Fantasy Drag Race Season 17

Some friends and I are doing a Fantasy Drag Race game for RuPaul's Drag Race Season 17. Here's a link to the rules (264 KB PDF): 2024-12-14_Rules for Fantasy Drag Race.pdf
(edit: updated file 12/14/24)

Message me your picks by Jan. 2, 2025 if you want to play!

Nauvis Space Platform is Go

Still chugging along in Factorio: Space Age. Last night I got my first space platform into orbit! Here's the big moment down at the rocket silo (surrounded by heavily polluted waters):

And the platform itself (named for the space station from Planetes), rinky-dink as it is:

And a snapshot of the main base map at time of launch:

Solid Fuel Optimizer

This is a little solid fuel optimizer I made in Factorio: Space Age using decider combinators. It figures out which oil fraction (light oil, heavy oil, petroleum gas) is most plentiful and processes it into solid fuel for boilers down the line.

Same image without the decider windows:

Kancho

This is an illustration of my porcine (piggy) character, Kancho, that I commissioned from the extremely talented Alen Fey. The design was largely inspired by the pig ninja from Chicken Pig Attack, a Gregory Brothers/Takeo Ischi music video from January 2020. I'm really happy with how it came out. Currently using this as my PFP in various places.

HT palette stuff

Worked on CMYK full-spectrum palette generation stuff over the Labor Day weekend. Some screencaps from various points in the process:

It's getting there!

New Shapes

New shapes for the next hex translator build: Gears, vacuoles, chiral start/north signs, end signs (halmos finality symbols).

Next on the docket: A large static CMYK palette.

2 Things to Vent About

Here are two behaviors I need to vent about. The world hardly needs more negativity so I will at least make it quick. This is all IMO, disclaimer disclaimer, etc.

1. Criticism by proxy. I've touched on this before, but it was from a don't-yuck-my-yum angle. Now, the true intent is more clear: Sometimes a person resents you but they want to keep up the appearance of being magnanimous (or simply "not a jerk"). So instead of belittling you directly, they criticize the things around you. "Your house is shabby, your car is gay, that picture (you picked out) is ugly." It's usually sneakier than that, but that's the gist of it. All of it so that if you blow up and ask them "what is your problem with me?" then they can look shocked and retort, honestly (technically), "I never said a word against you!" Right, you just slagged off every choice I made, they way I live, etc. etc. Eventually it's obvious what their real target has always been.
   
   
2. Setting daemons. A daemon is a background process in computing and it's how I think of certain (non-computing) tasks with specific triggers. I am assigned tasks all the time and they broadly fall into three categories: Do it when able, do it at a certain time, and do it when a condition is met. That last category has the potential to incur terrible costs beyond the cost of the task itself. "Tell me this account balance" and "tell me this account balance on the first of every month" are easy. The latter just needs a recurring calendar entry. But "tell me this account balance when it becomes negative" is a huge pain in the neck. (Because what am I going to do, check that account every day to see if the balance has turned negative? It might not turn negative for three years, and if it takes me one minute to check it each day, that's more than 18 hours of work you're asking for.)
   
   My real gripe with this one is that the people asking almost never think about the processes involved. They assume things can be automated when they can't. I explain this, but it rarely sinks in. Many times, the best I can do is turn it into a category-II task ("Okay, I'll check it on the first of every month and tell you if it's negative."), but even then, using the previous example, we're looking at 36 minutes of work. And the real problem here is that the asker, being ignorant of the process (and often unwilling to learn), gives the request as much weight as if it only needed to be done once ("It only takes you a minute!").

Alright, it's off my chest. Thanks.

Overcoming RF interference with old coaxial cabling

The Wi-Fi at our house has gotten worse over time. Or, more accurately, the RF environment in our neighborhood has gotten noisier. Which is to be expected. Density has been increasing and I imagine the number of RF-emitting devices has increased as all sorts of electronics have become cheaper, smaller, more energy efficient. We went through a few equipment upgrades trying to keep up— new Wi-Fi router, mesh range extender, different adapters. But it's been especially bad in certain areas, like the upstairs room where my main computer lives. Much packet loss. Here is a screencap of pings from before and after I finally got it fixed: 

I have to do a lot of remote desktop work and the packet loss was making that intolerable. I'd be remoting in, typing "8-7-23" and it'd come out "8-------------7-23." Very frustrating.

Of course, hardwired ethernet would solve this. But the layout of our house, with a set of stairs and many walls between my computer and the router, made this challenging. I'm not fussy about appearances, but Cat 5 cabling tacked up against the ceiling in most rooms is not a favorite look. But what other option is there?

I put up with the bad Wi-Fi for months. I figured out that I could disconnect and reconnect to our Wi-Fi and the connection would get a little more stable for a few hours. But it would degrade over time. I imagined there was someone in a nearby house doing the same thing, both of us jockeying for the least-crowded WLAN channel, like a Wi-Fi shoving match. Until one day it occurred to me that the previous owners had nearly every room wired for cable. Cable that we only use for internet through a single coax port in the living room. Was there some way we could use that to set up a hardwired network inside the house? Yep!

This is the product I decided to use. The ScreenBeam MoCA 2.5 Network Adapter. Lets you run ethernet over coax. Apparently, if you have a nice, modern cable provider you can even use these adapters on the very same wires that bring in internet, TV, and so on. But our cable provider is not nice or modern, so I had to figure out something else.

Since we only use the incoming cable signal in one place (the modem), I just had to wire that port to the provider's line directly (isolating that run from everything else) and connect the coax ports needed for networking. This got me very close to the router, but not the same room. I still had to run a single Cat 5 cable through a wall but at least it was a straight shot. Only had to get the RJ45 crimper out for one connector.

And now it's all done! Rock-solid hardwired connection, zero packet loss.

Mystery Solved :(

 

The fort's first casualty. He either fell down the well or somehow got sucked into the intake at the brook.

Loving the new Dwarf Fortress. Will be even better when the wiki gets updated. Accidentally starved my first fort to an unrecoverable state, this is my second.

Farm pits, jeweler, plumbing

Masons, stone stocks, farm causeway, leverland

Bedrooms, dorm, remnants of a plumbing mishap

Figuring out Mastodon

If I did it right, this should verify me on the new tw.town Mastodon instance: @volkspider@tw.town

Render distance differences

Checking to see how different Minecraft render distances look on map view

Render distance: 20 chunks

Render distance: 32 chunks

Minecraft frivolities: a QR code

Finished a little project in Minecraft, a working QR code. Made it out of white wool and polished blackstone bricks since they seemed to have the best black/white contrast in map views. Built it across a large cave opening. Here are some in-game screencaps:

from the cave below

And some map views:

very zoomed-out, QR code circled in red

closer view

And here's a much wider map view at 1:1 scale (3025px × 1879px):

mundouno1.png (11.2 MB; Google Drive link)

This is from my Minecraft world "mundo unopuntounoocho." Not that it matters, but the in-game coordinates for this build are -15,928, 68, 642 (xyz). I have a basic ID scheme for portals in that world; the one under the QR code is portal A-XIX and it connects to portal B-XIX with nether coordinates (N) -1,996, 65, 95.

Ha3Mogom (a macrostructure made of Hex Translator strings)

Over a year ago I finished a "Hex Translator" project I was working on for a while. I didn't want to post it here until I'd gotten prints to all the contributors. And the last one took me a while, but now that's done and I can share it here! The final print is 30 inches wide and 20 inches tall.

Here's a copy-paste of the "overview" text from the piece:

Ha3Mogom Macrostructure (HTb20210227A)

The Hex Translator is a deterministic algorithm that transforms character strings into patterns of hexagons with various qualities. The version used here, Hex Translator build 20210227A, can output patterns with three types of hexagons (solid, hollow, broken), six icons, and 1,216 colors. Colors are generated from, and cycle through, a 16-color palette.

The large, multicolored object at right is a macrostructure composed of eight different string patterns produced by the Hex Translator. Its label (Ha3Mogom) comes from shorthand for each string's source (Hill, Austin, 3, MIT, Older, Get, Own, Meteorology). In total, the macrostructure represents 4,935 characters.

Low-ish res raster render (~150 dpi):

And here's a photo of one of the framed prints:

I find it weirdly satisfying to look at this clumpy spatter of hexagons knowing that it's expressing all the input strings. It's neat to see that information with new patterns revealed all at once through a different lens.

Summer 2022 Playlist

I curated a thing: "Henry's Summer 2022 Playlist"

It's 66 songs, mostly recent (57% with release dates after 2018), total length around 3 hours 52 minutes. The songs are ordered in a way that I find pleasing, mainly focused on punctuating high-energy chunks with chill, low-intensity respites. But I've mostly been listening to it on shuffle and I think it works well in random order also. My advice would be to first try it in the order shown then shuffle thereafter.

• Spotify playlist link:
• open.spotify.com/playlist/1U8PXH2ATyJIwU884rJ7KP
• Spotify playlist CSV export:
• henrys_summer_2022_playlist.csv (Google Drive, 21KB)
• Last.fm playlist link (last.fm player uses different versions of some songs):
• last.fm/user/hjo3/playlists/12441619
• Excel spreadsheet (includes most spotify-export data, more readable, some stats):
• 2022-08-28_henrys_summer_2022_playlist.xlsx (Google Drive, 29KB)

I struggle to describe the kind of music in the playlist. Some of it is very mainstream, like "Sweetest Pie" by Megan Thee Stallion, and some is pretty obscure, like "Mirror Maru" by Cashmere Cat. There are a few odd tracks with short bits of spoken-word stuff (a Heaven Sent jingle from late-60s/early-70s, some Dawn FM DJ patter, a handful of lines from Fiddler on the Roof). There are songs from 1909 and 2022. There is a lot of variety. Hope you like it.

Hardcopy Wordle - W01

Ever wanted to play Wordle by yourself, offline, using a pen and paper? Do you love looking up numbers in tables and indexes? Then have I got the just the thing for you!

Hardcopy Wordle (W01, June 2022, 4 pages) (801 KB)

This is a four-page monochrome document formatted for standard US letter paper. Instructions are on the first page and six puzzles follow. I noticed there are Wordle puzzle books for sale, but every one of them I looked into "cheated" in some way: Some presented mostly-complete puzzles that have the player fill in the last guess only, some require a second human player to act as the computer (telling the first player which letters in their guess match, etc.). So I made an offline, solitaire version that tries to be faithful to the original experience and prevents players from accidentally spoiling solutions.

It works, but I think it's a little unwieldy because each time the player writes a guess they have to look up letter/position references in a table, then look up those references in the index. This process seemed like it would be fun (to me), but it's a little tedious in practice. Or maybe it contrasts too sharply with the instant gratification of the online version.

There are ways this could be optimized. Most players probably wouldn't remember the symbols (answers) associated with specific three-digit reference numbers if there was enough time between them, so I think you could reuse something like 30% of the reference numbers and shrink the size of the index.

If I were doing this as a book, another possible approach for the index might be to have tabbed sections for each position and a page for each alphabet letter at that position. Then each puzzle could have a unique non-sequential code and that's all a player would need to remember as they worked the puzzle. Of course, there would be more page-flipping. But it would be easier for folks with poor short-term memory and would probably decrease the player's chances of making errors.

Playing Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri on modern computers

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (SMAC) was released in February 1999⁠— 23 years ago as of this writing. That's nuts. It's the only computer game that old that I keep coming back to after such a long time. One of my all-time favorites. But I hadn't been able to play it for a while because an OS upgrade rendered all versions incompatible (or at least nonworking even with my tinkering). Now I'm on a new computer that's got enough mojo to run a proper Win10 virtual machine, so of course I downloaded GOG and SMAC. Noticed I was having some minor issues (display messing up after alt-tabbing, a menu option being unselectable) so I started googling around and found some unofficial patches that vastly improve the game on modern systems.

Did you know that if you have the Windows/GOG version you can just copy the Alpha Centauri directory from C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games, paste it anywhere, and run the executables?

There's a great wiki that has links to the fan-made patches here. I started by applying scient's v2.1 patch, then PRACX by PlotinusRedux/DrazharLn. Massive improvement. Here's a screencap from the current GOG-release SMAC:

And here's a screencap of the PRACX version with support for widescreen displays and multiple zoom levels:

Being able to zoom in and out with the mousewheel makes it so much nicer to play. Really grateful to these folks for making and sharing these patches.