My Cool Things Collection

Cool Things from Fall 2024

2024-11-11T13:31:00Z

Cool Things from Fall 2024

Here's some of the most interesting things I read this season, finally entering my Archive:

BOOTHAMMER Aims to Deliver Simple "Intermittent Computing" for Energy-Harvesting Arduino Sketches

2024-11-11

the team introduces its project: BOOTHAMMER, a assembly rewriter targeting Arm's Thumb architecture which adds checkpoint and restore operations — automatically saving the progress of computation at intervals to protect against power loss and restoring from the saved point when power returns

Having resilient low-power systems, things that can handle low sunlight conditions common in the Willamette Valley's winters, is going to be an important thing as we start building more ambient/embedded computing. I would love to have little ultra-low power radio sensors attached to my Home Assistant server and handing this scenario really opens doors.

Top ranked games in the Autumn Lisp Game Jam 2024 - itch.io

2024-11-11

I made a a roguelite card game and it placed fourth in the game jam, there are some other neat entries in here. Play Prism Escape!

BYD EV Teardown In Japan Reveals The Secret To Its Affordability

2024-11-11

China sells a 20000$ highly capable EV and Japan asks how:

The Atto 3 teardown in Japan revealed one of the ways BYD manages to keep costs down and pass the savings down to the person who buys the car. It’s all about producing as many of the components as possible in-house and integrating them. The source article highlights the so-called “E-Axle” used by BYD, which is comprised of eight different components.
It includes not only the motor, inverter, transmission and controller but also the onboard AC charger, the DC-to-DC converter and the battery monitoring system (BMS). This approach, combined with the economies of scale (the larger the number of cars you build, the cheaper you can build them) goes a long way toward explaining how these highly competent Chinese EVs can be sold at such low prices.
...
Kenichi Ito, director of industrial machinery company Sanyo Trading and one of the seminar organizers, noted that "Chinese manufacturers attach great importance to low-cost production” and "their views on quality are different from those of Japanese manufacturers." This was a subtle way of saying they are not built to the same standard, but the market doesn’t seem to mind, and BYD sold 300,000 Atto 3s in the vehicle’s first year of production starting in February 2022—it's been doing quite well in some European markets too.

A California Wetland Program’s Flood of New Funding Lifts Hopes for Shorebirds | Audubon

2024-11-11

Brennan has been working with growers for three decades and today he manages thousands of acres for farms including Robbins Rice Company and Davis Ranches. While rice remains his top crop, birds and wetlands have become an important side hustle—not just for Brennan but for scores of Central Valley farmers enrolled in BirdReturns, a program that pays them to flood their land, creating temporary wetlands when and where birds need them most.
For millennia seasonal wetlands dotted California’s Central Valley, providing crucial habitat for millions of shorebirds to rest and refuel during migration. But as farms and towns have taken over the landscape, nearly all those shallow, ephemeral water bodies have disappeared, leaving avian migrants with scant options for pit stops. With shorebirds rapidly declining along the Pacific Flyway, conservationists and landowners have joined forces to help turn the tide. Launched in 2014, BirdReturns runs via reverse auctions: Farmers offer up acreage and name the price. If it’s right, they get cash in exchange for spreading a thin layer of water across their land, where birds can forage on aquatic invertebrates and other foods. Since its inception, the program—jointly run by Audubon California, The Nature Conservancy, and Point Blue Conservation Science—has paid more than 100 farmers a total of $2 million to flood 60,000 acres throughout the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. Buoyed by a recent $15 million grant from the state, the program is poised to greatly expand its reach.

Hiding Images in Plain Sight: The Physics Of Magic Windows

2024-11-11

Documenting the process of converting a greyscale image in to an acrylic block which when illuminated, presents the image in the cast shadow by (ab)using caustics:

Caustics are the bright patches of light we see when illuminating a transparent object. All the photons that don't pass directly through the object are what form the object's shadow. All those photons still have to go somewhere; they contribute to the caustic pattern.
The most interesting aspect of caustics is that they arise from even the tiniest of variations in surface flatness. Even the gentlest waves on the surface of a pool form powerful lenses that cast intense caustics on the floor below.
The reason my acrylic square can form an image is because I've distributed just the right amount of concavity and convexity into the surface so that the refracted light forms a caustic image.

The original source code for Backyard Baseball is long gone. Mega Cat Studios remastered the game anyway.

2024-11-11

This is a cool story; I have great memories playing all the Humongous sports games, I would have never guessed they were SCUMM games.

Simon’s expertise with the Backyard Sports franchise proved especially useful, since it’s built within SCUMM, an obsolete game engine that LucasArts released in 1987.
“There might be maybe two dozen people globally that are actively contributing to or working in [SCUMM],” Deighan said. “It’s very much like a legacy artifact from a previous era.”
Even at the time of Backyard Baseball’s original release, SCUMM was already phasing out of use.
“Somehow, the Humongous developers back in the 90s, they built a 3D game inside of this 2D game engine,” Simon said. “Somehow they turned it into a sports game — it’s kind of an insane achievement, especially back in 1997.”

Tiny RunCPM CP/M computer based on Adafruit RP2040 Adalogger - Hackster.io

2024-11-11

Emulate CP/M on an RP2040 with an integrated SD card reader:

//hackster.imgix.net/uploads/attachments/1780973/_MRe2MWYNX9.blob?auto=compress%2Cformat&w=900&h=675&fit=min

Project Boondock Echo

2024-11-11

Radio reception in mountainous terrain is sporadic. During an emergency, poor communication can cost lives. The proposed solution is internet-backed time-shift radio.
This project uses commercial off-the-shelf handheld radios and a microcontroller-based internet gateway to receive and store messages on a server where they can be queued for playback locally or through a remote repeater. This solution allows increased communication in mountainous terrain with limited capital expenditure. Radio operators can capture traffic during a pileup, monitor multiple frequencies of interest, and replay important messages.

The stuff people are doing with OOTB ESP32 boards is always so creative and impressive. The espressif hardware and stack are such an interesting ecosystem to play!

Mossback's Northwest: 'The Graveyard of the Pacific' | Cascade PBS

2024-11-11

Since 1792, an estimated 2,000 ships have sunk at the Columbia’s mouth or on the nearby coastline, with hundreds of lives lost.
...
The town of Astoria, Oregon, sits at the Columbia’s mouth and at the continent’s edge. It was the first U.S. settlement west of the Rocky Mountains, founded by John Jacob Astor’s fur company. Today, people visit to vacation on the Oregon coast and visit the Goonies House. Each winter, Northwest fisher/poets put down their nets to read their poetry and drink local brews. The hoarse barks and deep grunts of sea lions, gathered by the hundreds to eat salmon, provide a background chorus that forms a riverside soundtrack.
In 2012, a brawl between fishermen and loggers occurred in the street outside a local tavern. Here is still a vintage feel of an older, rustic Northwest. The world’s not perfect, but at the meeting place between mighty river and wind-whipped sea, it’s harder to feel disappointment.

If data is the new oil, this is how to make a Molotov. | Alice Watson

2024-11-11

Our goal is to render as useless as possible the kinds of data that are: scraped and sold by data brokers, collected by ISPs and companies for targeted advertising, used by Fortnite players and other malicious individuals for doxxing attacks, identity theft, and account takeovers, or by abusers, stalkers, governments, and law enforcement, for surveillance and harassment.
To do that, we're going to: 1. Understand the data landscape, 2. figure out our threat model, 3. explore ways of buggering up our data, and 4. apply what we've learned.

The Powerful Density of Hypertextual Writing

2024-11-11

What makes this piece so effective is its plain language and its information density. This density is a real strength of hypertext that is often overlooked and taken for granted. Only 110 words in that paragraph but it contains 27 links to other NYT opinion pieces published over the last several months that expand on each linked statement or argument. If you were inclined to follow these links, you could spend hours reading about how unfit Trump is for office.
A simple list of headlines would have done the same basic job, but by presenting it this way, the Times editorial board is simultaneously able to deliver a strong opinion; each of those links is like a fist pounding on the desk for emphasis. Lies, threat, corruption, cruel, autocrats — bam! bam! bam! bam! bam! Here! Are! The! Fucking! Receipts!
How the links are deployed is an integral part of how the piece is read; it’s a style of writing that is native to the web, pioneered by sites like Suck in the mid-90s. It looks so simple, but IMO, this is top-notch, subtle information design.

Fat lot of good the receipts were, but this point about Hypertext remains salient.

Alternative angle of the famous "Cybergoth Dance Party" video

2024-11-11

Sorry for party rocking (posting tweets)

Alternative angle of the famous "Cybergoth Dance Party" video, showing more cybergoth dance moves to Early Hardstyle, ending where the famous one begins

My Compad V2: A tablet-like build with a full chorded keyboard : cyberDeck

2024-11-11

I have thought about building something like this for years, it's neat asf:

//preview.redd.it/1o9scvu4npyd1.jpg?width=4096&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b93b49952e86b65361c3fa0a5cdba960f53fcebd#.jpg

This is the second iteration of my cyberdeck, called Compad V2. It contains:
Raspberry pi 4 4GB ram
7 inch touchscreen
A chorded keyboard on the back with a modified ASETNIOP layout, it can type all keys found on a regular keyboard
The keys on the front are: shift, ctrl, alt, left mouse, right mouse, and a button for toggling to numeric keys
2 blackberry trackballs that function as the mouse+scrollwheel and arrow buttons
4x2500mAh lithium batteries
A dedicated circuit for turning the device on and off, powered by a pi pico. When shutting down, it safely turns of the Pi 4 first, and then cuts the power.
All 40 GPIO pins of the pi 4 are accessible (located above the charging port)

To make it as thin as possible (it's 30mm thick), most of the internal wiring is done by diy flex-pcbs, which are made of a sandwhich of kapton, copper tape, and kapton tape. This made it a lot more pleasant to assemble than manually wiring everything , but it did forever to design and etch all the circuits.

I still want to do something like this for the GPD Pocket 3...

Jumperless V5 | Crowd Supply

2024-11-11

Jumperless V5 lets you prototype like a nerdy wizard who can see electricity and conjure jumpers with a magic wand. It’s an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for hardware, with an analog-by-nature RP2350B-based dev board, a drawer full of wires, and a workbench full of test equipment (including a power supply, a multimeter, an oscilloscope, a function generator, and a logic analyzer) all crammed inside a breadboard.
You can connect any point to any other using software-defined jumpers, so the four individually programmable ±8 V power supplies; ten GPIOs; and seven management channels for voltage, current, and resistance can all be connected anywhere on the breadboard or the Arduino Nano header. RGB LEDs under each hole turn the breadboard itself into a display that provides real-time information about whatever’s happening in your circuit.
It’s intuitive enough that it becomes "just part of your brain," the same way your computer does. You’ll quickly forget this isn’t how prototyping has always been.

I really want one of these and don't think i can justify it lol

May 27 2023 Cool Things

2023-05-27T13:06:00Z

May 27 2023 Cool Things

Amal El-Mohtar interview about Bigolas Dickolas tweet and This Is How You Lose the Time War.

2023-05-23

The surreality didn’t come from going viral—it came from going viral due to an account called Bigolas Dickolas.

it's a good book tho. i bought a paper copy of it to lend out, i had just finished reading it the week before all this happened, funnily enough.

Gridfinity Modular Storage System: All You Need to Know | All3DP

2023-05-23

A friend of mine Josh Corbin clued me in to this organization system and it would be nice to have some more modules. I plan on using this to organize the un-racked parts of my IT situation to organize the New Homelab Build's rack top-shelf...

Colorful River Basin Maps – The Decolonial Atlas

2023-05-23

This would be a cool project to do on the AxiDraw......

inbtwn et al on cohost! - free game making tools

2023-05-23

Piling on from this gamedeveloper.com post from Daniell Riendeau about free game-making tools

narrat seems cool...

cohost! - @notable-trees

2023-05-23

a blog that describes "notable" trees. tees that own themselves, an "eternal" olive tree in Greece, an albino redwood in SF Bay Area golden gate park, the most isolated tree in the world, etc. lots of neat stuff in here. an Everest Pipkin production

The Cactus Derby Races of 1908–1914: Los Angeles to Phoenix - AxleAddict

2023-05-23

An early race in what would become IndyCar was a point-to-point endurance rally in 1914 from San Diego to Phoenix before there were any roads or much else out there. Cool write-up of these event:

The race route was over El Cajon Pass to Victorville with the first overnight stop in Needles. The next day, the race continued to Kingman, Seligman, Ashfork, Jerome and then over Mingus Mountain and into Prescott for the second overnight stop. The final race day would end at the finish line in the Phoenix Fairgrounds.

Why No One Wanted to Lead This Race - YouTube

2023-05-27

This Video talks about the strategy and racecraft involved in Formula E Motorsports where it's more about energy management and momentum conservation than it is all out pace.

driver69 says that it’s unlike anything else but i do think it has some parallels: low-horsepower rally categories and endurance racing are both fundamentally about momentum conservation though far less aerodynamically intense.

and rally drivers often don’t want to be in the lead of a rally at the end of a day because it means they have to start each stage first the next day which means cleaning dust and dirt off the track for the folks to come after you. stages get much quicker as more cars run over it, a similar sort of effect.

and in rally raid like the Dakar Rally the opposite is true: the folks behind you can just follow your tracks rather than having to be 100% focused on way-finding.

Motorsport is neat.

Why Lightbulbs Might Be The Best Invention Ever - YouTube

2023-05-27

This video is about the development of the vacuum tube and eventually the transistor, a very high-level and approachable history of computing.

We Tried to Build an ENTIRE CAR in 24 Hours - YouTube

2023-05-27

The Caterham Seven is a good introductory class of Motorsports, a simple spec racing series with decent power but high power-to-weight ratio, these cars are light, dynamic and fun. This video shows some amateur mechanics attempt to put together the kit that Caterham ships you; when it's built it's competition-ready. Some of it seems awfully fiddly.

I looked at how hard it would be to get one of these on the west coast US -- our insane vehicle import rules means you have to buy the powertrain and the car separately, even if it's been assembled already, and put it all together yourself, maybe 55000$ all said and done, and street-legal when you have? could be fun... I don't think it would be comfortable ride for my girlfriend, though, they're awfully small cars.

Springtime — Bloon

2023-05-27

Every so often, I remind myself that this bike pannier which transforms in to a Tea table exists as a product prototype, and I so badly want one of these for Jitensha Ni Ocha.

I would probably at some point try to design this thing in onshape and see if i could make it with a small set of wood tools at home. Dumb Ideas Done Dirt Cheap

Kei Cars Go Racing? Kei Cars Go Racing! We Visit The K4GP

2023-05-27

Japan has a car regulation for "light automobiles" which we could only dream of here. Maximum "bounding box" size, engine capacity and power output means they are small, light, and slow-but-nimble. They've got better gas mileage and are cheaper to drive and insure, and some of them are really fucking cute. Kei trucks are nice little work trucks, and things like the Honda Beat and Suzuki Cappuccino would be fun to drive on any winding state highway in America. Alas.

What if you put 120 of them on Fuji Speedway and allowed competitors to change the body styling however they saw fit and then raced them for 7 or 10 hours? That is K4GP and I would love to attend one of these races some day. Big "24 hours of lemons" energy

April 29 2023 cool things

2023-04-29T14:53:00Z

April 29 2023 cool things

Been focused on my own stuff lately, but here's some Cool Things...!

Nixica - The Nix on GitLab Startup Experience

2023-04-29

If I was ever going to make The Complete Computing Environment something that more than one person would work on, using something like this as the "base layer" for storage+CI+publishing would be neat, but I've found my own local minima. If I ever start a company this will maybe be the first piece of infra I deploy, a Nix and NixOS CI environment

My product is my garden | ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ Herman's blog

2023-04-29

During the early days of lockdown, my girlfriend got deep into gardening. She would spend hours nurturing her tomato plants, weeding, watering, puttering about. She would spend afternoons reading articles on permaculture, figuring out which plants grew well alongside other plants. Lavender with tomatoes kept the pests away, slight shade for the granadilla vine, some water, but not too much for the root vegetables. It was lovely to watch her coax tasty and nutritious food individually out of the ground. I can’t imagine full-scale farming being nearly as enjoyable.
That’s what I want from my products. I want to putter about, feel connected to the process, and have fun doing so. I want to make things that don’t scale. To see people tuck into them and enjoy them as people, not as stats. I’ve done this fairly successfully with JustSketchMe. We have a small, diverse, and amazing community of artists and illustrators making awesome things. I’m trying to build a similar product with Bear Blog. Something niche but valuable. Something I can spend time on because I want to.

Amen... just want to build a lot of small careful joyful things for my friends and family... This is why I don't want so much infrastructure like Nixica...

DIY MIDI controller for M8 | Maido's stuff

2023-04-29

I do enjoy my Dirtywave M8 Tracker but indeed the LSDJ input stuff makes it a bit difficult to just "fuck around and find out"... a box of knobs wired up to LFOs and instrument parameters and stuff seems like a fun thing. I might build one of these some day. open threads

Gochujang-Sesame Noodles Recipe

This shit is so good. the sauce (1/4 cup gochujang, 3tbsp soy, 2bsp tahini, 2tsp sesami oil, 2tbsp vegetable oil) is a great thing for any pasta, just a nice dan dan-ish noodle sauce.

I started my New Homelab Build

Terra Firma is an old celeron-based HP Microserver and since I set up Akkoma Server on it, I am getting almost constant LOAD15 and disk IO alerts from it.

I started to spec out a new server build, and bought the parts this week. Hoping that it comes together in the next month, and then I can move Matrix Synapse in-house and make my Wobscale Technologies-hosted server a thin Tailscale exit-node.

Sunthinking - Solar Protocol

2023-04-29

Sun Thinking is a group exhibition that brings together artists, writers, and researchers to explore the qualities and logics of solar power and solar powered computing networks. It presents a collection of network-based artworks, games, texts, and interviews and is the first exhibition project to be hosted on the Solar Protocol network.
In 2019 we (Tega Brain, Alex Nathanson, and Benedetta Piantella, all New York City-based artists, designers, and researchers) began talking about whether we could design a computer network that was not only powered by the sun, but also programmed by it. Could we subvert modernist dreams of designing machines to control our environments and instead let our environments control our machines? Could we design in a way that lets the intelligence of the world steer or even automate decision making in our technological systems rather than the other way around?

Perennial Rice - The Land Institute

2023-04-29

Stuff like this really excites me -- idle hands make for creative endeavors and that shouldn't be limited to the west and to the rich.

April 11 2023 cool things

2023-04-12T01:24:00Z

April 11 2023 cool things

I prototyped Group B Pace Notes

I wrote a prototype of a Video Game this weekend, a "roguelite deckbuilder" game where you traverse a Rally Racing stage. I'm probably gonna rewrite it in Elixir so that I can deploy a little web/mobile-web version of it. It mostly just exists to evaluate whether the actual game-loop works and the UX is lacking and there is nothing but a single-stage progression but I think there is some good room for longer stages, progression, a nice "in car" UI...

I'll probably keep working on this.

Pgweb - Cross-platform client for PostgreSQL databases

2023-04-11

This seems like a nice thing to have; one of my favorite things about working at Uber (and also one of the worst things about working on the data stack at Uber) was that there was a web-accessible SQL console that could query most of the databases in the company. It was really useful to be able to run and save ad-hoc commands and explore tables in production when I was looking to set up new tables for the Data Portability tooling. pgweb seems to be doing the same only for a single postgres database but this could be a nice thing to stick on The Wobserver!

1986 Rothmans Circuit of Ireland - VHS Rallies (day 2, day 3, day 4, and day 5)

2023-04-11

VHS Rallies has uploaded a bunch of Circuit of Ireland rallies; i linked to one on March 27's not about Rosemary Smith and the 70s golden era of rallying; well, they also uploaded a five-video summary series on the 1986 Circuit of Ireland in the golden era of Group B, completely with some very nice in-car footage. You can tell i've been on a kick lately.

Garum Masala | William Dalrymple | The New York Review of Books

2023-04-11

Ever since the first reports of the incredible riches and luxuries of India began reaching Europe after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, Europeans had fantasized about the wealth of the subcontinent, where, according to Herodotus and the Greek geographers, gold was dug by up by gigantic ants and guarded by griffins, and precious jewels were said to lie scattered on the ground like dust. As the two worlds were brought into regular contact through the ports of the Red Sea in the first century BCE, the Romans became eager consumers of Indian goods and luxuries, particularly the spices of southern India, while Indian merchants satisfied these cravings at considerable personal profit.

One of the bits of history stuff that consistently catches my interest is this sort of east-west communication and trade and intermingling for as far back as we can write that I think folks just assume didn't happen until the modern era. This latest bit is a review of a handful of books laying out the history of trade between India and the Roman Empire. With Greek-Buddhist statues in Bactria, Indians buried in Athens, etc, it's clear that it was considerably more than just Marco Polo's trip to China.

Globalization and Transculturality from Antiquity to the Pre-Modern World & The Indian Ocean Trade in Antiquity

The Ancient Indian Buddhist Monk Buried in Athens

2023-04-11

Kerameikos is the most important cemetery of Ancient Athens which came into existence in the 12th Century B.C. It derives its name from the very old community of the city quarter Kerameis who had settled on the banks of the river Eridanos. When the Eridanos River flowed through here, it produced an orange-red clay ideal for pottery (Keramos in Greek).
The community of pottery artisans was named Kerameikos and their style of elaborately painted earthenware was called Kerameikos (Greek for ceramic). Mythology credits Keramos (Ceramus) for lending his name. He was the lord of the Keramaikos pottery district and the mortal son of Dionysus, the god of wine who went on a campaign to India.
The 11-acre archaeological site is filled with tombstones and statues of astonishing design and quality. One of these tombs is that of an Indian Buddhist monk. On his tomb was placed this inscription: “Here lies Zarmanochegas, of Barygaza, who according to the ancestral custom of the Indians gave himself immortality.”

Sketching Now

2023-04-11

I would like to do more Watercolor Painting but haven't felt up to it in a few months. Not sure if it's some fear or hesitation or what, but I should consider taking on some of these classes some time. open threads

Pixel (addressable) LED strip controller A1-SLWF-02 powered by WLED

2023-04-11

I have a grip of these that I bought on a whim to put some of my old WS2812 strips to use again. I will probably buy some more and get Home Assistant deployed in the near future to tie these and my Hue bulbs and in the future some other local smart-home stuff working over the next year as I do more Homebuilding. I also want to stick one on my bike......

These couldn't be much closer to "plug and play" than they get. Screw terminals make it easy to get your strips working with it, and it spits out a wifi network with a configuration interface and a decent little mobile app for controlling and configuring the strips.

April 07 2023 cool things

2023-04-07T14:15:00Z

April 07 2023 cool things

It's been a long week! here's some of the tabs I liked opening:

Partiboi69 | Boiler Room: India Tour

2023-04-07

The CEO of mutual pleasure records finally made it to the Boiler Room. great set, goofy guy.

Toyota Prius GT300 2016 - Assetto Corsa Mods

2023-04-07

The rare supercar Toyota Prius might be my favorite Super GT car, just because of how gonzo it is. A car that has a reputation for being slow, boring, safe, tuned up to GT3 spec and running alongside Nissan GT-Rs and whatnot? hell yeah. And now I can drive it in Assetto Corsa!

2023 Toyota Prius Prime First Drive: Plugging In Is Now Cool

2023-04-07

Victoria Scott reviews the new Toyota Prius Prime:

Yes, it is a solid car—the Prius, especially the plug-in variant, has always been a solid car—and this one is the quickest, longest-range, most-efficient Prime ever. But this fifth-generation model is also the first one where loudly head-banging to trans rave music inside it doesn't feel out of place. It feels right. Turning heads is what this car does naturally.
The Prius is cool now, and the world is a better place for it.

I can't help but irrationally, stupidly, carnally, want to buy one of these new Prius Primes. I don't need a new car, I said I would drive My Subaru Outback until the engine explodes, but when it does y'all better be ready. It is so sexy??? The only thing I don't like is the continuing design motif of hiding the rear door handles in the C-pillar, mostly from a UX standpoint.

So much for slow, boring, safe... haha

Bicycle – Bartosz Ciechanowski - interactive physics demos of how bicycles work

2023-04-07

This page is full of a bunch of interactive physics demonstrations and explanations of how a bicycle works, how the power is put down, how riders maintain balance, how turning works. very cool thing. learned quite a little bit actually while going through it

I'm going to spend 12 days doing new things - Beau Miles

2023-04-07

Beau Miles, an Australian adventurist/filmmaker/speaker finished his "12 days of newness" video series where every day for 12 days before Christmas he would do something he hadn't done before. Some of these were simple, cute (going "snow kayaking" to take his daughter sledding), some of them were a little bit gonzo (going on a six hour run and collecting all the money he could find on roundabouts in his area) or just plain silly (playing a game of tennis where every point is on a different court; running a marathon inside of a Seattle hotel)

I really like this guy's videos, some of my favorites are

40 days eating only canned beans
Africa by Kayak
any of his commute videos (walking 90km to work, a four day kayaing adventure to work, triathalon my way to work)...

Good stuff.

should each Cool Thing have its own feed entry/feediverse post?

2023-04-01T01:11:00Z

DONE should each Cool Thing have its own feed entry/feediverse post?

March 31 2023 cool things

2023-03-31T17:47:00Z

March 31 2023 cool things

Bus Stop Bloom Filter

2023-03-31

You’re headed to Stendal from Osnabrück, how can you tell if you should get on that bus? [Julian Vanecek] is trying to turn that from an O(n) problem to an O(1) one with a bloom filter right at the bus stop.

This is one of those classic nerd solutions to a problem that no normal non-technical human being would be willing to learn how to use, and I love it.

Introducing Custom OIDC · Tailscale

2023-03-31

One of the enduring criticisms of using Tailscale is that you're outsourcing your network plane to a company, and outsourcing your network identity to a different company. And your choices of identity provider were a bunch that are hostile to minorities, queer folks, sex workers, etc.

Well they're finally looking at shipping custom OIDC integrations and my dear friend iliana who i linked to in the previous paragraph will likely have a blog post soon on setting up a self-hosted OIDC solution and migrating xer tailnet on to it.

The example in the Tailscale blog of hand-rolling an OIDC provider is a bit too unhinged for my tastes, and theirs: "If you’ve gotten this far, it should be very obvious that this is a terrible idea, and as we said, all entirely hypothetical. The whole point of this was to highlight just how bad of an idea this actually was, show you how it works, and encourage you to please, please, use a real IdP… Please."

I got Mozilla's syncstorage-rs working; free yourself from python2

2023-03-31

In the vein of continuing self-hosting +mistakes+ experiments, I would some day like to move from using Mozilla's Firefox Sync servers, but was always put off by the python2 pile. well now I can be put off by Rust instead:

You may not know this, but you can run your own sync server for Firefox Sync, which lets you keep all your sync’d data entirely on your own servers. The github:mozilla-services/syncserver has been what you use to do this for awhile now, but it’s written in Python 2, which is becoming increasingly non-existent on modern Linux distributions since Python 2 is end-of-life. The replacement is github:mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs, a new rust implementation. I had some trouble just following the docs, but I did some code diving to find the missing details. Here’s what I got working on my machine.

And as arty points out, this is a great usecase for a tailnet:

I’m running mine on a local network with my own VPN setup to make that work, but this is also a good application for tailscale if you use that (I don’t). I heard tailscale recently got beta support for custom OIDC providers, neat!

Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? - The Verge

2023-03-31

The Verge has a pretty long and wide-ranging interview with the Website Boy, CEO and Boy Dictator For Life of Mastodon Fediverse. It is an interesting interview touching not just on the short-text mastodon part of the fediverse but the over-arching interoparble bits, solving (or more likely, shoving off) the profit motives of operators, scaling issues, etc. It's too long to excerpt, but worth the read/listen.

USB Mass Storage Gadget: A Beginner's Guide

2023-03-31

More for my own Archive than anything else but my new laptop GPD Pocket 3 named Rose Quine has a USB-host/HDMI-in module in the back of it that I would love to purpose as a gadget in various respects. One of these days i'll read this and do something goofy.

The Ancient Indian Buddhist Monk Buried in Athens

2023-03-31

These tails of historical east/west interchange all the way back to the Greek and Roman eras are always very interesting to me. There's a lot of interplay between the stoics and the sophists and the buddhists. We act like the sort of global mindset is new or "modern" but it seems to me that we have always been a very small, interconnected world.

Dwarf Fortress devs on big Adventure mode plans: 'This is just gonna blow everyone's mind' | PC Gamer

2023-03-31

Dwarf Fortress's Zach and Tarn Adams talk at length about the long slow road to the very interesting Adventure Mode. There is already an adventuring mode in the "classic" Dwarf Fortress which started to see some development when they embarked on my 2022 Games of the Year honorable mention. The exciting thing is the interplay between a Fortress you build yourself, and the Adventure stories you can tell in it along with a fully procedurally-generated cast of villains and their minions.

Zach: The artifact is something that you created in Fortress mode, and then in Adventure mode, you have to go save it from the goblins and bring it back.
Tarn: But you wouldn't just go get it. You wouldn't even know where it was. The concept of investigation is kind of central to what we want to do with Adventure mode. If something was stolen, for instance, you'd go talk to people and they'd be able to get you to find this dwarf that took it. There's a certain amount of giving of information where maybe you don't deserve it—traditional RPGs are just horrible with that, everyone knows everything about what's going on. People leave notes. We were thinking about people just carrying things on them, like when a villain sends an agent to a fortress, like in a traditional RPG they're carrying a note in their pocket signed with the villain's first initial telling them what they're supposed to do.

Tarn spoke about the underlying system mechanics of this in a talk at 2018's Roguelike Celebration:

Bluff City 01: A Bowling Alley, A Boxer, and A Bird Pt. 1 + 02/Pt 2 on YouTube

2023-03-31

The Friends at the Table Patreon podcast started out with this legendary game of Fiasco!, a really fun GM-less Tabletop Roleplaying Game. I'm glad it's finally somewhere that I can link to.

An underground boxing tournament, an incredible bird, an IRS sting operation, all go horribly wrong in this two-parter.

Bluff City: America's Playground on LibSyn

2023-03-31

While I'm at it, I was happy to remember that Friends at the Table uploaded another really incredible Bluff City series to the main feed. What should have been some teens enjoying their last day of summer on the beach-side pier they grew up on turned in to a completely gonzo heist. Well worth the ~10 hours time to listen to it, the friends are at the top of their game here. Eventually these will be on YouTube I guess.

March 27 2023 cool things

2023-03-27T21:47:00Z

March 27 2023 cool things

Gonna try something new, just making a heading that I can clock in to when I am reading Tiny-Tiny RSS or watching youtube videos; i have an org-protocol Firefox bookmarklet which will capture the page I'm on under the org-mode task I am clocked in to. This org doc goes all the way to you in a circuitous fashion, to the theoretical reader, to no one in particular.

Kotaku Reviews Terra Nil

2023-03-27

I found the initial demo version of Terra Nil on itch.io a while ago and really enjoyed it. It seems like this high-fidelity release might have the same complexity/systems design of the demo though, if the review and publisher video are to be believed. But it sure does look pretty. I'm gonna buy it on Steam tomorrow, probably.

Maps don’t end once you’ve met their objectives; instead, they’ll only finish once you’ve packed up after yourself, because there’s no point in returning nature to its original state if you’re going to leave a bunch of deactivated pumps and scrubbers lying around. This involves powering down and recycling every single thing you built on the map, an immensely soothing and satisfying way to complete each mission.

Gran Turismo 4 Cheat Codes

2023-03-27

Someone found cheat codes for Gran Turismo 4 on the PS2 which are only able to be used after a year of in-game time passes.

Breaking games was fun. Unlimited currency is the best. Thank you.

Rosemary Smith: Rally driver as sharp at 82 as she was in 1961

2023-03-27

Spent some time watching Rally Racing stuff like this documentary-ish Video of the 1975 Circuit of Ireland on the VHS Rallies YouTube and reading Wikipedia and old rally news. That event is a ~1000 mile loop around Ireland by teams competing with BMW 2002s, Alpine A110s, Porsche 911s, Ford Escorts, Lancia Delta, etc... over 61 special stages. Wild stuff!

Reading about the Circuit of Ireland Rally and 70s rally in general lead me to Rosemary Smith, one of the rally drivers from this era. This lady seems pretty rad. She got to drive a Formula 1 car at one point:

“Everything had RS on it – the tyres, the big transporters, my overalls. And I thought, ‘Aren’t they really nice, doing all this just for me!’. I said to the PR man, ‘That’s wonderful that they’ve done all that’. And he looked at me pityingly and he said, ‘RS is for Renault Sport’”.
A senior moment, perhaps, but make no mistake – Smith is sharp as a tack at 82, as capable a driver now as she was when she entered her first rally back in 1961. The test drive in question saw her become the oldest-ever person to drive a Formula 1 car. She still competes in rallies, as well as giving lessons in the driving school she founded 20 years ago.

And here she is in the F1: