May 31st, 2017

* I wrote a bit on an idea to make Grandia III have competitive battles.
  I don't actually know how, though, and probably nobody on that subreddit
  does either, but whatever. The idea's still there.
  https://www.reddit.com/comments/6een02/

  Update, half a minute after it was posted - somebody upvoted. Har har.
  Internet points don't matter, but interest in your idea kind of does.
  (Especially when it's something a bit crazy, like this)

  Update, a few hours later: people downvoted. Oh well. Probably they made
  some sort of "hacking the game rom??? wow, that means you must be illegally
  downloading it!!!!!!" connection. That's too bad, since it's not true. Too
  bad they didn't comment instead, so that I'd be able to respond to them, and
  maybe give them a better chance to appreciate my idea.

  Then again, it's Reddit; it's more likely that everybody has some other
  reason for downvoting that *should* be blatantly obvious to me but isn't.
  Such is the internet.

* I worked for an hour or so on actually getting that to work, but that
  meant setting up another Ubuntu server. Well, surprise, the server
  they wanted me to install is outdated, which made getting the packages
  needed practically impossible. Fun. I wonder if it's possible to use
  a more recent version of Ubuntu and still have things work properly?

* I did a bunch of algebra - particularly, I learned the basics of
  differences of squares, and factoring them.

* I watched Old, by Domics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUnobJp3eH0

* I read a few (relatively simple, review-like) pages on wave physics
  from the book Science 1001.

* I read an (adapted) article titled "Will Technology Make You
  Healthier?". It's relatively self-descriptive, but it did touch on
  less obvious subjects like the controversy around future possibilities.
  (Is it alright to take from a human embyro to help someone if, in the
  process, the embyro will be destroyed?)

* I watched "The Speed of Light is NOT About Light", by PBS Space Time:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msVuCEs8Ydo

  It generally explained how the speed of light really doesn't derive from the
  speed that light travels at (rather it's the reverse), but I didn't find that
  it explained HOW particularly well (essentially they said that the universal
  constant, which the speed of light is equivalent to, must have the value that
  it does because of various other universal rules; but they didn't really
  explain the math that leads to it actually having the value it does).

  Particular topics I'd like to know more of include how the Lorentz
  transformation works, the difference between that and the previously set
  system, what Maxwell's equations actually mean, and why they require a
  specific constant value for the universal constant.

* I improved the style for `<code>`s on my blog. I think code looks nicer now;
  hopefully other people do, too.

* I worked on my Raspberry Pi HTTP-based music player a bunch. For me, the
  person who programs it all, I split it into a bunch of different files; that
  was done over the course of a series of messy git commits and computer-swaps.
  I also made it so that the temporary song download now use actual tempfiles,
  rather than hidden files that are semi-automatically deleted by the play.js
  program - so now things are in general a lot cleaner. Before, pressing ^C
  wouldn't get rid of the WAV for the currently playing file (nor the WAV for
  the up-next song), so you'd end up with tons of leftover WAVs, quickly eating
  up hundreds of megabytes (two new files every time you run the player!).
  That's fixed now - *real* tempfiles, which I'm now using, are automatically
  deleted by the system!

* I made my music player use `util.promisify` for `fs` methods. So much for
  `mz/fs` being relevant.

* I read a short story about a kid who broke his leg and got it fixed, all
  without getting any donations or funding from family friends (or others),
  and his not-particularly-rich family didn't even have any financial stress,
  period. I won't spoil the trick - read it yourself!

  Okay, but seriously, it's kind of interesting to think about not having any
  sort of fund-raiser needed. I never really thought of the stress that must
  come, you know, financially, in places where healthcare isn't free. I guess
  it's kind of taken for granted until you've got experience with a place that
  doesn't have free healthcare.

* I wrote a blog post on this log:
  https://liam4.github.io/blog/posts/12-nondaily-update.html