May 28th, 2017 * I began a Scratch animation engine thing. It's based around anchors and costumes; probably the way most all animations are done in the real world. * I did a quiz on the general topic of waves in physical science. I started writing proper notes (as I do for my geometry); they’re helpful, but it’s a bit annoying that I didn’t start earlier. Oh well. * I merged Broadcast Vars into Scrap. Scrap is pretty much finished at this point. * I took a shot at making a `;#` interpreter: https://gist.github.com/liam4/6b3d84f3200bdecc72bd848143fdcd86 * I looked up Baiyon after a PixelJunk Eden track randomly played on iTunes. Apparently he collaborated with C418 to make the track 185! What a small world. * I discovered Eden Obscura, a new PixelJunk game. This is being made RIGHT NOW, so it'll be something to keep an eye out for! * I learned not to use the `fs-promise` NPM module anymore, since it's deprecated. Opt for `mz/fs` instead! * I read a blog post by eevee; it's quite ridiculously relatable and worth reading in general: https://eev.ee/blog/2017/05/28/introspection/ * I read eevee's weekly update: https://eev.ee/dev/2017/05/28/weekly-roundup-in-flux/ "I'm feeling pretty good?" is generally the way I'd describe the days that go well for me, too. This was a comforting little paragraph to read: "I was held at gunpoint by glip and forced to help them design my own characters, which is, extremely cool and good. I’m starting to think they like doing creative work with me and think I have interesting ideas??" * I whined about a pull request that messed a little with default browser behaviour: https://github.com/DatOneLefty/ATC/pull/10 It'll probably be merged anyways. 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. May 30th, 2017 * I did a bunch of geometry and learned about transformation matrices. Well, it was mostly the topic of adding and multiplying matrices; that's not too surprising, though (and fine; it was interesting anyways). I wrote a bunch on multiplying matrices, but it only works in one case (when multiplying AxB * BxA matrices), which doesn't help much when the other case (multiplying AxB * BxC matrices) is also valid. I'm pretty sure the lecture skipped/glossed over that case. * I worked on the HTTP music player and added a fair few number of new features. The most important one is that it now preloads tracks while one is already playing; basically, it does all the work it needs to do to play a track while one is already playing, so that you don't notice it doing that work, and there's no significant pause between two tracks anymore. I also made it possible to play tracks in order rather than shuffled, fixed a bug or two, and cleaned up a bunch of code. * I read a few forum threads on the old Scratch forums (pre-2.0). They seem to have been a nicer place back then. * I worked a bit on my algebra on KhanAcademy and got to a point where I mastered 500 skills. That's nice. I also 100%-mastered a few earlier grade levels (third and fourth), as well as arithmetic; though they were all pretty much already mastered. * I watched a video on the designs based on celluar automota (/buzzword) that were put on the walls of a museum. Apparently they were named off of some variant of the game of life but don't really have anything to do with the game of life at all. (I don't have the link to it; but it was made by the guy from Numberphile). 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 ``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 June 1st, 2017 * I worked on my HTTP music player a bit, adding a new --play-opts option, which can be used to control things such as the playback volume. * I did a bunch of algebra, and learned about intervals, sets, and various notations for those (as well as function domain and range). * I wrote a tiny experiment on math digits in Khan Academy's processing.js workspace: https://gist.github.com/liam4/304420dcab65a1f3a5a95488a2ee458c * I made my HTTP music player work with YouTube URLs (by using a new --downloader youtube option), and put together a tiny script to convert a YouTube playlist page into a playlist file (though it's not added to the repository yet): https://gist.github.com/liam4/139b7aeb1e5154fbddb37c2509cfd707 * I progressed a bit in my science course and took some semi-meaningless notes. I'm on to electricity, now! Hopefully it'll be interesting; it seems a bit hopeful, anyways. * I discussed trackpad and laptop design with some friends. I also considered buying a relatively cheap (low-price, few-features) tablet, but it'll take a little more before I come to a definitive conclusion (for now), I think. Then again, I'm probably overthinking things; really it's just a sixty-dollar tablet that would make art a bit more accessible for me. Sixty dollars isn't that much; if I decide I want to buy something better later in the future, the cheap tablet's price wouldn't cut much into it. June 2nd, 2017 * I worked on my science course. Same topic as yesterday; today was mostly practice. We did read a bit from the Science 1001 book, though; it's a handy little to-the-point reference. * I watched a video demo of pre-generating chunks in Minecraft 1.12: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak3MRPaXOaQ * I read a million Wikipedia pages on various Chinese, Japanese and Korean dishes and ingredients, as well as the page on umami. June 3rd, 2017 * I watched two videos on what the whole Paris Agreement is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr2J_1J9w3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WKoj-kodBw ..and read several comments on those videos. People are so willing to verbally attack each other if they think the other is stupid or if they disagree with that person, it's kind of saddening. * I went on a (not) gigantic trip, and went on a hike around town with a group of people - it was a sort of "historical play", as they put it. It was celebrating the 100th year anniversary of some club I know nothing about, as well as more-or-less the 150th year anniversary of Canada (of course, it wasn't *actually* Canada's anniversary). My sister won a drawing contest. (That was nice; she'd worked on it quite a number of hours into two consecutive nights.) I should probably draw at some point in the future, again.. * While on the trip, I wrote a short and incomplete guide to http-music. * I watched Why I Left, by Michelle Phan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuGpm01SPcA Putting "good luck" at the end, rather than, you know, "thanks for watching", really was.. nice. June 4th, 2017 * I watched Rick Astley - Never Gonna Shoot Your Stars, by Rick Astley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc2u6AFImn8 * I read about the history, usage, and acceptence of "they" (especially as a singular pronoun). It was pretty interesting seeing the results of polls. (Apparently grammarians born before 1945 were much less accepting of the usage as those born past then!) https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=they (This all spawned from looking up the definition for "is", which lead to the definition of "be", which derived from "beon" (old english), which lead to wikitionary, which made me curious about its entry on "they". Whee!) * I wrote a few examples for http-music. I effectively discarded the guide; but it still exists on the internet, and I might use it, eventually. It just doesn't fit well in a man page. * I made http-music work with local files. Ha. Ha. * I properly figured out a little hack done with one Submachine saves across multiple games: http://pastelland.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=732&start=280#p84018 Could the backpack in Submachine 10 be used as a "dropoff", to stash items you don't need immediately, even from different games? The backpack can't be used in any game but Sub10, of course, but if you go in Sub10 maybe it'd be possible to use the backpack for general item storage. Who knows? Also, could you steal the tiles from Sub4 and bring them into Sub1? * I watched Brexit: Hard vs Soft, by piffle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHY9ap0eH6E The whole video is nicely made, but it seems awfully one-sided. I left a comment on it asking about the potential arguments for a "soft Brexit", and got a response to that. The video hasn't particularly gone viral, so it shouldn't be difficult to find my comment, if you're curious. June 5th, 2017 * I tried using the backpack in the Submachine hack. It didn't quite work, though, since you can't grab items from other games to put them into the backpack.. oops! I also worked on mapping Sub10 for a while. * I worked on some English. I didn't have much luck gathering ideas to write an essay on the book currently being read, unfortunately, which lead to - surprise - no essay. I could rant about this forever, but essentially it's just my fault for not grabbing a topic, hoping it works, and trying it out. * I watched the Apple WWDC 2017 keynote. Not much new is interesting with macOS; they're working on a new iMac, and for now are releasing slightly better iMacs and MacBook Pros. iOS for iPads has a new file manager, and drag/drop, which is nice. Other better productivity features for iPad/iOS as well. A new product - HomePod, a household speaker - was announced. It seems overrated, but I haven't had any experience with it, so who knows. Maybe it'll revolutionize music forever. * I read about the pictures on Brian Harvey's walls at his home and commented on them: https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/post/2660412/ * I watched Blocking People in Real Life, by Tom Scott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq7oauciBdc As usual, after watching any of Tom Scott's videos, one simple phrase can easily be muttered: "Oh dear." * I watched Extending Ulam Beyond Primes, by Jacob Yatsko: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGTxXWFj-Lo I also worked on programming a thing based on it: https://www.khanacademy.org/computer-programming/not-quite-ulom-again/5026835556270080 * I did some of my geometry course. Just a test on the Transformations chapter today. June 6th, 2017 * I watched an un-"box"ing video by Jatsko: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRffLvsTFD8 I guess I'll have to keep an eye out for mail from Poland! * I watched a couple of videos in which singingbanana discusses limits of series and busts a few math myths: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fGoins7q3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwYPOi-Hfg8 * I watched Squared Squares, by Numberphile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoRjwZomUK0 * I did some of my geometry course, beginning the Surface Area and Volume chapter. * I watched part of highspirit's Dragon Quest 8 World Record speedrun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S62VEM0bUqY This guy has to be the most energetic 12 consecutive hour speedrunner I've ever seen! June 7th, 2017 * I took the Grotto Mechanics guide I stylized for printing a while ago and actually put them inside of a binder, so now it's a bit more like a book. I kind of wish I could've used a spiral binder, though; those always give a more, er, /pristine/ feeling. * I bought a proper book of graph paper and worked on creating a map of a dungeon in Dragon Quest IX. The guaranteed drop for this dungeon is the Yggdrasil Leaf instead of a treasure map, and the only boss that can drop that is boss #12. That's exciting, because the rare loot for boss #12 is a legacy boss map, and I haven't gotten to fight any new legacy bosses for a while. * I watched Jatsko's Discussing SubVerse Theories Part 8 stream while it was live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj53NlE015Y June 8th, 2017 * I did a bunch of math on KhanAcademy; mostly practicing properties of functions and such. * I listened to some (VERY) obscure music by Beautiful Kings, as was suggested by glitchedpuppet on twitter: https://twitter.com/glitchedpuppet/status/872725155243360257 * I added a help message to http-music. It directs users to the man page. * I worked on my science course, creating several new (and lengthy!) notes. I also cleaned up some old notes. * I watched Is Binge Watching Bad For You?, by AsapSCIENCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJRzgl0FuMA If those statistics are right, I've probably lost several years of life to using computers. I'd like to think that doing mostly mentally involved things means it isn't as effective. Whether or not that's the case, properly exercising, moving, and the usual would all help. * I worked on the dungeon map for a Dragon Quest IX grotto from the previous day. I got to the end of the dungeon and, as was expected, found Boss #12. It's a pretty difficult boss, though, dealing well over a hundred damage each hit (sometimes against all party members), and it ended up wiping my party out. Good thing I drew that map; the dungeon is pretty deep (10 floors, not counting the boss floor) and when you exit a dungeon (e.g. from death) that you haven't beaten before and come back, the automatically generated map is cleared! * I watched The Rise of the Machines -- Why Automation is Different this Time, by Kurzgesagt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSKi8HfcxEk Oh dear. * I read about a bunch of advantages humans had over other animals, aside from plain old intelligence: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6g0a40/ * I listened to Weathervanes and Chemicals, by Team Me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liYLOcUUUoc It's quite the nice song. It gives a similar feeling to what Float On gives; although I only first heard this song a year or so ago, whereas I heard Float On for the first time when I was very young. How funny. This version was particularly heart-warming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLIUSAEnNzk June 9th, 2017 * I began an experiment with the recently released version of Minecraft's new way of programming things. I won't go into too much detail now, since it's mostly just a test project with the new code process; I did end up figuring out how to make a relatively simple (and even, dare I say, intuitive!) entity loop/parse with the new features: https://gist.github.com/liam4/8c7447ee1b54b7987eb1b57fcd35e977 * I read a bunch of trivia about Canada and read further on Wikipedia. (Apparently the only prime minister of the UK born outside of Britain was born in New Brunswick, though at the time it wasn't considered part of Canada. They only stayed in office for six months.. I didn't find out if that was connected to their place of origin. Hopefully it wasn't!) * I also read about doughnuts and various sorts of fried bread from around the world. For a while I got sidetracked and tried to figure out how to pronounce Norwegian words. (I couldn't even get "Norwegian" right, at first!) * I did another section of my literature course. The assignment was either to come up with a better name than "The Old Man and the Sea" or to write a synopsis of the story for the inside of a dust jacket; I chose the latter. (It's not easy to compete with a title like that, especially when it fits so well with Hemingway's writing style already!) The result was only a couple of paragraphs long, but that was alright, since it was designed for a dust jacket anyways. I'd have liked to make it flow a little less awkwardly (but I'm probably imagining it worse than it is). It turned out better than I expected, though, especially since I could hardly get myself to write anything not long previously. June 10th, 2017 * I watched "SMW on Wii U Virtual Console -- Executing Arbitrary Code for the First Time": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9zJ8GA6fEo The end of the video gives a few practical uses for this, rather than just a way to hack an easier-to-get version of Super Mario World. They're interesting! * I worked on my Minecraft thing a bit. * I read about Lord Buckethead and saw a few of his proposals. I would have voted for him if I were there. * I read about the Solarized color scheme: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized * I played through all the newly-released update to Submachine Universe, and updated various projects (including my Sub-U iTunes album, my Subnet Browse utility program, and my Subnet Archive) to reflect the changes and new things in the update. I also wrote a short step-by-step walkthrough for going through the content of the update: http://pastelland.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=25&start=3100#p84090 June 11th, 2017 * I read Teaching tech, by eevee: https://eev.ee/blog/2017/06/10/teaching-tech/ This is actually a really interesting post, since I just wrote a man page and a tiny guide for a project, and since I've gone through several programming books and courses. There's a bunch of sentences I'd take from that post; one of my favorites was "Too many concrete examples feel like rote memorization; too much abstract theory feels disconnected from anything tangible." I'd also think of this paragraph, though it's not quite as quote-like.. "The trouble is that I doubt a beginner would walk away from this feeling very enlightened. They might be closer to having the game they wanted, so there’s still value in it, but it feels closer to having someone else do it for them." * I watched A Simple Song, by patrickhadley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3b1bz_9gEo I'd heard of the mbira but never seen one. It's quite the interesting instrument! June 12th, 2017 * I watched Explaining the Minecraft Name Change, by AntVenom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3zKzb24BFk * I worked on updating my various Submachine things some more; there was a new update, with some minor bug fixes that needed to be reflected in my own projects. * I read an old post called Flora, by eevee: http://eev.ee/blog/2012/07/06/flora/ There's a bunch of interesting things in that. It's worth looking back on if I ever decide to make a game with an open world of any kind. The comments on that post are also inspiring! (I want a drawing tablet.) * I read some old question/answer posts with a role-play character by eevee. (They're at the very end of her tumblr.) June 13th, 2017 * I read about Twitter's lovely new "shadow banning" feature. Essentially it's this new automated mechanic that blocks Twitter accounts from being seen by others, without telling anyone. You can imagine the trouble this would cause when somebody's following someone else, and they aren't getting notifications for the mentions written by a person they're following..! There's a whole lot of other gook related to the issue; this thread was informative: https://twitter.com/Aichmomanic/status/874160155960647681 * I worked on my English course. I'm done The Old Man and the Sea; now I'm learning about writing a biography. It's not going to be an /auto/biography (that is, I won't be the subject); I'm not sure whether that'll make it easier or not. The assignment lets you pick whoever you want. (In fact, that's essentially the entire current assignment - pick somebody!) I picked AntVenom, because, unlike most other YouTubers, his life on the YouTube website has been somewhat tumultuous. (To be fair, the assignment didn't ask for a YouTuber specifically; but AntVenom works well since his life has been somewhat more interesting than the usual (or is it conceptual?) rainbows and sunshine filled career.) * I worked on my Khan Academy algebra. I'm not sure how much progress I actually made - it looks like I mostly did things I'd already practiced before - but hey. It's good to keep the mind fresh by revisting old things. * I experimented with my Raspberry Pi; this time I configured it to not use the somewhat bloated desktop environment, in favor of a simple console-only display. I'm not sure if that's actually improved much performance-wise, but intuitively it should, and at least I don't have to worry about there being some gigantic UI sitting around not being used when I'm only SSHing into the device! (I also tried out tmux; it's as slightly confusing as it's always been. I tried the Lynx browser, but it seems to be missing some basic browser features on the surface, such as scrolling by a single line rather than by a whole page; and naturally it doesn't work perfectly with every site. On another note, I figured out how to get my stupid gray ethernet cable out of whatever device it's plugged into - you only need to push down on its grip part and pull out! That should have been obvious from the start. Oh well; at least I know now.) * I read about the C Seed 262-inch TV. It's quite the large TV..! Too bad the only pictures of it didn't compare it to, you know, an ordinary- sized room. It's not as easy to get a sense of how huge it is when your only reference is a few couches and a table. * I took a look at some old Scratch projects that I favorited on my original Scratch account. Hm, did I say something about keeping the mind fresh by revisiting old things..? * I made a tiny music visualizer in Scratch: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/165923925/ * I got a bit of an idea on using microphones and speakers to communicate between a DS and a Raspberry Pi. The basic concept is that the DS has a built-in microphone, which we can use to send data to the DS, and an auxiliary output cable slot, which we can use to get data from the DS. Then we can make the DS and some other device (like the Raspberry Pi) talk to each other! (Too bad it's not wireless. It seems like it should be possible to dos something like this wirelessly, since the DS does have some sort of Wi-Fi support, but it doesn't seem to really be standard. Apparently it requires some Nintendo service to be online, which hasn't been since 2015..?) * I considered printing all of Piers Anthony's newsletter. I'd love to have it all as a book; it'll take a ton of work, if I do decide to do that, though! (In theory it'd be best to just automate the process, but then you run into issues such as - what if there's a table embedded? What if there's something that simply NEEDS human notice to be dealt with well? So doing it by hand is kind of required. It also seems like there's just a bit of merit to going through all of his posts by hand; though I'll mostly be copy-pasting. Or who knows. Maybe I'll go and type it all out manually. Wait, no, that's a terrible idea - each of his posts are several thousands of words long, and he's written well over a hundred and fifty posts! Yikes.) June 14th, 2017 * I watched Scapeboats, by Vsauce2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNJq6BlVyhM * I wrote a few responses to a discussion thread on splitting up and joining blocks in Scratch 3.0: https://github.com/LLK/scratch-gui/issues/447 * I worked on my Algebra course. I'm nearly half done Algebra I now..! * I worked on my Geometry course. I kind of feel like I should've done a bit more than I did. Maybe the issue is that I'm just not doing it frequently enough; once every day would be better than once every two days! * I watched a video on somebody's progression throughout practicing playing the piano for a year and a half. It's kind of crazy to think of what (consistent) practice can do for you.. now if only I could get that "consistent" part with anythign I do! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTQAF4spX2k * I spent a while searching for some old music from a keyboard I owned when I was around four years old. Well, lucky me, I found it..! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGTAOmBQZLA * I wrote a gigantic timestamp list for Jatsko's Submachine music mix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEgQGE1TPGo It'd be really fun to make that into an actual album split into separate songs. (I wrote a little more about the idea in my "timstamps" comment on that video.) June 15th, 2017 * I worked on splitting the Submix timestamp list into parts that might be able to work as individual songs. It'll probably take some fine-tuning, though. * I worked on my science course and discovered an interesting way to write and create proportions. First, A:B means A is directly proportional to B. A:1/B means A is inversely proportional to B. If you write A:B and A:1/C, then it can be said that A = B/C. (In practice this was used to define Ohm's law: current is directly proportional to voltage; current is inversely proportional to resistance; so, current equals voltage over resistance.) * I watched the new trailer for Dragon Quest XI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5XR1ZtNVE0 I really hope this game gets localized. * I watched a couple subtitled clips from The Hero Yoshihiko and the Demon King's Castle. I need to figure out how to watch the whole series, it seems incredible. * I watched Seeing the Invisible, by Veritasium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tgOyU34D44 It's a video on using a special setup with mirrors and a point light source to see tiny differences created from light refraction (i.e., when light passes from one medium to another). It's pretty interesting to see stuff from my science course used in the real world! * I worked on my Khan Academy algebra course. I'm now at 51%! * I listened to the album Mixes, by C418. Listening to it on shuffle is kind of funny - all the tracks kind of seem to merge together, regardless of the order they're played in. * I read a nice little comic on what the word bisexual means (as well as pansexual): https://twitter.com/korimichele/status/875084498395901954 It's definitely a clear explanation! Somebody did comment that it slightly implies that if you're bi and not attracted to trans people, you're automatically transphobic; but I'm pretty sure that's not whatsoever true. (If you happen to not be attracted to one gender, do you automatically hate the people of that gender? No, that doesn't make sense!) * I watched a video titled 4D MONKEY DUST, by Numberphile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhuaPhahHbU I didn't understand most of it. Oh well. * I read Converting a Git repo from tabs to spaces, by eevee: https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/04/converting-a-git-repo-from-tabs-to-spaces/ I actually understood some of this! Git is kind of magic. I wonder if all this works if you're using GitHub rather than a local git repository? * I worked on my geometry course; I finished a relatively long section (er, the "top" level group, containing only activities and lectures), finally. The section was surface area; and now it's finished. I guess I'm going to be moving on to volume, now. * I read Goodbye, Styx, by eevee: https://eev.ee/blog/2013/04/30/goodbye-styx/ It's as sad as it sounds. I definitely cried (..internally.. that ABSOLUTELY still counts) a bit. June 16th, 2017 * I worked on my old cloud-screensaver program, and improved it a bit: https://twitter.com/towerofnix/status/875787617278808066 * I made a short Twitter thread about some comments I had on the various things I drew in a sketch from a few days earlier: https://twitter.com/towerofnix/status/874463281292902401 * I watched a world record speedrun of Dinnerbone's "How did we get here?" Minecraft challenge, played by Darn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEASgs-Qb6o * I worked on improving http-music's HTTP crawler a little, and wrote a man page for it. (Although now there's no man page for the local crawler, which doesn't seem very good..!) * I explored the downloaded-assets folder for Minecraft a bit and found the challenge-completed sound effect. It's quite nice. Actually, most of the sound effects added recently have fit well with Minecraft's style (well, except for the challenge-completed one, ironically), which is definitely good. * I read a bunch of old posts by Eevee; mainly her yearly level-up posts, as well as "I quit the tech industry": https://eev.ee/blog/2015/06/09/i-quit-the-tech-industry/ Jobs sound like the worst. It seems like doing anything you like for money (or even just for somebody else, and not yourself) tends to be terrible. (I've had a tiny bit of experience with that, myself; I once worked on a website for a not-quite-startup project by somebody I hardly know. It wasn't fun, and certainly didn't get me the same feeling I get when I'm working on something that's, like, my idea, and something I really /want/ to make.) June 17th, 2017 * I tweaked a few things in my clouds program. * I read "Hello world!" and "Stems: an Android app for word study", both by __init__: http://xn--cr8h.xn--nj8hz0a.ws/welcome/ http://xn--cr8h.xn--nj8hz0a.ws/stems/ * I read Tim Cook was right to fight the FBI, by Marty Puranik: https://thenextweb.com/apple/2017/06/16/tim-cook-right-fight-fbi/ I still don't really get Apple's stance on privacy. Everything they do makes it look like they've got a huge focus on user privacy; and yet many people (read: many who use Linux, if that's a fair generalization) on the internet also seem to say they're outright horrible with privacy. It hardly seems like they're worse (rather, much /better/) than any other proprietary company, though. I skimmed GNU's document on Apple's Operating Systems are Malware; it always seems like everything in there somehow conflicts with other things Apple has done. I guess that's GNU's point (if they LOOK like they're being Wondeful and Good, but are actually doing Bad things, can you trust them?); but, you know, it's still a bit confusing (why are they generally being Good, but sometimes being Bad?). * I worked on making a gigantic JavaScript parser for a few hours. I made quite a lot of progress on it! (The idea is to make something a bit like Jens's "Elements", in JavaScript, but it probably won't go anywhere.) June 18th, 2017 * I worked on that JavaScript parser a bit more. I managed to get it to parse its own code, so that's a cute milestone! * I watched 4D Toys, by Miegakure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t4aKJuKP0Q * I watched the entirety of carykh's new evolution simulator video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghwXmA1s1I4 He's actually really good at explaining how things work in that video. Besides that the video content is interesting and well-presented, so it's worth watching with an hour of spare time and a bit of interest in the topic! * I watched Primitive Technology: Reusable charcoal mound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjK2XlNE39Q I also watched their video on firesticks, since I was curious how those worked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9n9rqb-lvY June 19th, 2017 * I read A year of progress, by glitchedpuppet: http://glitchedpuppet.com/blog/12/ * I read Eevee's weekly roundup ("successful juggling"): https://eev.ee/dev/2017/06/19/weekly-roundup-successful-juggling/ * I messed around with MATH UGH??? and figured out the reasoning behind why we can remove the "* 20"s from (3 * 20) / (5 * 20). (The reasoning is that we can multiply that whole fraction (3 * 20) / (5 * 20) by the fraction (1/20)/(1/20), which leads to (3*20*1/20) / (5*20*1/20); and we can simplify that to 3/5, because x * (1 / x) = 1, so ax*1/x = a. It's !!LEGAL!! to multiply the whole original fraction by (1/20)/(1/20), because that magic fraction is equal to 1.) (This was while doing my science course.) * I read a post on the various behind-the-scene changes in macOS High Sierra, by Andrew Cunningham: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2017/06/macos-high-sierra-tech-preview-a-quick-look-at-the-stuff-you-cant-see/ * I made embedded math work on my blog (though I didn't write any posts using math - yet!). I also updated the categories of some old posts (several posts including art didn't have the "Art" tag). * I recorded the music in Duckers (an iOS game) for my iTunes library. The music is online, as well; but there's no way to download, or even buy, it. So I had to record the output of my iPad. I only did this because I played Duckers several years ago, and clearly recall quite liking the music from the game. Up until just today, though, I didn't know the name of the game. I'd tried to find the game by looking up various keywords on Google several occasions before, but didn't have much luck. Today was successful, though; turns out searching the iTunes App Store, rather than Google, works lot better! June 20th, 2017 * I discussed various Floraverse theories with a friend. * I read a ton of posts from the Animusic 3 Kickstarter. It's not a good idea; don't waste your time with it. * I worked on gathering notes and whatnot for my biography on AntVenom. Going through his Draw my Life video took nearly an hour for only twenty minutes of video. Such is research! * I made myself lunch, wow. It was a simple dish of salsa and (leftover) ground beef mixed together on top of bread, plus spinach. Unpopular opinion: butter is always better than margarine, except when on untoasted bread with chili or salsa. * I did a test in my geometry course. I'm just not sure if I already did the test earlier.. * I watched ""Speedrunning" Super Mario World in Under a Minute", by SethBling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz-c_vDubSE "Speedrunning" is between quotes, mind you. And with reason! It's a big hack, although it's arguably "fine".. technically. * I worked on http-music a bit, and made it play all of Tom7's music: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/music/index.html * I discussed more stuff on Floraverse with the same friend. It's so significant it gets two entries! June 21st, 2017 * I worked on my geometry course. I'm on volume of 3D figures, now; it's not really that surprising of a concept. I think I've done it before in an old math book I used to use. * I read Math Invented or Discovered? by Doctor Rick: http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/52340.html It's quite an interesting answer (although not too surprising). * I worked on my science course and failed to understand the concept of kilowatt-hours well. I got all the quiz questions right, but.. you know, that doesn't seem quite right when I don't really know how the concept works! I still feel like writing that blog post on fractions and unit multiplication. * I wrote a response to someone asking about why I use the Scratch account _nix instead of towerofnix: https://scratch.mit.edu/users/towerofnix/#comments-34592324 * I wrote an email to the Scratch developers about why scratch-api is private. I don't expect a response! June 22nd, 2017 * I downloaded all of Cmanblast3's Floraverse bullet pictures into a folder. It totals to 104 items! * I worked on my biography on AntVenom. In about an hour of total time spent, I got through ten minutes of video, and ended up writing 12 draft-like paragraphs. Research is fun, but it sure takes a while! * I worked on my science course. I'm now at electric circuits, which is quite an interesting topic! * I created this terrible, terrible Floraverse video remix thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YaB_kqAe9Q June 23rd, 2017 * I created another stupid Flora thing. This one's even more stupid, though, and it's a bit more of a personal joke; it was an awful lot more tedious to make than the last one, and not for something quite as interesting! Oh well. * I continued work on the biography. Technically, research is slow - again, only ten minutes of video across over an hour of work - but it doesn't really feel like it's slow. In the "I'm enjoying this, so time's flying" kind of way, you know? I wrote about thirteen paragraphs of draft content. I'm now half way through the "My YouTube Story" video. It's definitely more in-depth than his Draw My Life, which makes it easier to write a story with. This last section I wrote was all on his endeavours in making RuneScape videos; it's actually pretty interesting, which, like I said, makes the lengthy research a bit better! * I wrote a tiny utility script for my music player; it tells you what files in a folder aren't being used by a playlist. It's only really handy for local file playlists, obviously. * I watched Reviewing Musicals from their Wikipedia Pages, by vlogbrothers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcwBt1vbvRY June 24th, 2017 * I wrote the beginning of a blog post. Maybe I'll even finish it, at some point..! * I got a battery pack for my raspberry pi! Plus it didn't cost near as much as I expected it to, so I'll be able to buy a monitor for the pi essentially for free (relative to my original expectations). * I went to a market and got the second item in Charlie Brown's 'Cyclopedia. It was a farmer's market of some sort; and, interestingly, the whole thing was set up around the theme of.. rhubarb! We got to try the plant dehydrated. While there I also made a small painting, which I later shared at the end of this blog post: https://liam4.github.io/blog/posts/15-i-accidentally-drew-some-things.html * I checked if my http-music player worked in a car, without access to the internet (using its local downloader, obviously). Turns out it does! Good. June 25th, 2017 * I drew a few things and wrote a short blog post showcasing them: https://liam4.github.io/blog/posts/15-i-accidentally-drew-some-things.html June 26th, 2017 * I attempted to take a look at a book on pre-calculus that I'd gotten a month or so ago for fun; but apparently my booklet of graph paper was missing, so I couldn't actually make much progress in it! Oops. * I read the first couple sections of Charlie Brown's 'Cyclopedia, volume 2, Featuring All Kinds of Animals from Fish to Frogs. Obviously it's an animal- themed book. I found it interesting that, under a question titled "why do some animals die out?", they said that no animals had gone extinct due to pollution yet. The book is some thirty years old; I suppose that's changed quite a lot in more recent times.. Also of note was that the book's first page number is 49; and it ends on page 99. I suspect each volume in the series has roughly 50 pages, and that the page number carries across books. * I celebrated reaching a thousand lines in my log file - wonderful! It's been nearly a month I've been filling it up, as well. * I discovered that I managed to bork my Raspberry Pi by leaving it plugged into the battery pack overnight; I suppose it must have ran out of power while performing some file I/O. Yikes! * While working on improvements for http-music, I discovered mpv, a music player command that is in general better than SoX's play command. I worked that into my music player; now it can seek back and forth through the active track, change the output volume (while the track is playing), and pause/play. * I read about various USB connector types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#Connector_types June 27th, 2017 * I fixed my Raspberry Pi; it's now succesfully running http-music again! (Er, now NOW - right now its battery pack is charging, unconnected to the Pi. I don't repeat to make the same mistake only a day later..!) * I whined a little bit about MPV, which isn't actually all incredible: https://github.com/liam4/http-music/commit/814dc0623c0e4c20f1372f048459de9b63aa30f6 * I wrote a quick bug report for Scratch 3.0's GUI and made a small patch for it: https://github.com/LLK/scratch-gui/issues/474 * I finished a blog post: https://liam4.github.io/blog/posts/16-on-socialization.html June 28th, 2017 * I wrote a short browser script used to share Scratch projects. It looks like the person that needed it lived in a place with pretty minimal computer access; hopefully it's helpful to them: https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/post/2699772/ * I wrote a response to somebody looking for help getting a Raspberry Pi working so that they could share a Scratch project with a family member who doesn't have a computer. Hopefully they'll have some luck with that: https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/post/2699818/ * I was given the two Harry Potter: Illustrated Edition books, as well as the second book in the Magnus Chase series. June 29th, 2017 * I hacked around Submachine a little, and programmed the portal in Sub4 to act as a room teleporter. It now teleports you to a specific room, rather than a specific coordinate. * I watched the first video Tom 7 made on Learnfun Playfun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCurBYI_gY I also read the first couple sections of that paper; those introduced the concept of the project and its purpose, and explained how the learning-part of the project works. June 30th, 2017 * I watched Nintendo's BACK, Baby!!! by Arlo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWZUOpRDGRU * I watched Why YouTube Used to Prefer Quality, by Veritasium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03dTJ4nXkXw * I wrote a ridiculously long response to somebody who was having trouble figuring out how to use promises in their JavaScript code: https://stackoverflow.com/a/44849645/4633828 * I wrote a big long not-quite-blog-post on math that explains how simplifying fractions *actually* works (i.e., the math behind it), as well as all the concepts behind simplification. July 1st, 2017 * It was Canada Day! I went to the place people in the local community were celebrating at. It wasn't particularly eventful, I suppose; we went and got a hot dog (the mustard had an interesting taste - it wasn't the normal brand) and hid away from (the drastically-crowded) society in a nearby field to enjoy the small meal there. We made an attempt to get my siblings' faces painted (it's not really my thing), but the line-up moved on so slowly we didn't get a chance to actually get our faces painted before the entire event ended! * I finished up writing my blog post on simplifying fractions, and published it: https://liam4.github.io/blog/posts/17-fractions-and-simplification-explained.html * I read a bunch of documentation on iTunes and created an iTunes library generator for http-music. If the one thing I appreciate most about Apple can't be their operating systems, it'd be how well-documented their apps are. July 2nd, 2017 * I watched Bug Of The Week: Vines in 1.12, by ilmango: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFqMbKE_52c * I played a small platformer by Samhayn on Scratch: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/141679725/ It's not much more impressive than any other platformer, but it did remind me of platformers from a few years ago on Scratch. * I helped a friend of mine with ideas for specifics about the game they were making; it's basically this, but an actual (browser) game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLn8vo0fcm0&t=88s * While helping them, I suggested music. That inevitably lead to me looking up music from old video games; so I listened to a few tracks from the Super Collapse 3 soundtrack. That lead me to watch somebody play through the final level in the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IammKYIv9LU * I watched most of a speedrun of Metroid Prime done in Games Done Quick 2017. (Mind you I watched until the end; I just got there late!) July 3rd, 2017 * I downloaded and archived all the required files for a few Curious George games; they now run on a locally hosted server without issue. The old Teletubbies games were removed from the PBS Kids site; eventually, all the other games will be taken down, as well (for one reason or another). It'll be nice to have an archive of the games when they no longer exist there anymore. * I worked on my physical science course a bunch. (The last week had been set as a school-vacation in advance a few months earlier, mostly to have time set off to enjoy having an expected visit.) * I worked a bunch on my old console-UI library project. The idea is to eventually use it to make a crazy iTunes-look-alike for the terminal; but I'll probably never get there. https://github.com/liam4/ui-lib * I spent a bunch of time messing around with terminal mouse-detection, as described in these places: https://gist.github.com/sylt/93d3f7b77e7f3a881603 http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man4/console_codes.4.html July 4th, 2017 * It was Canada Day Was Better Day! I celebrated by doing absolutely nothing for the occasion. * I worked on my silly UI library, and implemented a (simple) table-manager class. * I learned about everyone's favorite topic, how cells make babby. That spawned (no pun intended) from looking up various cell-related vocabulary for a review quiz. * I tried moldy cheese - er, brie - on crackers. I decidedly chose to avoid it in the future. July 5th, 2017 * I worked on my silly UI library a little, and implemented a "group browser", which takes groups from an http-music playlist and lets you select subgroups and preview what songs are there. It's basically Finder's column view, but text-based. * I read Antisocial Coding: My Year at GitHub, by Coraline Ada Ehmke: http://where.coraline.codes/blog/my-year-at-github/ (This is actually important.) * Apparently Disqus is going to be making ad-free comments cost money now. This is great - as in, the WORST - and it means I'm going to need to remove comments from my blog until I can figure out some workaround. Ugh?? July 6th, 2017 * I visited a friend's house and worked on an old project abandoned on my laptop for a while: https://twitter.com/towerofnix/status/883075577032343552 * I watched hi, i'm steve by bill wurtz: http://www.billwurtz.com/hi-im-steve.mp4 I can't help but feel that there's a deeper meaning to this video. * I worked a little on making my blog's SVG embeds more sane: https://github.com/liam4/blog/issues/16 * I watched/read/viewed the Scratch project Trillion Plates, by aellsworth: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/75323922/ It's actually pretty incredible. Don't get scared off by its usual simple slideshow-presentation appearance at the start! July 7th, 2017 * We spent almost the whole day visiting an old friend's place (they were visiting the area, so we decided to say hi and spend the day together). While there we visited a nearby beach. I spent a while working on making a sand wall against the ocean waters; after a while of working on it, a young kid working on digging out a pit came over and asked what I was doing. Eventaully that lead to them helping me with the project; it was fun! I also noticed an awful ton of jellyfish floating around the water. (One group must have contained well over fifty of them!) This was slightly curious, because a week or so earlier I'd gone to a separate beach in the province, and it was also much more crowded with jellyfish than usual. I wonder what could be causing so many of them to congregate around beaches lately? (The jellyfish that were at this beach were clearly of the same species as the ones at the other.) * I read about a newly-proposed federal requirement where all cars would be required to constantly broadcast information about its location (and velocity, physical dimensions, etc) in a nearby (300 meter) range. This sounds.. really, really bad. Hopefully it doesn't go anywhere (no pun intended). https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/06/21/killing-car-privacy-by-federal-mandate/ Somebody commented about it being related to self-driving cars realistically working. I guess that should have been obvious! Another person commented that just about all of the problems this would cause are already problems caused by other sources, which is a bit of a fair point (though the post combats it). July 8th, 2017 * I spent around ten or eleven hours travelling to a friend's place, far, far away from where I live. Yikes! * I wrote a short "ask me a question" page I'd like to put on my blog site at some point - it's basically the same as http://www.billwurtz.com/questions/ - but it's kind of difficult to do that, since I need to actually stick it on an actual server somewhere (because of its backend). July 17th, 2017 * I got home from vacation! July 18th, 2017 * While driving, we compared and discussed ways of recalling which songs are which in C418's album, one: https://c418.bandcamp.com/album/one * I watched a short video discussing some potential new textures for various Minecraft blocks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhHQ4JQzU3k I'm curious what the obsidian will look like in a natural environment but I'm doubtful about it. It seems too grainy..? It's not near as smooth as it's always been, and I'm not sure I like that change. * I watched "I Can't Show You How Pink This Pink Is", by Tom Scott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NzVmtbPOrM * I implemented a few new features (and touched up some old ones) on my music player; you can now save (modified "active") playlists to a file, and play- opts is working again. I also updated the manual pages; things are a little cleaner and more up-to-date there now! * I caught up on a few quizzes in my science course. Luckily it looks like I mostly remember the concepts that were taught in the section I was quizzed on! * I tried out a new geography book we were given. It's apparently done from a Christian perspective, but that mostly just seems to mean they're praising the universe's One and Only Holy Creator every second paragraph ("of course, all this wouldn't be useful if God had not created foo-bar process"). The content seems to otherwise be what you'd expect from a geography book. So far it seems pretty nice! * I read "A Rant About Social Media", by Matt Roszak: http://kupogames.com/2017/07/18/a-rant-about-social-media/ I think it kind of lines up with my old post on the topic. * I watched "Accio Decade Hallows", from John on vlogbrothers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T90l1QoPcuI * I watched "How Much of the Earth Can You See at Once?", by Vsauce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxhxL1LzKww * ..That lead to watching "Times Tables, Mandelbrot and the Heart of Mathematics", by Mathologer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhbuKbxJsk8 * ..And that lead to listening to "Shoulder Closures", by Gunnar Olsen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WctGKfiSEMA * ..And that lead to listening to a bunch of other music by Gunnar Olsen: http://www.gunnarolsen.net/music/ July 19th, 2017 * I read a bunch of discussion on the whole high speed fiber optic infrastructure situation: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/6o1zuu/just_a_reminder_you_already_paid_for_high_speed/ * I worked on my music player a bit; it now shows the group path to a track when you press I, so it'll be easy to do things like filtering a playlist by some album you're reminded you like (since now you'll know the group path of that album). * Much searching lead to finding the old Discover & Do course I played with when I was five-ish. Success! What a memory. * I worked on my science course. A new topic, today - magnetism! I don't feel like I understood it as well as I should have, but I also don't feel that it was explained as in-depthly as it could've been. * I watched a video on deviance, in Crash Course Psychology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGq9zW9w3Fw * I watched a video by a friend of mine, titled "Should you get a PLEOrb?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuIXZSbBVSc I also brutally criticized it! Hopefully that makes clear any issues and such to keep an eye out for when making the next video. * We finished up reading the section of the geography course we'd started yesterday, and I wrote out my answers to the review questions. * I watched "JavaScript that drops a RAT - Reverse Engineer it like a pro", by Colin Hardy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzGLCqW_wrM July 20th, 2017 * I updated my music player a bunch; I combined all of the commands to be run under a single master command http-music, and I made a new YouTube playlist downloader. * I responded to a comment on an old video of a thing I made in Minecraft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27c2boIFwF8 I wonder how they found my video? According to Analytics, "YouTube search" seems most likely, but I'm not sure. * I ordered the tenth Wings of Fire book, Darkness of Dragons, on Amazon! Hopefully it'll be good; chances are it will be. (The author sure is excited about it!) I also ordered a portable monitor for my Raspberry Pi at the same time. Apparently, it only requires USB power and an HDMI cable. That's convenient, since both of those ports are on the outside, which means I get to keep my Pi in its case! The only trouble is that if I attach the screen and a keyboard, I'm already out of USB ports, so I guess I'll need to bring my USB hub that I typically have at home with it (or maybe I'll buy another - they aren't expensive, can be gotten locally, and work well). * I spent a while playing through Lunar Legend. I got to the point where you'd collect and search for all the old locked red chests you didn't have access to until then, and did search for some of them, but I made a mistake and opened a wrong chest and had to reload from a save. That save was from before I'd searched any red chests; but at least it wasn't from long before! July 21st, 2017 * I read about how AAPL (Apple) was declared the most profitable company in the world: https://9to5mac.com/2017/07/20/apple-global-fortune-500/ * I continued my playthrough of Lunar Legend, and actually collected all the red chests I was looking for (this time without opening any bad ones!). I also progressed through Iluk and to the red dragon's cave, and stopped there. * I played some Roblox games with my younger brother - Lumber Racing, a simple car-racing game: https://www.roblox.com/games/623095796/Lumber-Racing-BETA-release ..and Time Travel Obby, a cinematic parkour-adventure: https://www.roblox.com/games/344772181/Time-Travel-Obby * I wrote an answer to a StackOverflow question on how to modify a method of a class that's privately declared (so, not normally accessible from outside the function that constructs it): https://stackoverflow.com/a/45237361/4633828 * I explained JavaScript promises to a friend of mine, and discussed a project they're working on (with them and another friend). * I hopped by Saigancat's Twitch stream (with his friend, Pat, also a player of the old Dragon Quest IX let's play); they were playing River City Ransom. Honestly, I have no idea how that game works. I wonder how Sai feels about his Patreon? He mostly seems somewhat optimistic and high-spirited (no in-joke intended), but he's set goals of reaching - for example - 500 dollars per month, by the end of this month; and he hasn't made any progress towards that for an entire week. It reminds me of the Floraverse (not-)Kickstarter that's currently happening. Their goal is 30000 dollars, total, but the donations have slowed nearly to a halt, around only 11000 dollars. They've still got roughly three weeks to go, but for nearly a whole week they haven't made much progress.. * I looked up the old Turn Biased channel, looking for any update as to why it's been abandoned.. I didn't have much luck, though. * I spent a while trying to figure out the whole ordeal of whatever the Scratch user X__0 was; I didn't get very far, though! I found their "secret Discord server", but that was completely empty, and there weren't any further clues. Oh well. * I made http-music able to download playlists again. I also came to the sudden realization that it's possible to play the one and only important videos with it. So I tried that; while doing so I implemented some error handling for YouTube downloads, so that it won't crash on (but will instead skip) private or blacklisted (copyrighted) videos. * I cheated, and added some entries for the previous day in this log file. Meta, much?