Bookmarked that shit so fuckin’ hard.

Curl.

Check your spam folder. I don’t know that I’ve ever not received an email I was supposed to have received and found that the spam folder was actually the issue. But it’s still a good idea to check it in case that’s the whole issue.

Hey thank you! I’m glad to hear some interest in it. I’ve definitely got ideas as far as how I’d like to see it improve moving forward (some syntactic sugar, more sophisticated ways of drawing “people”/creatures/skeletons/etc, maybe vector graphics output support – no project is ever really done, you know.) I’m on another project at the moment, but if it got enough interest, I’d probably be inclined to put more work into it.

I don’t have a TTRPG campaign running right now (which is what I wrote it for), so I’m not “eating my own dog food” very much with that particular project. But I would love to do more with it. Only reason I’m not already is because I’ve got so many other projects I want to work on. Heh.

The main project I’m working on lately has been that 3D game assets DSL that I mentioned later in my post. It’s probably quite a bit more ambitious than codecomic (it’s actually Turing complete which definitely adds to the challenge), but I do see a point approaching where it’s feature-complete enough to at least publish an alpha version. It also definitely needs a lot more code comments/documentation before I publish. Probably still months away, but it feels a lot closer than it did last week. Heh.

Anyway, thanks again for the complement!

Cura’s a fantastic slicer, but kindof a terrible program. They gave up on ARM support a while ago. And their dependency situation is majorly out of control. To the point that Gentoo has literally given up on supporting it and maintaining a working package.

Here’s my GitLab. None of it’s “active” really. I’m the only contributor to most things I have on GitLab. At least some of the things there, if they started getting attention and interest, I might very likely make them active. But for now, they’re just out there and may or may not receive further updates. Though I’m working on other projects I specifically intend to publish as FOSS in the future.

• Simple-CSS-Shrinker was made for a web-based game I wrote back in the day. I ought to dust that game off and publish it.
• JeSter, the JS tester. A really simple JS unit testing framework that runs in a browser and doesn’t require Node or V8 or anything. Made in service to the same game I mentioned in the previous item.
• pystocking was basically in service of hydrogen_proxy
• hydrogen_proxy is a “scriptable HTTP proxy” written in Python. Definitely intended for privacy kind of applications. But it’s kinda slow. I have in the back of my mind to rewrite it in Go, but it’s not high on my priority list. (I’m honestly mulling the idea of quitting the use of browsers all together if I can wrangle a way to do that that doesn’t involve switching to a bunch of proprietary software. The main browsers are bullshit these days.)
• GoVTT was written because I wanted to play a TTRPG with friends remotely. It’s a web-based virtual tabletop application that you can self-host. I may some day offer hosting for it. (Like, if you want to use it but don’t want to be bothered to go through the hassle of hosting it yourself, maybe I’ll offer to host it for a small fee.) No guarantees, though, except that it’ll always be FOSS and it’ll always be an option to self-host.
• codecomic is a domain-specific language for making simple webcomics or story boards. I made it because I wanted to be able to include webcomics/story boards in my game mastering notes, which are managed with a system that I should also publish as FOSS.

My main side-projects right now that I haven’t published yet are:

• A domain-specific language for building 3d game assets. Roughly speaking, FreeCAD is to OpenSCAD as Blender is to what I’m currently working on building. (It’s in the early stages right now. I intend for it to be able to do modeling, rigging, animations, textures, normals, etc. All in the DSL’s syntax. I’m making progress, but of course that project is ridiculously ambitious. We’ll see where it is in a year.)
• A framework for rapidly prototyping 3d-printable mechanical keyboards. (Also pretty ridiculously ambitious.) The image below is a sneak peak at the first keyboard I’m intending to build with it. Some day.

On the flip side, you’ve probably met someone who has saved a person’s life.

Lazy.

If you’re a software engineer, memorizing an ASCII table (particularly the hex numbers of each character code) is definitely helpful. If for no other reason than so that you can read things that are randomly written in binary without having to consult a table.

Something not really otherwise terribly useful that nonetheless helped me keep my sanity: learn how to convert to base64 in your head. At work, we had really boring 8-hours-a-day training for a couple of weeks. To pass the time, I came up with random strings to base64 encode in my head. “Hat is 48 61 7a. The first six bits are 010010 which in base64 is an S. The next six bits would be 000110 which in base64 is G.” Etc. I’d write down the base64 strings character by character as I derived them and then check my results for errors when I got back to my desk.

How to convert various units of measurement. (Including between imperial and metric.)

2.54 centimeters in an inch. Degrees Fahrenheit is nine fifths of degrees Celsius plus 32. Stuff like that.

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Star Trek: Voyager. I was raised on that shit. Not objectively the “best” Star Trek. (Far from the worst, though.) But it’s the one that’s most nostalgic and, indeed, “cozy” for me.

Crocheting gloves for rancors.

5-MTHF.

Okay so Emperor Shaddam gave the fifedom of Arrakis to House Atraides after… okay so the houses all make up the Landsraad which was established right after the Butlerian Jih- Okay see the Butlerian Jihad was a war waged between the humans and the thinking machines and the titons- Ok, but before that humans were enslaved by…

That sounds like exactly the sort of thing therapy is for. I’m no kind of expert, but it’s very likely there’s a lot of deeper things keeping you from developing achieving the kind of skills you’re wanting. And it sounds very much like it’s a problem in your life that’s causing you a lot of anxiety and pain. I think if there’s any way you can do talk therapy, that’s the place to start.

Wow. Huge topic. And it depends on a ton of things. And I definitely don’t feel like I’ve got it all figured out myself.

If you’re young and just for the first time having to manage your own affairs rather than depend on parents to help with that, then self-help kind of stuff might well be a fine place to start. (Just avoid Jordan Peterson.) If you’re older and feel like you’ve had the time needed to develop those skills and still don’t have them, it’s likely there’s something deeper going on that might benefit from therapy.

I personally cared for my ailing grandmother for a long time. And that shit’s hard work, and takes a lot of time. In the process, I let a lot of things go by the wayside like yardwork, home repair, and organization. Now that she has passed, I find myself with a lot of remedial work to catch up on. I feel like I’m making progress. It’s frustrating and slow, but it is progressing and that’s the important part.

Send help.

Every time you see a Grimreaper thread, I want you all to remember…

I can’t imagine you’re the only one in this situation. If I were in your shoes, I’d search for similar stories online and see if I could get a sense of how friendly the company is to swapping OSs. For some companies, changing the OS is a complete deal breaker. Other companies are pretty willing to assume the issue was indeed strictly hardware and had nothing to do with changing the OS, and thus will go ahead and do the repair.

If you find that company is more like the former, install Windows. If not, just start the warranty repair process.