look!! a strange bug
Lately I’ve been reading the disassembled source code to Super Mario Bros. , and I learned that, in its code, events are scheduled for the future in much the same way I do it when making a quick game-jam game in Lua, such as o moku e mun . It’s so simple it’s barely a system! But I like how understandable-yet-flexible it is. I’ll describe it in Lua, for use in a PICO-8 or Picotron game. It’s two…
I am in far too many Discord servers. I wanted to organize the folders they’re grouped in. This is really annoying to do in Discord itself, because it only lets you drag and drop them around one at a time in the left sidebar. So I did a little bit of messing around in Firefox’s Developer Tools to extract and reinsert my folder data. I’m not sure if I saved time doing all this. It would have been…
It’s a Saturday morning, and suddenly I wonder: what’s the most compressible list of eight distinct 8-letter English words? Let’s write some Python code. import random , re , zlib words = open ( "/usr/share/dict/words" ). read (). split () words = [ w for w in words if re . match ( "^[a-z]{8}$" , w )] N = 8 def compress ( w ): return zlib . compress ( " " . join ( w ). encode ( "utf-8" ), level =…
I wrote a small Bash (plus Python) script for adding my current clipboard contents to my compose key . It’s made for my combination of GNOME + Wayland + XCompose + ibus, so you may have to tweak it. But here’s the idea: #!/usr/bin/env bash symbol = $( wl-paste ) code = $( zenity --entry --title = "Adding compose rule from clipboard" --text = "Which keys should make ' $symbol '?" ) if [[ -z " $code…
NetHack is the strangest game that I regularly get sucked back into. Recently, the DevTeam released version 5.0.0. The version I’m most familiar with is 3.4.3, which seemed to be the “definitive” version when I started playing as a teenager (c. 2008) and development had already long slowed to a crawl. I long considered the changes in 3.6.0 and beyond to be a bit disappointing: they mostly served…
I’ve been doing a bunch of livecoding/algorave stuff in Strudel , and it’s great fun. You can make all kinds of fun sounds through experimentation, and the docs are fantastic, but I’ve been itching to make a kind of “guide” that catalogues certain winning formulas for electronic music that I frequently turn to. Here are some scattered thoughts that would make it into such a guide. Each code block…
Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat and realize it’s been three weeks since I ran pacman -Syu . No more. I use GNOME (btw), so I made a little GNOME shell extension for myself, constantly showing how long it’s been in the top bar. That 1d means I updated my packages one day ago. If it’s been ten days or more, the number turns yellow. As far as engineering goes, the process was pretty unremarkable.…
I think computers should beep. Put this in ~/.local/bin/bip if you agree: #/usr/bin/bash notes =() times =() t = 0 for arg in $@ ; do if [[ $arg != 0 ]] ; then notes+ =( sine $arg ) times + =( ${ t } s ) fi t = $(( t + 3500 )) done play -qn -c1 synth 1 ${ notes [*] } \ fade 0.01 0.1 0.06 delay ${ times [*] } gain -20 The play command is provided by sox . Now you can run long_command && bip C4 D4…
Lately I’ve been playing with Uiua , an APL-like programming language that has no local variables on purpose. Instead, you describe how data flows through your function using combinators. One can also think of the language as stack-based, though the official documentation has recently started to discourage this perspective. I appreciate the die-hard commitment to tacit, point-free programming on…