Feel free to tell what you plan on doing this weekend and even ask for help or feedback.
Please keep in mind it’s more than OK to do nothing at all too!
Feel free to tell what you plan on doing this weekend and even ask for help or feedback.
Please keep in mind it’s more than OK to do nothing at all too!
I’m going to buy Animal Crossing.
Hope you enjoy it! I’m glad I picked it up.
My social life has gotten weirdly more busy since the pandemic started. This weekend:
I suspect this means I’m not really all that anti-social, but instead I just don’t like leaving the house. ;-)
How do you usually bake over video with people? I’ve been interested in trying this out.
Nothing too complicated. I’m just standing up an iPad on my kitchen counter and chatting while we both make the same recipe.
Every once in a while the camera gets pointed at the baking – “this is such wet dough!” or “MORE GARLIC” – but it’s much more about being social and getting us to actually do the baking. :)
Same for me. I am connecting more with people who live far away. It’s seems like now that it’s more normal to just get on a video call with people, I am connecting with them again. And no driving home at the end of the night is nice.
Recently acquired a Sparrows Challenge Vault, so I’ll be pretending the rest of the world doesn’t exist and seeing if I can learn how to open it (and then opening it).
A bike ride Saturday. Some bike tuning/maintenance. Some reading. If I’m feeling responsible, cleaning the garage.
After a conversation on here about the relative difficulty of wrapping C vs C++, I’m going to try creating Common Lisp bindings for either FLTK or the FOX Toolkit. Creating C bindings is very easy with cl-autowrap, but I don’t know how well (or even if) it supports C++, so I’ll probably end up using Swig. Swig is more work, but claims to support a lot of C++.
I’ve also been thinking about the next steps with the Spotify client I’m writing. The low level functionality is working, so I can call API methods using the full URL and it handles authentication transparently, but I’d like an interface with higher level functions like (play &key (track) (offset) …). The problem is, I don’t want to write them all manually, so I’m looking for WADL or even markdown documentation that I can parse to generate it.
Wow, very exciting to see someone else working with the FOX Toolkit! A little pet project of mine is building a simple HTML renderer on top of FOX, since GTK is a bit too heavy these days and FOX has that Windows 95/98 aesthetic.
When working with FOX, don’t lose hope. The documentation is spartan but the source code is small and relatively straightforward.
Digital detox. I’ll not touch my computer for the whole weekend.
We’ve had a full cart ready to go on Instacart for a week now, trying to find an open delivery time from Costco.
My wife was checking when she could to find an open spot, but no luck. Finally decided to write a script to check for open spots.
It logs into Instacart a couple times an hour to check availability of delivery times for a few stores. Sends a text and email using mutt/sendmail if it finds available delivery times.
edit: not sure I understand the downvote. if they’d care to explain I’d love to understand what in this was downvote worthy.
We had a submission about this which you might find interesting.
So, uh, if I can get two bloody days to myself, I’m working through the Cryptopals challenges.
A very long time ago (nearly 20 years?) I was very interested in computer security, and seriously considered a career in that field. That’s not how it turned out but I kept in touch with that field as much as I could, and worked on some non-critical bits of various security-related projects along the years (and some critical bits, with supervision from people who, unlike me, really knew what they were doing).
I’d like to (seriously) get into it again, partly because I think I could really do a lot of good things with my background in embedded systems, partly because it’s really interesting, and partly because the labour market in my field isn’t going the way I’d like it to be going.
However, last time I sat down and hacked on something in this field for more than three days in a row, it was to check out that news that MD5 had just been shown to be vulnerable to practical collision attacks.
So here I am, piecing together a CBC/ECB detection oracle, which I’m pretty sure I’ve done at some point in the past when CRTs were still in vogue. It was definitely easier back when I didn’t have to do it while juggling consulting contracts though…
Edit: oh, all that, and scones.
Packing up–we’re moving at the end of the month, so the sooner we get the less used items in boxes the better. We bought a house, and I am so excited for this to be last move for least a decade after 5 years of moving every year to escape rising rent.
Drinking cans of cheap beer, do random stuff at the computer (I’m supposed to be learning keycloak and related technologies, but it’s getting nauseating – any suggestions about keycloak are welcome, however).
Ideally I should go out for my weekly visit at the grocery store, but meh.
I’m starting to feel the quarantine, but meh, there’s not much to do, I have to keep calm and carry on.
These last two days I had some headache, my willpower is low right now. I’ll probably spend my weekend in bed pretending I’m a larvae.
I’m glad I self host stuff though. The internet connection has been occasionally unstable but I can watch my torrents anyway streaming from my home server.
Improving user interface of
cargo-crev.cargo-crevverifies that you only use dependencies that have been reviewed and verified to be safe by people you trust. It’s a combination of a code-reviews database and web of trust.I’m setting up some personal computer environments that are representative of what it was like to do development in the 1980s and early 1990s. That includes using the appropriate versions of MS-DOS, various C compilers, assemblers, debuggers, and yes, even the editors.
People like the nostalgia of personal computers from that era, but I’m going to see what it’s like to actually work on them, down to reasonable cycle accuracy (even on a 8088 or 286). (If you do this, you’ll quickly notice that file I/O is pretty slow.)
If anyone can point me to some QEMU examples of getting this sort of thing running, I’d appreciate it. I’m using PCem now and it crashes on Linux so I’m forced to use my Windows machine for it, and it’s very CPU intensive. I’m looking for alternatives. (VARCem was worse.)
I tried this in the past before, although I cheated and maybe used DOSBox. You can get pretty far with Borland’s compilers (I stuck with Turbo C++, but perhaps Turbo Pascal was even more popular back then?). I think another option is using Bochs where you can set the cycles.
Borland Turbo C is truly great software, as was Turbo Pascal. I’m mostly focusing on C environments. I’ve got five set up at the moment. The manuals can be a bit of a trick to find.
Watcom? I still have my circa 1997 box Watcom 11 (the actual cardboard box) I used with OS/2.
How about Mix C? Remember that? I still have those floppies around.
Great suggestions. Thanks!
Although I am old enough to have used all this software when it came out, I didn’t because, well, I didn’t have a computer at the time. I’ve never heard of Mix C, so thanks for that.
See here and original company site.
They’re free at least on CPM. Packrat that I am, I have the v2.2.0 for DOS on 720k 3.5” floppies. The DOS versions look to be still for sale. There’s also the PCC/DeSmet C and for 386+ djgpp.
I’ve reminded my teenage son that the phone in his pocket has more CPU power, RAM, and storage than the first six or seven personal computers I owned combined (and I walked uphill to school, both ways, in the snow ;) ).
It’s always better to get real hardware for this sort of stuff. Cycle-accurate emulation is a thing but even then, in most emulators, things like hard-drive or floppy-drive latency and seek times aren’t too accurate. (With variable consequences, depending on hardware; probably not that big a deal on a C64, but a Windows 95 machine thrashing the swap file will be nothing like in the good ol’ days…). Plus there are things that were significant but you can’t replicate in a virtual-only setting, like the inherent physical latency introduced by swapping floppy disks (and dealing with the occasional bad one). Due to the recent retrogaming craze, lots of 1980s systems are selling at pretty outrageous prices these days, but 386-era laptops are still cheap and plentiful, and don’t take up that much space.
Now for some useful advice:
For x86, Dosbox may actually be reasonably hassle-free, and you can slow it down until it’s annoying :). Bochs may also be an option but it might be pretty CPU-intensive, too – last time I used it, it didn’t have a JIT engine, it was a good ol’ interpreter, which tends to be slow and instruction-heavy.
For other 1980s-era systems, some emulators do have settings that give you “native” speeds. For the C64 & friends, the VICE emulator has, or used to have, pretty good support for that. For the Amiga, fs-uae can do a reasonably convincing rendition of the A500’s pace.
These come off the top of my head but if it’s some other particular system that you’re curious about let me know, there’s a chance I may have played with an emulator for it at some point and I might at least be able to point you in some right directions :).
Real hardware is a no-go. Not only do I not have the space, I don’t have the patience for it. I did all kinds of that in the 90s. Messing with the BIOSes of the various machines in PCem is enough. :)
Emulation of cycle accuracy is enough for what I have planned. I’m not embarking on any serious software projects.
Thanks for advice. I may send you a private message with questions later.
Oh, yeah, I know what you mean :). Don’t get me wrong, I love my old machines, but unless I have a specific reason and specifically need something that’s only available on the real stuff, or a lot of free time to kill, I go by the emulator route, too.
I’m going to continue working on my last weekend project. It seems there a lot of people who are trying to order from Instacart, but not getting delivery windows available. This week I helped a couple of my friends to use this program in order to get alerts for their favorite store on Instacart.
This weekend I’m hoping to see if I can run it as a web app or so that folks can just put their email or phone number so that they can get a notification for their store. I also need to figure out how to get a list of stores for a particular zip code. More hacking!
Here is source code reference: Notify Me for Instacart Availability
awesome! I just did this too, your code is much nicer. :)
a tip - you can send text message notifications using email-to-text [0] gateways. While it may not be as nice for a scalable web app, it works well for an individual use case. I was able to use with mutt/sendmail as part of a python script (tested with Google FI).
I was going to try and extend my script to automatically place the order from a saved cart, when it finds a delivery window.
Hope you get your delivery!
Thank you, Dhruv. In fact, I started with an email to text gateway. But during testing, I didn’t get any texts (sent via emails). So I decided to switch to Twilio. It was a fun experience.
After I publish this on my blog, many friends express similar disappointment with not able to order on Instacart and were happy to use bot I wrote :-)
cheers, Raju
I think I’ll take another stab at learning how to program.
Nice, what are you learning? Is there something specific you would like to build?
I bought a couple of books about Ruby, mainly because the syntax makes sense to me. I’ll also give Python another look (have tons of ebooks about it). I want to create cross-platform apps, so I can contribute to the FOSS world. I’m not a fan of Electron and the NPM mess, so no Javascript for me. :)
In the past, when I tried to start learning to program, I saw something about another language and would go “That looks cool, let me check that out.” It’s hard to know what is the best language to learn.
Oh yeah, that’s such a classic problem, I’ve fought with this type of indecision for years. Honestly, either Ruby or Python are going to be great for you, and JavaScript would be fine too! But it’s important to just stick with one for now and build whatever is satisfying to you.
I wish you luck and joy with it, programming is sometimes frustrating, but in the end very rewarding!
Making yogurt, going for a bike ride, fixing some knee pain from running by doing some yoga, calling friends.
What can Yoga do exactly about knee pain ? Do you have some resources to share about it ? I am curious because I have some for the same reason !
Not OP, but there are many pains caused by one half of a muscle pair being too short (typically caused by not stretching it out often enough).
This results in misalignment, which means some force gets transmitted through stabilisation muscles instead of main muscles, which strains them quickly.
Yoga helps those pains by including whole body stretching, lengthening muscles so they can rest in an aligned pose.
That said, any exercise can also exacerbate these problems - if you load up an area that’s not able to hold alignment, you will get injured pretty quickly. Large yoga classes are not conducive to avoiding this.
Today I learned, thank you :)
That’s the million dollar question, and @danielrheath summarised it very well!
Basically I’m trying to be as gentle with my body as possible while still exercising. My experience from climbing taught me that to properly heal something like tendinosis/tendonitis I need to keep the affected bodyparts active while incorporating a stretching routine after exertion. I stopped running for years, and nothing at all healed, it just stayed the same :)
Yoga just gives you great end-to-end routines, so I don’t have to piece together something from different exercises. I just did this one for example: https://youtu.be/nzCMptGGZt8.
But as Daniel said, I would definitely be aware of the limits of your body. If you try to “compete” with the girls in your class that have flexible bone structures, you’re going to get hurt. I prefer to do it alone for that reason.
Last note: all that self study, getting to know your body, and trying out what works for you is really important. BUT, if you have the chance (and money) to see a professional you should definitely also use that option. Especially if your pain persists.
Thanks for the tips: I experienced the same problem when climbing so I will definitely try to strech (gently) more often; starting tomorrow morning !
Hell yeah, fixing yourself and learning how to practice your sport(s) more sustainably is the best 💪
In case you’re mostly bouldering I can also recommend doing more sport climbing for a while!
I’ll be grinding on LeetCode for a bit, playing Animal Crossing and checking out some free Coursera courses!
Preparing to my new job at Google :)
Learning some Go, by delving into the code for AVA.
My last 400 push-ups!
Also, I’ve revised my approach to implementing a Content-Security Policy in Yesod websites, and I’ve written most of a middleware for it which can just be dropped into any existing Yesod site. With my revised approach, I’ll be able to use different CSPs on different pages by composing directives where they’re needed. I hope to finish that up this weekend, and I’ll be super happy if I manage to add some Hedgehog tests in that project.
Hopefully finishing Pillars of Eternity :)
And perhaps implementing pauses for my CLI work tracker.
Reading, writing, waiting.
Taxes! Sigh…
Some hacking on Remits. Making a DB is about being in it for the long haul, so my updates here might get a little repetitive.
I do plan to carve out most of Saturday to use the Remits Go client that /u/volgorean made to build some small group mini games on http://group.games which I just grabbed. Mostly it’s to have little coop games to play with 2-10 of my remote team during little 10 min breaks here and there. It’ll be good to actually build something ontop of Remits to get a feel for the experience and to make sure we’re going down the right track.
btw, if anyone has ideas for silly little group games I’d love to hear them.
The first one I’m building is co-op sudoku, where you get a point for filling in a square, but lose one for filling in the square incorrectly. At the end whoever has the highest points wins, but also the team has finished a sudoku.
I’d be interested in making monopoly on top of it! Much trickier to model, though.
Weather was lovely today, so I moved the garden furniture out from the spare bedroom (where they’ve been spending the winter) and enjoyed some sun. I plan on playing board games with my family and experimenting with my new EH Pitch Fork guitar pedal that arrived 3 days ago; we currently quarantine mail for 72+ hours.
Rewriting my secure boot tooling as I discovered
sbkeysyncfromsbsigntoolshas functionality for live key enrollment. I did some experimentation with efi-roller which I have been using personally for a while. But it’s a bit ugly and uses theefitoolsutilities, thus starting a little bit from scratch.The goal is to try aid in key rotation and management and try bind the utilities
sbsigntoolsprovide together into a easier interface for signing EFI binaries.Just finished with a contract at a client’s and I have to wait until the 20th for the next one to start, so I guess I’ll be sleeping a lot and finally living the quarantine life to the fullest for a week.
I spend some time to connect my lab LAN back to dn42. My lab LAN router is an old TP-Link WR841 which connects to our home network using regular Wi-Fi. I get around 70 MBit/s which is enough.
I love tinkering with networking stuff.
Sleeping and playing final fantasy vii.
New ps4 game; long bike ride with a pal; hike further on a trail than last time; finally starting that clojure project.
Aaand getting my shit together and coming up with a system for reading books, both in choosing from a queue and the act of reading. My intent is to make reading more interactive: note taking, chapter/book summaries, and criteria for sticking with a book or putting it down. (Good interview with P. Collison on Econtalk where he covers how he values his time and how to qualify if a book is worth it.)
Current two books:
Godot Wild Jam :)
Writing an essay on Artificial Intelligence that I’ve been putting off writing for a while. It’s just an overview using a new approach, with the conclusion being a much better Turing Test.
While I am extremely impressed with a lot of the cool things we’re doing with AI, I feel that in a lot of ways we’re lying to ourselves about what we’re actually accomplishing. Perhaps a bit of a reset and refocus on the AGI goal might help some.
In a glorious yak shave last night, I decided to commandeer a misused shelf in my office and turn it into a Raspberry Pi “rack”, but I need to get some Ethernet to it, first. That linked Twitter thread details some of the hijinks, but it ended with me needing to be outside in now freezing weather to test two exterior Ethernet runs.
So, I’m going to get that connectivity working and figure out something to do with my few idle Pis. I’m already running Pi.hole, HomeAssistant, Transmission, and some other inconsequential things on a more powerful NAS or other Pis. Suggestions welcome.
Sewing masks! Family, friends, elderly people and even nurses can’t find surgical masks around where I live.
I’m also trying to hack something in C with OpenSSL or LibreSSL or libtls but it’s… complicated. OpenSSL/LibreSSL API is horrible, libtls API is really nice but it doesn’t work with OpenSSL out of the box… I actually tried to tweak libtls in order to link it with OpenSSL, the problem is that libtls uses a few things specific to LibreSSL that don’t exist in OpenSSL. I should think about this a bit more and consider other alternatives. I’ll also try to read source code in existing C programs that use TLS.
Dark Souls 3 run has begun Wednesday, so more of that.
Doing more x86_64.
Making lemon cake bread thing Saturday. :)
Happy Weekend everyone!
On a reading streak.
I don’t know for sure… I’ve been going a bit stir-crazy lately and I have a ton of project ideas but can’t seem to focus on any of them…
Who knows, maybe I’ll get to one of them, maybe none of them.
Relaxing, poking at my inbox, and starting on taxes.
wasting time developing braindead, a brainfsck compiler/interpreter :)
It’s my sons 7th birthday, so we’re trying a video conference birthday party thing. Not sure how it’ll work out, but we got to try something 🤷♂️.
Otherwise we have a small hobby farm, so there’s plenty of spring chores to do. I’ve got a couple of small tractors that need fixes but tbh honest I find fixing mechanical stuff way harder than fixing software so it’s a long process with that sort of stuff
Finally I’m trying to get an update Crystal port into the OBSD tree before if freezes 😅
I’ve started migrating my website from Jekyll to Zola and adding Netlify CMS to make content authoring easier when not on my computer.
Managed to recreate most of the functionality I wanted today but still have some to go to make the static site more “dynamic”.
Spending time with immediate family for Easter.
Playing around with my experimental language. Specifically I’m still investigating different concurrency models. I want complete concurrent safety with a simple API surface; unsurprisingly, this is quite difficult to achieve. Actors seem like the front-runner, but I don’t like many of the options for returning values (pass return actor in as a parameter, or future-style).
Committing to a university for my undergrad, and compartmentalizing various support stuff I’ve written for my FIRST Robotics Competition team as a JITPack library.
I still can’t believe I was suckered into writing Java.
Fighting with Gitlab CI to skip jobs based on results of previous jobs.
Building a practice k8s cluster out of a couple of i5 ThinkCentre’s I picked up off ebay.