Chaos Communicaiton Congress has been cancelled this year and as a response several European hackerspaces make their own holiday hacker conferences. I’m helping to organizing one at Hackeriet in Oslo.
Around a year ago I wrote an alternate frontend for ninsheetmusic, a website for video game piano arrangements. The official website lacks a search feature which makes it annoying to find sheet music when you know the title. So I wrote a scraper in Python to create a db of all the sheet music and displayed that data with a SvelteKit frontend. It was just a quick hack that took a couple of hours, so over time my website has gotten out of sync.
I looked at the new 1.0 SvelteKit release and I didn’t like it, so this week I’m writing a simple Flask app to replace my first frontend. That way I can keep my scraper in Python and schedule my scraper to run periodically. I’ve never done anything more than the Flask demo so it’s been fun to learn something new!
Sickness and on-call kept me from hiking for a few weeks now, so I’ll hopefully go on some snowy winter hikes too!
After realizing subtitles are an amazing resource for language learning, and trying it out on The Office, I’m going write a small program to print srt files. Basically it’ll print lines at the specified times, calculating the “word speed” based on syllables and the time-on-screen in the file, centered to your terminal window size, as plain text, so you can see if you missed anything by scrolling back. I’m surprised this doesn’t exist :) This is part of my personal tool collection of enhancing my learning (the other is sm2 as I’ve mentioned in the past).
I’m going to try my 3D print again for my Kindle Scribe. Brother-in-law got a printer for Christmas and my time showing him how to use it has instilled some new motivation in me.
I’m trying to compile GCC 4.2.2 for a music player I bought (AGPTEK A02). After some searching I found what I think is the SDK but it uses a hella old version of a toolchain from Cygnus that targets MIPSEL-ELF. Seems impossible to find but I was able to deduce they used GCC 4.2.2. I’ve failed to compile it with GCC 10, so I tried to compile GCC 8.5.5 but that failed too because of redefinition errors. I’ve now learned it’s easier to install an old version of Debian and build GCC 4.2.2 mipsel-elf in a virtual machine.
Past few days I’ve tried to find an offline version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, and I did, but it’s not the whole thing. If you download the Merriam-Webster Android application, and unzip the APK, you’ll find an assets/db/main.db sqlite db which holds a ton of words and an assets/db/defs/definitions_*.dat which hold the definitions but all as HTML. I’m pretty sure it’s all derived from an in-house source. So I’ve put that to the side.
I’m trying to get an Emacs package ready for wider distribution. It’s a little physics toy, where sand (and other items) drop down to the bottom of a grid. They can interact in various ways: rocks push aside sand, antimatter annihilates whatever it touches, balloons actually go up.
It’s not exactly a game, not exactly a tool. Just something I’ve been having fun working on. If you want to try it out, it’s here. The only thing it needs that isn’t part of Emacs is ht.el.
Starting to learn Plan 9 properly. Day one has resulted in a bunch of notes, and a corrupt filesystem requiring re-installation.
I think I’m going to have only a few, simple, goals for 2023:
Learn Plan 9 (specifically, 9front) well enough to know whether I want to switch to it from FreeBSD, and whether that’s feasible (given non-negotiable requirements to use both Signal and Mattermost).
Get my weight down to 86kg.
Fix my approach to work (currently very heavy on meetings; struggling to have any time for deep thinking or strategic work).
Mercifully point 3 can wait until I’m back in the office (virtually speaking). At the moment I’m enjoying spending most of my time on leave with my family :)
I have been working pretty heavily on my book (https://linuxmemory.org/) and, relatedly, contributing some patches to the linux kernel (mm) good to take advantage of some time off from work to do both!
I’m doing nothing :D Spending time with the little one and have a friend come over and hang out tomorrow, and just recharge for the new year in general!
Spending time with my extended family and drinking. When I don’t do that I work on my dissertation project. At the moment I need to compile a list of undefined behaviors in C89 that are used for compiler optimizations.
$work: automating some docker builds off of git tags and otherwise removing various places of human error
$notwork: continuing to hack and slash away at https://github.com/klardotsh/gluumy ‘s memory management, notably, trying to figure out why a slice of pointers (in Zig) isn’t working the way I expect, and is instead leaving me with uninitialized RAM (thanks, Zig authors, for populating uninitialized RAM as 0xAA so I can find it - albeit, the issue was discovered only by way of an invalid tagged enum being set…)
If I get the Molex connectors timely, installing a KinT controller in my second Kinesis Advantage. Also got the printed edition of The RISC-V Reader for Christmas, so probably some reading as well. Other than that mostly relaxing and doing some stuff around the house that we have been postponing.
Taking it pretty chill, doing some advent of code. I’ve written up my experience doing advent of code this year, but with a focus on self-reflection rather than the solutions themselves. Read here if that interests you
Finishing installing my laptop. Seems I flattened it to do the Ventura upgrade when I finished work last week and then totally forgot until I came to fiddle with a DNS issue and was greeted by the macOS installation screen. At least nix & Arq make it fairly quick to restore the bulk of my settings/environment.
Otherwise pottering round the house, playing snooker with a friend and generally being lazy.
Chaos Communicaiton Congress has been cancelled this year and as a response several European hackerspaces make their own holiday hacker conferences. I’m helping to organizing one at Hackeriet in Oslo.
oslohack:22.
There are also several others being organized.
HiP in Berlin.
FireShonks 🦈💥 which is remote.
And a lot more!
https://events.ccc.de/2022/11/28/dezentral-2022/
Nice! I’m attending from Berlin. 👋
Around a year ago I wrote an alternate frontend for ninsheetmusic, a website for video game piano arrangements. The official website lacks a search feature which makes it annoying to find sheet music when you know the title. So I wrote a scraper in Python to create a db of all the sheet music and displayed that data with a SvelteKit frontend. It was just a quick hack that took a couple of hours, so over time my website has gotten out of sync.
I looked at the new 1.0 SvelteKit release and I didn’t like it, so this week I’m writing a simple Flask app to replace my first frontend. That way I can keep my scraper in Python and schedule my scraper to run periodically. I’ve never done anything more than the Flask demo so it’s been fun to learn something new!
Sickness and on-call kept me from hiking for a few weeks now, so I’ll hopefully go on some snowy winter hikes too!
After realizing subtitles are an amazing resource for language learning, and trying it out on The Office, I’m going write a small program to print srt files. Basically it’ll print lines at the specified times, calculating the “word speed” based on syllables and the time-on-screen in the file, centered to your terminal window size, as plain text, so you can see if you missed anything by scrolling back. I’m surprised this doesn’t exist :) This is part of my personal tool collection of enhancing my learning (the other is sm2 as I’ve mentioned in the past).
I’m going to try my 3D print again for my Kindle Scribe. Brother-in-law got a printer for Christmas and my time showing him how to use it has instilled some new motivation in me.
I’m trying to compile GCC 4.2.2 for a music player I bought (AGPTEK A02). After some searching I found what I think is the SDK but it uses a hella old version of a toolchain from Cygnus that targets MIPSEL-ELF. Seems impossible to find but I was able to deduce they used GCC 4.2.2. I’ve failed to compile it with GCC 10, so I tried to compile GCC 8.5.5 but that failed too because of redefinition errors. I’ve now learned it’s easier to install an old version of Debian and build GCC 4.2.2 mipsel-elf in a virtual machine.
Past few days I’ve tried to find an offline version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, and I did, but it’s not the whole thing. If you download the Merriam-Webster Android application, and unzip the APK, you’ll find an
assets/db/main.dbsqlite db which holds a ton of words and anassets/db/defs/definitions_*.datwhich hold the definitions but all as HTML. I’m pretty sure it’s all derived from an in-house source. So I’ve put that to the side.Other than that, back to work tomorrow!
Hacking in Parallel.
Tuesday to Thursday: Hoping the kids will like it and meeting some old friends.
Friday: being nervous about my presentation in the afternoon.
I’m trying to get an Emacs package ready for wider distribution. It’s a little physics toy, where sand (and other items) drop down to the bottom of a grid. They can interact in various ways: rocks push aside sand, antimatter annihilates whatever it touches, balloons actually go up.
It’s not exactly a game, not exactly a tool. Just something I’ve been having fun working on. If you want to try it out, it’s here. The only thing it needs that isn’t part of Emacs is ht.el.
Starting to learn Plan 9 properly. Day one has resulted in a bunch of notes, and a corrupt filesystem requiring re-installation.
I think I’m going to have only a few, simple, goals for 2023:
Mercifully point 3 can wait until I’m back in the office (virtually speaking). At the moment I’m enjoying spending most of my time on leave with my family :)
I have been working pretty heavily on my book (https://linuxmemory.org/) and, relatedly, contributing some patches to the linux kernel (mm) good to take advantage of some time off from work to do both!
I’m working on a SCRAM auth implementation for my postgresql wire protocol library, pgwire
I’m doing nothing :D Spending time with the little one and have a friend come over and hang out tomorrow, and just recharge for the new year in general!
Spending time with my extended family and drinking. When I don’t do that I work on my dissertation project. At the moment I need to compile a list of undefined behaviors in C89 that are used for compiler optimizations.
$work: automating some docker builds off of git tags and otherwise removing various places of human error
$notwork: continuing to hack and slash away at https://github.com/klardotsh/gluumy ‘s memory management, notably, trying to figure out why a slice of pointers (in Zig) isn’t working the way I expect, and is instead leaving me with uninitialized RAM (thanks, Zig authors, for populating uninitialized RAM as 0xAA so I can find it - albeit, the issue was discovered only by way of an invalid tagged enum being set…)
If I get the Molex connectors timely, installing a KinT controller in my second Kinesis Advantage. Also got the printed edition of The RISC-V Reader for Christmas, so probably some reading as well. Other than that mostly relaxing and doing some stuff around the house that we have been postponing.
Taking it pretty chill, doing some advent of code. I’ve written up my experience doing advent of code this year, but with a focus on self-reflection rather than the solutions themselves. Read here if that interests you
Finishing installing my laptop. Seems I flattened it to do the Ventura upgrade when I finished work last week and then totally forgot until I came to fiddle with a DNS issue and was greeted by the macOS installation screen. At least nix & Arq make it fairly quick to restore the bulk of my settings/environment.
Otherwise pottering round the house, playing snooker with a friend and generally being lazy.