Apparently it’s been a few years since I last yelled into the void about what laptop I use. Well, in that time, a lot has changed. First off, I gave my prized collection of x230 ThinkPads (and a few others) to my sisters, nieces, and nephews. Apparently they’re all broken at this point and I’m not allowed to have them back for repairs. Because of this, I got myself an x250, which was my main laptop for about two years before I gave it to my mother-in-law.
Microsoft Teams allows you to message a channel by sending an email to
a certain address. This is great unless you are at a corporation that
appends some boilerplate to all outgoing emails. Then it is frustrating
and sad.
I haven’t really worked on anything I felt was worth posting here, but I
really don’t want to have gone an entire half year with no blog post. So, I
figured I’d do a write-up of everything I have done since I last posted,
mostly with the intent of it being a reminder that I actually did stuff.
My internet woes will be solved, be it by moving to a different house, by Starlink, or by getting an ISP to actually service an area. But that doesn’t solve the internet problem. Motivation Right now an insane number of people in the world, even in America, even in a high tech state like California, do not have broadband internet. More importantly, throwing money at ISPs does not yield meaningful results.
Eleven days ago I wrote about the great digital divide. Today, I rant about the cost of bridging that divide. I’ve done a fair bit to try to secure better internet up here. For one, I bugged Spectrum, the big ISP around here, into giving me a quote on a service install. A lot more on that later. I also got a Visible SIM card, giving us a three-tiered solution for the time being.
Oh, Hello Deborah, Simone, the internet. Speaking of the internet, I recently moved to Northern California - specifically Shasta County, where more than 40,000 people, myself included, lack broadband internet. Now, I currently work as a Software Engineer, so having the internet is very important for me to work - here’s how that’s going. I guess I should begin by describing what internet we do have. Currently, the house I’m living in is connected to TDS DSL, at a blistering megabit or so download, and a blazing 300 kilobits per second upload.
I’ve posted a few times now about RuneScape, and since recently I’ve been falling behind on my GitHub commits, I figured I’d do it again. Backstory Shortly after deciding to make RuneScape 2 in 3D, I started to message my good friend a3qz some thoughts on how one could do fair gambling in the game Old School RuneScape. You see, ever since I was a kid, people would gamble in the game.
GitHub Copilot is a very cool idea, and at the very least will be very fun to play around with.
But there’re definitely some things to be concerned about.
Since I was a medium-sized child, I’ve enjoyed playing the MMO RuneScape. It is by far the game I’ve spent the most time playing, and, well, despite that, I’m not very far in the game at all. I started sometime in 2006 and, being that the internet hadn’t even been invented yet, I was constantly lost. Even though the game had only been around for ~5 years, it was still absolutely massive.
Hello, this is the page on the internet where there are a few random bookmarklets that are likely only useful for me, Jeffrey. However, on the off chance they are useful to anyone else, they are provided here, free of charge! Lichessify - the first bookmarklet I ever made, it converts a Chess.com analysis page into a lichess analysis page. I blogged about it here. CloudLab URLs - this one copies to your clipboard all of the URLs to a node on CloudLab.
Did you actually think I was going to rickroll you lol? setTimeout(function(){ window.location = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ";}, 10000);
Back when I did my Model M thingy with CircuitPython, I encountered a lot of difficulties doing I/O. For one, the I/O speed was much too slow for bit-banging anything in Python. Now, you could write some C and call it from Python, but that defeats the benefit of working with Python to begin with. Additionally, hardware peripherals seemed to be destined to be behind in Python. I doubt this will ever change, but a certain recent product seems to offer a bizarre best-of-all-worlds.
I created this page to post random things that I learned that I figure I should share. The things I learn about that I post here can be any range of things, but I will try to keep it technical and avoid posting things like “TIL that the Washington Redskins are not from the state Washington.” The posted TILs will also not necessarily be things that aren’t widely known - they will only be things that I did not know before the date I added them.
I haven’t really worked on anything I felt was worth posting here, but I
really don’t want to have gone an entire year with no blog post. So, I
figured I’d do a write-up of everything I have done since the world ended,
mostly with the intent of it being a reminder that I actually did stuff.
Getting started with Open Source contributions can be a daunting task, but there are many projects
that are just waiting for contributors to help out with, regardless of skill level.
As I mentioned in my post about my mental health, I am using an X230 as my personal daily driver. I have yet to go completely crazy and swap the keyboard for an X220 keyboard (which I’m actually not sure I’d want to do - I like both keyboards and can’t say for certain which I like more), nor have I upgraded the display to either an IPS 12” or 13” panel (which I am more keen on doing when I have the money).
This story is going to seem like it is going nowhere, but trust me, it only kind of goes nowhere. Last year, someone asked me for advice on a pair of headphones for under $50, so I started watching random collections of tech stuff under $50. This led me to randomfrankp. After finding out that he was an Eagles fan, I decided to keep watching his videos, and eventually I saw the single best looking computer mouse of all time.
I have gone completely insane. Within the month of May, I have ordered four ThinkPads. X201 Tablet My first purchase was an X201 Tablet, with an i7-640LM, and 4GB of RAM. It came with a battery and a charger, but no storage. I slapped in a 120GB SSD with Arch Linux, and all was well. I also spent $18 on a new pen for it. The laptop itself was $57 off eBay.
To be honest, I haven’t posted in a while, and this is really just an excuse for me to do so. Anyways, I’ll just briefly be talking about my experience with Hacktoberfest this year. If you’re not familiar with Hacktoberfest, you can read more about it here. I’ll admit that I shamefully only did the minimum 5 pull requests, but I’ve had a very busy month. Hopefully I will do better for Christmas, when I should have more free time.
Back when I did my arcade machine, I encountered two pretty big problems. First of all, writing the code to mimick a USB keyboard was not straightforward at all, and I resorted to copying some sample code and modifying it. But I didn’t understand the sample code at all. I know the TI boards are probably aimed at a more hardcode audience, one that wants to have as much control over the hardware as possibl, and while I usually love that sort of thing, there are days where I want to just write simple code.
My last semester is over, which is pretty sad. I was pretty busy for most of it, so this is actually my very first blog post all semester; I didn’t even do a semester in review post for last semester, other than the “What I’ve Been Up To” post. I did finally finish my GameCube adapter for the front of my computer, though. So, I took A History of Computing, Ethics, CSE Service Projects, and Introduction to Droid Building, and I did undergraduate research.
This semester has definitely been my busiest. I know there are a few projects that I started and haven’t had any updates
on for a while now, so I figured I’d make a general update post.
I’m totally doing that GameCube controller adapter in my 5.25” drive bay thing. I’m pretty close to done
with the 3D model, and I am currently looking into 3D printing it. I also got some COTS
parts to help me. I fully expect to be done this soon, like, this week soon.
I haven’t posted in a little while, and thought an update was due, so today
I am posting two blog posts with similar content. This post will be
about something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now - build my own desktop.
Many people build their own PCs. Many of them do it because it can be cheaper,
and many do it to have something completely custom for themselves. For me,
it was a little of A, and a little of B. Despite having chosen the
parts myself, there is a chance someone has a build just like mine - and
if you only go by appearances, my build isn’t that unique. I have to fix that.
Another semester is over, one that happened to be my first semester where I was allowed to take only Computer Science courses. So, I took Paradigms, Operating System Principles, CSE Service Projects, Hackers of the Bazaar, and Mobile Computing, and I did undergraduate research. The projects in Operating System Principles were all fairly straightforward, but the last one involved writing a file system of sorts which was cool, but there was no room to do what I wanted, so I will only discuss the other courses.