post on Impact.js site about Box2D physics engine in Javascript. For anyone not familiar with Box2D engine, let me put it this way: it’s the engine behind Angry Birds game. Yeah, all those fancy animations, box collisions and pigs getting killed are being taken care of this beautiful library. So knowing that Box2D isn’t only available in Objective-C (C++) and Actionscript but also in Javascript, was just the excuse I was waiting for.

Thus I spent two days messing around with the documentation, the forces, impulses and joints and all those exciting terms. I was amazed by Box2D and I began integrating it to my Breakout game. Unfortunately, I had to erase all my code in order for Box2D to fit, as everything had to be a Box2D body with real properties like elasticity (restitution), density and friction but hey, the result was better than I could have ever imagined! After hours of tweaking, learning and fixing, the ball was bouncing with the right speed, the paddle was moving just right and the bricks …well the bricks don’t have any animation at all!

I have to thank Jonas Wagner for porting Box2D in Javascript and Box2D team for the awesome documentation of the engine. Although documentation is not written for Javascript, the concepts are the same and you can easily implement a Javascript based game using Box2D in JS.

I am planning of updating Breakout in the next few days with new features so stay tuned!

You can play the game here.

Update: Demos are now available @ my Github page:

Otomata Game of Death Breakout

Announcing Analytiks iPhone app

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 13:36:53 +0300

The time has come to finally unveil the “unannounced iphone app” I was working on lately (for those who happened to notice the ‘Projects’ section on the sidebar).

So what’s Analytiks? First and foremost, Analytiks is a group project; it’s an app based on a Stefanos’ idea, developed by me and designed by Kostas.

For Analytiks, we wanted to create a simple, unique and personalized interface for your Google Analytics stats. We don’t plan to create an app that will bring the whole feature set of Google Analytics to your phone; there are already lots of pretty good apps out there for this kind of job.

Our aim is to give you a quick idea of your daily and monthly progress, across your five most important sites of your account. With this app everyone with a Google Analytics account will be able to have an overview of his/her site’s stats without having to mess around with the Google’s (sometimes hard-to-get) web interface.

We are already working on the next version of Analytiks, brining new and exciting features and I will keep you posted for those changes as they occur.

In the meantime you can download the app, visit the official site, follow it on Twitter and “like” it on Facebook!

Google Reader Reimagined (name pending)

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 11:03:00 +0200

TL;DR: I have built a small utility service for Google Reader where you can define the topics you love and then let the system group and prioritize the stories for you. You can test it here or fork it at Github.

So this weekend I had an idea: I was going to build a small utility as an weekend project, in order to help me deal with my daily information overload issue, also known as “Google Reader”.

I rely heavily on Google Reader and my 335 subscriptions give me a headache every time I wanna keep up with the world, so I had to do something.

There were to major problems that I wanted to tackle with Google Reader: First up, I wanted the “interesting” stories, more precisely some topics that I am interested in (javascript, ios, html5, diablo), to come up first and stop being buried under the whole pile of boring articles. Secondly, due to the volume of my subscriptions, some stories were mentioned over one time by multiple sources, so it would have been nice if those stories were grouped and being pushed up to the top, right after my ‘interesting’ articles. In that way, developing stories of the day (e.g. AT&T buys T-Mobile) could bubble up easily.

So that’s what I coded over the past two days.

First up, some technology heads up: I used the excellent HTML 5 Boilerplate “framework” by Paul Irish, in order not mess around with CSS too much. I have found myself fiddling with CSS many times, where I really had to focus on the development side of things, so boilerplate made things a lot faster. I also didn’t wanna mess around with databases in this small project, so I used Local Storage. Everything that has to be saved (no username/passwords of course) is saved on the client using HTML 5 Local Storage feature, so no db, no tables, no transactions, nothing. Also jQuery rocks, but I guess you know that already!

The “backend”, although trivial, was a bit trickier. Dealing with the fact that Google Reader hasn’t released an official API yet, I had to rely on a pretty useful wiki and some Stack Overflow posts when dealing with the whole request/response game, which proved to be quite fun!

The real heart of the system though is the algorithm which takes care of all the rest and yeah it’s no rocket science either.

Once you login to the service with your Google Reader credentials, you get to enter some topics that you love (1 word per topic at the moment). For example in my case those are: blizzard, wow, ipad, iphone, ios, apple, javascript, html5, css3, warcraft, diablo, webgl, nodejs. The system then scans through your unread items of your reading list, breaks up every title of those items into terms and groups the items with the common terms. It excludes some unnecessary words (mostly verbs) and then groups the terms that have the same items together. It finally breaks up this list into two: one with your “interesting” stories and one with the rest. And that’s pretty much it!

You can test Google Reader Reimagined here but bear in mind that this project was made by me, in order to work for me. I don’t know if it can help you with your reading list and no, there is no feature request button. I plan to add some things in the future but those will primarily tend to serve my needs.

On the other hand, I plan to push the source of this project to my Github page this week (hopefully), so anybody can fork, tweak, download and mess around with it!

Update: You can now find the code of the project @ Github!

New Year's Resolutions

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 04:04:25 +0200

Happy 2011 everyone, I wish you a healthy and productive new year!

Below you can see the list of my top ten resolutions for 2011 (with random order):

Work out a lot (Kinect && (Walk || Cycle || Gym))
Eat Healthy
Cook more (& healthy)
Travel (outside Greece for first time hopefully)
Look into this coffee “business” (Marco inspired me)
Play way less (or quit playing) World of Warcraft
Launch my personal projects & update the existing ones
Look into interesting and new technologies (iOS, Node.js, Python, WebGL/JS 3D frameworks)
Get involved into OS projects (Github FTW)
Be a better person to everyone around me

(above: my iPhone [3G] home screen) If anything I am not a chain...

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 19:20:34 +0200

(above: my iPhone [3G] home screen)

If anything I am not a chain breaker, so after Yiannis I am gonna pass the ball to Mark.

In other news, I am found amidst various projects this time of year, FancyCage being the one I am most actively involved with at the moment. We are currently in public beta phase, so any feedback is more than welcome!

On Kindle

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 13:53:00 +0300

While staying at a friend’s place, I had the opportunity to get my hands on the new Kindle (you can view some Kindle photos on my Flickr account). Truth be told I wasn’t expecting it to be so small and light, although I had used (not owned) ebook readers before (Kindle 1st generation and a Turbo-X one).

So after the initial surprise, my attention was focused on the screen. E-ink has (almost) 180^o of viewing angle (yeah it really feels like paper) and indeed provides a very comfortable reading experience. Screen size is big and the side buttons for page turning makes the whole process easy and distraction free.

This is where the problems arise though, for me at least. Being an iPhone/iPad owner I found myself touching the screen all the time, trying to navigate through the book I was reading (ReWork, you should get it by all means). Wouldn’t it be nice (although I think this is bound to happen soon) to have a touch-enabled e-ink screen? If that was to happen Kindle would get to lose its annoying keyboard on the bottom plus the navigation joystick. I kinda believe this a barrier we will overcome the following months/years, so all I have to do is wait.

Next thing I noticed about the screen was the refresh rate. Although it was faster than any other ebook reader device I came across, it was rather unpleasant to watch the (almost instantaneous) flickering of the screen when Kindle needed to redraw the contents. I assume this is something you get used to, but it feels pretty weird the first few times.

On top of that, I tried some “experimental” Kindle features, cause you know I never say no to some beta testing, and I almost instantly regretted it. Kindle’s browser (although Webkit-based, which is always good) has some nasty UX issues. Once you open the browser, a mouse cursor comes up and you get to navigate everywhere inside the app with this cursor using the keyboard’s “joystick”. Pretty lame if you ask me although I get that, considering the hardware of device, they had no other alternatives. Anyway, Kindle is not an Internet device per se and I love the fact that it’s so different from iPad.

Then of course, when iPad and Kindle meet themselves on a sentence you must always argue on which one is the best. If you are a Kindle user your “throw it to the bag when you are going on a trip” and “you can even read under the sun” arguments can start the debate, but it’s not like that. I really think that if you have a dilemma on which device you should get, the answer is simple. Do you want an awesome reading device and just that? Buy a Kindle, cheap, distraction-free, relaxing. Do you want an awesome portable Internet device with reading capabilities, games and media playback? Buy an iPad and maybe it’s gonna change a part of you.

Kindle 3 really feels like (or maybe it is) the right device to read stuff, but it doesn’t appeal to me so much at the moment. Owning an iPad I do find myself using it pretty often for reading, so I can genuinely say that I simply don’t need it. That of course doesn’t mean that if I will ever get a Kindle as a gift, I’ll throw it away. Far from it :)

(Tip) If you live in Greece (like me) I found that the common procedure of buying a Kindle is the following: Get someone you know in U.K. get it (from Amazon.co.uk) and then mail it to you.

The Playaz (in Greek language) Me and my buddy Peter...

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 09:59:00 +0300

The Playaz (in Greek language)

Me and my buddy Peter (@petrakeas) decided to start a new gaming vidcast series called ‘The Playaz’. We hope to run it in a weekly basis, covering games that we play the most. The whole setting is pretty quick and draft: We record our gaming sessions along with our audio comments. If you speak (or understand) Greek and you like videogames, you might probably want to check it out!

Tip: Read PDF files in iBooks the easy way

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 01:21:00 +0300

iBooks is, imo, the best pdf reader for iPad at the moment. It is fast, well implemented and you can read ePub & PDF files without switching apps.

The only problem is that the default way of loading PDF files into the app is rather unpleasant (yeah, I am referring to the ‘iTunes sync’ procedure).

So here’s what I do when I want to read a PDF file in iBooks.

Disclaimer: The following steps require that you install Dropbox (which is free and awesome) both on the device that hosts the pdf file and on your iPad.

Move the file to your Dropbox folder.
Open Dropbox for iPad and select the PDF file.
You will notice the following icon in the upper right corner:
Tap on iBooks and the PDF file will be copied to your iBooks app!

"For us, it’s been all about building a regular audience and treating the people that choose to..."

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 23:20:12 +0300

“For us, it’s been all about building a regular audience and treating the people that choose to spend their time with us with the respect they deserve.”

- Giantbomb guys

Sure there are lots of good distraction-free text editors out...

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 20:48:53 +0300

Sure there are lots of good distraction-free text editors out there (Writeroom, OmmWriter) but it seems that there’s already a pretty simple app in your basic MacOSX installation that can fill your needs: TextEdit.

Yeah I know, its default setup (rulers, rich text format) is not so attractive but if you find some time and tweak the preferences you can transform it to a simple, distraction-free text editor.

Here’s how: Fire up TextEdit, open its Preferences (command + ,), select “Plain text” in Format group, uncheck “Show ruler” option and this is pretty much it! Restart TextEdit and behold, simple and clutter free interface! Plus, TextEdit has integrated spell & grammar checking and correction.

Bonus point: Try getting Consolas installed and set it as a default font for TextEdit, it really really helps.

[Thanks Markp for the tip]

Found this really neat feature in Chrome: Type amazon.co.uk...

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 13:37:28 +0300

Found this really neat feature in Chrome: Type amazon.co.uk press space or tab and you can search right inside amazon. Works in any site that Chrome knows its search result page. Cool!

"Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for."

Thu, 27 May 2010 02:07:34 +0300

“Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.”

- Bob Marley

How to fall in love with an app: Kindle for iPad

Wed, 26 May 2010 00:30:00 +0300

How to fall in love with an app: Kindle for iPad

How to keep your Tweetie timeline "Lost" spoiler-free

Mon, 24 May 2010 14:23:00 +0300

It’s a big day today, the last episode of Lost series is out and almost everyone in the Twitter-verse is talking about it. Here’s a neat way to keep your Twitter timeline spoiler free till you watch the last episode.

Requirements

Instructions

Open the Terminal application
Copy paste the following line and hit enter:
defaults write com.atebits.tweetie-mac filterTerms -array-add "lost"
Restart Tweetie, ignorance is bliss!

To remove this term afterwards, repeat the procedure but copy paste this line instead:

defaults delete com.atebits.tweetie-mac filterTerms

Apps missing from the iPad

Mon, 24 May 2010 10:18:00 +0300

I’ve been using my iPad for half a week now and I just love it.

Although there is already a huge number of iPad apps, most of them -surprisingly- very well designed, I couldn’t help but notice some of the big names missing.

Lots of those missing apps have awesome iPhone equivalents and yes I can just install them to my iPad right away, but deep inside I know that their iPad versions would be way more powerful, like Instapaper (iTunes link).

Although it’s a bit early, much like when App store was firstly introduced to iPhone, here is my list of apps that I am waiting to be created/released in the not-so-distant future:

Facebook: Well, I don’t use Facebook that often and mobile Safari for iPad renders Facebook interface just like in the desktop version, but I guess a native iPad app could make the difference. Too bad Joe Hewitt decided to stop creating iPhone apps.
Delicious: This app has a true potential on the iPad. Having a central point to organize/view your bookmarks (ala Instapaper) can make Delicious for iPad a killer app. So, who’s gonna build it first? :P
Google Reader: There is already Reeder for iPad in the works (you can view some early screenshots here) so it’s really a matter of time to have a truly awesome gReader app for iPad.
Flickr: Many might point out that a Flickr app in a device with no camera would be just useless. But Flickr is a lot more than just uploading photos. Organizing your stuff & socializing through Flickr is probably more important and this is where an iPad app can truly shine.
Spotify: I really wanna see a Spotify iPad app. This would make me use my Macbook/iMac only for work and just have the iPad for nearly everything else (well except World of Warcraft and Steam games I suppose).
Classics: Classics (& Stanza) must get an iPad makeover. So freaking simple.

This is why I love Gmail. Always thinks ahead of me.

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 00:51:28 +0300

This is why I love Gmail. Always thinks ahead of me.

6+2 iPhone apps I can't live without

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 11:09:00 +0300

People have already started making lists of their favorite iPad apps, so I guess it’s time to list 6 iPhone apps that I use almost all the time on my iPhone (games count as bonus):

Mail: Mail is like the water of the intertubes. I am an email junkie, so Mail takes the first place in this list. I have all my email accounts synced to the iPhone so I am always up-to-date.
Tweetie: Tweetie is *the* Twitter client for the iPhone. Its features and unique UI (“Pull down to refresh…” - awesome) makes every other Twitter client just not good enough. ‘Nuff said.
Reeder: If you are also a Google Reader junkie like me, you will find what you need in Reeder. Among others, Reeder features Instapaper and Readitlater integration, beautiful and useful interface and in-app browser. The definition of ‘money well spent’.
FreeMemory: Although not available on the App Store anymore (Apple removed those kind of apps some time ago), it’s pretty handy: Once you get a low memory warning from an app, you don’t have to reset the phone, you just fire off FreeMemory and does all the dirty job for you.
Spotify: Tricky to get (both the Premium account and the iPhone app are not available in Greece), but once you use them you can never go back. Offline mode is essential for having some music on-the-go while driving.
Deliveries: Buying stuff online require tracking them and Deliveries does exactly that. It supports almost every delivering service, and yes you can track your package in Google Maps.
Bonus 1: Plants vs Zombies: PvZ is pretty unique. Not only from gameplay point of view (mix of tower defense with resource management and card game features) but from the fact that anyone can play it and get addicted easily. And I mean it: anyone.
Bonus 2: We Rule: The new craze! We Rule is like Farmville but better. You have your own kingdom, you build businesses, houses and farms and you order things from friends’ businesses, acquire taxes from houses and harvest your crops. Caution though: it’s extremely addictive.

How I reduced my fuel consumption by 1lt/100km

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 10:13:38 +0300

Disclaimer: I really love driving, but I am not a I-know-everything-about-car-mechanics guy, so the following post is based simply on my empirical knowledge.

My first car (Ford Fiesta 1.25) is now about a year old and I must admit that I haven’t always been treating it nice in terms of fuel consumption levels. As a result, it was gradually turning into a fuel monster, eating up about 7.9 liters per 100 km (or 29.7mpg). That was clearly over the limit, especially from an environmental point of view.

The change came after one of my tires (Hankook Optimo) went flat and more specifically when I decided to purchase a new set of tires (Bridgestone). Amazingly, the improvement was dramatic! Following the three key points below, I managed to reduce fuel consumption within a month from 7.9 liters per 100km (29.7mpg) to 6.9 liters per 100km (34mpg):

New tires Switching from Hankook to Bridgestone, and having new fresh tires was a real improvement
Changing gears in 3.5k rpm (4k tops) Not pushing car engine to its limits always helps
Avoiding holes or bumps on the road (common phenomenon in Crete) & using gears to slow down car instead of hiting the break all the time

I hope that those tips might help, but in any case ask a car geek for this kind of task, I might be sharing some silly knowledge here!

Stelabouras.com

2012 Resolutions

Personal Stuff

Work Related

Minecraft on the Cloud!

If you are installing Minecraft for the first time

If you already have Minecraft installed and you want to move your save games to the cloud

Canvas Experiments

Otomata

Game of Death

Breakout

Announcing Analytiks iPhone app

Google Reader Reimagined (name pending)

New Year's Resolutions

(above: my iPhone [3G] home screen) If anything I am not a chain...

On Kindle

The Playaz (in Greek language) Me and my buddy Peter...

Tip: Read PDF files in iBooks the easy way

"For us, it’s been all about building a regular audience and treating the people that choose to..."

Sure there are lots of good distraction-free text editors out...

Found this really neat feature in Chrome: Type amazon.co.uk...

"Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for."

How to fall in love with an app: Kindle for iPad

How to keep your Tweetie timeline "Lost" spoiler-free

Apps missing from the iPad

Facebook

Delicious

Google Reader

Flickr

Spotify

Classics

This is why I love Gmail. Always thinks ahead of me.

6+2 iPhone apps I can't live without

How I reduced my fuel consumption by 1lt/100km