Hacker News: sodaplayer

New comment by sodaplayer in "Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing"

sodaplayer — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:31:25 +0000

It'll be Brian Reynolds in this case. It's a quote from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

New comment by sodaplayer in "DRAM has a design flaw from 1966. I bypassed it [video]"

sodaplayer — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:40:23 +0000

>Many of our maps' routes would be laid out in a predominately east or west-facing track

That's fascinating to find out! I grew up a fan of Nova Logic, so I'll have to pay attention to this the next time I revisit their games.

Was this done for Comanche or did you also do this for Delta Force?

New comment by sodaplayer in "Conway's Game of Life, in real life"

sodaplayer — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:33:06 +0000

There's custom firmware project for the Novation Launchpad.

I had a fork of this at one point where I made GoL for it and had mapped the lit cells to a MIDI output.

https://github.com/mat1jaczyyy/lpp-performance-cfw

I haven't tried this yet, but there's also an open source grid-controller project.

https://github.com/203-Systems/MatrixOS

New comment by sodaplayer in "Conway's Game of Life, but musical"

sodaplayer — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 16:27:42 +0000

Oh this is cool. I did something similar with a modded Launchpad by programming GOL on it and converting the positions by column and row to octave and degree and then outputting MIDI to a synth.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/os4nF1RoPJCwNiLt6

New comment by sodaplayer in "How do I get into the game industry"

sodaplayer — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 20:14:03 +0000

> That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller for a tank turret so I could point the tank's gun using my mouse.

Yeah, same here! I had done a couple of simple personal Flash games previously, but Garry's Mod is where I really felt like I cut my teeth on programming. Doing Wiremod/Expression 2 taught me PID controllers and some basic linear algebra, and after having helped some friends debug their code, taught me the importance of style and good practices.

New comment by sodaplayer in "How to post when no one is reading"

sodaplayer — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 17:55:42 +0000

It's easy for me to quickly idolize the authors of books and blogs I have read—yours included (thanks for writing GPP)—and it's often I think I fall into the trap of feeling like I need to dedicate all my free time into practicing and learning software and computer science topics.

I also got a small collection of synths and grooveboxes, so seeing you start your Tiny Wires channel was a nice reminder that even those authors have things outside of software.

One of my favorite moments lately was just hanging out with my wife in the living room after setting up all my synths there and just jamming with her present as she also worked on her hobby.

New comment by sodaplayer in "The History of S.U.S..E"

sodaplayer — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 16:04:35 +0000

I got a soft spot for SUSE. In the late 2000s, Novell partnered with my highschool to teach a certification class, so it became the distribution I cut my teeth on if you don't count my time playing with compiz window effects on a free Ubuntu live-disk in junior high.

New comment by sodaplayer in "Show HN: Phobos – an engine extension for Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge"

sodaplayer — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 05:12:43 +0000

Scroll through the extension docs:

https://phobos.readthedocs.io/en/latest/New-or-Enhanced-Logi...

They have recordings of most of the different features Phobos enables.

New comment by sodaplayer in "A MiniGolf game for Palm OS"

sodaplayer — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 20:55:24 +0000

I just came across my old Palm Tungsten E2 last week while doing some cleaning. If I can also find its charger, I'll report back on running it.

New comment by sodaplayer in "Notes on EndeavourOS"

sodaplayer — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 20:20:58 +0000

And in Windows it's `shutdown /r /fw`.

New comment by sodaplayer in "Kagi Sidekick (alpha)"

sodaplayer — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 17:27:45 +0000

I remember there was another story here about Google returning bad results for what to do for a particular medical emergency. The page had a list of "Do"s and "Don't"s, but Google had grabbed the list of the "Don't"s and displayed it as the immediate results.

New comment by sodaplayer in "The Two Cultures (1959) [pdf]"

sodaplayer — Thu, 11 May 2023 23:16:57 +0000

During my CS degree, I had an opportunity to take a course which sought to bridge these two cultures. The class was described as a kinetic art and embedded systems class opened to EE, CE, CS and art students.

We'd study some essays like Snow's "The Two Cultures" and create reports on contemporary artists before breaking up into groups consisting of both engineering and art students with the goal of designing and implementing kinetic art. Coming from the engineering side, it was fun for me to get the chance to experience an academic art setting, and I think the class overall helped me overcome being immediately dismissive of more conceptual art as well as showing me tools and the frame of mind to approach and appreciate art.

For the artists, I think the goal of our professor was to build some technical literacy, and provide them with the technology that could inspire them, expanding their breadth of what could be feasibly done.

Though like this essay, the relationship between the two cultures could seem like it would turn adversarial or pretentious or dismissive, but I believe everyone in the class had a great time, and were all just excited to create things together.

New comment by sodaplayer in "The Four Hobbies, and Apparent Expertise"

sodaplayer — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 15:09:12 +0000

Yup, bought an old, used point-and-shoot last year, and the low stakes of it have me using it more than my DSLR. Much easier to slip small P&S is my pocket for a vacation or hike. It's got the CHDK firmware on it as well, so it still outputs RAW, and I can keep my development process.

New comment by sodaplayer in "The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera"

sodaplayer — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 22:23:15 +0000

Oh this is kinda funny for me. I just bought a 2009 model PowerShot for $10 last summer so that I could experiment with the Canon Hack Dev Kit, [0] and use it to get RAW photos on my trips without having to lug around or risk my DSLR. Some of the eBay listings of that same model are going up to $70 now.

The PowerShot has been pretty nice to have. Been developing the RAWs with DarkTable, and the PowerShot's auto mode is sufficient for me to develop a nice image, and it's better at capturing a random moment where I would otherwise have been trying to adjust my DSLR.

I'm also not surprised at this new trend. Most of my close Gen-Z friends have Fujifilm instant cameras or a PaperShoot, a digital camera that markets itself emulating the film look, and I could see them jumping on this.

[0] https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/CHDK

New comment by sodaplayer in "Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation"

sodaplayer — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 17:29:58 +0000

Thanks for starting it! I dabbled with Ubuntu, Debian and SUSE in highschool and would occasionally see things from the Arch Wiki when troubleshooting problems. Learned about its philosophy when at a highschool computing competition and my team captain was raving about one of our opponents using Arch.

Started a CS degree the following year, and I decided I wanted to take Linux more seriously, so I wiped Windows off my laptop and threw Arch on it to force myself to learn, and it's been my daily driver now for the last decade!

New comment by sodaplayer in "It’s 1997 and you want to build a website"

sodaplayer — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 07:36:19 +0000

When people ask me how I learned web, I'm usually at a loss remembering what path I took. I often say it was some Dreamweaver and osmosis through reading a lot of A List Apart and Smashing Magazine after being introduced to those websites by my friend, but now seeing the cover the books in this article brought up memories of me being preteen in the mid-2000s finding "HTML for the World Wide Web" on my dad's bookshelf and meticulously going through it.

New comment by sodaplayer in "HTML5-based physics simulation for building and animating springy creations"

sodaplayer — Sat, 02 Apr 2022 16:01:49 +0000

Oh wow, this is awesome! As you can see by my username, this was influential enough to me as a kid that I named my online presence after it. My whole 6th grade class got into it―particularly making Line-Rider-equse roller coasters with the beta version.

It was really fun being able to immediately load something from the "zoo", and reverse engineer how the mechanisms worked, and try to implement it yourself.

New comment by sodaplayer in "Wezterm – A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer"

sodaplayer — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 03:21:01 +0000

The font's designers did create a video and a page explaining their choices if you're interested. I wouldn't necessarily call it haphazard as it seems there was intention behind the choice to use script for the italics.

https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-operator

New comment by sodaplayer in "Creating a QR Code step by step"

sodaplayer — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 05:31:33 +0000

Make sure to have a QR code reader on hand as you watch this. The video is full of Easter eggs hidden in the dramatizations.

New comment by sodaplayer in "Kongregate closed to new games, shutting down forums and chat"

sodaplayer — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 20:32:12 +0000

Yeah, Kongregate was also one of my first chatroom experiences as a kid. The community had many friendly people, and now as an adult, it's nice looking back and feeling I had a good environment to learn how to interact on the web. It also inspired me to learn Actionscript to try to make my own Flash games, which eventually lead to me now with a CS degree.