A central node with 5 nodes connected to it, in a star shape Index

2022 05May 01

YouTube == Link to YouTube.com

Text == Text-heavy link / blog / Wikipedia article

YouTube SimCity 4 soundtrack

SC4 was one of the first real PC games I played as a kid.

Text fillText on MDN

I keep having to look this up. I thought it was called drawText. Maybe drawText is what LOVE2D calls it?

YouTube Orson Welles Frozen Peas Out-takes

Behind the scenes as Orson Welles complains about bad copy for some commercials

Shane McCutcheon - "The L Word" fan wiki

Trying to find a shorter hair style for summer.

Copernicus - Bojack Horseman fan wiki

I kept thinking his name was "Confucius". Different historical figure.

YouTube Aztec death whistle

I kinda want one. I thought maybe the new Ghostbuster movie had made these things up, but they're totally real! You can 3D print them, too. Maybe I should commission one from my friend who has a printer.

YouTube Half-Life 2 facts for pros

This guy on YouTube does all kinds of stuff to break the scripting in Half-Life 2. He got two instances of Alyx at once, and got the airboat to the hunter-chopper fight without the machine gun. Mildly interesting.

YouTube The electric hummer project's "coolest" video yet

This guy Jerry from YouTube is converting an old military Humvee to a street-legal electric truck. Car videos are a guilty pleasure of mine. I don't know much about cars, and I don't like Humvees, but I do like electric cars, and it's fun to watch people build stuff.

YouTube What happens if you put a propeller on a bike?

In the same vein as Jerry's electric Humvee, this guy does smaller-scale builds. He made a bicycle where the pedals power a propeller instead of driving the wheels directly.

Turns out it doesn't work.

Text GetAddrInfoW API reference

I was thinking of porting PTTH to the Win32 API as a joke, but my ReactOS VM froze as I was about to try out this DNS lookup function. So forget that.

FreeRadical.zone

Mastodon instance on the Fediverse. There's some cool stuff on there.

Text List of wasm runtimes

I was trying to pick out a pure C/C++ wasm runtime. I figured if I can't compile PTTH's Rust code directly for Windows XP / ReactOS, I could probably compile it to wasm and then write a C++ host to make it Windows-compatible.

Unfortunately I gave up on this whole idea when my ReactOS VM seized up. It would have been too much work, anyway. I've been trying to find a cool wasm project for like a year and I just haven't thought of anything I really want to do.

YouTube Making snow graphics in Godot

This guy shows how to make snow graphics for a 3D game. I've never done this, but it's made of individual pieces that are mostly familiar to me.

YouTube Flowmaps, gradient maps

Same guy shows how to make an animated Jupiter-like planet in 3D using flowmaps, which is also used for animated water in 3D games.

This was really cool to see. I had read a Valve whitepaper on their flowmap implementation, but I didn't really understand it until I saw it in motion.

YouTube Signed Distance Field fonts

Same guy, showing how to do SDF fonts. This is another really famous Valve 3D graphics whitepaper. It's a simple trick and I read it years ago, but it's kinda fun to see it again. I think they published the paper around 2007, their SDF text rendering was part of TF2 / The Orange Box. SDF fonts have improved since then, and now people (people with GPUs that cost as much as a Humvee) are just raymarching 3D SDFs so they can render 3D fractals and stuff.

Lichess

I played chess against a friend and it was surprisingly fun. I'm not good at chess. Lichess lets two guests play against each other, which is nice. Some chess sites require an account to play.

Text winpthread doesn't run on Windows XP

Part of the sad story of realizing none of my stuff will work on XP. Even MinGW gave up on XP.

Text Zig platform support

Guess what platform Zig doesn't support for cross-compiling? Windows XP.

CopperSpice

CopperSpice is a fork of Qt with various improvements. The CopperSpice binaries do run on Windows XP, so I was considering this for the PTTH port. If I got a curl-like library working with the CS event loop, it could have worked, but I didn't want to bother setting up the environment and then coding inside the VM.

YouTube Penn & Teller perform "Lift-off of love"

This is a cool magic trick they do, and half-way through they reveal the trick and do it again.

"That's how everyone else does it. But this is how Penn & Teller do it! We had to get these built special!"

YouTube Splitting bullets with a butter knife

Penn & Teller doing Mythbusters-type stuff.

YouTube White Bird (Part II) - Ace Combat 5

I played AC5 in college. I didn't get to this mission, but in the last few years I looked up playthroughs on YouTube and I've become a fan of the Arkbird series of missions.

In this mission you must shoot down the Arkbird, a hybrid satellite / airplane.

The Arkbird was originally a symbol of cooperation between two superpowers after the end of the last war, but it was hijacked and used as a weapon by the villains.

One of the pilots says, "We're going to destroy the Arkbird. Are you sure about this?"

Nagase responds, "When we're at peace again, the President will build another one for us."

It makes you think.

YouTube Front Line - Ace Combat 5

This is an earlier mission in the Arkbird storyline.

This is before the villains capture it. The Arkbird gets a Big Damn Heroes moment as it shoots down the Scinfaxi's ballistic missiles and then rips it apart.

"Blue Hound, this is Arkbird... Requesting sonobuoy data link."

Text Inglip

Internet meme from a few years ago. A fictional cult worships a mad god who only speaks through CAPTCHAs.

Text Diceware

One of the best ways to make passwords. If you don't have dice and paper, a computer is a fine source of entropy, too.

Tiny C Compiler

Fabrice Bellard's Tiny C Compiler does work great on ReactOS, but I ended up not using it for my PTTH port idea.

Secure Scuttlebutt

Recommended to me when I was talking about offline-first Fediverse.

This is a social media sort of project that's meant to work even if you don't always have any network access.

Text no_std embedded Rust

Windows XP is kind of embedded.

Text libuv supported platforms list

Libuv gave up on Windows XP as well...

Text Electron.js supported platforms list

Electron.js gave up on Windows XP as well...

Text Rust platform support

I don't think Rust ever promised anything for Windows XP. Rust hit 1.0 in 2015 and XP was pretty much EoL by then.

YouTube SimCopter Hangar Backdrop

More nostalgia music from video games I liked as a kid.

YouTube Dave Martone - Dinky Pinky

It's a good instrumental guitar track.

I don't know why he calls it "Dinky Pinky". I don't know why he makes those faces when performing, either.

YouTube Doug Dimmadome, owner of the Dimmsdale Dimmadome

Internet meme from an episode I never saw of a cartoon I barely watched. It makes me laugh, though.

YouTube I converted my microwave into a LASER oven!

Styropyro is a YouTube guy who does stuff with lasers. In this episode you get to see him eating a burnt onion 'cooked' with lasers.

XKCD 1162 - Log scale

All hydrocarbon fuels are in the same ballpark. Sugar, fat, gasoline, whatever. It's just stuff that burns.

Text LessWrong - Universal Fire

Rationalist piece about why a universe where humans exist and matches don't work, isn't internally consistent.

It's a little nit-picky (a universe where all chemistry is the same but specific technologies can't work was never going to make sense, anyway) but I learned something from it.

YouTube BIG YOSHI

YouTube game reviewer "videogamedunkey" makes some prank calls.

"Taco Bell?" "Hey, I want pizza."

YouTube Yoshi.mp4

I was on a Yoshi kick that day.

Text Slate Star Codex - Basic Income, not Basic Jobs - Against Hijacking Utopia

Political blog article about why universal basic jobs programs are a worse idea than Universal Basic Income.

YouTube Super Mario 64 4K 60FPS

They recompiled Mario 64.

TOML: Tom's Obvious Minimal Language

It's not obvious! I keep having to look up the syntax!

YouTube Business Parks Suck (but they don't have to)

This YouTube guy compares public transit / walkability / car dependence between a business park in Canada and one in Europe.

Text Slate Star Codex - Samsara

One man's quest to remain un-enlightened.

YouTube Heat pumps are not hard

YouTube guy Technology Connections explains how we can heat our homes and apartments with backwards air conditioners in the very very near future.

YouTube Yanni - Acroyali / Standing in motion

I don't actually like this track. But I love the first 2 minutes.

A lot of music suffers from that. The intro is amazing and then the song is just okay. Sorry, Yanni.

Everybody works but the vacant lot

I paid $3600 for this lot and will hold it ‘till I get $6000. The profit is unearned increment made possible by the presence of this community and the enterprise of its people. I take the profit without earning it. For the remedy read ”HENRY GEORGE”

Yours truly

Fay Lewis

annoying_journal

This is a program I wrote. It works okay.

XKCD 977 - Map Projections

What your favorite map projection says about you.

How to use the node.js REPL

I've been thinking about getting into Node. Turns out it's easy to use.

Text All you need is links

This inspired me to write an HTML5 music player. Ironically I needed the songs to be linked from a JSON file so that auto-play would work. But it did inspire me.

YouTube Ace Combat 7 OST - Magic Spear I

I've never played Ace Combat 7, but most people agree this is the best song on the soundtrack. Maybe on any soundtrack.

Text Zooko's Triangle

Names can be secure, human-readable, or decentralized, but not all three.

There is a proposed blockchain solution to this, but it hasn't caught on.

YouTube ADHD: Essential Ideas for Parents

This is aimed at parents of children with ADHD, but it made me think.

It's a 3-hour video explaining the misnaming and misconceptions surrounding ADHD.

In short, ADHD is not a lack of attention, and it only presents as hyperactive in some children.

ADHD would be better named as an executive function disorder. Executive function is what we call it when your mind exerts control over its own attention and focus.

What we call ADHD is really an inability to control attention. It isn't something you can will yourself out of, and it isn't something you can always grow out of.

YouTube Fire Emblem 16 OST - The Spirit Dais

My spouse loves this game Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

I couldn't get into it, but I like this song from the OST. It's spooky.

Text NATO phonetic alphabet

This is the spelling alphabet that's like "Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo".

I keep meaning to learn it, and I keep forgetting.

YouTube The giant archive hidden under the British countryside

Tom Scott shows us an archive in a salt mine.

YouTube Microservices

Comedy YouTube video about web development.

Yeah I guess that's it for now.