Captain’s Log

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In some ways: it’s kind of fascinating how far our species has come, and how depressing how far we may have yet to go.

Dealing with Misty’s blister problem has made me think increasingly often about a scene from Star Trek 4: where Bones meets a patient waiting for kidney dialysis, and wonders if this is the dark ages–because it kind of is. And then they proceed to go rescue Chekov from having holes drilled in his skull by a crack team of ’80s brain surgeons.

We live in a world where science and reason has come a long way: yet much of our medical technology hasn’t evolved as significantly as our practical knowledge of medicine. We understand better how and why things work, but our influence is often limited.

In science fiction, such as aboard star ships named Enterprise: we see a world where what is broken can be repaired. Fixing broken bones is easier than welding metal. Bandaids and sutures replaced by repairing tissue and arteries. Tools that our chemists and biologists could only dream of for understanding the world around us.

Yet we live in a world where our only options are essentially medieval, compared to our dreams. We have to suture and staple people back together, because this is often the best our technology can do.

Hell, can you even imagine how much the equipment for an MRI costs, or how much it weighs, or how much our technology had to evolve to make that possible? From a pure technology standpoint such equipment is a miracle, a magical marvel. One we’ve only just begun.

I feel in many ways, we’re benefiting from the rise of science, and the ease at sharing collective knowledge. Our doctors know a lot more than in centuries past, and that’s a good thing. But the technology we’ve managed to develop for them? It’s far slower to evolve: tools and technologies take lifetimes to evolve.

On the other hand, in some ways the world we live in has been travelling like a rocket ship as marvelous technology is stacked upon marvelous technology, and knew knowledge refines our perceptions of the possible. When my grandparents were young, the concept of a transistor exceeded what we could construct. When my own parents were young, a long road made such things possible. As I sit here typing this, I can’t even fathom how many transistors were involved in making this journal entry. By the time I die, perhaps to a younger generation: the microchips of my computer will look like the capacitors and tubes in my great grandparents radio do to me.

It’s like, we managed to shoot man to the moon in a tin can using sticks and stones, compared to what our electronics have become since. Much as Apollo, surely would have been to Jules Verne, a lot of cool shit has happened since man took to the stars . But in many ways, our technology is still very primitive to what we can imagine.

Wouldn’t it be damned awesome, if we lived in a world where people created technologies that help man kind, far more than we spend writing buggy assed software? At least nerds can dream. Hmm, I wonder if androids would dream….

Captain’s log, stardate 2019.334

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Misc thoughts from the holiday.

Despite how depressing my life might appear to some outsiders, I’m actually pretty happy. Thankful for the good things in my life, and hopeful that they stay that way. As the old prayer goes, “Grant me dexterity for things I cannot kill, Crit for things I can, And enough points in wisdom to know the difference”

Making reuben sandwiches reminded me just how damned delicious a good sandwich is. Didn’t find any cuban or rye bread when I went shopping, so I grabbed a loaf of Texas Toast in the hopes that it would at least hold up to the frying. Experiments in eating leftovers make me think, getting this again might be a good plan. It’s thick enough that I can actually pack a sandwich well, the kind my momma would make; without being as cost and space ineffective as a hoggy roll.

I might be a terrible human being if I’m inclined to share my sandwich with the doggos, and then threaten them with hugs as the price of giving me a “Hey, where’s the follow up treats?”. Or just a weirdo.  Yeah, I’m going with that last one.

Willow and Misty are definitely smarter than me when it comes to being comfortable.

Revising one of my old projects, I’ve come to two conclusions, well three but that’s another paragraph. First is when I do stuff at home: the working conditions are kind of brutal. A positive side of working on work stuff at work, is there is more encouragement to take micro breaks. You know, like drinking a cup of coffee or taking a piss. It’s very draining to code at home, and I’m not a seventeen year old kid no more.

The suffering of CMake while reviving one of my own projects, finally crossed the “Just live with it” point, and I spent my day making a really good start on a simple json -> build.ninja generator. It probably helps that C++ and I are long time companions, and that I’ve a high tendency of hand writing build.ninja files rather than using a tool to generate them.

And whoever the hell decided to wake the neighborhood up at 0400, better knock that shit off. My first thought was neighbor taking the family on a their own Vacation ’83, my second thought was wondering if they’re skipping town before rent’s due. In any case Corky and I didn’t enjoy the sleep disruption.

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Sometimes it’s hard to decide whether the room I’m in is defined by what I’m trying to do, or by the comfort of dogs.

Willow’s well versed in finding the most comfortable spot she can, and in where the food eating happens.  Mostly she chooses her spot based around where I’ve chosen mine: but she doesn’t hesitate to influence this ad the requirements for comfort and such change.

The amount of times I end up changing between living room and bedroom to suit Willow’s preference, is probably balanced by how often my drifting around doing stuff causes her to follow me around and wonder if I’ve lost my mind or started sleep walking.

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How Much of a Genius-Level Move Was Using Binary Space Partitioning in Doom?

I still remember the first time that I played Wolfenstein 3D. It was on a contemporary hardware, as a minigame in a far more recent Wolfenstein game. My first thought was how rudimentary simple it was; my second was “Holy crap, you could do this on a 286?”.

By modern definitions, I don’t think anyone would be thrilled by the limitations Id’s early engines had for map geometry. But I think for their times, it was a small price to pay given the hardware. And to be fair, as a kid, when I first played DooM ’93 on a Sega 32X^, I certainly didn’t notice. Years later when I would play it on a PC, I didn’t care—because it was still fun. All these years later, I still find DooM ’93 to be a lot of fun. That’s the real success of a video game, I’d say :P.

For the time, even the console ports were pretty impressive games. I mean, most of the games we had looked like this:

Meanwhile if you popped in DooM, this was what you got:

That just didn’t happen, lol.

Many times that I’ve read about porting PC games to the Super Nintendo, and other consoles, they’ve usually been stories that I would describe as “Lossy” or “Brutal” depending on the complexity gap. Such as when an arcade machine was far more powerful than a console, or a PC simply had more oompth than a console.

Id’s games were kind of revolutionary: both in their visual technology, and in their portability. Wolf 3D, DooM, and Quake were pretty widely ported during their era of commercial viability. Post open sourcing of their code, they have come to run on virtually everything, and anything. As technology has advanced, we’ve probably reached the point where it is no longer a surprise if your wrist watch is more powerful than many of the things DooM ’93 was ported to in the ’90s.

Today, I think that DooM’s use of BSP is somewhat novel. You should think of that today, or your hardware is probably so powerful compared to your goal: that you just don’t care. Given a decent computer science education, the concept isn’t the leap into rocket science. Today though, I imagine most people aren’t tasked with solving such a problem, because they live in the world John Carmack helped create: one where we have this thing called a Game Engine.

When Carmack programmed these games, I don’t think it was so obvious a technique. People were still struggling to make PCs do this kind of thing at all. Resources for learning these things have also changed a lot over time. Many of us have the advantage of knowledge built on the minds of geniuses, if we have any education at all—and the code.

Two of my favourite engines to read: are modern source ports of the Quake III: Arena and DooM engines. By releasing the code into the wild, I think it helped all of us learn better how to solve these problems. Both the things you can go off and learn, and the code you can get ahold of have evolved since these games were written. But thanks to games like DooM: it’s easier for us to do that today. Because technology is built upon what came before, by extending the ideas of others in new directions and taking advantage of improved hardware.

Genius isn’t in using a rock to smash something, it is in realizing you can smash things with a rock far better than your thick head.

―

^ Being around 25 years later, my brain cells are foggy. But DooM was one of my brother’s games, so the first thing we had that played that would probably have been the Sega Genesis, which AFAIK means 32X release. We also had the PlayStation versions of DooM, Final DooM, and Quake II but those were later in our childhood.

HDMI extension and switching time

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Well, it’s taken about six years, but I think I’ve finally found something the first generation Chromecast is good at, aside from demonstrating the meaning of choking hazard. They came with these little extension cables, so that you could put a bit of distance between your display’s HDMI port and the device itself versus shoving the Chromecast G1 into your TV.

Simply put, my old Asus monitor only has two real problems. One is the speakers are utterly and completely crap—that audio should never and under no circumstances have audio routed through them. Thankfully, Asus put a 3.5 mm port that let’s me hook up external speakers to handle the HDMI audio input. The other problem that is less easily solved: is there is only one HDMI port. It’s from an era where even a nice monitor only had one if any. Thus with my conversion to HDMI all the things around 2013~2014 thereabouts, It has been the real sticking point.

To swap cables: I’ve got to either blind man finger for the port until the HDMI goes in, or flip the monitor forward so I can get a visual on the port. Yeah, my top request for HDMI 3.0 is going to be a reversible connector like USB-C.

Today I did a bit of experiment. I connected my old HDMI switch, so I could check if my 780GTX or iPad took offense to it. At least under Linux, I’ve not been able to use Skylake or Braswell graphics with the switch, so it’s mostly been underutilized since my Xbox and Fire TV went to different displays. Much to my happiness, the GTX doesn’t care about the switch and my iPad Pro 11 -> HooToo adapter setup doesn’t seem to mind; although I didn’t test HDCP on either, I doubt that’s an issue here.

As a follow up, I decided to test if doing a hotplug from the iPad end would be smart enough to trigger the switches input auto switch behavior and it is not. Since the Chromecast G1 extension cable makes it easier to swap cables on my Asus monitor, I think what I will do is just toggle cables and spare myself wiring up yet another thing with an idiot light.

Breffo Spiderpodiums as an Xbox controller caddy and headphone stand

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The Breffo Spiderpodium was originally made with holding an iPhone in mind, but I have to admit that it works pretty good as an Xbox controller caddy.

Two middle legs are folded to create stand, two back legs to lip over the controller, and two front legs are folded to make a sort of rest by the accessory port. So I can pretty much tilt the controller about ten degrees downward, slide it into place, and relax.

The larger model originally designed for the iPad, also works pretty neatly as a headphones holder. Hehe.

Plus whatever Breffo’s definition of British steel or whatever the interior is made out of, I’ve never actually managed to break one of these things. The most damage I’ve ever done is melting the plastic a bit by hanging one out of my car’s air vents for a lustrum or more.

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Not sure if it’s better or worse, that my temptation to put batteries in this is tempered by wondering where the heck my other cartridges went.

It’s been in an old green pencil case for plenty of years, which was also home for my PlayStation and PS2 memory cards, but I only found two cartridges :/.

Mechanical and Apple pencil shown for scale. It’s about the thickness of three pencils :P.

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Well, my back hurts and I need a fresh shower, but my closet is a box of shit lighter and now back into an organized tech state.

The dogs, Corky especially, were about half convinced that I had lost my mind.

Last time I cleaned tech, I had eliminated some of the oldest stuff. E.g. limiting myself to a single graphics card that’s AGP, one SATA DVD burner, and a lone floppy drive/cable: just in case. But that did nothing for ~20 years of VGA, Ethernet, AC power, IDE, and other cables. Most of which survived.

For some of the harder to kill items like VGA and IDE, I’m keeping at least one decent pair for the odds that someday I’ll actually need one, and that’ll probably be in enough decades that they won’t be so cheap without visiting a landfill.

Likewise it feels good to have things back to order. One drawer is everything audio, video, network, and power that isn’t collected else where. Another bin collects the various USB things that aren’t the above, and another for misc stuff like my spare keyboards. Boxes used to collect internal components, like old PCI-E graphics cards(, and yes, still one AGP card), my old Audigy 4, internal cables and fans and shit, etc. Some larger things like an old tape drive

It’s kinda interesting how over the past thirty years, we went from having hardly anything but the Tandy 1000 set, to a closet full of computer shit. I feel bad for how unlikely some of it is—might need a VGA cable within the next twenty years, but I doubt MHL and SlimPort DP over MicroUSB-B are ever going to make the “Just in case” bin. Actually in another five to ten years, those should probably join the last composite video cables on their way out….lol.

A good Game Boy video

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Retro Tech: Game Boy

This kind of makes me feel old, and tempted to root around in my closet.

A long, long time ago in a childhood increasingly far away, I remember what mobile gaming was like. More than a bit of my childhood involved being stuck in the back of a car, bored for the duration, or stuck waiting places. Needless to say it was more remember to bring your shit with you than remember your phone charger. ‘Cuz if T-800 and Cpl Hicks lost their guns, you weren’t going back, lol.

Mobile gaming when I was little was something more like Tiger’s hand held games. I’m pretty sure that Double Dragon passed more than a few hours of my early childhood. And then there was Game Boy and Game Gear. Those were cool. More often than not, mobile gaming was borrowing my grandmother’s deck of cards, which didn’t require more power than daylight.

My first “Real” video gaming system of my own, was the Super NES. Between the original NES my brother and I played, and the THHGs I was used to, I came very close to choosing the original Game Boy for my first system, but in the end the green screen balanced me in favor of a more traditional console. The Super Nintendo had plenty of pretty colours, and Super Game Boy was eventually a thing anyway.  Some time later my brother would also end up with a Sega Game Gear, but that was short lived.

Most of my time with the Game Boy turned out to be the later Color model. My mother bought me a purple Game Boy Color out of the local pawn shop around the time Pokemon Red & Blue were still young in America, and I still have that GBC in my closet. Along with my Pokemon Blue cartridge, and other games. Before the rise of the affordable smart phone, more than a bit of time spent waiting someplace, I passed either reading books or playing on my Game Boy Color.