2026 July Retrospective With the second month of this big beautiful summer all wrapped up, writing this one up feels more like a monthly newsletter than anything else, and oddly enough I am not even covering half of all the remotely semi-interesting topics that came into my radar and sparked my interest. Perhaps this is a sign that I should venture into the monthly newsletter business, which still…
2026 June Retrospective The first month of summer all gone; Poof! , like the great Houdini. The older I get, the more and more I tend to adhere to the mythos of the perception of time accelerating ever so faster with age. All that is to say, that the whole month felt like it lasted about as long as the whole Fable 5 release. Too soon? Alright, I’ll shut up. The Boroughs What did I just say last…
2026 May Retrospective In my April retrospective. I have hinted at how we might have just heard the first gong that signaled the beginning of the end of the so called unlimited and highly subsidized token era. Roughly a month or so later, it feels like it’s a lot more serious than that, and a whole lot of people might find themselves feeling like their favorite toys were taken away by the end of…
FreeDOS on a USB stick I looked around and couldn’t find any reasonably good guide to install FreeDOS on a USB stick with persistence. So, I thought to myself that I’d write something up, because why not? Now, why on earth would one want a USB stick with FreeDOS ? I don’t know, perhaps one doesn’t really need any particular reason. You can just do things! Haven’t you heard? Installation Anyway,…
Does your blog still render in IE6? I got really curious a short while back, if this very blog would still be somewhat readable in the crown prince of terrible browsers, also known as IE6 . And, while I was contemplating that evil thought, I said to myself what about others like Mozilla 1.5 or Netscape 6 ? IIS While this blog is statically generated, it still needs a local web server to be…
2026 April Retrospective This month we got to hear the first gong that signals the beginning of the end of what I like to call the infinitely subsidized token era . Uh-oh! Rooh-rah! What does this really mean in the long term? Well, it remains to be seen, but in my opinion there’s a pretty high chance that only a handful of the so called frontier-labs will survive in the end. Which ones? You might…
Cracker Editor The Hungarian edition of the Chip Magazine used to ship semi-regular dumps of sac ( Slovak Antivirus Center ) archive, which was nothing short of a treastrove composed of copious amounts of freeware and shareware, among a variety of other things like documentation. The whole collection used to be around 500 megabytes in the mid 90s, which of course would have been unphantomably…
2026 March Retrospective This month was pretty much dominated by war, death, sex, drugs, layoffs, DLSS 5 , and last but not least quite a few highly anticipated indie-game releases. But, isn’t this actually the case every single month nowadays? A fair point my liege . DLSS 5 Let’s start with the elephant in the room, just to get it out of the way. Personally, I couldn’t care less about DLSS or any…
2026 February Retrospective Let me start this off by saying yet again: we should really offset each day of the year by a tiny amount in order to have a February with proper 30 days . This nonsense has to stop somewhere. Imagine us as a multi-planetary species, doing shit like this across multiple planets; it’s gonna be a nightmare to deal with this crap. And, while we are at it, let’s just all use…
2026 Birthday Retrospective I decided to start another tradition this year in the form of so called birthday retrospective . Not entirely sure if this is something that is going to stick, nor what I am actually going to yap about exactly, but it seems like a reasonable idea to do at this time. 0x14 years since “…” It’s pretty crazy to think about the fact that it has been 0x14 since graduating…
2026 January Retrospective The year started as good as Return to SIlent Hill ended up doing at the box office. It’s not all doom and gloom though, I stumbled upon this funny little nugget on mighty Wokopedia, that made me smile. That must count for something, right? The film had its release on January 23, 2026 in the United States had grossed $2 million in the United States on opening day. It is…
2025 Retrospective Let me kick this off with the obligatory GitHub contributions chart. Why are there two charts? Because, I’ve been using two separate accounts. This is one of the weakest aspects of GitHub. One should really have a single account, and then one or more profiles, similar to how one account can house multiple channels on YouTube. Oh well! Archive Here is an archive of all the posts…
2025 November Retrospective I find myself writing this up at the end of the month once more, while getting ready for my usual month long sabbatical. The weeks turned into months, very fast this year, perhaps faster than usual as cliché as might sound. Luckily for you, I decided to leave my more juicy musings about everything that has transpired during the course of this year, for my last…
Monkey-patching WEBrick In the early days of GitHub Pages , I found myself hosting this blog on a Heroku dyno, backed by the rather generous free-tier that they used have on there. Gone are those days, am I right? Naturally, I ended up rolling my own static site generator in the process, which I have written in Python. This was a rather uncertain time in the Python ecosystem, because it happened…
2025 October Retrospective Octobers seem to alternate between elections and massive layoffs. Over 112,732 employees have been laid off by 218 companies so far in 2025, according to Layoffs.fyi . This number doesn’t seem to include the recent 30,000 yet, as this was announced only a couple of days ago by Amazon . People are coming up with all sorts of outlandish theories around these layoffs, but…
La luna del cacciatore If you have watched Alien vs. Predator from 2004,, then you surely will remember the now infamous Hunter’s Moon scene, which happens during an exchange between Alexa “Lex” Woods , and one of the Italian archaeologists, professor Sebastian De Rosa . If none of this rings a bell to you, not to worry, because I did all the hard work for your pleasure and entertainment. Please…
2025 September Retrospective It’s September, that’s pretty much the start of the early-spooky-season, right? Therefore, I thought that it would be appropriate to have Conjuring: The Last Rites as the theme of this month’s retrospective. I even adjusted the link highlight color to be redrum . As far as the movie goes, I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but based on the trailer it feels like a…
2025 August Retrospective As summer is coming to an end , I can only hope that we’ll have some indian summer this year, or just a plain old fashioned warm-autumn at least. Is that too much to ask? This August felt to be packed with all sorts of events, drama and so forth, so much so that I had to cherry-pick some of the highlights, which is very rarely the case. The base selection or filtering…
The curious case of Theseus and his long-ship I am sure that there’s a that’s what she said joke in there somewhere, one might not even have to squint too hard or long enough to find it, but alas I have to disappoint you as this is not the purpose of this late Sunday afternoon post. While playing around with llama.cpp , I stumbled upon a particular prompt that was producing some rather curious and…
2025 July Retrospective I probably said this more times than I can remember, but July felt especially short. I don’t want to speak for everyone, but it felt like we barely managed to wrap our heads around Zuckerberg’s now traditional, and expected 4th of July appearance, then boom all of the sudden the 31st showed up in our calendars. Luckily, there’s still one month of sweet summertime left,…
2025 June Retrospective The first month of summer is all said and done. Lots of complaints about the heat as per usual; all of which I find quite amusing to be perfectly honest. I don’t know about you, but back in the day, when I was all young and shit, it used to be so hot that one’s feet would leave an imprint in the asphalt covering the sidewalk, not to mention that the grass was all burn out…
Lomo: Smena Symbol By a series of rather unexpected events, I found myself in the possession of an ancient Lomo: Smena Symbol camera, which seems to be in an almost pristine condition, on the outside at least! I grew out of my habit to take everything apart at around age 13 or thereabouts, and I am to report that I managed to resist the temptation of verifying if time was indeed kind to it on the…
2025 May Retrospective I must be getting really old, I mean – I didn’t even notice that May flew by just like that. But hey, are you ready for some more Stronghold Crusader Definitive Edition news? Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition Final Destination The Final Destination franchise should need no introductions, I hope. Please try to avoid driving close behind trucks carrying logs; if you know…
2025 April Retrospective It feels like I was writing up last month’s retrospective just like a day or two ago, yet here I am again. Where did April go? And naturally, I am not talking about April Lavigne, when I say this. M3GAN 2.0 I might have said this before, but James Wan is undoubtedly one of the great masters of horror. He has proven his weight in gold time and time again. Even though, I am…
2025 March Retrospective Eddie Barzoon, Eddie Barzoon. Ha! I nursed him through two divorces, a cocaine rehab, and a …. Oops, if you could unread all that, and forget about it ever happened, I’d really appreciate it. Cool, thanks! The problem with writing up last month’s retrospective six days into the current month is that things start to blur into each other; one has to delay talking about…
FreeBSD In my February retrospective I was lamenting the total enshitification of Linux as a whole. I mean the user-land was always plagued by it, which is why we never got the mythical year of the Linux desktop. However, the Kernel itself has always managed to maintain a higher standard in respect to what was allowed to go in, and most importantly when it came to maintaining backwards…
2025 February Retrospective I really don’t now, why don’t we just adjust all months to be 30 days long, instead of having this 28 versus 29 days nonsense. I know, I know – the math just wouldn’t work out. And while at it, let’s also can this so called daylight saving time . Let’s take a look at a very short-list of important events that occurred on February 28th – pre-1600 of course, according to…
2025 January Retrospective If this was some tabloid blog, then this very post would be quite a mouthful, considering all that has went down, and the year hasn’t even started in earnest yet. But, alas it is not. Whether that is a good or bad thing, I’ll let you be the judge of it, as I am not a judge or jury myself. Stronghold Crusader: Conspiracy Theory Edition (Cont.) Just like all good…
2024 Retrospective Let’s kick this off with the obligatory GitHub contributions chart. December looks like a barren wasteland out there as I mostly paid off some of my sleep debt, and didn’t end up tinkering too much. Archive 2024-01-31 / 2024 January Retrospective 2024-02-04 / Image Kernels 2024-02-24 / Amalgamation 2024-02-29 / 2024 February Retrospective 2024-03-31 / 2024 March Retrospective…
2024 November Retrospective Where did November go? Honestly, I have absolutely no idea. It feels like I was writing up the October retrospective just a few days ago, and poof, gone like Houdini. Half Life 2 - 20th Anniversary Update While I am not a die hard Half Life fan, an anniversary update like this is still something worth talking about, especially when it comes bundled with a documentary.…
2024 October Retrospective Octobers always seem to fly by in an instant, and this one was no exception. Maybe it’s one of the side effects of Halloween , or Donnie Darko ; I’ll let you be the judge of that. On moving fast and breaking things I’ve been using Linux in some capacity from around 1998, and as my daily driver from around early 2006 or so; which means that I never, or very rarely moan…
2024 September Retrospective September was a truly indie game release month in my book. Isn’t every month of the year like that? Probably, but these days I am only interested in a relatively tiny selection of games, and most of them do fall into the indie game bucket; which is not too shocking or surprising, I guess. Frostpunk 2 Let’s start with the behemoth in the room, which I am sure you…
Abandonware: Evolution Evolution: The Game of Intelligent Life is a hybrid life-simulation-real-time-strategy game released all the way back in the absolutely glorious year of 1997 . It’s considered pretty much abandonware at this point, and sadly doesn’t seem to be too happy on modern systems or in Wine for that particular matter. Fortunately, one doesn’t have to be an absolute genius in order to…
2024 August Retrospective I feel like this month’s theme should have been easy to guess. I am talking about Alien Romulus of course. Haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but as an avid fan of the franchise is pretty high up on my to-watch-list . Alien: Romulus Diablo: WebAssembly A WebAssembly port of Diablo devolved (a.k.a devolution) has made some rounds on the information-super-highway…
2024 July Retrospective July also flew by like the north wind and of course I didn’t exactly end up working too much on any of my gazillion side projects, which I am sure that you are sick and tired of reading about at this point. Kingdom Rush I did end up buying the latest installment of the Kingdom Rush franchise and played through it like I always do. In the last few entries of the franchise,…
2024 June Retrospective Just like in May, I must ask the same age old question, where did June go? The weeks and months are flying by like no tomorrow. Or perhaps this is just the one of first signs of the infamous midlife-crisis? It’s hard to tell, but if you end up seeing me posting about fast cars, then at least you’ll not be totally taken by surprise. Tarot But on a more serious note, keeping…
Generating Colored Noise When I talked about generating noise , I only focused on storing the results in the typical grayscale form and ended up just using the same noise value for the R , G , B channels, while setting the A channel to 255 . It should go without saying that it’s perfectly fine and possible to store a separate noise value in each channel and thus have 4 noise textures packed into…
2024 May Retrospective Where did may go? Hell, where did half the year go? That’s a much better question to as I suppose. Tears of the Kingdom The first thing to note is that it’s been roughly a year since the launch of Tears of the Kingdom . And, I must confess that I still haven’t even scratched the surface of the game. The hype has pretty much died down and disappeared at this point, which is a…
2024 April Retrospective Continuing with the tradition of talking about a fresh or interesting indie games, I’d like to point out Rusty’s Retriment , which came fresh out of the oven at the tail end of the month. Now, I am not a fan of the so called “cozy game genre” , but this one happens to be the proverbial exception that enforces and solidifies the rule itself, I guess. Based on the Gamalytic…
Plush If you ever used Winamp in the 90s or early 2000s for that matter, then you might have semi-accidentally stumbled upon the mysterious word of “ Plush “ . And, even if you did not for some peculiar reason or another, then you most certainly have seen the “Credits” in the “About Winamp” dialog. Alright, so what is Plush exactly? Plush is tiny real time software renderer written in the…
2024 March Retrospective Picking this months’ theme was a difficult one for a number of reasons. On one hand, the excellent Shogun mini series has dropped, and in the wee days of the month we got a difficult game about climbing . A rather though call to make, I am not going to lie. But, if you happen to be reading this in the confines of your browser, then you already know who won as far as the…
2024 February Retrospective As February came and went so did the layoffs which seem to be ramping up. According to layoffs.fyi at least 49,386 employees have been laid off since the beginning of the year. It seems and feels like the layoffs will continue until morale improves. Night Swim I feel like it’s a semi-well known fact by now, that I am a horror movie aficionado of some sorts and my first…
Amalgamation Amalgamation is not a new thing by any means and in many ways it’s the great-great-great ancestor of what we get to call today single file or header only libraries . Now, single file libraries don’t necessarily have to be constructed through amalgamation, but many of them are, simply because of ergonomics and ease of development. There are a few distinct approaches that one can take…
Image Kernels I built quite a lot of utilities last year that did image processing in some form or another. However, whenever I’ve written about them, I purposely avoided using the terms kernel and convolution . Why? Simply speaking, to save the unsuspecting AI bros from wetting their pants too much. So, what are convolution kernels or filters exactly? These fancy words are used to describe an NxN…
2024 January Retrospective January started out pretty much as bad as I expected that it would. With mass layoffs at several companies, which pretty much reinforces my intuition from last year insofar that the actual financial crisis hasn’t even started yet in earnest; and when it finally does, it will make the one from way back 2007-2008 look like a nice dreamy-holiday. It’s not all doom and gloom…
2023 Retrospective Here we are on day 1401 of 2020 and it’s time to start things off with the quintessential and very controversial yearly GitHub contributions or commits chart. Not good and not terrible to use the words of a wise man located more to the east from my location. But on a more serious note, 2023 has been a pretty rough year all around no matter how one slices or dices it, and I feel…
The VLC Xmas Hat Easter Egg As a certified easter egg hunter, I pride myself with discovering the llama snake inside the modern Bento Skin of Winamp 5 , all the way back in late 2007 or thereabouts. While I can’t be 100% certain that I was the first person that ended up discovering it, the chances are pretty damn high. I do remember searching around the information super-highway at the time and…
Generating Noise In my previous post I talked about generating voronoi noise , but when the subject of noise comes up, most people tend to think of perlin noise or simplex noise rather than anything else. However, one doesn’t have to go that fancy to get relatively decent results. But, without any further ado, let’s dive into it and explore the world of noise. To start things off on the right…
Generating Voronoi Noise Voronoi Diagrams always seemed to me like a weird stepchild of noise and signed distance fields . The process of creating a Voronoi diagram is not terribly complicated and it consists of two steps: Pick N random points and colors For each pixel find the closest point relative to it and use its color Profit! Talk is cheap, so let’s take a look at the code, starting with the…
Upscaling Pixel Art A few years ago there was some sort of renaissance of pixel-art-upscalers, mainly fueled by the emulator community. It has gotten to a point where even some research division at Microsoft joined in and produced a paper around the subject. The emulator community of course wanted to be able to “apply the upscaling” in real-time; as a direct result many of the so called upscalers…