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.
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.
Last time I wrote about RuneScape, I described how I play the game without really playing it at all.
But what if I like, did want to actually look at the game I’m playing?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.