You’re in a foreign country, and you’ve been mugged1, completely — you’ve got the clothes on your back, and nothing more. Maybe you beg a phone call from someone to get in touch with a loved one to wire you some money. You’ve now got enough to buy a basic phone and use wifi to access Dropbox or Google to get at important papers, password manager data files, credit card numbers to set up contactless/mobile pay, etc.
I love me a typewriter. They’re gorgeous, mechanical works of art. Sadly, they’re loud, and I’m just not as fast on them as a keyboard. So, I made a “Writer Deck,” a subspecies of cyberdeck, the science-fiction-spawned concept of a small, self contained compute device that’s hyper-portable and often kept on one’s person. Writer decks deemphasize general computing and instead focus on distraction-free systems optimized for focused writing and composing. I’ve been writing some more fiction lately, and I’m an easily distractable man (I mean, c’mon, it’s the internet – it’s awesome!). So I made myself one:
ohai. Been a minute. The brain hasn’t been braining very well lately from a health perspective but we ball.
I’ll do a more full post on it sometime soon, but I’ve been having fun with a Docker-contained VNC honeypot. @Xtrato did something similar but I wanted something that I could blow away easily and that was slightly (as barely as Docker is) more isolated. It’s been a ton of fun watching randos drift through, and it got more fun when I put an nvidia-smi executable that indicates that I have 3xP100s attached to the system hehe. I get about ten connections a day, mostly connect-then-drop, but have seen:
And boy that came out well 😍😍😍
Conway’s Game of Life LED matrix with frame
TL;DR No.
I swore Narrator on Windows XP was saying “pothole,” as in “pothole start” and “pothole menu end” – maybe even something closer to “pothole-p” with a plosive at the end. I finally got fedup and cracked open an XP VM and ResHacker, and sure enough, it’s saying “popup” with the world’s worst diction.
What I heard:
Reality/Proof:
Always wanted to build one of these and now I have!
This is a more frenetic color-demo mode, but my goodness I love it so much. The video doesn’t do the colors justice; they’re so vibrant. Sadly my phone struggles with the refresh rate of the board, but there’s no tearing in person.
This weekend I set out to build a 64x64 LED matrix version of Conway’s Game of Life. For compute’s sake, the board would be wrap-around i.e. on a torus. I wanted each set of generations to run for as long as possible until stagnancy and reset, so I wrote an analysis script to determine what alive-percentage for a random fill would be optimal to keep the game going as long as possible.
I scoured the web for an easy-run RFC865 Cookie/QotD server that I could throw into my Docker host and serve a proper DHCP Option 8 on my home network, but none existed so I vibe coded one. Now, my home network can vibe out like it’s 1983.
Open source as always, I wrote a version that spits out a generic 8-ball fortune (Outlook good, My sources say no, etc.) as well as one that does a classic cowsay | fortune.
Well, turns out this design (an ouroboros twisted to form a Möbius loop, interlocked with two others into Borromean Rings) doesn’t really exist on the internet as far as I can tell. I can find ouroboros as Möbius loop, and I can find ouroboros arranged as Borromean rings, but not all three. For a project I’m doing, I commissioned some!
I didn’t end up using them for what I was planning to, but I am now the rightsholder (as far as I can tell from Fiverr’s ToS? including a commercial add-on where applicable?), so I’m putting them on the web under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 license – feel free to use as long as you credit where you got it (me, although I only claim to be the rightsholder and not the original artist) and don’t use it for commercial purposes. Beyond that, what you do with it is your business.
Help I’ve fallen down a well [and it’s filled with regular solids].
Couldn’t shake it out of my mind so I made another spinner, this time with an icosahedron. Haven’t printed it yet but my shipment of 100 bearings just got in so it’s time to warm the printer up.
Check it out again on Thingiverse.
