2025 12 13 09:09 PST
I did it! I put rockbox on my old iPod:
I was sure I would accidentally break the thing in the process, but somehow this all worked :D I really like the library of themes available, and I chose to install the redux one.
2025 12 11 14:33 PST
This is cool, apparently there's a relatively simple systematic way to rewrite functions point-free style in Haskell: stackoverflow.com/a/29596461.
2025 12 11 07:32 PST
I replaced my iPod's HDD with an iFlash adapter and SD card, and now I've been trying to reformat it as a "Windows iPod" in order to install Rockbox on it. Of course, I don't have a windows computer. My school and library do, but I can't install any software like iTunes to actually reformat the iPod. So I basically have two choices: reformat it manually through Linux, or borrow a friend's computer to reformat it. I've already tried the former, but I'm still really new to everything Linux-related. I may borrow my brother's windows laptop, but it's almost out of storage so I probably wouldn't be able to do that.
It's frustrating how hard this is. I'm following all the online instructions and documentation step-by-step, but I still run into unexplainable (from my POV) issues. I hope I manage to reformat this thing soon.
2025 12 03 16:25 PST
Three things:
First, I ordered an iFlash-SOLO board to mod the iPod 5th gen I found, and it arrived today! Soon enough I'll get an SD card for the actual storage medium, a USB stick to back the iPod up, and a spudger to actually open the thing in the first place. I just hope I don't accidentally destroy the iPod in the process :D
Second, I've been working on this concept: a 3D renderer in ASCII. Basically an "engine" that renders a world completely in text. Really, it's just a mediocre raycasting engine that stylistically uses text to render the world. Below is a screenshot of a wedge shape I rendered.
I'm currently figuring out how to not make my computer (try to) calculate one million trig calculations per second. The way I'm enabling camera movement is by encoding each ray with two angles (pitch and yaw) and movement adds an offset angle to each. Idk. Someone else has probably made a better way to do this, I'm basically doing all of this from scratch (almost-- I learned about the Moller-Trumbore algorithm to make the renderer in the first place.
And finally: I might redesign the site again. I've been looking at other sites, and began to feel that this one is a little too...generic? Maybe it's the dark mode design. I kind of want to make a lighter website that still uses black, white, and blue. Maybe I'll figure some other design out later.
Edit (2025 12 03 16:27 PST): credit to Wouter van Oortmerssen for designing the font and making the font freely available on the internet!
2025 11 30 16:24 PST
Isn't it funny how a few large companies convinced nearly an entire country that a chatbot is the most revolutionary thing? Random thought...
My parents had an old iMac sitting in their bedroom. According to them, it "stopped working" over a decade ago. I plugged it in and it started booting. Then, I tried booting into the original OS and it hung. I restarted it and booted into the recovery boot, which concluded the main partition/drive is not recoverable. At this point I decided to wipe it (maybe not a good idea) and tried installing a "new" version of MacOS X. It didn't work (I selected the option to recover via the internet). I shut it off and decided to try to get it to run Linux Mint.
I managed to get Linux Mint to boot, which was cool. However, I kept running into weird errors, problems, etc. The iMac itself was a "model a1311" which means it comes with a disk reader. I decided to try ripping one of my CDs for the first time, which was cool. The computer crashed around the 60% mark but I managed to get 11 out of the 18 songs from The Best of Talking Heads.
The computer then just stopped working. This all happened a few days ago, but I decided to try booting the computer up today. It rendered the Linux Mint loading icon correctly, but after that all I am met with is a black screen. My guess is a dead/very old HDD, but given my inexperience it could be something else.
2025 11 24 07:58 PST
Today, if using year-month-day or month-day-year, is "1124" which is 2^10+10^2.
Anyway, my school district is pretending to care about the students' opinions on "AI." They're running a monthly survey and they're saying "share your thoughts on AI." I was ready to share my very critical thoughts, but I was very underwhelmed to find out the survey is only two multiple choice questions: 1) Which "AI" tools have you used, and 2) How "confident" are you in using them. I feel this is horribly misrepresenting the opinions of the (probably four) high schoolers including me that don't like generative AI. The survey/website also sort of implies "AI" learning/integration into our curriculum, which worries me, not only because "learning AI" is a waste of time unless you know linear algebra, computer science, etc., but it also implies that the higher-ups in the district really think "AI" is this important. It really isn't.
2025 11 15 10:46 PST
I've been spending the past couple of days researching what to do with my iPod. I'd like to replace the hard drive with an SD card and adapter and use iTunes as little as possible. It looks like the most viable way is to install Rockbox, which allows you to manage an iPod without iTunes by using a completely different software.
In unrelated news, it's raining where I live, which is cool because that only really happens a few times a year.
2025 11 12 22:10 PST
It's been weeks, but I finally did it.
I found my family's old iPod (5th gen)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This thing has like over 1700 songs, and I really want to change the drive from a hard disk drive to card (and change the battery) so that I can actually use it for my own needs. A goal I have is doing that, and ripping the music off of all my CDs and put a bunch of the music on the iPod. What I worry about is the drive change-- the OS is on the hard drive, right? And I don't use macOS, so putting music on it might be difficult, unless my experience with the iPod nano was not reflective of how the conventional iPod experience with linux is.
I think it's really neat to have a seperate device for music. I never used spotify before, and youtube only works with internet (I'm not wasting money on premium, silly). Along with music, I could use it as a general external drive, because iPods were really designed to be useful like that.
Anyway, this thing has distracted me from my other personal projects, but I can justify myself: modding an iPod might be a thing I can actually do. So now I have that :)
2025 11 04 20:06 PST
I've been drawing up lots of ideas AGHCK
There's an ant in my keyboard. My desk has been cursed with *periodic ant*. Let's try that again.
I've been drawing up lots of ideas, designs, concepts, etc., for the game I'm working on. With my "experience" in game development, I'm so used to jumping right in and improvising on everything, because if I don't then I'd typically only think about the project for a bit before losing interest entirely. The problem with this project of mine is that it requires LOTS of planning. At the moment I'm very eager to make this, but I'm worried that if I "plan too much," this project will end up like all my other ideas that never really become anything.
Most of my time is being wasted doing Haskell coding problems online. I should probably spend more time working on my game development project and actually getting employed.
2025 11 02 20:20 PST
I don't like to vent about things online because later on I'll read it again and it'll be embarrassing, but this is something that's been boiling in my mind for the past few weeks and I just need to write about it.
In California, this Tuesday, there's a special election going on where citizens get to vote on propositions to pass/modify legislation. I read up a bit on Proposition 50, and I've got to say it may be one of the stupidest pieces of relevant legislation.
Basically, Texas is going through redistricting and it's arguably very political (for those outside of the US, or for most Americans who don't know how the US government works anyway, "redistricting" is supposed to be very non-partisan, dividing states and trying to give equal representation to all citizens while not engaging in a pure democracy) so naturally, prop 50 is, to my knowledge, retaliation against this redistricting in Texas. Its goal is to re-draw the California districs into something equally as flawed and terrible, just for the other party.
So imagine yourself as a political party. Your opponent is attempting to abuse the political system. So as a response, you... abuse the political system back?
Millions of dollars have been wasted in bad faith to convince voters that this is "the way to stop Trump." No it isn't. It's a way to further wreck the already inadequate district lines in this state. But the current state of politics in the US is that blue people vote for things that say "Trump bad," and red people vote for things that say "change is evil." If you think otherwise in any other way for a moment, you are a defective American.
Doesn't it seem a little fishy that the party pushing for this proposition would seriously benefit from this? Maybe I'm sounding like a crazy conspiracy theorist with this claim, but this proposition would seem to give incumbents of the party a great advantage in next elections (not that a candidate from any other party would win a position in the state government in the first place, but I digress).
Sure, for a tiny bit of reason you could argue that prop 50 would be a proper way to respond to abuses in the political system, but what about all those cliches of fighting fire with fire and two wrongs not making a right? I feel that this proposition, if passed, would normalize the reckless mishandling of redistricting in this country.
Maybe I'm wrong. Propositions in California are unique from other legislative processes in this country in that they pass if a majority votes in favor, not some wacky electoral college system. If a majority of Californians decide that destroying the state's district map is worth it, then surely by some crazy leaps in logic, I must be mistaken. But it seems that in the US, many active voters are very polarized and will vote for their party without any second thoughts, so maybe in this strange case I am correct and many others are wrong.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, for those who are in support of this proposition, haha), I'm a shade too young to vote in this election. I hope prop 50 fails to pass, but my individual opinions are nothing in comparison to the political hivemind fostered in this state.
And now for something completely different (and perhaps healthier to talk about, mentally):
My cold is... gone? I had a sore throat for like, one afternoon, and now I just have a cough and a runny nose. So I'm still sick technically, but my throat feels fine and that's all that counts.
Daylight savings time is over! This means I get an hour of sleep back... sort of. I'm used to waking up slightly early so honestly, I think I'm just gonna wake up a half hour "earlier" than usual and hope that we abolish this obsolete system before spring.
And finally: I never actually put this idea on this site anywhere yet, so I might as well say it now. I would really love to have a sort of portable Haskell compiler. Like a calculator that does GHCi. Maybe this'll be one of my long personal projects, alongside game development. I'm a novice at many things involving computers, but I'm glad I'm at least beginning to learn these things now.
2025 11 01 17:32 PDT
So Halloween was fun, I hung out with some friends and played some switch games on a projector screen outside for about five hours.
Unfortunately, I also caught a cold yesterday morning, so I sort of feel eugh, but surprisingly the horrible sensation in my throat has been going away already. Maybe my immune system is actually good? lol jk
But yeah sore throats are the worst.
Anyway, I'm designing things for a video game I'm working on (closely related to the one of the picture I posted about several days ago) so that's fun. However, the obligatory bad news is that I only have about 1 GB of storage on my main computer, so I need to figure out how to free up some storage (which will be especially hard because I have hardly anything downloaded anyway, the majority of the storage is actually being taken up by one timeshift snapshot).
Anyway that's all I've got to say for now. Thank you for attending my ted talk bye
2025 10 27 19:34 PDT
I did it! I made my website dark! I think it looks nice, and it's definitely nicer on the eyes with a bright screen, I think. I didn't really like having a central page with a main iframe to navigate the site, because if you were to visit any of the other pages without the iframe, everything would look bad and aeuauegh. So I just made all the pages look like this instead.
I also cleaned up some of the pages' code, which were ridden with old commented-out code, weird css classes, etc. That doesn't really effect you but for me it's nice to see clean HTML code.
I've also added a seperate "blog" page, where I'll be putting my longer posts, when I eventually get to them. I enjoy reading peoples' essays online and I figured that's a cool hobby I should take up as well. Anyway, that's all for now :D
2025 10 26 20:20 PDT
wait I should definitely make this website dark-mode looking
...
...
I'm not procrastinating, you are
2025 10 25 09:31 PDT
The game is in development!
I don't really have anything else to say here.
2025 10 04 18:10 PDT
Around a week ago I installed SFML onto my computer and I began my journey into making games! I recreated an old game of mine (as previously mentioned) and now I'm working on an isometric-perspective, warped space (some people call non-euclidean, which is technically wrong from what I remember) sort-of-puzzle game. This past week I spent a couple of days working on an isometric map renderer from scratch, which proved to be very very annoying, but I was extremely pleased with the result once I actually got it to work. After that, I had to think what I was actually going to do with the renderer I made. I thought about making a puzzle game around pushing blocks and stuff, which would probably be great practice for coding a game in C++, but I thought it'd be too much work, and after I remembered some warped space concept games, I decided to go with that idea. I finished writing the warped space scripts today, and like earlier, I was very pleased. It's a bit lacking in game/puzzle mechanics, and I haven't implemented the functionality of some I've already started working on (along with not animating the player yet), but if I give it some more effort and myself more time, I'll maybe be able to finish this game in about another week.
I have a more long-term goal pertaining to game-development, and that's to create an RPG. However, I know I am NOWHERE near that level of experience yet, and I need to get comfortable the basics of game development first. I could of course use RPG Maker or an actual game engine thing like Godot, but considering that my background in game development is literally 98% comprised of making video games on Scratch (and 2% messing around in Roblox Studio many years ago), I'm more used to making things from the ground up anyway.
In unrelated news, this SITE! I still want to redesign it but I never really got around to it. Maybe soon...
2025 10 01 18:25 PDT
I've been visiting several more websites, and as of now, WOW I really want to redesign this website. Originally, my idea of this website would be a "square" with which you would access different pages. But I've been seeing the "traditional" website style of a list of blog posts, and some pages for other things. Now I'm not someone who typically follows the "norm" (well, personal websites are relatively niche), but I've come to really like "that" kind of website, so I'm still going to continue to redesign this place :D
2025 09 29 20:32 PDT
Aeugaughughhh. I've got a physics exam tomorrow (on thermodynamics, fun!!!!!) and a calculus exam the day after (not as bad). But I'm gonna ignore that for now!
I really want to get more involved in game development, so I spent a lot of my free time designing a game I have in mind. Anyway, the main thing I learned today is that designing and creating a game in a simple teeny little library thing (SFML) is going to be a lot harder than I initially anticipated. Aside from that, nothing's really been going on.
2025 09 28 21:30 PDT
It's been a pretty nice weekend. I decided to actually manage my time, so I finished all my homework on Saturday, which left me plenty of time to re-explore my ideas and hobbies. I've installed SFML, and now I'm learning C++, so I can begin working on "actual" video games (the ones I've made before were all on Scratch). I have much to learn about independent game development, and although I've already recreated an old game of mine from several years ago, that only means that I've covered the basics. Still though, it's all very cool and I hope to get better!
2025 09 26 20:19 PDT
I'm beginning to redo this website in a few ways. When I first made it, I thought I'd use it for making little javascript things for people to play with and use. Consequently, I never got around to doing that. Anyway, I have a clearer idea of what I want to do with this place (although, it's an idea that'll always need time for refining)-- I'm going to continue with the blog posts, but I'm going to base this site around something called "my binder" or something like that. It's going to be a collection of tutorials (which I haven't really been doing), cool websites I'm finding, etc. I guess we'll see how this goes!
