I write code and play games and stuff. My old username from reddit and HN was already taken and I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to be called so I just picked some random characters like this:

>>> import random
>>> ''.join([random.choice("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789") for x in range(5)])
'e0qdk'

My avatar is a quick doodle made in KolourPaint. I might replace it later. Maybe.

日本語が少し分かるけど、下手です。

Alt: [email protected]

  • 0 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: September 22nd, 2023
  • e0qdk@kbin.socialtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What is a tip, fact, or piece of information that you want to share?
    4·
    9 months ago

    What upside down thing with a banana??

    There was a viral video/meme maybe a decade ago about how monkeys peel bananas (might have actually been an orangutan or gorilla in the one I saw; been too long since I’ve seen it) where they peel it from the end opposite of how people are usually shown doing it. I’m guessing they mean that? Basically, instead of bending the stem bit (from where the bananas bunch up), you can pinch the tip at the other end and the peel splits open very easily – it’s easier to do, especially if the banana is still a bit on the greener side of ripeness and the stem part is flexible. (I tried it after seeing it and switched to peeling them from the “bottom” myself.)

    What back bit?

    There is a little black fibrous part of most Cavendish bananas near the tip I was describing; many people do not like eating it and avoid it.

    Also…veins?

    I’m not sure what they mean either.

  • e0qdk@kbin.socialtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Looking for a self hosted Dementia Clock
    4·
    9 months ago

    What I’d do is set up a simple website that uses a little JavaScript to rewrite the date and time into the page and periodically refresh an image under/next to it. Size the image to fit the remaining free space of however you set up the iPad, and then you can stick anything you want there (pictures/reminder text/whatever) with your favorite image editor. Upload a new image to the server when you want to change the note. The idea with an image is that it’s just really easy to do and keeps the amount of effort to redo layout to a minimum – just drag stuff around in your image editor and you’ll know it’ll all fit as expected as long as you don’t change the resolution (instead of needing to muck around with CSS and maybe breaking something if you can’t see the device to check that it displays correctly).

    There’s a couple issues to watch out for – e.g. what happens if the internet connection/server goes down, screen burn-in, keeping the browser from being closed/switched to another page, keeping it powered, etc. that might or might not matter depending on your particular circumstances. If you need to fix all that for your circumstances, it might be more trouble than just buying something purpose built… but getting a first pass DIY version working is trivial if you’re comfortable hosting a website.

    Edit: If some sample code that you can use as a starting point would be helpful, let me know.

  • e0qdk@kbin.socialtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What would you put in duck stew?
    45·
    10 months ago

    I’ve never tried to make a stew out of duck before, but if someone asked me to wing it anyway, I’d probably try to use it in a gumbo: Dark roux, Cajun Trinity (celery + onion + bell pepper), jalapeno, garlic, stock, fresh thyme, bay leaf, lots of fresh ground black pepper, spoonful of hot sauce (e.g. Crystal or Tabasco if I can’t get that), plus your meat – served over white rice. For chicken (e.g. chicken thighs), I’d sear it first but I’m not sure on the best treatment for gamey fowl. Personally I might try to blanch it first to try to reduce the gameyness (based on recommendations I’ve seen about cooking certain kinds of stewed pork – like pork belly in Chinese dishes), but you’d do better to get advice from someone who’s actually cooked with gamey ingredients more than I have if you can.

    Adapting a coq au vin recipe might be another idea to try if gumbo doesn’t appeal, but again, I’ve never tried that with duck either.

  • e0qdk@kbin.socialtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What is an obscure piece of media or videogame that you think nobody else here has heard of?
    2·
    11 months ago

    And Sim Tower I was obsessed with that game for a long time when I was younger. Couldn’t stop playing until I got everything completed and filled every empty space on the map.

    Single, double, or triple story lobby? :-)

    I remember having a pretty good time with SimTower myself – I liked seeing all the little animations of people doing stuff throughout the building. I didn’t understand the apartment pricing thing as a kid, but as an adult thinking back on it, it’s clear that I was supposed to renovate the units if I wanted to keep renting them at the higher rates… (Delete and rebuild was not intuitive to me as a kid so I kept getting frustrated with the apartments and usually built massive amounts of hotel rooms instead.)

    I haven’t heard of Sim Safari myself what was that one like?

    I hadn’t played it for 20+ years so my memory of it wasn’t great when you asked this question – but I went down a bit of a rabbit hole digging through my boxes of old anime DVDs and strange things I burned to CD-Rs as a teenager and such – and it turns out I still have the original CD-ROM! It’s got orange and white stripes. It’s scratched up a little bit, but it’s still readable enough that I was able to install the game under WINE and IT WORKS! (The installer prompted me to install DirectX 5 to “improve performance”… lol)

    The game opens with a short animated splash screen – a map of Africa with animated zebras and other animals shown over it before eventually displaying the game’s logo. It then dumps me onto a main menu with a lantern that toggles an interactive tutorial on and off – somewhat confusingly; it wasn’t immediately clear that it was a switch unlike the other options. I turned the tutorial on but didn’t find it very helpful.

    The game itself is isometric and features a bunch of animals wandering around randomly while grass grows. (Screenshot) There are three different modes (park, camp, village) that I don’t really understand the details of. Park shows your animals, of course. I think the idea is you build up the camp site to get tourists to come (and bring you money), do gardening and animal management and such in the park which attracts more tourists, and hire people from the village to keep things running (otherwise they poach your animals, probably?) but it’s not clear how to actually get things going and most of the advisors seem pretty useless.

    There’s an ecologist adviser who has a field guide about plants and animals and can also show you various graphs and things. You can click on binoculars and then on an animal and it will bring up a window with a little animation of that animal.

    The game constantly plays animal sound effects by default including crickets and various birds and a bunch of animals whose sounds I don’t know well enough to name – but could probably learn from the embedded educational material if I cared to. (I have a feeling many parents of kids who had this game were probably driven bonkers by some animal or other going “AWEEEEE heee heee heee hee!” over and over.)

    I remembered the game being presented as more serious than SimPark (which has a talking cartoon frog guide you through things like leaf identification) – and, indeed, the character graphics are more realistic cartoon drawings in this one, but it’s also more cartoony than I remember with the sound effects for things like a “boing-a-boing-oing-oing” failure noise if you misclick the binoculars.

    The controls are not very good. Moving around the map is tediuous and unintuitive (you have to click in a particular region near the window border and hold the mouse down there – or else pull up a mini-map and navigate with that). The game also just builds paths immediately when you try to draw them with the mouse instead of letting you choose a route and drop to release to confirm the construction. You can “build” a 4 door car on your camp site for some reason as well as construct roads, but I think it may just be a decoration. There doesn’t seem to be any way to pick it up and move it if you plopped it in a bad spot (bye $3k!).

    Unfortunately I don’t have the original box/paper manual/whatever else came with the disc and the README file (in an ancient .DOC format) is not very helpful. It does, however, contain some lines like:

    By the time you read this document, the average home computer might be a 700MHz GazillaComp 2000 with 58 gigabytes of memory.

    which is pretty amusing since the decade old machine I’m running it on has a 3.7GHz processor – obscenely far beyond their dreams of high performance – but a mere 32GB of RAM. :p

    Somewhat oddly the game apparently has the ability to print – although I haven’t tried it.

  • e0qdk@kbin.socialtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What is an obscure piece of media or videogame that you think nobody else here has heard of?
    2·
    11 months ago

    I’ve seen Bubba Ho-Tep and Cemetery Man! Watched them during a movie marathon once that also included From Dusk Till Dawn and Jacob’s Ladder. That was a night well spent.

    Out of the games, I’ve played Sim Tower. I never made it to 5 stars but got as far as building the subway in at least one of my towers. I played way too many sim games as a kid. SimSafari is probably the most obscure I tried – never really made much sense out of that one though.

    I don’t know if it’s that obscure… but for anyone else who played a bunch of sim games – do you remember the song with the lyrics “I’m just a splatter, splatter, splatter on the windshield of life”?

  • e0qdk@kbin.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.world•IBM releases first-ever 1,000-qubit quantum chip
    57·
    11 months ago

    The attached picture says 133 qubits, so whatever that chip is (edit: Heron) it’s not this thing.

    IBM’s post (that the article links) says:

    Breaking the 1,000-qubit barrier with Condor

    We have introduced IBM Condor, a 1,121 superconducting qubit quantum processor based on our cross-resonance gate technology. Condor pushes the limits of scale and yield in chip design with a 50% increase in qubit density, advances in qubit fabrication and laminate size, and includes over a mile of high-density cryogenic flex IO wiring within a single dilution refigerator.

    So, it sounds like this is actually another fridge sized system.

  • e0qdk@kbin.socialtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Does federation connect to a single lemmy network, or can there be multiple?
    6·
    1 year ago

    You could crawl the Fediverse looking for instances and communities of the sort that your instance understands, but new servers and communities can show up whenever, so you’d have to keep looking continuously. Stuff also gets interesting because different servers have different views of content.

    I’ve seen posts from users on two different servers talking in a thread on a 3rd server asking other users to help proxy messages manually between them because one of the servers was defederated from another and the messages were only going one way between the two users… I’m not sure in that case what the communication pattern was between the three servers (never mind me on kbin.social – which isn’t a Lemmy server at all – also able to see the conversation), but it seemed like a big headache.

    I’ve manually gone to different instances to make sure my posts show up when I make them; kbin is often pretty bad at getting new photo threads to federate out and sometimes needs a bit of coaxing… Looking at my profile on those instances though shows wildly different thread and comment counts sometimes. As of the time of writing this (before posting this comment) I have 30 threads and 85 comments listed in my profile on kbin.social. lemmy.world shows me as having 30 “posts” (threads) and 78 comments. lemmy.mindoki.com (your instance) shows 0 posts and just 10 comments!

    There’s also users on Mastodon and Misskey which show up for me as part of the regular experience of using kbin but which are a bit more awkward to interact with from Lemmy, I think? If I manually put in a mastodon.social user’s account into lemmy.world’s user lookup, for example, I can see some of their posts, but I’m not sure if they would ever actually show up anywhere on Lemmy without manually looking for a user?

    Nevermind the other parts of the Fediverse like Peertube and AP-enabled Wordpress blogs and whatever else is out there… You can probably get a decent view of most of the Lemmy/kbin-like communities if you have a good list of servers to scrape community lists from and subscribe to everything you find regularly, but I think you’ll still have some problems in practice.

  • e0qdk@kbin.socialtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•*Permanently Deleted*
    2·
    1 year ago

    I’m currently regularly posting to:

    I’m mostly posting screenshots and other people are mostly posting fan art when they post.

    It’s not very active, but I’ve also been posting (when I have content) to:

    I’m following with interest and occasionally commenting on:

    There are some really fun images being generated over there lately with a lot of variety!

    I like random art popping up in the sidebar from time to time on kbin. I’m not actively following but have seen some fun imagery occasionally pop-up from:

    So maybe take a look at those as well if they sound interesting.

    I’m also subbed to a bunch of other communities, but not interacting with them very much; no content of my own to post right now and they’re either (mostly) dormant or the people who are posting are not posting the sorts of content I’m interested in engaging with currently (but I might be interested in the future, so I subbed):

    I joined that last one to hopefully find other interesting communities as well.

    Occasionally I’ll interact with other communities when they pop-up in the newest threads feed on kbin.social – e.g. !196 or other meme communities. Sometimes people post things like technical problems they’re struggling with in !cpp or wherever and if I see the threads and have time I try to answer them.

    If you find a community that looks interesting but is dormant, start posting regularly (like maybe once a day). If you get upvotes or comments, there are still people around who just don’t have content to interact with!

    Edit: I should also add for the off kbin/lemmy part, I’m also on Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) under a different username – although that has a tendency to piss me off, so I’m cutting back on reading it.