Computational investigative journal
I'm writing this immediately after finishing this, to record it for others, in case they need some ideas for methodologies on recovering their own saves. These days I have stopped writing mostly due to time and focusing my energy further on either leisure or hacking. The best I can do these days is grab a quick picture and give context. --- Context: I brought my modified Playstation 1 to my…
A small document describing two possible scenarios to find yourself in and wasting time on. SELECTING THE FIRST ELEMENT OF ELEMENTS Awhile ago I ran into a problem using :first-child with document.querySelector . I have learned this selector literally means "select the element if it is the first child . It is super important to emphasize this, because if you have, for example:…
In an age where the open source ideology is gaining popularity, it makes me wonder: is profitable software useless? It appears that when you look at which software is profitable, it's not the software itself which generates revenue, but the resources it requires around it. Let's examine the Sublime text editor. The price used to be 70$ for a single license. It was worth it to a lot of people for…
How many times has Windows or Android warn you, that you're running out of space? How many times have you just opted to delete the Downloads folder because that's most likely to not contain important information (to only find out 2 months later, it did!), because your whole file system is a disorganized black-hole? My *nix brethren, how many times have you run `du` to find out what to delete to…
For the past couple of weeks I decided to go on a small journey. While I'm familiar with assembly, I'm no expert. I wanted to have first hand exposure to the common statement that compilers "will generally output faster assembly than handwritten assembly". To sum it up: yes. Let me quickly set the scene for when I started: I had zero exposure to x86_64 before this. I had very small exposure to…
State machines can be clunky to define in some languages. The definition of clunky here is mostly about boilerplate. I wanted to see how it was in assembly. I think assembly is well suited for it with the usage of macros. I think it demonstrates an interesting property of macros: they allow you essentially create DSLs with little effort. Exhibit A: .intel_syntax noprefix /* My macros for making…
At 5:03 I received an email from DigitalOcean that my account has been disabled due to suspicious activity. Cool, that's what you'd expect them to do...Right?...Right?! Well, some may think otherwise after this. It turns out this was a phishing email. This particular simply-put message made me think I had received a genuine message from DigitalOcean. On mobile, the message looks like this: Look at…
All quines in existence can be presented by this lambda expression: (λx.x x)(λx.x x) ...or my favorite: λ1 1λ1 1 The Turing Machine equivalent to this is given one symbol @, the rewrite rule: @ -> O@ (Where O is an empty space now) And the Turing Machine head moving forward one symbol cell. These are very closely interconnected. Lambda application is equivalent to executing a Turing Machine…
UPDATE: I've discovered a great source of information around this http://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/awweb/awarchive?type=file&item=52443 It dates 1984, but confirms the DJS series was produced in 1977, during the time when American home computers began to explode, and were 8080 based. ------ Please note quotes are machine translated. While doing the usual information dive through old 8-bit…
I am playing Dr. Mario in my living room, frantically destroying viruses. The "Win!" message appears and I press start to begin level 20. The board fills up with viruses, and I wait until it's done to start. And I wait. I wait...what is going on here? Looks like the game has soft locked! There is only thing to do - reverse engineer the game board initialization routine and figure out why this has…
Nothing like spending your night refreshing yourself on propositional logic, Turing machines and AOE2's scenario editor...😇 Among all the cool things you can do in the editor, the coolest by far are defining triggers . They cause effects to happen based on conditions. To me this was an obvious place to start because there is some form of rules happening here. It lead to the question: what kind of…
Unfortunately there appears to be a large barrier of entry to begin writing EVM-based code. The documentation is essentially non-existent for many languages, and for Solidity, outdated. Before I started looking into how to program for the EVM, I partially read the Ethereum white and yellow paper. Essentially the entire system boils down (up?) to this equation: Which can be interpreted as "A…
A reply to today's The JavaScript phenomenon is a mass psychosis ... Let's start from the top. An address from Mr.President of some company: I recently received this kind message on LinkedIn from the president of a Canadian cybercrime technology company This should have nothing to do with anything. Anyone can be a president of anything. It's a fallacy to think because some president has sent you a…
It's been nearly two years since I wrote " A brief glance at various text editors " which was fun to write. A lot of people wanted to see how modern web-based editors manage their text. I've found the time and motivation to write another article about these wonderful tools. This does not cover rich text web-based editors - only source code editors. As with the last article, this is no way 100%…
This is different from what I usually do. This article describes how I removed stickers and the glue from Pokemon Pinball and the Game Boy Color using pictures and captions. I am not responsible for anything that may go wrong. The original stickers. Looks terrible! Get a plastic card to remove the old sticker. This will prevent scratches. The replacement stickers! Look at that gold goodness. Get…
It's always interesting to see what older people have to say about things. Their opinions are based on many experiences, rather than feelings.They have seen what works, and what doesn't work. " Reflections of an 'Old' Programmer " is an article written by 40 year old Ben. My expectations before reading were: 1. He will mention how "things change the most in our field". 2. Learn a technology that…
Challenge accepted. Want to skip the hubbub and see results? Scroll to the bottom. Anything in green is an annotation. Lets get started. With Game Boy backlight modifications, playing your childhood games in the dark has never been so fun. The backlight installation itself is one of the more advanced modifications in the hardware modification scene. One major side effect of the backlight when…
Foreword: This is not an attack on JavaScript. After talking with people, this is just the behavior of IEEE-754 . I knew what floating point numbers were - limited precision decimals - but nothing past that. For some reason while writing this and playing around it just didn't occur to me that's what was happening. Personal study can be a lot of fun. Lately Mathematics has been the subject of study…
The beginning of the 3 day journey. (The only issue on TensorFlow related to BSD, and of course it wasn't useful.) The first thing any FreeBSD user does when looking for software that isn't officially supported is to look for an unofficial port. Of course there was nothing when I looked. The only relevant results were related to a GitHub issue that was closed because "the build system is to…
Forewarning: The tests conducted in this article are not proof of anything . We all have lots of thinking (or sleeping) time while traveling. I find these times to be the best for really thinking an idea through. While I was on a charter bus, I just randomly thought about something: we store data in 8 bit chunks - why can't we store data in 256 number "chunks"? Would this be performant over other…
Unbuckle your seatbelts and stretch your legs ladies and gentlemen. This is a long ride. (Or you could skip straight to the fun: http://lf94.github.io/kdl2viewer/) 1.1 Why Kirby's Dreamland 2? I recently bought a Super Game Boy (commonly abbreviated as SGB). The SGB is literally a Game Boy CPU crammed into a SNES cartridge. In order for Game Boy emulators to emulate the SGB, they have to either…
Recently I've decided to do what few have done: complete Super Mario Bros. with no shortcuts. The reasoning behind it is simple. I want to experience the most famous game on the planet, and bring others along for the ride. As a kid I was able to beat the game, but using warp pipes. A warp pipe is a shortcut that lets you skip portions or entire levels. Basically in those younger years I was doing:…
Yes, I am using serif fonts on an LCD. Try it for a week sometime. You might experience something interesting ! I've decided to give serif fonts, specifically Liberation Serif and Source Serif Pro, another try on LCD screens. I don't know what it is but for some odd reason I find it easier to read and the serifs don't really look like "noise" to me. It could be because I use 16px font size. In any…
The Test Preliminary test: Is MVC a programming paradigm, or a programming design pattern? Scroll to the bottom of this post to see the answer. If you answered correctly with 100% confidence, and could explain it to a 5 year old, you may close this web page. Otherwise let the learning begin...! The Reasoning A lot of the people in the Information Technology industry forget their Computer Science…
Please put on your 3 D glasses Virtual Reality headset. Different name, same game. The Real Reality of Virtual Reality Virtual reality has been a dream for so many. I remember seeing my first 3D image at a museum. It was fairly bad visually, but at least gave the impression of being there. The only honest reason why it was bad though is because of the colouration. Other than that the image was…