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tilde.club mailbox you can read using pine :-)public_html folder where you can put stuff and make your homepage like it's 1994 again.server. side. includes!What's not to like?
I'm a 50-something 1x Engineer. I wrote stuff using an awful lot of languages: if it's something imperativ-ish, expect me to learn its basics in a quite short time. Maybe I'm a master of none, but sure I can cover a lot of bases quite well.
Wrote some stuff mainly for fun: follow the links below.
I also love me a good tabletop roleplaying session once in a while.
Other things that piqued my interests are graphics (mainly DTP. fonts and the like) and making music (sorta: I can't play any instrument, yet I remember how to read the music, so I resort to DAWs)
Enough of this, here's...
This can be found on my gitlab.com and github.com repos. Most of these goods are in a pre-alpha form: that is, they are good enough for my personal use, but I won't suggest using them in a production environment. Moreover, standard disclaimers apply: if you use them, you agree that you won't hold me liable for any damage that happens on your machine due to my stuff's usage. USE THIS STUFF AT YOUR OWN RISK!.
SyD is a Synth1 Random/Evolutive patchset generator. The "pure random" generation step creates 50% of unusable sounds, 35% usable for droning, 20% for industrial-techno and 5% melodic-sounding stuff. It's also written in D Now you're warned.
SRD 5.1 with tools is an HTML/Markdown to LaTex converter using to create nifty-looking PDF out of DnD5 markdown SRD. Should fork this project into a new one with a more meaningful name, since it absolutely makes no sense right now.
PlanetNoise is a command-line tool written in C++ that randomly creates planetary textures to be wrapped around spheres using 3D-modelling programs like Blender. AFAIK it's quite a unique tool. Written in C++, source only, but AFAIK it compiles on linux and windows (using MingW toolset).
To see a sample of the texture it can generate, go there. Every 30 minutes, a new planetary texture gets generated. Thanks the magic of three.js, you'll see a world serenely rotating in spaces sporting these textures. All of them can be downloaded by using the time-honored "right-click + save as" method on the appropriate link (again, save stuff like it's 1995).
Simple Font Previewer is a not-quite-complete font previewer written in Python3 for Linux using wxPython toolkit. It's not complete but it somewhat works. It has no printing capabilities of its own; instead, it leverages XeLaTeX's capabilities to produce specimen using selected fonts. Works on windows, too!
Warp2010 This is da big one. It's a starmapping program geared towards 2300AD aficionados. Since one of the main problem of the game was to determine which stars were reachable using a 7.7LY jump limit, I made a program that did the heavy lifting. Over the years, it suffered from^H^H^H embraced feature creep with gusto and grafted the following features on it:
The Celestia Sector Generation feature is useful only for smallish sectors (say < 20-30 stars with solarsystems) because it takes a lot of processing power and disk space to generate textures complete with bump and reflec map for so many solar systems.
SWN Sector Creator, a python desktop app to generate sectors according to the Stars Without Numbers, 1st edition rules, written in Python2/PySide on a Linux box. Since Python 2 is offically deprecated, I'd have to port it to Py3 (Update 20200704: Migrated somewhat painlessly to Pyside2/Python3).
SWNSectorGeneratorApp Same as above, only it is
This just in:! According to this article, it seems that Google and Ubuntu are teaming up to bring Flutter toolkit to Linux Desktop. Me, I'm quite skeptical, for a number of reasons: 1) Phone Apps and Desktop Apps are different beasts and 2) Microsoft botched it, Apple Catalysts wasn't exactly met with joy. Still, I think I'll try and download the toolkit and make my SWN Sector Generator run on linux. More to come...
There's other stuff that I'll add later, I promise!
I’m not a musician, but being a prog rock fan, I always was more interested in how music gets made than your average fanboi on the street. I guess I’d have to blame my old Music professor, who made us listen Tangerine Dream’s Ricochet when I was 12 and he was so cool that I can still play flute and read music.
However, being a proghead didn’t stop me to develop some guilty pleasures so, as soon it became possible, I started toying with trackers and soft synths.
Nowadays there’s nothing stopping you to create quite cool music in your bedroom. Granted, it’s not like playing on stage or rehearsing in studios, but you can churn out real nice electro working from home (that’s what I did with some friends in these months, btw) spending little or no money.
There are countless resources out there to help you get started: here are my suggestions (that are free or mostly free)
OpenMPT is my go-to tracker. It is free, it can use VSTs on windows, it runs nicely under WINE (so you can use it on Linux, too) and can open the metric ton of old MODs you (or, more likely, your father) has stored somewhere.
LMMS LMMS is a nice multiplatform DAW that runs on MacOS, Linux, Windows. It’s got its own synths (including the all-powerful ZynAddSubFX) and, with some tweaking, can be used to create nice tunes (I know because I used it). Worth a try.
Ardour A powerful, albeit quite complex to setup, open source DAW. Code is free/libre. However, compiled images are not. This means that the only free binary images can be downloaded only as packages in your favorite linux distro. Use it if you’re serious about making music using linux.
Audacity THE multiplatform audio editor.
Reaper Not free, but reasonably priced for its sheer power (and you can freely try it for one month and then it’s only a nag screen for one minute). I used it during the quarantine – thanks to a license expressly made for these weird times – and it’s worth every cent of the retail price. There are tutorials galore on the web ( Kenny Gioia’s ones are clear and comprehensive, start from here).
Wavosaur is fast, powerful and very lightweight audio editor for windows (buy very WINE-friendly). Also, check out https://blog.wavosaur.com/
VST4Free A one-stop shop for most FREE VSTs (virtual instruments and fx) for DAWs.
Some shameless promotion: My Bancamp Page contains some stuff I made over the years, including a techno trance tune with mellotrons and a 14/4 time signature, which is quit weird but still somewhat groovy.
Repository of useful links that helped me solve a problem.
Snowdusk DJ If you were a teen in the eighties or love electronica, this is quite a blog to follow.
Create a bootable ISO keys with multiple ISOs. Because, you know, before committing gigs of your HD to any given distro you might want to test it live. Or you just want to show Linux to someone who'd like to join the tortuous path to the OS freedom and you think it'd be nice to have a nifty, good-looking distro in your USB key.
How to remove YouTube Tracking. Sometimes you just want to embed a video and, at the same time, avoid google tracking. Well, it all boils down to change URL domain from youtube.com to youtube-nocookie.com. It's that easy!
I keep hearing and reading this nice proverb *if it ain't broke, don't fix
it*. The latest appearance was in response to [Shlomi
Fish](http://community.livejournal.com/shlomif_tech/37969.html) suggesting
that some Ancient Perl code should be replaced by Modern Perl code.
I am not saying that every piece of code should be rewritten every 6 months,
but in my understanding that sentence actually translates to *let's wait till
it breaks and then panic*.
I think people who say that sentence are afraid that the new version will
break something. Sure, there is always a chance that a change introduces an
error, but, if we are afraid to touch the code, what will happen when later on
we encounter a case where it does not work? For example, if we need to use it
in a new environment. Will we have the courage to change the code then? How
much will it cost in money, time, and lost sleep?
I think we have been trying to teach ourselves that we should have really good
test coverage of our code and then we can easily refactor it and get rid of
technical debt. So why do we keep hearing that sentence?
-- Gabor Szabo
-- What does "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." really mean? ( )
