May 29th, 2017

* I read a few old stories I made and published on a blog I don't use anymore.
  They weren't that bad, considering I was around five when I wrote them.

* I fixed a couple of typos in a blog post I made a few days earlier. Honestly
  I don't know how I managed to make them, but I'm guessing it has something
  to do with me using a monospace-based text editor; maybe typos stand out
  less in it.

* I did a section on electromagnetic waves (and the electromagnetic spectrum)
  in my physical science course. I don't feel like the course teaches it very
  well; they never seem to give explanations on WHY anything works the way it
  does. I guess since this is essentially an introductory course, I'm not
  really supposed to expect much of that, but.. it'd be more interesting if
  they explained why things work the way they do at least a little, you know?

  While doing that I also wrote a few paragraphs on the math behind some
  behaviour of waves; I think that it'll be helpful, considering I've been
  having a bit of trouble totally understanding the actual logic behind how
  waves work.

  Also, the questions for my science always feel a bit.. stupid? They're
  pretty much always a matter of "can you remember all the facts we threw at
  you in the lecture?" or "did you take enough notes? - did you catch that
  one detail?". Of the five questions on the section, three of them were just
  "which is true?" questions on the positioning of different types of waves
  on the EM spectrum.

  (I mentioned that I'm not really satisfied with what they teach, right?
  Like, they didn't even explain what the difference between electromagnetic
  and non-electromagnetic waves are.. just that some waves fall on the EM
  spectrum, and some don't, and that the ones that do are EM waves.)

* I watched a video on a jailbreak for Super Mario World:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixu8tn__91E

  It's a bit crazy to think that people are still discovering incredible bugs
  and tricks for ancient games like SMW.

* djdolphin made this crazy little program that uploads scripts to a Scratch
  site. I've GOT to do something with this; and I have a bit of an idea..
  https://gist.github.com/djsrv/36a04832a0fa0dffad86f4cb62ef33af

* I looked at and discussed my grandparents' photos of Italy and places
  within. The town-on-a-boat stood out pretty gigantically (ha, ha). It was
  also interesting to look at particularly old buildings, like the
  Colosseum and the Pantheon; people seemed to care a lot more about
  designing places that look incredible than they do now.

* I worked on my Raspberry Pi music player a bit. That included improving
  the reliability of the iTunes/`python3 -m http.server` crawler; there
  shouldn't be any more missing albums or artists. I also added a few options
  to the command line interface for it; you can now keep and ignore specific
  groups. It's not technically more powerful than iTunes itself, but I'd say
  it's a lot more comparable, now, and potentially easier to use.

* I worked on my Scratch mod, Scrap, for a while, and implemented a couple of
  new (and old) ideas. I also made a "spread" custom block in it; it takes the
  values in a list and puts them into a set of variables. (For example, you
  could spread the list [Joe, Apple] into the variables "name,food" and their
  values would be set to name = Joe, food = Apple.)

* I watched "time mop" by bill wurtz:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DofhF-2sg1o

  I wonder what makes the part where it goes past zero so funny? Maybe it's
  just the fact that it's doing something so *obviously* intuitively right
  ("it's already going down, why stop at zero?") but also entirely unexpected
  (countdowns usually do stop at zero), combined with the happy, fun music in
  the background.