Jonas Hietala

I find that ai can help significantly with doing plumbing, but it has no problems with connecting the pipes wrong. I need to double and triple check the updated code - or fix the resulting errors when I don’t do that. thih9 on Hacker News I’ve been skeptical of the AI craze that’s been going on in the developer community. It’s a useful tool but...

I’ve been a fan of Home Assistant a while now; it’s a great platform for home automation with its beginner friendly and feature rich UI, support for a ton of different devices and integrations, and there’s a bunch of ways to create automations. But there’s no engine for writing automations in Elixir that I could find; this post addresses this...

I recently bought the Eight Sleep Pod 4—a smart mattress cover that tracks your heart rate, HRV, snoring, and cools or warms the mattress during the night. There’s a lot to like about the mattress but in the end I opted to return it. This post describes my experience with the Pod 4. Sleep is important enough to offset the steep price The Eight...

Time flies when you’re having fun. Before you know it, your little babies have started school, you celebrate the 30th anniversary of Jurassic Park, and that little blog you started have now been going for 15 years. 15 years is a long time; longer than I’ve been waiting for Winds of Winter, and that wait has felt like an eternity. How did I—who...

As I added a /now page to the site I also decided to refresh my /about page and I figured it would be neat to have timeline element where I could list some of the larger events in my life. To my surprise it wasn’t too difficult to create one that looks pretty clean—the flexbox feature in CSS is really good. In this post I’ll walk you through how...

Introduction This is an essay for the course Game Design and I’m going to give you a ride through the evolution of RTS game genre. I like RTS games and I’ve played them for as long as I can remember, from the classic Red Alert and Age of Empires to the newer Supreme Commander and Starcraft 2 (beta). First of all what is a Real Time Strategy game?...

Introduction This is the second essay for the course Game Design and this thime I will be analysing the game World of Goo a bit. The first level The game is very simple. You begin with a structure and a few Goo balls, the charming balls bobbing around there, which you can drag and drop to build on the structure. Your goal is to reach the pipe and...

My brain is a curious thing. I’m on a business trip right now and I’ve set aside time to finish some important todos I want and need to get done. But instead of focusing on them, I started playing around with Gleam—a young and interesting programming language. My (current) favorite programming languages are Rust and Elixir. They’re really...

Well, here it is: The opening post. What will come here? Here’s where I’ll outline what the blog will be about and maybe, if I’m dedicated, it won’t die before Christmas you think. And sure, you’re right. I will run away to the corner in about two and a half months crying I never got the traffic I’m fantasizing about but I can try to summarize...

In true experimental spirit I’ll now announce the theme for my first game: Addictive Gaming. I won’t be following the lead from the Experimental Gameplay Project’s site but I will follow their three laws (7 days, alone, themes). Puh… my first game! Wish me luck =)

Here’s my first ever experimental game! The theme was Addictive Gaming. My first thought was oh god I’ll be making another tetris clone but the end result turned out a bit different. I’m not sure it’s very addictive but it’s actually okay! =D Balls is a game about… balls. Well it’s all in 2D so maybe Circles would be a better description but I...

So it’s been what? Two, three years since I discovered the art of programming and I haven’t made one single game?! Well now I’m not counting the visual basic nightmare mastermind I made a long time ago but a real game. Whatever that means. I’ve had these monster-projects; Point and click monkey island style adventure game The beginning c++...

This time I’ll be following my inspiring site and declare Bare Minimum as the theme for my next game. This could really be anything, from graphics to user interaction… But I’ve got an idea. It’ll be a real challange for me to make but hopefully I’ll have a game in a few weeks time.

Ah my first game was so painless so I thought I could do any game I could imagine! Shooters, and mario bros kinda stuff. Well now I’m not so upbeat anymore, I’ve worked on this game for 7 days now and it’s not playable at all. With seven days I don’t mean a week, I’ve had a big break in the middle with no reason at all! Anyway I realize I can’t...

Man I’m far too much of a perfectionist, with this mentality I’ll never get anything done - seriously. I spent far too many hours, even days, figuring out in my mind how the game should be and I started off going for nothing less than just that. But it turned out to be a lot harder and a lot bigger but still I couldn’t let it go and start over...

Here it is at last! Boasting a unoriginal name, themed Bare Minimum. My thoughts where to create a game where graphics where included into the gameplay but sadly it didn’t come out nearly as good as I expected it too. Yes I know there are a lot of things bad and wrong with this game, but this is a competition with myself to create a game in only...

All this time working on my latest game I thought it sucked and I was trying hard to make it to not suck. My spirit wasn’t high, just check this post and this but now when it’s done it’s like night and day, or like black and white! I’m damn happy I got it done!! Aah I’ll try to make this postmortem shorter than the last one… That was huge....

I’m in the civil service atm and, sadly, we’re going to be extremely busy the coming… two months or something? So I can’t promise a game the next two months. Kinda beats the point of this site doesn’t it? I’m really sorry and that’s all I can say really… Hopefully I’ll get a week somewhere with enough spare time to create something. It’s a damn...

I’m out of the busy mode and here’s the new theme! I’ve got an idea and I’ll be beginning very soon I hope and again I’m following Experimental Gameplay Project’s site. Let’s rock!!

Ahhh… Finally another game! Theme of this beauty is Failure and your mission here is to avoid the bugs. As a programmer the fight with those nasty bugs are a daily occurrence and now I’ve brought you a chance to kill those nasties too! The gameplay wasn’t what I was planning on - yet again - but I’m actually quite content with the game. It’s able...

It’s time for the follow up on my latest game Bugger. Wow it seems like forever since I begun this monthly game business, but it’s only been two months since I first thought about this and here I am having finished my third game. I’ve really come a long way, in the beginning I though I’d only make state of the art crap games. Like I would...

Why did I start making games? Because I like to play them of course. Think of all the fantastic games; Super Mario, Lemmings, Tetris, GTA, The Sims, Counterstrike, Theme Hospital, SimCity and Rollercoaster Tycoon… Damn - when you count them like this you’ll see how many great games there are out there. And I can honestly say each and every one of...

New month and a new theme. As with the two previous games I’m following The Experimental Gameplay Project theme which this month is numbers. What’s it gonna be? A sudoku game or something more… thrilling? I’ll see what I can do :)

This game is called MenuCity and it’s a numbers game. Well that’s the theme anyway. The game pretty much held to what I planned for - except that it deviated from the theme -again- a bit. My game is very reminiscent of the old calculator classic Block Dude made by Brandon Sterner. If you like that game, or any puzzle game for that matter, you’re...

Here’s another game made for the experimental gameplay project: Slidoku which is a sort of mix between Rubik’s cube and sudoku. I enjoy puzzles like those and I really enjoyed this one too - it took me a while to beat it but I just love the feeling when you do. If you like puzzles take a look, it’ll be worth it!

It hasn’t even been a week since I released my latest game MenyCity and already so much positive feedback! I’m so thrilled :) However, all isn’t blue skies and nice sunshine. A lot of times the first question is: How do you play it? or How do you get past the first level? I admit yes, the tutorial is really bad… So this is me trying to redeem...

Good times, good times. MenuCity has been out a while and thanks for all the positive and constructive feedback guys, it’s like my food doing this (programming is my air and the fun is the water… err). Anyway here’s the postmortem of my latest, and greatest, game. Let’s start with a hideous graph: God it’s ugly, but it works I guess. I spent...

Back over at The Experimental Gameplay Project a new theme has come up. My last three themes haven’t been “my” themes: I’ve been following their lead and their themes and this month is no exception. This months’ apparently a big theme - Art. It’s even a collaboration with a big art museum… The idea that games are art is an old one and there are a...

What does a guy like me do when not working on a new game? Except living my life, being a coach for my little brother’s hockey team and eating strawberries? The last week or so I’ve been working hard with my webpage, yes this page. If you’ve visited my site before today you’ll know what I’m talking about. NOT There’s practically zero visible...

Ahoy there! This time I’ll take you along for a ride with an arty Tycoon game. Jonas IceCream Stand Get wild and become a Crazy Dealer of IceCream! Instructions It should be pretty self-explanatory, it’s a very simply tycoon game. Credits Music: All Around Us - Eric Maskol I Will Always Look up to You - Steve Chatterton Sound effects: Random from...

Ah my latest game Jonas IceCream Stand is finished and up and running and I’m really proud of it! And thanks for the feedback guys, it’s always welcome. I spent almost exactly fifty hours on this game and that’s by far the most I’ve spent on a 7day project. To be honest it’s probably more but I’m not really good at logging all the hours… A Race...

The The Experimental Gameplay Project drives on with the Art Game theme which will last the rest of this year but that’s something we can’t accept! I’ve done my game and I didn’t force myself out from the Haskell world just to do nuthin so here’s a new little theme for me :) What does the U.S one dollar bill, the French Revolution and Zion have...

While working on Jonas IceCream Stand I took a screenshot every day and I thought they looked pretty cool so here they are: And now I’m off with New World Order and (for once) I’ve got a really really good idea!

It’s pretty darn stressful making a game in a week, especially when you have this big great vision on how your game should be (which is always grand). For me making Balls, Black and White and Jonas IceCream Stand where truly stressful, MenuCity and Bugger not so much but still. This is why I’m giving me an early Christmas gift: I won’t make the...

The time has come; it’s time for me to move my source out in the open for the first time. I present to you the source of the upcoming game (which has no name yet): Repository deleted, never became anything Available on Github It’s nothing special really, if you want take a look at the code and help me improve it.

In a burst of random energy I made a forum for madeoftree. Well okay I just made an awesome style for the awesome phpBB - the forum itself was up and running in say 10min and the rest of the latest days has been all about customizing. Now it’s finally kinda complete so here it is (EDIT: it is now taken down)! Making it was the easy bit - now we...

Happy New Year, Everyone! 2009 was great in many ways; I drove a submarine (yeah quite literally), I released 6 experimental games and recently I discovered the completely amazing game Evil Genius but lets try to make 2010 even better! So let’s forget our small mishaps (yes I’m looking at you - December month without a game) and roll out a new...

Aaah feels good having a game ready after the last month’s failure! This time it’s a small shooter. The Chronicles of Bim: The 100 Fake Afro Bullet masher - can you keep up with 100 enemies at the screen? Instruction W: up A: left S: down D: right mouse: shoot space: leap into the sky! Credits Music: The Last Prophecy - Matthew Le Blanc (SynthR)...

Even if there are a million great games there’s one that has a very special place in my heart: Supreme Commander. It’s not the game I’ve played the most and there might even be games which are better and more fun but supcom was the game that introduced me to competitive gaming and it made it me feel like no game had done before. I took gaming...

My first shooter! It’s working (although a friend got a null pointer error) so I’m a little happy. The Time I spent about 24 hours on this game. A whopping 30% was break time, mostly me eating, reading manga or playing games… This is proof of me being really lazy this month I think. It’s pretty cool that everything regarding the scripting,...

My latest game was absolutely huge! And I’m not talking about the music (which was pretty huge too - roughly 20mb) but the little .exe file. It was 14,6mb!! Now every way you look at it, that’s incredibly huge. It’s like comparing an ant to a human. Normally the little ant is the exe file which should be small, except that it’s not. Ants are...

The Experimental Gameplay Project has announced their next theme - and shame on me if I wouldn’t follow suite! With valentine coming up I might just have found a pretty nice idea, just now, writing this… Booyah!!

Yes! I made it! It’s 22:22 on the very last day of February and I’ve been programming virtually non-stop for the past two days, my brain feels like mashed potatoes. A Geek Valentine Controls Steer with the arrow keys. Use spacebar to: Build the time machine Buy and place traps (Just face an empty square and choose a trop on the top right) Sell...

Well well here’s something interesting. The Experimental Gameplay Project has given us a really interesting thing to focus on: Time. Like Braid, it’s time for us to make something interesting with time itself. 10 seconds is the constraint and that’s not a lot, but perhaps enough?

Ah man the mush in my brain is finally letting go and I’m starting to feel this tiny little programming urge again… This time it’s not Haskell or a new experimental game that’s luring me on, no this time it’s me longing to create this fantastic awesome epic RTS game. Sadly it’s a long way to go there… Anyway let’s get this going! A Geek Valentine...

Well here I am in the end of the month - without a game. It’s a failure I know but once again I lack inspiration and then it’s really hard to do something. Instead I’ve been thinking of something I could do that would make me wanna code like really bad again. I’m thinking of patching up this website, the forums are bugging me like hell as I...

It’s been nine months since I started doing Experimental Games and I think it’s time to evaluate and maybe go in a new direction. At first I had been stuck for ages with my never-ending projects and I had literally nothing to show for all my coding. Well now things have changed a bit: I’ve successfully released seven experimental games, games...

Well it was fun while it lasted, but now it’s gone and it’ll stay gone for a long time I think. It was mainly a test to see if I could do it and I’m really proud of my styling of it but it’s deader than in a grave, which isn’t really surprising, and it bothered me that I didn’t write it myself - like really bothered me. phpBB is fantastic in many...

I read an article the other day where he met someone who didn’t read fiction: He suggested that fiction was a waste of his time — he read to learn, not for "mere" entertainment I don’t agree with this view and neither did he: Fiction allows you to be part of situations that are unlikely to happen otherwise. You can experience thousands of years...

This is a game making site but where are the games? What gives? I’ve been slightly less motivated in making games lately and I’ve been doing different things, just to get my ideas and my motivation up. As I said in an earlier post I wanted a break from Experimental Games and I want to spend more time on each game just to get the quality of the...

I’ve got some things I want to do before I start with my next game and they’re all about improving the site. The last week or so has been extremely productive with me throwing out a lot of wasted code, speeding up the site and adding/removing features and I want to continue with that and get the things done now when I’m in the flow. You can find...

I decided to participate in the Ludum Dare this time, even though I’ve spent the whole day on a massage course (which by the way was pretty darn good), and about halfway there this is what I’ve done: Chockingly… ugly All is not what meets the eye though, I’ve got the basics done with fully scriptable islands and actually the very basic gameplay...

It’s here! The stuff of dreams, an entry for the epic Ludum Dare 17 has been made! For those who don’t know it’s a 48 hour game making competition which actually is pretty silly. Even more silly is my two hours of commitment yesterday but late this night at about 03:05 I am now, finally, writing this post! The theme was islands and this is what I...

So I participated in the Ludum Dare for the first time and this is a postmortem of my game Beebop The Island Hopper for the theme Islands. About Ludum Dare Ludum Dare is a competition which runs maybe two times a year and the competition is 24 hours long with a specific theme. After the 48 hours are over everyone who submitted a game can rate the...

The voting is over and I got a few ratings I want to comment on. You can view all ratings and comments here. They’re all from 1 to 5. Innovation: 3.75 This is by far the most positive of the bunch and the one button timing combination worked great! Fun: 3.29 Again a good grade and I thought the game was fun although it became really frustrating....

So I got a fairly fun assignment from the game design course I’m taking for once. I should come up with 50 ideas using my own idea generation technique. I used a sort of “notes in the basket” approach where you placed some notes with words in a basket and randomly drew two and then you should come up with something with the two words. But I’m too...

So I did this course Game Design and what’s a course on Game Design without a game? Well, here it is. Made in about seven days (more likely eight) and I thought it became quite cool. Where’s Teddy? How to Play Your mission is to find teddy and his teddybear friends. The problem is that it’s dark and it’s really hard to find them if you can’t...

Hey there. A lot has happened lately since my last update and my last game here. I’m now a pretty happy student at Linköpings university and I’m reading something similar to Computer Science or Computer engineering, but I guess it’ll become whatever you make it to be. For starters we’re reading a bit math and a bit common lisp, which is fun but...

I mentioned in the last post that I’m going to the university, which might explain my lack of activity here and for that I’m sorry. It’s not as hard as I had imagined, and I don’t have that much in school but there’s still a lot that’s going on. For example now how to make something which doesn’t focus on pasta or meatballs and I’ve also done the...

So school is on a break and I welcome it with all of my heart. The semester has been pretty fun and I really enjoy studying here. We had lisp the whole time which is a pretty sweet little language and if you haven’t, give it a shot. Then we had math and I do like math, although I wasn’t really motivated this time around and I dunno why. Maybe...

I’ve been playing Starcraft 2 a little this christmas. It wasn’t dead serious 1v1 which really is my favorite but I’ve played 2v2 with some friends and I actually played the campaign a bit and it was pretty fun! Usually I never play the campaign on RTS games but this one I liked. I even bought it to my little brother and he seems to like it. But...

I saw a post on briancarper where he reviews the past year and it sounds like a great idea actually. 2010 Geek Achievements Wrote a few games earlier this year; The Chronicles of Bim: The 100 Fake Afros A Geek Valentine Beebop The Island Hopper Where’s Teddy? Updated this site a bit. In the process I learned a lot of PHP, Javascript, mysql and...

Recently I’ve been having a dozen ideas and projects I’ve been poking around with: I wrote a simple lua, later perl, which announced when a new day9 episode has come. Later I expanded it to search for new manga episodes, but now it’s broken and unfinished. In an attempt to learn Haskell I began writing a simple irc bot, but I never did come far...

In my last post I wrote about some ideas and projects I have and how it’s a little bit too much at a time, so now I’m going to try something new here. In the beginning of every week I’ll declare something I’ll be focusing on and then that’s the only thing I should focus on on my free time. Just so I don’t drift off from irc bots in haskell to...

A new semester at the uni and so far it looks promising; I got a hold of some new books even though the bookstore had a snakelike queue similar to the Jörmungandr (the snake that encircled the earth in nordic mythology) and our new programming course started. This time it’s Ada’s turn and as always it should be interesting. At a first glance it...

A week of drawing is over, but I didn’t draw that much. It was a little bit of a fail from my part. But the past is the past and this week I’m going to be study focused. Not that I need to study, but I really need to rework my study technique. I’ve been going on like a classical student, in the bad sense, by skipping class and getting super...

I’ve been a vim vim fan for a while now and with some recent configs I’m starting to feel pretty confident and happy with it. For those who don’t know it’s basically a text editor, like notepad, but with a lot of keycommands which allows you to edit code (and text in general) faster. For writing a simple straight up text it might not be worth it,...

These last two weeks have been a small attempt at clearing up my head a bit. I have far too many things I’d like to do and even if it’s not possible to do them all at once it didn’t stop me from thinking of them. One minute it’s that and the other it’s something completely different. This is really not good as it messes with the top idea a lot so...

It’s the little things in life that makes it extra special. Sometimes it’s the luxury of coffee together with the morning paper and other times it’s just a small simple smile from a random stranger, kid or dog. Today when I got this bad headache I got saved by a two hour nap and my Programming in Ada book. It was quite a pleasure to just read it...

This was supposed to be a productive week with lots and lots of Perl and Ada but instead I’ve had this big headache all week, and some the week before and it’s gotten pretty bad so I can’t really concentrate on anything really. The electronics assignment was a bitch and it took a looong time to complete, even if all I had to do was to rewrite...

Wow it’s been a while! Almost a month and a half since my last update. There I complained about my almost constant headaches which hampered me a lot actually. Luckily now I have joined the rank of cool. I took home three frames I think and tried them out and I settled some I thought were fairly good looking, nothing special mind you but at least...

It’s been a while again since the last time we met mr. Blog. I’ve been busy with school and other stuff. I’ve thought about you but I just never really picked up emacs to write to you. I know it’s my fault but I beg of your mercy mr. Blog. You know that I had laid off school for a bit but now I’ve caught up with almost everything. I’ve got a bit...

I’ve gotta do a lab today at school, tomorrow I need to do the exam I missed when I had my glasses-missing headaches and I’m going to Ikea and some other shops for, you guessed it, shopping! Sure it’s fun and sure I need to do these things but the only thing on my mind now is making a new game. This weekend Ludum Dare is on again and I would...

So I think I made it! It became a pretty different game from what I set out to create, but I’m glad with how it turned out. My Minions Instructions Build a pathway and then place objects or release minions on it, everything must be on a path. Place musical objects or make the minions turn or split to make sound and create some music. Or you can...

It’s been over a year, but I haven’t lost (most) my touch yet! For the second time I’ve completed a Ludum Dare! Not an easy feat and yet there are tons of games that look absolutely wonderful. I’m not there yet but now I have at least gotten back into game making again, long overdue. I will make a formal post and all that jaz when I wake up...

So this time I managed to compose a timelapse of my weekend and the making of My Minions. Sadly I lost the first few hours as I forgot to turn it on… Anyway here’s the result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABVPlRaA5iI

Aah what a nice summer! It was nice to be back in Övertorneå, doing nothing in particular. Just not having to make lunch and dinner every day is such a relief, and if you do slip up food with grandma or Veronica’s parents is only a phone call away. I watched TV, played rollercoaster 2 and simcity 4 and just killed time in front of my beloved...

I briefly mentioned my new computer in the last post and I thought I’d make a post about it, as it’s awesome (as all new computers are). The specs: GPU: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 550Ti OC 1GB CPU: Intel core i5 2500K CPU cooler: Zalman CNPS-9900NT Motherboard: MSI P67A-C45 REV B3 Ram: Corsair 4GB (2x2048MB) CL9 1600Mhz XMS Harddrive: 1TB Samsung...

So I physically built the computer and now I’ve been using it a while, configuring stuff and getting used to my new screens. I think they’re about three times wide as my old laptop and now I have this one huge vertical space which is absolutely wonderful for surfing forums and reading code. Damn I love coding on it! When I go back to the laptop I...

Five days of school now and things are starting to settle down a bit. The courses are pretty cool; we have linear algebra which is pretty interesting, we have a java course where we’re going to make a game (!) and one about structures and algorithms. Pretty promising but we’ll see how things pan out. Taekwon-do practice has started and it’s...

For school we have this programming course for Java. It isn’t anything special really and it would be really boring if I don’t like to program, it almost is anyway, if it weren’t for the fact that we’re to create a game! Just any game will do and we’re in a group of two and we have about a month to complete it. Mmh I like. Me and Li, my...

I get these.. urges sometimes. Not like Dexter no, but sometimes I just have to buy a specific thing. It happened again yesterday (or was it the day before I don’t know) when I saw this post on hackernews. It’s a book this time, again, but this is something a little different - it’s about design. Now I know nothing about design but I’ve enjoyed...

School’s been going on now for… Is it a month and a half maybe? I don’t know really but it’s all going so fast, week after week is disappearing and I don’t know where they go but I know that I’m at least not wasting them like I did most of last year! Last year I managed school sure, but without doing anything special. Well if you don’t count...

Here’s me and Li’s game for our school course. The game isn’t tweaked too much but it’s a game with some fairly cool ideas. Grand Thief Arto Instructions Your goal is to collect loot until you can escape through the entry point when you’ve collected enough to complete the level. There are touchpads and lasers you need to shutdown by walking next...

Lately I’ve been feeling like there’s been a shit-ton of stuff going on, quite a turn-around from the last time. One course about data structure and algorithms (super fun to be honest) has wrapped up. We thought we were ahead with the assignments but in the end it got very stressful. I sat up pretty late trying to optimize our code from 0.16 to...

Design for Hackers It’s here! After about a month of waiting I’ve finally gotten the book that will make me a design god! Or at least make me aware of something called design. Joking aside I’m really terrible at design and making things look good. Admittedly my programming art for my games has gradually improved but I honestly don’t know what I’m...

Finished and uploaded our java game Grand Thief Arto, done an exam (didn’t quite go as intended) and starting some new courses in school. I’m liking my choice of Computer Science more and more. Data structures and Algorithms was a super fun course, I actually ordered a new book about the subject just yesterday. Linear Algebra is really fun now as...

So I read the wonderful Design for Hackers and I managed to win some money for books from a course… So I ran away and ordered some new books, and they just arrived today. Yay! First off I ordered Introduction to Algorithms which is the de facto book about algorithms and it seemed like a fitting thing to do as I won it by doing algorithm...

I read an article about the decline of FPS games and it made me think a bit. When was the last time I actually enjoyed an FPS game? I installed old Deus Ex a while ago but it’s what 12 years old? Team Fortress was okay, the one or two times I tried it, but I can’t say I truly enjoyed it, hell I never even played it apart from trying it at a...

I’ve had a pretty nice weekend. On Friday MLG Orlando began and I’ve been staying up to 2 and sleeping until at least 10 the last days. My inner night-owl is very happy about it, my early-rising girlfriend perhaps not as much, but I think she’s a bit understanding? On Saturday we cleaned the house for Christmas and hung up a star and stuff like...

I haven’t done much blogging or game programming in a while but instead I’ve finished some school stuff. We completed the assembly course labs, which were pretty fun actually, and I managed to finally complete the electronics course I’ve been holding off on for like forever… But now it’s gone, yay! There’s not much left before christmas either,...

Mr. Eriksson just sent me this link as a fitting video on my post on The Decline of FPS Games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZtBCpo0eU Oh How true!

The time has finally come. After more than three hours of exam writing, and almost double spent on studying for it, I am now ready to declare my entry into Ludum Dare 22! I’ve been away far too long, with my entries for the 17th and the 20th dare being almost a century away, the ancient game making creature will once again move into action. We’ll...

When I ordered this computer I was compelled, utterly compelled to buy a mechanical keyboard. Sure they cost almost 10x as much as a “regular” one and they didn’t even have these funky multimedia keys, what gives? Did I loose my insanity? It was supposed to give a great typing experience… And it sure did deliver! I’m bringing this up again...

So I entered Ludum Dare 22 this weekend as a preamble for tomorrow’s linear algebra exam. The theme this time around was Alone and the game I came up with is about a lonely satellite in space, kinda like Wall-E. Sat-E Instructions Collect junk and other items for you to buy upgrades, and finally, your friend to finish the game. Be careful not to...

Here’s the timelapse for my entry to Ludum Dare 22, Sat-E. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoKDyhxCVm0 This time I managed to record one screen every minute, which is very suboptimal to say the least but I slowed it down a bit so you can at least see something being done there.

This is my postmortem for my Ludum Dare 22 entry, Sat-E. You can find the timelapse over here. The Good Motivation I was really motivated for this dare and it showed in the game and outside it. It’s super hard to make a game in only 48 hours but this time it went pretty well. My previous attempts went okay, but there were always something...

It’s time to wrap up the year that’s been. Be warned for slight ego boosting here. 2011 Geek Achievements Wrote three games this year: My Minions Grand Thief Arto Sat-E Bought a new computer! Bought a mechanical keyboard. Bought custom Starcraft 2 keycaps for the keyboard. Learned 68k assembly. Learned about algorithms and data structures. Bought...

The results from Ludum Dare 22 are in! I made the game Sat-E for the 48 hour competition and I was quite happy with it. #24 Community 3.71 This one was really surprising, but welcome. I did post a cute picture of a korean k-pop star so I guess that’s why. #40 Fun 3.38 Fun is always great! I’m so happy ^^ #49 Theme 3.69 I thought my theme choice...

Life is slowly settling down over here. School has started with some pretty interesting stuff this year. Firstly we have a math analysis course in multiple variables which is ok. I’m not a fan of the previous analysis courses but maybe this will be a bit different. We’re contining with computer hardware, microprogramming and such, and I enjoy it...

I wrote that we where doing some microprogramming, making the processor work etc. We had a lab about that yesterday and I was very, very nervous. The preparations weren’t that hard, but they where very bothersome. Converting the instructions to binary/hex by hand is never nice. Turns out the lab was very easy! You also had the option to prepare...

The school and my life is trotting along. I’m handling the extra course fine, but instead I’ve left the standard math course behind a bit. Actually more than a bit but hopefully I’ll correct things later. No my life is going along just fine, it almost feels like my life is runing ahead and leaving me behind. What have I done lately? School work I...

It’s funny how motivation can play such a huge role with my productivity. I’m currently having two math courses; one mandatory about analysis in multiple variables and vector analysis and one voluntary about advanced linear algebra. I don’t like the analysis course, didn’t like the previous ones and I don’t like this one.I don’t fall asleep on...

All the programmers love to promote their favourite language, or to hate on others. Now I read a post which claimes my favourite language is not good enough! But he’s correct of course, there is no one language to rule them all. You should always choose the mest language for the job, be it C or Ruby, but most don’t learn enough of them. Maybe...

A lot has been going on lately and it feels like I’m being swamped. I can’t complain too much but there are things I’d like to change after the exam period this week. Program more! I have seriously done nothing since christmas or someting. I need to finish: Ada project for school. Can’t believe I still haven’t done it. New web page. Need to track...

I read a wonderful post, 3 Things I hate about “beginner” programming books, which I couldn’t agree more with. Basically he has these points: Too long Too many examples like “Hello World!” No answers to exercises. Nr 1 is a pretty curious one. Even though I think a book is good, I often end up only completing 75-85% of it before going on with my...

I was looking forward to this weekend, for Ludum Dare and for me to finally make a game again. But it just don’t feel right to me. I’m not prepared, I feel a little bit stressed and I don’t really have faith in my game so I’m gonna step down this one as well. But it’s fine, Ludum Dare is supposed to be fun and challenging with an emphasis on fun...

Ludum Dare is coming along… Slowly. The rust on me is probably so brown it’s nearly black. But I have an idea and it might be good, all I need to do is execute it. Right? Programmer graphics coming to take you away! Anyway it’s going to be a risk-like game with a twist: you can change all the rules and victory conditions. I played a pretty cool...

I’ve been a long time gone, been busy with school then having summer vacation and generally not making games or blogging. But I have revived! I scrambled to push my new website live because today it’s Ludum Dare time! The theme is “Evolution” and it’s the 24th time for Ludum Dare and my 4th time entering. Of course, as usual with my Ludum Dare...

Today it’s finally starting again and it’s off with a flying start. We have 11 lectures this first week and an absolutely smacked schedule. If that wasn’t enough I also have a mentor time to prepare for and I need to start Taekwon-do again. On another note Ḯ’m currently plowing through ‘Liar Game’ manga which is pretty damn nice. It’s a...

First week of school is over and it’s been full throttle from the start, in a good way. We’re having four courses and for once I like them all. We have an interesting math course, a useful course “Software Development in Theory” (boring but useful) and a big project course where we shall build a robot. That’ll be fun! But my favourite course so...

So it has begun, the long road until christmas when we’re supposed to have a working warrior robot. We’re gonna do battle with infrared lasers instead of axes but it might be fun anyway. Luckily for me I’m responsible for software and nothing harder than that! w00p! We could maybe cheat a little… Our group seem pretty good, all nice guys (so...

So we have eduroam at our University and unsurprisingly wicd is not on their official support list but with some googling the wonderful Arch Wiki had the answer. Well, almost. Save the following as /etc/wicd/encryption/templates/ttls-80211: name = TTLS for Wireless author = Alexander Clouter version = 1 require anon_identity *Anonymous_Username...

Long overdue, I recently moved my private repositories from Github to Bitbucket. Github is great of courseand they even gave me a free students account and I still host all my public repositories there. Still, Bitbucket has unlimited free private repositories for up to 5 users which is a much better pricing model. And Bitbucket is pretty awesome...

Exam period is here which means all courses should be wrapping up and a week or so ago we finished up our lab series about pintos. The labs were among the best I’ve had yet and I learned a ton. We didn’t follow the official instructions but we had our own assigmnets. Basically: Implement some basic system calls. Reimplement timer_sleep to not use...

Every now and day blog posts about what it takes to be a good programmer or how you figure out if someone is a bad programmer arrives. There’s always talk about how you find the good programmers in interviews and the topic is always hot in schools and universities. Today I read the best comment so far about the topic by hacker news regular...

So I made a small irc bot in 294 characters in code-golfing language #1: Perl. Usage perl Dbot Commands .name - Echo the bots name .hello - Output “hello world!” .src - Dump the source code Code use IO::Socket;$s=IO::Socket::INET->new("158.38.8.251:6667");sub o{print$s "$_[0]\n"}o("NICK $0");o("USER b * *...

After a season with very bad attendence, I blame school and lack of motivation, I still went to grading. I slept well but I was super stressed all weekend so I had to constantly run to the bathroom and I couldn’t eat lunch or breakfast properly, and I don’t usually get nervous… Anyways the grading went well, the kids where absolutely great! They...

I’ve been waiting for soon to be three years for Monaco What’s Yours is Mine, and today I was granted an early christmas present - I was given a beta key! w00p!! I was planning on studying and sending some emails to some companies… But who knows what I’ll end up doing? Tomorrow is preorder release, yes I’m going to buy a 4-pack directly, and they...

School is almost over and it’s almost time to travel back up to Övertorneå. This year me and Veronica opened our Christmas presents a bit early - we’re impatient like that. I got one of the best presents yet I think! A Raspberry Pi! Just look at this bad boy! She got some crochet (virkning?) stuff from me, but she seemed content with that little....

When I discovered programming it felt like a whole new world opened up for me with endless possibilities. It granted unlimited power and I could create virtually anything and it explained so much to me - how did a program work? How could you make a game or a website? But there was a big question without a good answer lurking in the background. I...

I read a post, sadly lost the link, where the author had recorded all books she had read during the year and I thought it’d be pretty fun to do. So here goes, in a mostly ordered list. The Art of Learning - Josh Waitzkin Världens Whiskey More of a reference book. Linear Algebra Done Right Course book. Linear Algebra Done Wrong Course book....

Like the last two years I’m summarizing the year. At the end of the year like this it always feel like I didn’t accomplish much, but after the yearly summary it always feels better. 2012 Geek Achievements Designed a processor which fulfills the Core Wars 88 standard. Includes a redcode assembler. Went through pintos in school and learned a lot...

A nice thing about school are the nice long vacations. Directly after my last exam we went north to our dear home village Övertorneå and spent two weeks celebrating Christmas and New Years Eve. What did we do? I practiced some obsessive behavior with Power Grid and Minecraft (and finishing up with some World of Tanks). It all began with an...

Today I have fixed two large annoyances I’ve had! I fixed the blue people on youtube bug I found a nice thread with a great answer. I solved it by forcefully patching libflashplayer.so perl -pi.bak -e 's/libvdpau/lixvdpau/g' libflashplayer.so Worked perfectly! I fixed the minecraft stuck in pause bug This affects you if you’re using xmonad (or...

Here are the results of the big robot construction course we had before christmas! The whole process went smooth and our group was amazing. The design and building of the robot went well even though in hindsight I would’ve changed a lot of stuff. The ending competition didn’t go quite as we had hoped, but we never did place much effort in it...

So I returned to Faster than Light again this weekend, this time for real. I bought it when it came out and I played it only in passing, but this weekend I played it a ton. Aaahh a new beginning in FTL. Will it be death once more I generally don’t like games where you have to restart after you die, I have a tendency to get really upset when...

I have a lot of things I want to do. Right now I want to go to the kids training tomorrow and also to our training time. I haven’t trained a lot lately so it feels good to do something again and training the kids is very rewarding. On Monday I have the next graph theory lecture and I want to do all our lesson assignments until then. As I’ve...

A few minutes after I wrote about my long term goals, in the shower, I realize I forgot a few major goals I have: Write my own Programming Language Why? Because it sounds fun and epic as hell. Write a Book So I like books and I like to collect them and I have my whole bookcase filled with programming books, manga and fiction. Something really...

Faster than Light the great game I lost a ton of time on, has found a new victim. It’s not someone you’d expect, it’s even someone who said: “What a bad game” when she saw me playing it. But nevertheless this Saturday she played it more than 2.5 hours! I told Veronica I wanted her try out FTL and minecraft, but we never got time for minecraft… It...

I play the phenomena that is Minecraft on and off. Sometimes the laid back building or the exploring is just what I need. Sometimes I can challange myself to build cool complex stuff and I’m even an avid follower of Doc’M and Etho and the other mindcrackers over at the youtube. Now brother Filip is an even more Minecraft follower than me and...

I actually read more books in 2013 than in 2012. In a somewhat unorganized list: Fiction Livet Deluxe - Jens Lapidius Escape from camp 14 - Blaine Harden Wonderful. A great book. Edge - Jeffery Deaver Dollar - Lee Child Gisslan - Lee Child Bränd - Lee Child Besökaren - Lee Child Hetta - Lee Child Värt att dö för - Lee Child Livvakt - Lee Child...

The year is almost over and I think I accomplished a lot this year. You can read my reviews of 2010, 2011 and 2012. 2013 Geek Achievements Solved 213 UVa problems. Got 43rd at NWERC 2013. Placed high in IMPA, with one turn won. Completed the online course Programming Languages in Coursera. Wrote some ML, Racket and Ruby. Won the TDDD56 Parallel...

I think rust is one of the most interesting upcoming programming languages out there. So I wrote a solution to the 8-puzzle (see the 15-puzzle) using A*. It also has a breadth first search for solutions on a specific distance away from the goal. The solution is not by any means a great one and there are parts I’m a bit annoyed with, but that’s...

After months of procrastination it is time for me to enter Ludum Dare again! I am totally unprepared, but I did setup a setup which actually compiles. I never got audio to run but hopefully I can manage something. Repository: https://github.com/treeman/LD29. Going for C++ this time. Graphics library: SFML. Sound effects: sfxr Graphics: mtpaint...

After a few hours of coding I’ve made a little, little, bit of progress but it took a lot longer than I would have liked. I’ve basically managed to make a world and some tiles in the world and we have a worker who can move around on the tiles and he can’t move on all tiles. Look! He can pathfind! But here the real coding begins…

Oh what a mistake. I woke up at 05.00 when my girlfriend woke up, she’s working early today, and went to the bathroom. After I was done, still pretty tired, I made a big mistake. I checked the current theme for Ludum Dare 29: Beneath the Surface and guess what? Now I wasn’t tired anymore. So I got out of bed, at 5!, and wrote down some ideas....

I’ve spent literally the whole day coding and it feels like I’ve only done a small parts of the actual game mechanics… I know this isn’t going to end well. I can allow myself a small pause I feel… Not sure where this is going to end, but I’m having a blast anyway!

Finally we have some sort of progress! We can now build rooms and place and remove objects! Yay!! But we still haven’t even begun with the game logic, resource management, the actual mining mechanic, multiple levels, actual tasks for our workers. But it’s something.

Now we can build rooms, we can place objects and the worker will do things for us. Now I’ve added some ores which makes the game look a bit less boring. I realize I’ve spent all my time on these little things and I still don’t have a game! But it doesn’t matter, maybe I can finish the game on a later date. Oooh, is that diamond?

Download Linux 64bit Windows Timelapse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIbr-mLi4DU I made a very serious attempt at making a grand game for Ludum Dare 29. Unfortunately it was a far, far, too big of a game for me to be able to finish it in one weekend. But I had a great experience and was fun beating the procrastination devil for once. Anyways,...

IDA Summer of Code is Linköping University’s response to Google Summer of Code. Students can send in a project of their choice and if selected they get paid to work on it for 4 weeks during the summer. In return the university get to show off the students and their projects in marketing purposes. As I’m writing this, my application got accepted...

While tampering with Hakyll and running site preview I stumbled upon this error message: site: addWatch: resource exhausted (No space left on device) At first I tried to clear /tmp but, so clearly the device did have some space left. After a bit of googling I found a solution which managed to solve my problem. # for foo in /proc/*/fd/*; do...

In rust one might want to have a list of closures, for example as a list of callbacks. let mut fs: Vec||> = Vec::new(); fs.push(|| { println!("imma firing my lazer"); }); for f in fs.iter() { f(); // error: expected function but found `&||` }; Maybe if we borrow f? for &f in fs.iter() { // error: cannot move out of dereference of...

So I’ve been idling on irc for years now and I’ve been using irssi for that, which works fine. I have not had notifications enabled, so I can see from the statusbar whenever someone messages me. As I’ve never been very active this has been fine, but now I figured it’s time to fix that. Fortunately it was very easy, there’s even a perfect match...

So I reinstalled slackware on my machine and decided to take some rough notes of the most important steps I made. I did not document the steps in detail, and some are very specific for my setup. But maybe it can be useful for someone, or myself. Basic steps Make slackware usb loader See README_USB.TXT in usb folder from slackware installation....

This is a wrap up of my 5 weeks at Configura as a summer internship. There were 6 interns and we had two teams doing different things. I worked with two other awesome guys and it was great! The Premise We had two assignments this summer. One was to create an optimized version of an octree (more on that later). We had a reference implementation in...

My first summer job is now over, and after a weekend of rest, it is now time to plan for my second summer job: IDA Summer of Code. I will work a month, or 4 weeks, with contributing to rust! The only issue is, I have no idea where to start. I didn’t have a strict plan or a vision of what I want to accomplish when I applied, but now I’m running...

The problem with open-source for most people isn’t writing code, but it’s all the other things. How shall I push my changes? How do I handle git? What should I do? I was the same and I actually dreaded my awesome summer job, just a little bit, because now I’m supposed to contribute and preferrably a non-trivial amount. Although I’ve been...

For rust, I’m updating the documentation for the standard library and specifically with the collections. For the priority queue I had the idea to use Dijkstra’s algorithm as a fun example. That idea was well received and that example is now live. At first I wanted to use A* to solve the eight puzzle, which I’ve done before, but that example...

I’m currently reading The Drunkard’s Walk, a well written book about probabilities. There they discussed the famous Monty Hall Problem. I’ve heard about it before and I know the answer, but he mentioned a simulation of the problem and that sounded cool so I made a simulation of my own. This example will be in the rust documentation as well....

Finally back from a 2 week vacation up at Övertorneå. It’s been pretty great to be taken care of and not doing anything. Well, I did get my ass kicked in Terra Mystica and I played a bit of Minecraft, but still. We got some nice food and my in-laws and my parents were nice. I’m still feeling extremely tired though and I don’t know why. The...

I purposefully and more or less idiotically executed git reset --hard in hopes of going back a bit. What I didn’t realize then is that you throw away all the commits between now until . Not quite what was planned. After a bit of panic I found the answer: Find your hash using git reflog. Do git cherry-pick to go back in time. This saved me a...

A while ago a made a timelapse of my entry to Ludum Dare. This is how I parse and embed videos using Hakyll. I don’t want to remember any special syntax for embedding, I don’t want to bother (remember?) to use something like {% youtube: %} or whatever syntax we might find pretty. The simplest solution I could think of is simply to have a bare...

I have now worked a bit more than 3 weeks out of my 4 weeks of IDA Summer of Code and this is an update post of what I’ve done so far. I will write a more extensive summary post at the end of the project. I was planning on writing a weekly summary, but that ship sailed a long time ago. I’ve written a lot of documenting code examples, specifically...

This is a wrap-up post of my entry to IDA Summer of Code this year. Quick stats 65 merged commits 6790 lines added 2822 lines deleted 36 pull requests, 34 merged 12 pull requests directly fixing issues rest either documentation or cleanup 1 RFC submitted (postponed) Worked ~160 hours Initial work Before this summer I had never contributed...

I just noticed I was recognized as a friend of the tree in a weekly meeting by the rust team. It came during my documentation sprint during IDA Summer of Code and I discovered it now, only two and a half month later. Still a very pleasant surprise!

These quotes are from hacker news and I found them all too funny. It’s hard for me to understand the whole soda phenomenon in Canada and the US. Is it as addictive as cigarettes? Does it make you crave for more? Or it simply tastes so good that you can’t get enough of it? Why not eat a bunch of apples instead (if you don’t care about the amount...

I like Hearthstone and recently the next expansion Goblins vs Gnomes so I wanted to install and play it. It didn’t work in vanilla wine, with a “time out error”, but I found a bug report which makes it work. Here’s a short summary: Get wine source from git. My version was wine-1.7.30-121-g6fe4d9e. Make shlexec.patch inside the source directory @@...

At LIU we use timeedit to track our schedules. Recently they updated their interface and improved some parts. It’s now possible to create a prenumeration of a collection of courses exported as csv which can then be imported to other calendar apps. But they also started to obfuscate their urls. This is the schedule for a single course TGTU49 in...

I’m going through a bit of a boardgame stint, as I usually do during christmas time. I had exactly one thing on my wishlist for this christmas for my little brother: Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries. Guess what? I got something from my wishlist! This was our 5th or 6th game (or something?) and it’s a nice piece of game! Much simpler than Agricola...

In total I read 20 books, which is 33% less than last year. Fiction How to Be a Woman - Catilin Moran Fun! The Kill Room - Jeffery Deaver A Song of Ice and Fire: Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin Reread. A Song of Ice and Fire: A Clash of Kings - George R.R. Martin Reread. A Song of Ice and Fire: A Storm of Swords - George R.R. Martin Reread....

Previous reviews: 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. 2014 Geek Achievements Solved 73 UVa problems. Won a turn in IMPA and solved a bunch of problems. Completed a doctorand course about algorithmic problem solving. Finished my 4 first years in University. Became a contributor to rust and became a friend of the tree. Completed the online course Machine...

My girlfriend has told me I get these narrow interests where I pour all my energy and thoughts into and about 1,5 months ago I discovered Netrunner, a very awesome card game. Check out this how to play or team covenant’s channel if you want to know more. So this Sunday I went to my first store championship with Henrik, the one other player I’ve...

After the awesomeness during the previous store championship, I decided to go to the store championship at Lindhska Bokhandel in Örebro. I brought a modified version of the same corp I used the last time, a Blue Sun kill deck and a new runner with Leela Patel. See the links for cards and some card choices. The tournament was a 26-player one, at...

When this man opens his mouth, truth comes out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsFnJYJ2buU If I ever make a game and I want someone to balance it and I had the money, I would hire Thorin.

I came back to Linköping yesterday and I had a package waiting for me to pick it up. What could it be? With a crummy mobile phone photo I give you my TOXIC keycaps mounted on my trusty old das keyboard: Woooo If only my GH60 could arrive some time this decade…

There was another, smaller, netrunner tournament about a week ago. I was looking forward to a very casual setting but there were also some guys who came from… Västerås I think, but I’m not sure. We managed to scrape together 9 people at least, and I didn’t notice anyone bringing anything super janky. Runner is my Achilles Heel and so I decided...

I recently bought an Intuos Manga drawing tablet recently, because I got this fix idea that I want to learn how to draw. And what better way to do it than with a drawing tablet, while satisfying my need for new things? With little experience I boldly set forth and I found a lovely and free drawing program Krita. I’ve used photoshop earlier but...

I thought Krita worked fine… Until I tried to save. Krita crashed whenever I tried to save (or open) a file and gave the error: Could not find mime type "application/x-krita" Turns out if you reinstall the package shared-mime-info which comes natively with Slackware the problem goes away.

I recently finished my master’s degree (civilingenjör or civil engineering) at Linköping’s University. At first it felt like 5 years would be an eternity, but in hindsight it was over in a flash. my gut feeling is that I haven’t learnt or done anything of note, except you know actually finishing my degree, but if I sit down and think about it I...

The last time I (re)installed Slackware I documented what I did. Somehow I managed to really bork my installation and I decided to go through with a larger reinstallation once more. This is a log of some things I did differently. Kernel Before installing the kernel it’s nice to check the GPG signature of the downloaded packages. With the kernel...

With a fresh firefox installation I found that it kept creating a ~/Desktop directory. But I found how to turn it off. Edit ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs to XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/" XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/" XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/" XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/" XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/" XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/" XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/"...

This is a guide on how to build Krita on Slackware 14.1. This is based on this guide for linux. removepkg calligra Install some dependencies from Slackbuilds. gsl libgexiv2 libpqxx pstoedit Get Krita. The original guide recommends building in ~/kde4 but I moved i to /opt/kde4. mkdir -p /opt/kde4/build /opt/kde4/src /opt/kde4/inst cd /opt/kde4/src...

I’ve been trying out fish shell lately. A cool feature with fish is that it can automatically generate completions by parsing the installed man pages by running fish_update_completions. Unfortunately this is what I got: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/share/fish/tools/create_manpage_completions.py", line 963, in ...

Edit: I have updated the highlighting again so the inline code used as examples have changed. I guess I should’ve used images to record the look. Recently when I reinstalled Slackware I decided to restyle my workspace as well. I settled on gruvbox with neovim and using the generalized package I also styled my terminal. Then on a whim I wanted to...

Drawing is hard. I’d like to improve though. Here’s a self portrait I tried to draw in Krita. I’m really slow so I stopped a bit before it really was finished. Obviously I’d like it to be a bit better, but I’m still a little happy about the glasses and the eyebrows. The mouth and nose is ugly though.

About two years ago after Lavabit’s shutdown I searched for a replacement email provider. For some reason I settled on eumx which I used since then. Yesterday I got an email saying the recurring billing could not be renewed as I had my old credit card registered and it got me thinking of moving on. I wasn’t particularly unhappy but I had some...

I had installed and used rust already but today I fired it up and received: rustc --version rustc: error while loading shared libraries: librustc_driver-7e44814b.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory I’ve seen this before… I thought modifying LD_LIBRARY_PATH in my shell was enough, but no. According to the bug report the...

You can change the application to handle mailto: links in Firefox in Preferences -> Applications. The problem is that you can’t input custom urls and some email providers, like hotmail or fastmail, aren’t supported. I managed to fix it with the plugin MailtoWebmails. It annoys me that a plugin is needed, but there it is.

One of my goals this year was to participate in a Ludum Dare. I have cleared up my schedule, negotiated with my better half and everything is set up for epicness. At first the idea was to make a game in rust, even tough I basically haven’t used it in almost a year, but when I tried to set things up (yes today) it was extremely frustrating. Not so...

I think I’ve decided what to do. Some very slight progress has been made.

Time is running out! At least the more technical parts are mostly done. The ships have an acceptable AI, they have rechargeable shields and they can now even be killed. Currently the game is far too easy, but it’s starting to look a little cooler at least.

The game is still far from being an actual game but some progress has been made. I fixed most of the collision detection problems and I’m now trying to make some sort of AI working for the ship. It’s a bit hard and time consuming and I don’t know how to make things good. Maybe some time I need to focus on actually making graphics as well?

Download Linux 64bit Windows So I actually finished Ludum Dare 33. I can’t believe how hard it was to actually make something! It continues to amaze me what fantastic stuff everyone manage to make in just 48 hours. This is what I came up with for the theme You are the Monster. Yes I couldn’t come up with a name until submission… So I just took...

I entered an ID draft tournament in Netrunner hosted in Örebro and this is a brief overview of what happened. Disclaimer: My memory is a little bit fuzzy and the events may or may not correspond to what actually happened. The draft The idea was to randomly sort all entrants and in turn each chooses an ID which nobody else can choose. When...

There was another Netrunner tournament this Sunday with 8 entrants. We had two new legal data packs with Old Hollywood and The Universe of Tomorrow so a lot of new things were tried. I heard a rumor that a full playset of both Aesop’s Pawnshop and Wyldside were available so I decided to not take my jankiest ideas and play Noise and Blue Sun. The...

I read a great essay or article about stereotypical programmers called The Little Printf. I really couldn’t do it justice so do yourself a favor and go read it. It touches on several types of programmers or rather traits of programmers I recognize in my surroundings and also sadly a bit in myself. I can especially relate to the programmer who’s...

I have used Habitica the last 18 months to organize my habits and things I want to get done. I believe it all started with an amazing book called The Power of Habit which describes the amazing benefits habits can give, both in the context of your own life but also in business. The argument is that habits is the basis for success in whatever area...

I didn’t read a lot of books in 2015, but the books I did read were pretty damn good. Fiction A Song of Ice and Fire: A Dance with Dragons - George R.R. Martin Reread. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms - Gearge R.R. Martin The Skin Collector - Jeffery Deaver Best Served Cold - Joe Abercrombie The Heroes - Joe Abercrombie Red Country - Joe...

Previous reviews: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. 2015 Geek Achievements Finished my university studies and got a Master in Computer Science. Discovered a new boardgame love: Android Netrunner. Finished top 4 in my first Netrunner Store Championship. Won a small local Netrunner tournament. Completed my master thesis about recommender systems....

After quite the hiatus from Netrunner I had a chance to join a tournament here in Linköping with 14 participants. The number of players has grown a lot since the previous tournament which is really great. As I really wanted to win the wonderful Day Job playmat I went with two of the best decks I could come up with. I went with the Noise deck I’ve...

After a bit of a hiatus after the Winter Kit Tournament the 16th January I participated in three tournaments during February - March. After each of these tournaments I started a writeup of them but they fell off my mind a bit but consider this my break with my blogging hiatus. Store Championship Örebro After more than a month with no Netrunner I...

During my vacation I suddenly got a bunch of “life crisis” type thoughts in an almost panic inducing intensity. They were mostly thoughts about not having accomplished anything and that the future looks bleak and meaningless and it’s not worth to do anything. As usual they are mostly illogical and they usually subside fairly quickly. But they got...

It seems like it’s been a yearly recurrence reinstalling slackware from scratch. This time it happened during my vacation when I was mucking around with trying to compile erlang with wxWidgets support and somehow a make clean started to remove / and I only noticed it too late… Not sure how it happened but I had changed things in the make and...

Every once and a while I like to redo my priorities and set new goals for myself. I recently read the book 59 seconds which among other things presented a way of structuring goals I will try out. In short you should divide your main goal into 5 subgoals with a date of completion, a reward upon completion and you should specify why and how you can...

As a follow up of my hobby project goals this autumn I have now completed the smallest goal there. I got started a little with soldering by constructing a small 3x3x3 LED cube. Although extremely hard to see in this picture it actually worked without a hitch! It’s not the prettiest job ever but it was quite meditative to work with actually. Now...

This weekend was filled by playing cards. On Saturday I hosted a small Game of Thrones tournament and on Sunday the local Netrunner community hosted a small summer kit tournament. Game of Thrones We’ve had a similar tournament once before when me and my girlfriend invited two of our friends and had a small 4 person tournament. The last time I was...

I’ve finally completed my first custom made keyboard. I’m still missing stabilizers and some smaller screws to hold it all together but I’ve been using it the last days and I thought I’d share. The hardware Several years ago I joined the geekhack forum and I joined in a few group buys. I ordered some cool keycaps and I also entered the GH60 Group...

For some reason I’ve done a couple of personality tests the last month, mostly to satisfy my own curiosity. The Braverman Test Inspired by Charles Poliquin’s visit on The Tim Ferriss Show I tried out the Braverman test to determine my neurotransmitter type. The point Charles makes is that the type of training most suited to you is determined by...

Earlier this year I set out some goals I wanted to accomplish this autumn. I accomplished a few things and I failed others. Exercise and Health Eat more strict LCHF for 1 month ok Train BJJ or MMA for 1 month ok 2 months of lifting at the gym ok Powerlifting 100 kg deadlift 5x5 ok 75 kg bench 5x5 failed 85 kg squat 5x5 ok Side split with both...

Yeah so I managed to not read a single fiction book this year. To compensate and make myself feel better I’ll add in some new mangas I’ve read, but I may may have missed some. Fiction Crickets Non-Fiction Getting to Yes Relax into Stretch Thinking, Fast and Slow 59 seconds The Hard Thing About Hard Things The Design of Everyday Things Winning...

See the previous reviews. 2016 Geek Achievements Placed 2nd in Linköping’s Regional in Netrunner. Won a couple of smaller Netrunner tournaments. Got Veronica to play Game of Thrones with us. She beat us and she loved it! Programmed a little bit of Elixir and a tiny bit of front end web development. Built a custom keyboard. 2016 Non-Geek...

I’ve been listening to The Tim Ferriss Show a while now and he and his guests often inspire me to make changes and start doing new things. I got introduced to Josh Waitzkin’s excellent The Art of Learning and the meta skill of learning has since then fascinated me. So when I got wind of Tim’s book about learning (and coincidentally also about...

It’s time for lesson 3. I made the mistake of not planning for something to augment the mash with, but a simple salad had to do: It was okay. Girlfriend gave it 5/10 and I gave it a 6/10, a higher rating would be possible if there was something else to eat it with.

With a tiny bit more planning I made a dinner out the lessons 4 and 5 as the crabcakes were only supposed to be an appetizer: Crabcakes: Surprisingly delicious. Both me and Veronica gives them a 7. Zucchini: While I thought they passed Veronica said “Zucchini is not my thing” and promptly gave it a 2. Yikes.

Lesson 6! I went to Cervera and bought a holder to allow me to steam chicken. I broke the recipe on multiple fronts: chicken wings instead of chicken breasts, mushroom soy instead of tamarin, roman salad instead of baby bok choi (where the heck do you find that…) and I even forgot to season with salt and lemon… But the chicken itself turned out...

I haven’t been feeling quite as forward or as energetic lately. There are no set plans, habits or goals for this spring and I don’t have a clear vision of what to do currently but it also feels… fine? Maybe I will cruise in a lower gear for a while and rev up when my mood changes. In the meanwhile I have habits I’d like to cultivate sometime....

Recently we finally moved out of our old apartment and into a new larger apartment and it’s awesome. It’s no more than a year old and feels very fresh compared to the old one. It’s also larger with an extra room, dishwasher (!) and closer to the city centrum and everything is basically better. The move also showed me just how easy it is to...

Two new Bitcoin Cash token solutions have recently been suggested: Simple Ledger Protocol: A token system for Bitcoin Cash Introducing Colored Coins: a Bitcoin Cash token implementation Both are improvements over Tokeda as they allow permissionless transfers. However all commit to OP_RETURN which unfortunately is fundamentally flawed. No true SPV...

I’d like to address a misconception that’s at the core in many Bitcoin discussions lately: Bitcoin’s security isn’t binary. In fact security in general isn’t black and white. It’s a trade-off being secure enough for your threat model vs the cost and feasibility of your protection. Consider having your front door locked for example. You could...

In contrast to previous years I haven’t kept up with the blog. For good reason I’d say since we got a child in October! It really alters your perspectives and other things suddenly feel a little less important and of course there’s less time to do other stuff. A little late and incomplete perhaps but at least I’ll try to have an unbroken streak...

I’m not a Bitcoin developer, I’m just some guy looking in from the outside. Lately there’s been a bunch of heated debates between the different Bitcoin Cash developer teams. Something that stood out from all the noise was problems with communications and a lack of specification for new proposals. Thinking about it there’s no specification at all....

The HandCash wallet has recently become a popular Bitcoin Cash wallet in large part thanks to their $handle concept. It’s basically a username you use instead of the normal Bitcoin Cash address, similar to how domain names abstract away IP addresses. For example instead of sending BCH to my address...

A new year and a lingering feeling of not having done enough during the year. A fast review of the year usually makes me feel better. 2018 non-geek achievements Was on parental leave for about 7 months. It was great although I’ve been crawling up the walls a little the last month. Moved to a small village or society far from Linköping. But kept...

I’m not sure how I got started but I recently read an excellent book about typography: Butterick’s Practical Typography. It’s free and there’s a section Typography in ten minutes if you want the important bits. He makes a pretty good case for why it matters when he points out the vast majority of a webpage is text. Despite this it seems focus is...

While remaking the site I noticed my automatic embedding of bare youtube links sometimes didn’t work. The culprit was unicode in the document which the regex library couldn’t handle. Apparently while this would be supported by default by almost all modern languages it’s not the case with Haskell. I tried several regex libraries which either...

When we moved back to our childhood community and bought a house I had one pretty big requirement: I had to have a home office as I need to work remote. There simply isn’t any software development work for me here. So the later part of 2018 and early 2019 we’ve renovated an old storage room in the basement and made it into a home office. The...

After having consumed Practical Typography I took a look at the library he wrote to create books for the web called Pollen written in Racket. I’ve only used it a little but I feel I can give my first impressions of it. What I like The first thing I really like is Pollen enables powerful text transformation using X-expressions. They’re like...

When evaluating Pollen I complained about markdown/pandoc’s lack of sidenote handling. I have solved it for Pollen but felt it deserved it’s own post. A caveat: I generated Tufte CSS style sidenotes and marginnotes which made it more complex than if I had simply generated “standard” sidenotes. If you want to adapt this yourself I’m sure you can...

Monero has once again changed the POW to brick ASICs following confirmation that 85% of Monero’s hashrate were ASICs. Recurring hard forks to brick ASICs is a very dangerous game and what better to illustrate this than with an xkcd-style plot? You’re safe on the edges but how do you bridge the gap?

There are a bunch of posts about making your audio work by default in Linux but none that just worked for me. I had three separate problems: Getting sound Playing sound from multiple sources at the same time Audio card getting different numbers on reboot Getting sound Here I followed this excellent guide, here’s a summary: Firstly identify card...

I’ve been hosting my site on Amazon S3 for a while now but I never activated SSL for it. I just never got around to it, probably the usual procrastination. When I had to setup a new site for another project I chose to host on Amazon as well. Although there are many other free options, why switch when it’s working? This time I activated SSL as...

I wanted to pick up rust again after having used it many years ago. After around 5 years or so I didn’t really know where to start? Approaches to picking up a language When learning, or as in this case re-learning, a programming language there are different approaches. For example: Read book(s). Solve different kinds of programming puzzles....

I decided to write a book. It’s called “Why Cryptocurrencies?” and I will be uploading chapters as I complete them. It’s available to read online for free. I’ve only uploaded the introductory parts but I’ve got a bunch more planned. Why write a book you ask? Well, why not? I wanted to have a side project I can work on. It’s something I can use to...

I did the MCU Movie Re-Watch again this year in preparation for Avengers: Endgame. I wasn’t a huge MCU fan before doing the same re-watch for Infinity War, but after that I became one. For fun I tried to rank the movies as I saw them, this is some sort of accounting my rankings and how they changed compared to last year. I did see Endgame...

Me and my friend spent 2 weeks in Japan and had a great time. I wasn’t planning on taking a lot of pictures, but I ended up sending a bunch back home as a ways of keeping my family up to date. When I look back most of them are about food… So I’ll turn this into a post about the various foods we ate in Japan! Breakfast and dinner at an Onsen....

When me and my girlfriend Veronica moved to Linköping to study at the University the plan was never to stay there permanently. We just moved there to study but the longterm plan, if you can have one at that stage, was always to move back to the north of Sweden where we came from. After 8 years in Linköping we’ve now lived a little more than a...

A few weeks ago I played my first game of Twilight Imperium (Fourth Edition). It was fantastic. We were six players, most had played the third edition before. As I was quite hyped before the game, I had read up on the rules, watched a let’s play or two and listened to a podcast dedicated to the game. (This is a bit of a play recap, so if you...

As is tradition a quick rundown of the year is due. It’s been good to do as it makes me reflect on the past year, and see that I did indeed do some things, and to look ahead a little. 2019 Non-Geek Achievements Played around with Isidor. It’s hard to describe how happy a kid can make you. Read a bunch of books. I like the idea of tracking all the...

My first commit on my book Why Cryptocurrencies? is from Dec 19, 2018, and now about 17 months later and 1006 more commits I’m finally done! Well, I’m done with the online version at least. I still plan to create an e-book, a PDF and a paperback and who knows how long that will take? It would be great to have a physical copy in my hands in 2020,...

As it happens I got a little tired of the syntax highlighter Pandoc uses so on a whim I started looking at moving to Pygments as my highlighter. With some searching around I found a blog post about just that! That’s lucky because while I like Haskell, I’ve never really grocked it and I’ve only dabbled enough with it to (mostly) make things work...

After writing a few blog posts about Pollen I started getting annoyed that I didn’t have syntax highlighting for the code snippets. So I did a bit of fooling around with Pygments, and it turns out writing a custom lexer isn’t that unreasonable, so here’s how I did it. Pollen markup Pollen’s rules are pretty simple as it’s basically just some...

I wrote an online book using Pollen, a static site generator in Racket. An earlier post contains my first impressions of it, but as the book is now completed I think I can summarize some implementation details in more detail with this post. I really like the markup language and the usage of X-expressions. You do need to write code yourself for a...

I’ve been using cabal to manage my Haskell dependencies for years, but when I last updated my system it suddenly stopped working. I installed my dependencies with cabal install xmonad, and checked that it’s installed under ~/.cabal: $ ls .cabal/bin/ xmonad@ But still when I go to compile my xmonad config file ghc says it cannot find it: Could not...

Five months ago I gloriously declared that “my book was done”. Since then I’ve been working hard to finish the book. Sorry that’s a bit of a lie, I’ve had a nice long vacation where I didn’t work on the book and I’m also on part-time parental leave. And believe me there’s not a lot of time left over with two kids pulling for your attention....

Bitcoin Unlimited is hosting a Bitcoin Cash hackathon this December and it seemed like a good opportunity for me to explore how to program against Bitcoin Cash, and it gives me an excuse to build something real with Phoenix and Elixir. (While an event like this might help combat my procrastination, I should really work on finishing my book, so...

And so 2020 has come to an end. On a global scale it’s been quite a horrible year, and for me personally it’s been both good and bad. Luckily we haven’t been directly affected by COVID too much, but it’s still been very disruptive. Either way as I’ve done for years now it always makes me feel better to do a little yearly review, as when I sit...

In December I declared that I would enter a Bitcoin Cash hackathon and I was excited to give my procrastination a kick in the balls. Unfortunately the hackathon was postponed to January just an hour later. Maybe the organizers didn’t think my project was exciting enough or something? Oh well. It’s January and I want to give it a try again! This...

Around a month ago I placed an order for a reference copy of my upcoming book Why Cryptocurrencies?. I took the cheapest shipping option at IngramSpark, without tracking and, apparently, without customs declarations as it got stuck in customs for several weeks. But it’s here now! It’s here! It’s real! There’s something special of having worked on...

If you want to publish a book, one of the most important things to consider is the cover—after all, we judge the book by the cover. And I did it the universally recommended way: I hired a designer. Simple, right? But real talk; it’s not exactly that simple and I did a bunch of work to get a cover that I’m very happy with (scroll down if you just...

Today is a big milestone for me, as this marks a big milestone in the biggest personal project I’ve undertaken. My book ‘Why Cryptocurrencies?’ is released in print today! It’s my attempt to explain what cryptocurrencies are and what problems they solve, in a simple and approachable manner. I’ve been working on the book in the open on GitHub and...

A couple of months ago I started looking into ergonomical keyboards; mainly split keyboards with much fewer keys, like the 36-key Gergoplex and the 44-key Kyria. I may write another post about the reasons why, but long story short I started getting pain in my thumbs, fingers, wrist and forearm, and I thought it was time to do something about it....

This is an update to the T-34 keyboard layout I’ve been using for a solid number of weeks. While there are more changes I’d like to try, I’m quite pleased with these changes so I figured I might as well immortalize them before I explore further. (And I do have a bunch of big changes I want to experiment with.) The repeat key The big change to the...

This is the revision of the T-34 keyboard layout that I use as my primary driver. I’ve used this particular version without any major changes for almost 3 months, so I’d say it’s a good improvement over the last revision. There are two large changes from T-34/0: swapping o and Repeat and preferring modifiers on combos over callum-style mods. Swap...

A new year is always a good time to review the past year. Funny how this is already the 12th year I’ve done this kind of quick review… Time sure flies. 2021 Non-Geek Achievements Started strength training using a strength coach from Kabuki. I got inspired by the book Peak that makes the case for the efficiency of having an experienced coach guide...

The T-34/2 layout. Generated with the QMK Heatmap Generator, with all layers and combos. It’s been 6 months since my last update on the T-34 keyboard layout, and I’ve made some changes I’d like to document here. As seen in the heatmap above, the layout seems quite decent. There’s still an issue with j and k being too prominent (because I’m a Vim...

Background I’ve used Hakyll as my static site generator for around 9 years now. Before that I think I used Jekyll and also more dynamic pages with Mojolicious in Perl and Kohana in PHP, but I can’t be completely sure as the git history doesn’t go back that far. But all good things come to an end and I’ve now migrated to my own custom site...

I’ve been documenting my own keyboard layout in a series for a while now. But as the layout is constantly changing it’s been difficult to piece together how the layout currently looks like, so this post tries to show how the layout looks right now in it’s entirety. If you want to read about the background and philosophy about the layout, please...

A bit late, but it’s time for my yearly review. It’s something I like doing for myself and it’s nice to see that despite a tough year I’ve done some good things. 2022 Non-Geek Achievements We got our third child! This time we got a girl to complement our two boys, and I love them all more than anything. I wouldn’t trade them for the world. Wrote...

Mamma Mia! Here we go again… Once again, I’m finding myself trying to recover from burnout, and after about a year I’m finally feeling more like myself. Even though I’ve been here before, it’s a difficult thing to recognize and avoid, so I’m writing this to maybe help you or my future self. Is it burnout, depression or both? I find it’s difficult...

For 2023 I wanted to do something different than usual—I wanted to start playing computer games again. So I gave myself a late Christmas gift and bought a Steam Deck (and like any self-serving gentleman I took care to pitch it as being for my kids) and I started loading it up with loads of emulated games and more modern ones from Steam. But then...

This screenshot betrays just how much productive time was wasted setting this up. I’ve got tons of things to do; clean the bathrooms, prototype an idea for a SaaS and ponder world peace. So naturally the procrastination took over and I rewrote my Neovim configuration in Lua. But why? No, but seriously, I’ve had my Neovim configuration since...

When I rewrote the blog in Rust I tried not to touch any of the styling, but some things annoyed me: It wasn’t pretty (even ugly in some parts). No dark mode support. Some elements were broken, for instance images or code blocks overlapping the header when it was floating to the side. I wanted to promote my series and projects more. A better...

Even though I just recently restyled the blog and wasn’t going to touch it, there was one thing I wanted to add, but it felt a little bothersome so I skipped it. It was to display the highlighted language in code blocks: The code spec displays what programming language the code block contains. As it happens, my little girl—the fountain of joy...

After 5 years or so I’ve made a large upgrade to my desktop, and this post contains details and some pictures about the process. It was time I didn’t really want to do an upgrade right now, but I felt I had to do it. Sometimes the lag had gotten very noticeable, for example when running multiple Neovim instances with several different LSPs in...

The end goal, as rendered by Autodesk’s online viewer I’m not sure where it came from, but it was suddenly very important that I got myself a 3D printer. Maybe it was an important insight, but it maybe it was only a fix idea I got that somehow became this all-import thing. Either way, I now have lots of parts for a VORON Trident 250 and I figured...

Since the last update I’ve made some good progress: All the motors are installed The x-axis and belt are installed Tap is installed The toolhead with Stealthburner + Clockwork 2 is also installed Purple means Pretty. I’ve run into a few problems on the way that I’ll try to document, but other than that the build has been really fun so far. The...

I’ve made a lot of progress on my VORON. Electronics and other stuff are installed to the degree that I’ve begun wiring, but I’m going to separate the wiring into it’s own post. This will be a short post about bed preparation and installing electronics components. Feedback from the VORON forum I’ve gotten some feedback from the friendly VORON...

In the beginning of the year I gave myself a late Christmas gift and bought a Steam Deck for myself. There were two main reasons I decided to buy it: I wanted my kids to play games instead of passively consuming endless amounts of YouTube. I wanted to combat my burnout and depression by picking up gaming again. And boy did it deliver. The Deck is...

Almost two and a half years ago I embarked on the journey to change keyboard layout. At first I tried out existing ones, but it didn’t take long before I figured it’s better to develop my own—and things went downhill fast from there. (Some) horizontal combos of the T-34 layout. But now that I haven’t made any changes to the layout for over a...

Dread it. Run from it. Wiring arrives all the same. It’s time for the part of my VORON build that I’ve been dreading: the wiring. It’s scary because I really have no clue what I’m doing, and mistakes can be very costly and time-consuming. I’ve taken my time to double- and triple-check everything, and I took lots of pictures. I ran into some...

The build continues, now in a little more familiar territory. Firmware flashing To flash the firmware I had to order a microSD card reader. With that on hand the flashing wasn’t difficult. The VORON docs walks you through the installation very well. Mainsail I chose to install Mainsail instead of Fluidd simply because I liked the screenshot a...

A good writer isn’t born; a good writer is created It may sound dumb, but one of my reasons for writing a book was to improve my writing ability. Maybe I could’ve practiced on the blog instead, but putting things on paper gave it some added weight I don’t think I would’ve gotten otherwise. Here are some of my most important writing takeaways I’ve...

It’s up and running, and now it’s finally printing time! Less exciting—but necessary—tuning the printer to make the prints better. Filament shipment Even though I’ve been building the printer for more than a month, I wasn’t ready for it being time for printing so soon. I don’t know what filament is good and what I need, so I decided to get a few...

I can print, but the printer is missing a very important thing that I alluded to in the previous post: filtering dangerous particles and fumes. This is mostly covered by the kit, but I was missing some parts from the print it forward and the kit didn’t include a HEPA filter. Because the printer is in the office and health is super important...

This is my yearly review #14. Amazing that I’ve kept up with this for 14 years. Even though it’s not anything advanced, I really like looking back at the year to see what has happened. Maybe it’s a very light version of a reverse bucket list, and I can see that it provides some of the same happiness benefits. 2023 Non-Geek Achievements All my...

I’ve been busy. Busy printing stuff. Which is awesome, because one big worry I had was if I’d actually use the printer or just end up modding and tweaking it until the end of time. But of course, I’ve been slowly working through my large mods-I-want list. My initial plan was to write one blog post about modding, but for space and sanity reasons...

What if we weren’t chained to the past? What if we tried to create a light markup syntax that keeps what is good about Markdown, while revising some of the features that have led to bloat and complexity in the CommonMark spec? John Macfarlane, Beyond Markdown I recently happened to see an offhand comment on Hacker News about a markup language...

A session of Hextraction, a 3D printed board game. I did it. I made something actually useful with my 3D printer instead of just tinkering with it. I printed Hextraction, a very cool 3D printed board game for my kids—and they love it. Hextraction is a gamified marble run, where you place tiles and drop balls in order to reach the end without...

This is a rundown of how I typeset and laid out my self-published book for the web version, the EPUB version, and the printed version. I was planning to include many more details, but the project took a lot longer than planned so I’ve forgotten some things. Web page I started by creating the book in a web format. It’s a static site generator that...

The eBook for my book Why Cryptocurrencies? is now available for free. It’s been almost 4 years since the web version was done, and 3 since the physical copy was available… Which can hardly be called a success. Things happened, so let’s do a quick retrospective to, maybe, learn something. The project is done I’m very good at putting myself down...

The printer is done, but I feel one of the best part of a VORON printer is the ability to modify and personalize it. There a tons of mods you can do, and while I’ve done a few there are lots more that I’d like to do some day. It’s a wonderful feeling to augment the printer with parts made by the printer itself. RockNRoll Flipping over the printer...

The build is going well and the printer is printing tons of random stuff and I’m generally in awe of how cool the printer is. But there’s one thing that sucks: it’s damn loud. I knew that it wouldn’t be silent, but I wasn’t prepared for this kind of noise. Silent controller fans The very first mod I made (even before my first print) was to...

The left POM nut got ground down, making the bed fall down. After 600 hours, the printer met it’s first major failure. I know I earlier described how the extruder starter skipping in a big way, but that was just some filament getting stuck in the extruder. This time a part physically broke down. What happened was that the rod on one of the...

It’s finally done™. I’ve built a VORON that prints reliably and I’ve modded it enough to be able to leave it alone for a while, so I think it’s time to wrap up this build series with a little retrospective. Building the printer was really fun and rewarding I’ve always seen myself as a software person instead of a hardware person. But I must...

One of my favorite features in Neovim is the Tree-sitter integration. It allows for fast syntax highlighting that works well even in an error state (often the case when you’re editing code), and it has additional semantics (you can differentiate between function parameters and local variables). With nvim-treesitter-textobjects you can also jump...

Scripting is configuration. Configuration is scripting. TJ DeVries A different take on editing code I’ve been using Neovim since it forked from Vim almost 8 years ago, and I used Vim many years before that. I feel quite comfortable with Neovim, and I’ve gone down the configuration rabbit hole too many times I’d like to admit, but I never dove...

I’ve used telescope.nvim's find files with require("telescope.builtin").find_files for quite some time. I use find files together with it’s cousin .oldfiles (find recently opened files) all the time for finding source code files, blog posts, and more. But it’s naturally restricted to operate on only filenames and you can make telescope richer by...

Autocomplete tags in the frontmatter. Autocompletion is an absurdly powerful feature that I—and I must assume most programmers—use all the time. It’s not as crucial for writing blog posts as when you’re coding but it’s still easy to come up with examples of how autocomplete would help. For example: Complete frontmatter metadata tags = ["Lua",...

My relationship with my Neovim config is best described as an On-again, off-again relationship. At times I’m deeply in love and spend all my time caressing the config—like how in September I did a complete rewrite in Lua—while other times I’m busy with other love interests and the config is left alone, sometimes for months or even years. While...

Around a month ago I had an affair with rocks.nvim. It was fun, but I’m back together with lazy.nvim again. This is a short post to explain why—at this point in time—the grass wasn’t greener on the other side. Problems with rocks.nvim Too many weird issues. I had quite a few weird bugs that I couldn’t pin down. What finally broke the camel’s back...

xkcd: Nerd sniping A while I ago I encountered a blog post called Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites, and together with the related Hacker News discussion I got nerd sniped. (I spent more time than I care to admit implementing new and exciting microfeatures for the blog.) Microfeatures are fun and time consuming For some people,...