December Adventure
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Day 25-31
Took a break for the end of the year and didn't post or work on anything. I drummed a bunch, ran and rock climbed a bunch and had a great time with family and friends.
This was a fun challenge, and I think with a more directed approach it would go even better. My plan with this was to go through a bunch of ideas that I had listed out and assigned to a day each, but most days I got distracted with something else that was more interesting. Frequently that was tinkering on this website, because it's sort of in progress and structured in a way that additions are straightforward.
Having said that, this was a successful adventure. All over the place in trying things, but there were some great days and great learning approaches.
- Day 05, I (kinda) made sand! (do lines with gravity count?)
- Day 10, throwing a bunch of creation together all in one night
- Day 15, fixing a button on a flannel
- Day 22, changing the css for that flannel pic panel usinc css I didn't know existed before then
- Day 24, rambling along as I try to solve an issue, effectively creating a blog post as I go
Many other days were nothing, but so many were something. Next year rather than start a dozen projects, I'll plan to have a couple ready for a focused adventure, but I'm very happy with how this years adventure went.
Day 24
Tried to make the Zoom In focus mode thing in Zed more like a focus mode than it currently is ( ideally by centering the text view within it, rather than left algining as it currently does.)
After much debugging I've made no real progress.
In addition I tried to use a printer, at my parents request. HP does not maintain MacOS drivers for their LaserJet, so off to the virtual machines I went.
Lima, which I already had installed did not work, it did not immediately pass through the usb devices and an draft PR suggested it wouldn't work easily so I moved on.
Off to UTM I went, with it's promising GUI and straightforward list of preconfigured vms. That preconfigured vm promised to complete it's download in 3.5 hours, likely due to our internet here, so I went back and found a smaller one that would be done in 10 minutes.
While waiting on that download, I reached out to a friend in search of alternative vm options. Unfortunately that options wasn't the move, but in the meantime we considered a usb over ssh to a remote pc I have running with a known working OS.
This was deemed a relatively bad idea and so has been put on the back burner for future projects.
By this point the pdf in question was also deemed a bad idea, as well as a decent portion of the crowd in eventual attendance had decided not to come over covid concerns. Needless to say the print was a no go... but the download had completed.
UTM booted up a debian image no problem, although attaching a shared drive between the operating systems did not work immediately. The reboot was less than graceful. After a reboot the shared directory worked, but the printers were still failing to show up.
Suggested usb sharing should be an option, however I can't seem to find it. Directly boothing through qemu may be an option, however at this point guests that could arrive had started, so it was time to give up entirely.
Additionally, writing down the process as it was occurring wasn't as much of a lift as I tend to think it to be. Not atht most of it is useful, but take this approach on a more practical problem and I could see it working out. Maybe tomorrow will be tagged posts, so I can support a
ramblefilter.
Day 23
Wrote a small, basic, lazy, innefficient parser for Vera in rust. Hoping tomorrow to make it run to some extent. Should probably run an existing implementation to understand how that's meant to work... but parsing it has helped understand how the language is supposed to work kinda.
Day 22
Travel day! And of course that means basicall nothing got done except one for the one flight.
But I did get the css working while waiting for my flight. @media queries
are kinda wack. They don't work inline so had to move the them to a separate
file. Also they can't use var()s in the query apparently? At least that wasn't
working for me. Maybe that's related to the lack of inline usage.
Below is the code, for your enjoyment:
.image_panel > p > img {
width: 90%;
margin-left: 5%;
margin-right: 5%;
filter: saturate(10%);
border-radius: 3%;
}
.image_panel {
display: flex;
justify-content: space-around;
}
@media (min-width: 32rem * 1.5) {
.image_panel {
margin-left: -20%;
margin-right: -20%;
}
}
Day 21
Nothing. And by nothing I mean nothing coding wise, since spent a good day with friends, and solid chunk of that was working on a D&D map for our campaign.
Day 20
Messed with a bit of css, incomplete change but committing anyways. See the image panel below, then see on a phone to see the problem.
Day 19
Tried messing with some music stuff, didn't make anything worth sharing, but did put chords in midi and hear them back.
Day 18
I learned how to rename a directory via the command line in linux:
mv old_name new_name
There is no way to actually do it. I've definitely googled this before but now it's also here.
The idea didn't even pan out. Giving up on it for the moment, but will revisit.
Tried adding raw md content to to the output of zola. Made some progress on understanding that maze, but not much in terms of adding on to it.
Day 17
Also nothing noteworthy, got distracted by a picture of a library.
Day 16
Didn't do anything technical. This is (partly) because I found a weird rust thing. More at 11 if I can reproduce it (so far, haven't).
Day 15
I fixed a button on the left sleeve of one of my flannels.
I've also been messing around with desaturating my devices. It feels a bit surreal to hold and look at a phone that is black & white. It also makes looking up from the phone feel like a bigger relief. Maybe that's my eyes straining and I shouldn't be doing that, or maybe it's making "real life" much brighter and colorful by comparison.
Applying that to the images here, it keeps the page feeling a bit lower energy which I think is the vibe I want.
Day 14
Small amount of Minecraft planning for a build there. Did it in tldraw (a much more competent tool than the side of my site). You can see some of the in game outlining as well, this is part of taking a step back before diving full on into a project.
Is this programming? Aren't we all programming? What is programming again?
The first result for me on searching programming was Computer Programming, which I guess is what we're focused on with this. Wikipedia at the time of writing (I know, reliable source, and who relies on definitions ever anyways? It's an overused way to start anything but stay with me) starts out that article with
By drawing in tldraw, I instructed the computer what to display, and it continued to do that. Those are instructions in a way, so that is programming as far as I can tell. Maybe it doesn't "do" anything, but it does, it tells the computer what to display.
In addition, if you look at how tldraw is stored, when downloaded, you'll see it's a json blob. Which is very convenient for scanning quickly once formatted.
You can see a list of every line that was drawn, where it was drawn, and all of the segments that make it up. This looks a lot to me like a list of instructions, that the computer executes to do things.
I doubt anyone reading this will really object, but I do think it's interesting that in this case the program is written in the tldraw editor, and executed in the tldraw editor. The code itself is still the internal json. This layer is small and not an issue, but it is on top of many other layers.
I suppose an operating system that was entirely tldraw would be a bit difficult to make work, so cutting out all the layers might not make the most sense, but I wonder how many layers we can get rid of? Is there a low level canvasing tool that's as easy to use?
PS. Left Minecraft open while doing writing ramble. Would recommend for unending background music if you have resources to spare. Based on an unscientific glance to activity monitor & htop it's title screen had comparable ram usage to an idle Spotify, but fewer extra service running taking up ram.
Day 13
Basically nothing today, D&D immediately after work which lasted until midnight. I'm calling that a good excuse to have nothing to show, and in a way I contributed a small part to a story with friends, which is making something.
Day 12
Started back up on a small little song tracker for spotify. It currently has an issue around refreshing tokens which is a pain, but I'll keep tinkering on it.
I think that with a small api endpoint will be the target for my larger scale proxy plans:
+--------------tailnet----------+
| |
+----linode vm----+ |
boats ------+----> proxy +---> Local PC |
+-----------------+ |
| |
+-------------------------------+
This is all tentative. After typing that all up I've realized it may be simpler to use Val Town or similar, but this would allow more granular forwarding to my local setup as well. Tradeoffs still left to weigh.
Also fixed a small issue around styling code elements, the inline code styling
was conflicting with the code block styling (uses the same tag).
Day 11
Yesterday's work rolled over to today, so I'm counting it. It cost me sleep, and I really enjoyed working on it. Tomorrow something will be properly tinkered with.
Day 10
Spent the day watching the fog pass through, living with not just my head, but my whole being in the clouds.
Day 9
These days all kinda blur into one, and by that I of course mean that I did very
little this weekend, so am making up for it doing anything at all today.
Drafted up some thoughts, on Cat's Cradle. I think there's more I could do with it, so waiting to post until I can think a bit more on it.
So I guess today I wrote some markdown code.
Day 8
Finished Cat's Cradle but no time for anything else. (Had important board games to lose at)
Day 7
Read a bit more of Cat's Cradle, otherwise busy trying bad beer and good seltzer.
Day 6
Today I did two (2) noteworthy things to my adventure.
-
I read Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut for an hour. I'll finish it soon and have more thoughts, but it's been good so far.
-
I fried ground turkey in a carbon steel pan for the first time.
Firstly, it heated up way faster than expected, and to higher temperatures than my previous pan (a too big, never used T-Fal, as the interim for a reasonably sized over used T-Fal). I love that efficiency of this new pan but was not prepared for it. Butter, glue-sticked on was cooking fast. Throwing garlic powder for seasoning put it over the edge, and the contents were burnt instantly.
Luckily like it's quick heating, it also cooled quickly. Scraped off the garlic remains, Set it to the side, a few minutes later it had dropped in temperature and was back on the now lowered burner.
At this now reasonable temperature the butter bubbled, the garlic sizzled, and the pepper permeated. It was ready. The ground turkey was added without issue, and fried fine.
The pasta, broccoli, and sauces were done as usual (lazily, but effectively), the dish was piled together, cheesed up and tossed in the toaster to top it off. Ate it up too fast, forgot to take a picture to share. I'll consider do a recipe write up in the future if there's interest.
The cleaning was odd but alright. No soap, like a cast iron, but some stuff was stuck on through scraping it I found the current seasoning of this pan seems a bit... fragile. The rough side of my sponge (new sponge no soap (although apparently that's not actually the end of the world)) was enough to leave some marks of apparent abrasion on the pan.
After getting the gunk off I dried it, heated it up and attempted at adding some vegetable oil layers to season it. I have no idea if this worked. I have a feeling it wasn't hot enough.
We'll see tomorrow after eggs for breakfast.
Day 5
I added gravity to the drawing bits. Take a note to off to either side, enable gravity, and watch it all fall down.
In addition you'll see it piles up at the bottom! It's sand! Sorta!
This is jankily implemented on top of the drawing. It's applying gravity to each of the points in each line, and then continuing to draw the lines, which leads to some oddities in the piling up. I'll probably take some steps to improve it over the month.
Day 4
And now for something entirely different. I've listened in on some of the flok setup at https://todepond.cool/flok, but haven't gotten too involved. This is mostly down to not having any idea what anything is doing when looking at it, and not wanting to break things. But this is nothing that couldn't be fixed with a bit of practice, so I copied some starter code from there to strudel.cc and went to tinkering.
window.foo="<A3:minor C4:major [D3:lydian D4:mixolydian]>/3"
$: n("1 5 9 11")
.s("sawtooth")
.lpf(300)
.scale(foo)
.room(3)
$: n("3 [1 3 5 7]")
.iter(4)
.s("piano")
.delay(2)
.lpf(300)
.scale(foo)
.room(3)
$: n("<[1 3 5 9] 3 [1 3 5 7] 3>*2")
.s("square")
.lpf(300)
.hpf(900)
.scale(foo)
.room(3).decay("<.1 .2 .3 .4>").sustain(1)
This is the last state of it. It's not "good". But it, and more importantly strudel concept is interesting, especially when extended to the flok system. Sounds better while being tinkered with, so hopefully I'll be around as more of those collab sessions occur.
Day 3
- Fixed the rss feed
- Stylized the button below
- Set the ips to be displayed in the top right
- Split the tracking rate from the frame rate, probably to the detrimetn of the browser experience. Did find out that frame rate was running the loop around 15 times faster.
- added some easter eggs to the site that I'll for sure forget and be confused by some day.
- Ran of of time to make a nicer write up
Day 2
Super simple ips rate (iterations per second), currently being logged to the
console. I've added draw to this page so it can be viewed here, so click to
the side to draw whatever you want. It won't persist so screenshot if it's
something good.
But to see the debugging, click below and open the console.
Unfortunately in doing this I was reminded that the update rate is tied directly to the frame request rate. It also at this point, time to put away the laptops on the flight, so my time was up. Eventually this will be useful, but for now it is merely noteworthy.
Day 1
The Technical
Setup this post, posted the monthly now().
The Technically Counts
Drummed for an hour. I'm bad... but not getting worse. What's more adventurous than loud noises and trying to do things in a consistently pleasant way. Could also describe some of my programming that way.
Note:
Yes I'm counting drumming as part of this. It will probably not be the weirdest thing I count, but it won't all be non programming. Goal here is to do things.