Thursday, Jun 8, 2023
Source lives here. Play it here.
In a joint effort, Aliasing and myself have created a novel top-down action rogue-lite for the 2023 Spring Lisp Game Jam. Aliasing is an experienced game dev so in a way, I was along for the ride. Still, I managed to contribute some game mechanics, features, unit testing, CI/CD that deploys to super-rogue.workinprogress.top on every commit. This was a fun devops exercise for me - Aliasing mentioned to me that I helped keep him on track with the addition of automated testing and per-commit deploys to a website (it makes it easy to play-test pull requests).
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Thursday, May 18, 2023
I’ve been operating Sillypaste (source code) - a simple Django pastebin created for dogfooding. In this post I hope to capture some of the painpoints of working with Django, Python, Heroku, and the migration to fly.io.
Ever since Heroku sold its soul to SalesForce its been on the decline. Customer service is worse than ever, giving wonderful canned responses to most questions. It used to be free to host Sillypaste on heroku, now is a $17/mo ordeal.
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Monday, Feb 6, 2023
Figure 1: your computer on low memory
TL;DR: yes. You can throw more swap at most processes and it’ll eventually finish… Eventually.
Last year I warranty-ed a Dell XPS 13 with 32 GiB of RAM, all specced out. Sidenote: I wouldn’t recommend the Dell XPS 13, at least in 4K. The laptop gets anywhere from 1-3 hours of real world usage and gets hot as most Macbooks. The Dell XPS 13 4K is not a viable product.
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Monday, Jan 9, 2023
Here’s a small outline of how I validate used computers as “usable” and “in working condition”. My hope is these steps help computer users spot “lemons” - machines that shouldn’t be depended on because they don’t work all the time.
Basics Before stress testing or examining SMART data, consider the following checklist:
Turn it on and ensure you can access the firmware settings/BIOS. F2 and Delete seem like the most common keys.
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Wednesday, Jul 27, 2022
For the Lang Party Summer 2022, I wrote a BASIC interpreter. It took a bit of mental gymnastics and learning on my part. In this post I hope to share some of the experience in implementing this interpreter. For the curious, the code lives on GitHub.
Figure 1: A TinyBASIC session in Cool Retro Term
Try it out! Want to try it out? Run raco pkg install --auto tinybasic to install it.
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Wednesday, Jun 8, 2022
Recently I have begun migrating my workstation and laptop from Gentoo to NixOS. There are a great deal of tradeoffs between the two operating systems. Before going into the details, consider where I’m coming from and why I moved away from Gentoo below.
Why was I running Gentoo on workstations?? This is my heuristic for a good operating system:
The Distro must provide facility to modify system packages and maintain their modifications in sync with the upstream distro.
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Monday, Feb 7, 2022
Awhile back I found a stack of audio CDs I wished to digitize. It’s a bit of work to do the following steps quickly and while doing other more cerebral work:
Open the disc tray Insert the disc Wait a few seconds for the disc to be detected by the OS Kick off abcde to rip the CD. Repeat ad infinitum. The solution is to streamline the workflow:
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