💾 Archived View for dfortes.srht.site › tinylog.gmi captured on 2023-05-24 at 17:40:27. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Spent most of the day resting since I will be having shoulder surgery tomorrow. The only thing I did, other than watching an episode of "Kojak", was play around with Zig a little. Wrote a small pong clone using Zig+raylib and it was pretty fun!
I should ideally stay focused on these programming languages: C (maaaybe very C-like C++, but in a good way), go, zig, python, lua. C# when necessary (I don't really dislike it for some reason); Javascript and Rust idem. Verliog for hardware design. Would like to add something more functional but (i) Haskell is just too abstrace and lisps have way too many parenthesis.
An odd coincidence: I was reading Colix Dexter's Inspector Morse novel "The Mistery of the Third Mile". Throughout most of this novel Morse is plagued by a tooth-aching tooth-ache. The odd thing is **I sterted to feel a tooth ache as well**. And the craziest part is that I think this pain started after I ate popcorn one night, a few days ago, while watching the TV episode adapted from the same book, where, of course, Morse was suffering form the same tooth ache as in the book. Talk about "Synchronicity" --- not always such a good thing it appears.
Some anxiety regarding my upcoming surgery. Not about the surgery itself, but all the details, tests, preparation, etc. It is all very unceratain. I need to get a PCR test for COVID but the time is really short (the surgery is scheduled for tuesday afternoon), and I just don't know if there will be time for that.
Started building the bluebox from filipeflop. It was pretty fun, but I found out I *really* suck at soldering right now. I suck at a (literally) dangerous level. Also I soldered the light sensor pins in the wrong side. Since I don't know just how to un-solder the pins, I ordered a new sensor today. I will resume the project when it arrives (and when my shoulder is useable after the surgery).
Worked a couple of hours on AR+GPS, and it was productive enough. I was able to get the mapbox directions route line rendering working. Next step is make the demo scene working *exaclyt* like it was before the refactor.
That's it, cheers!
Worked on AR+GPS, but not a whole lot. Some minor tweaks on the "SingPost", and also some support. Tomorrow I should work on the Route line renderer. Other than that I was looking into some stuff about my upcoming shoulder surgery.
Few hours of actual work, but it was quite productive. Worked on the AR+GPS plugin. Created a basic implementation of the `SignPost` as a State Machine (FSM). Seems to work pretty well but there are some adjustments to be made.
Received some cool stuff. The "bluebox" form filipeflop arrived. It like an electronics loot box. It comes with a surprise project ready to build. In this edittion I got a pretty cool one: an IOT smart plant vase. It comes with a ESP8266, humidity and temperature sensors and an LCD screen! Pretty nice. The cheap PAM audio amplifier module also arrived today, so hopefully soon I will try to mess around with some audio stuff.
Today, after a long time, I went to take a look at gfx/c/c++/rust/zig twitter-land. More specifically, I went to search "@FlohOfWoe + rust" (a favourite search of mine), to see what is the current talk of c vs c++ vs rust vs zig currently (I really value Floh's opinion, and he is usually tagget in a lot of interesting discussions). Things seem to be pretty much the same... Floh favours zig over rust and c over c++.
Now, that is not really the matter here. The thing is I don't think browsing this area of twitter is very good for me. It distracts me with these discussions, makes me uncertain of my decisions (since there will be always people screming their ways are the best), and there is a lot of negativity and toxicity around. For instance, in a few minutes I was in a crazy thread, where a crazy ex-valve dev (@richgel999) was bad-mouthing casey muratori and all the RAD guys in general. And, though I like casey, he and his *entourage* do atract rants, fights and aggressivity. He is also way too opinionated, as is the whole gang (jonathan blow, sean whatshisname, etc.) They have too much of that holier-than-thou attitude, which is annoying.
On the other hand it is not so great to stay totally isolated from that world: You can learn a lot from these people which are doing high-level work and do have a lot of experience. So I'm trying out this "mailbrew" service which lets you create custom digest/feeds from various sources, like twitter, which are delivered daily to your email:
I really don't like usint these type of online services, but I will try this one out and see if it works for me. Could be interesting. While I'm here, one of these days I need to take time to go take a better look at Floh's emulator stuff. He has z80 implementations in C, C++, Rust and Zig!
First day using new chair and the new height-adjustable table. Feels pretty good, but the chair seems to bother me a little. But it was veeeery expensive (and I can't return it now), so I will have to adapt to it. The desk is a killer though, more than worth it (and it wasn't expensive).
Was able to work much more today. Some AR+GPS support and then development. The refactoring of the mapbox routes is going well. Worked mostly on the menu controller and api/requests. Tomorrow I will work on the route experience, sign-posts, route line rendering and all that.
Now I will take a light walk on the threadmill while watching an episode of "Inspector Morse".
Tinnitus annoying the hell out of me today. I need to have music all the time so I can focus, but, once I forget about it, it is not that bad.
Bought an esp32 board, a ps2 keyboard and a ps2 adapter/module. In the future I will try to write a program that can interface with VGA and ps2. I will do that for both the esp32 and the pico and see which one is better.
Last day working on revamping my neovim configuration. There is no way around it, it's procrastination, pure and simple. But it has its uses... and my neovim experience is better for it. Tomorrow I hope to get my real work back on track.
Other than that, the day had its fun times, hanging around and playing with my nephew and my niece. And missing my girlfriend a lot. Even far away she aways makes me a happier person.
Tinnitus survivor should be a thing.
Not a great day today. Woke up with my left ear filling stuffed. Slowly I realized I was not hearing so great with that ear. More specifically, it seems I can't hear lower frequency sounds very well. It's a very weird feeling when both of your ears hear things differently --- you get very confused, and everything seems to echo inside your head. I'll go to the hospital tomorrow to check up on this. Hopefully I can recover from whatever damage has taken place, but I'm not betting too much on it. Let's wait and see whatever happens.
Player around with neovim configuration again. I tried to use lunarvim for a little while,
but I felt it to be a little too slow and, well, just not tailored for me as my own configuration. But, even though I'm not gonna use it, I will still many ideas from it and refactor my own config. I already started: added "null-ls",
to get additional formatters and linters. Now I can use "stylua" and "luacheck" to improve my lua dev environment. Next I think I will try to use some plain tables to configure in a way that is easier to change things. Buuuut, I'm not 100% sure on thet yet --- I fear it will only make things more complicated in the end... but let's see.
This morning I discovered the existence of the KIM-1 computer. It was one of the first single-board computers ever made, back in 1976, by MOS themselves.
I'm totally in love with it's simplicity. Just a 6502, two 6530 memory/IO controllers, memmory, a built-in segment display and numeric keyboard. Still I don't have enough knowledge to completly understand how it works!
I think I have a basic understanding of how the 6502 works, but I need to understand better the 6530 and how it interfaces with the 6502.
The board has a few capacitors as well.... most of mother-boards do, right? But I really could never figure out *why*. In theory capacitors block current in a DC circuit. But, maybe, since there are timers in a computer, it is not such a "pure" DC circtuit? Googling took me to this Quora answer:
Decoupling capacitors are used to stabilize the power to each IC (Integrated
Circuit) as they operate (including the CPU which use a lot). Because of
inductance of the motherboard wires or power and ground planes, the power to
the IC locally (within about 1/4″) varies a lot when the IC uses more or less
power as it operates.
So the capacitors provide a local transient power source for this operation.
Depending upon the frequency of the power transients, smaller or lower values
of capacitors are used. Smaller values typically need to be closer to the IC
and larger ones a bit further away. Values are typically values like .01 uf, .1
uf, 1 uf, and 2.2 uf.
There is an wikipedia article on it as well.
Decoupling capacitor - Wikipedia
In it we read this:
The decoupling capacitor works as the device’s local energy storage. The
capacitor is placed between power line and ground to the circuit that current
is to be provided. According to capacitor equation, i(t)=CdV/dt, voltage
drop between power line and ground results in current draw out from the
capacitor to the circuit and when capacitance C is large enough, sufficient
current is supplied to maintain an acceptable range of voltage drop. To reduce
the effective series inductance, small and large capacitors are often placed in
parallel; commonly positioned adjacent to individual integrated circuits. The
capacitor stores a small amount of energy that can compensate for the voltage
drop in the power supply conductors to the capacitor.
So I guess I kind of get it now. I realize this is getting way to long for a supposedly "tinylog" entry so I'm out.
Gororoba cĂłsmica.
Now I write this tiniylog in markdown, and it is placed inside my "cabinet" note taking system. Them I use the "md2gemini" python program to convert it to gemtext.
I'm aiming to use very simple markdown in all my notes, and specially on this tiniylog, so that the conversion runs smooth. In the future I plan to write my own lightweight markup. The reason I avoid writing gemtext directly is that (i) I don't like the long lines (not great to write long lines in neovim), and (ii) I do want to have some extensions, like mathematical equations.
My sholder pain today is gotten really better. I'm using a lower keyboard right now, and it is incredible how much of a difference two centimeters can make on your whole ergonomy setup. As concequence of the despeair of pain and not being able to work, in the last few days I spent A LOT of money on a new desk and chair. Much more than I would ever care to expend. But the table has two height-adjustable panels --- one for the monitor, and other for the keyboard, writing, etc. Not only that, but I purchased an expensive floating keyboard/mouse support. So, in the future (the table and the chair have yet to arrive) I will be able to adjust my setup's ergonomy to the millimeter. Hopefully that will make a difference in the long run, and make all the money I spend worth the while.
One last thing. This was the only thing I actually intended to write down in this log entry initially. It' this wonderful little video.
Raro vĂdeo dos anos 40 SĂŁo Paulo
I just found amazing how "european" the (apparently) middle/upper class tried to be. It actually seemed quite british, they playing Tennis in the club... and you contrast that with all the black labour carrying the heavy sacks of coffee which mantained their status. It feels like a wonderful work to dive into. Imagine a detective story running on this background. I should think about crteating a game, a short story, or anything, in this setting.
The past few days have been tough. I was feeling extremelly depressed due to my shoulder injury. It was not so much my right shoulder that was hurting, but my neck and back would get stiff after sitting down and trying to work for more than 30 minutes.
Today I spent most of the day on bed in the dark. Spent hours searching for good chairs online. Watched an episode of "Inspector Morse"... the first time I ever watched, and I really liked it. Will keep watching the next episodes.
Later in the day actually managed to sit down and do some work, and am not feeling much pain or disconfort. I do think the next days will be better. Out for now.
Created my gemini capsule using sourcehut pages at:
I found this was the easiest way to get a capsule up and running. This is the first entry on my capsule's tinylog. Hopefully I will keep on posting!