Your Laptop Is Now A Typewriter (YLINAT)

YLINAT is a text "editor" that does not allow you to edit your text. You can write, but you cannot backspace or reposition the cursor. If you've ever gotten stuck in a self-critical loop while writing, you might find this appealing. (If not, you probably find it horrifying!)

YLINAT was written in Python, and uses PyQt6 for the GUI stuff. My day job doesn't involve development work, so this was a good opportunity to stretch some skills I haven't used in a while. Thank you @kfwyre for organizing this, it was a ton of fun!

Features:

• Simple, boring UI with minimal distractions
• Autosave
• Word count, both in total and for the current session
• Font, margin, and line length options, so you can make it your typewriter
• A completely useless "Edit" menu
• "Goldfish mode" for when you can't stand to look at what you wrote before
• A text box that won't let you fix that typo no matter how much you cry, scream, or beg

If you'd like to try it out, the GitHub repo for YLINAT is here. Release builds for Windows, Mac, and Linux can be found here.

Quick tags for people who expressed interest in using YLINAT: @arqalite @atomicshoreline @Handshape @lou @palimpsest @TangibleLight

I limped over the finish line with a song about a friend I knew from age ~3-13 that pulled a knife on me, and some reflections on his situation/life.

Well, more like I made good progress up I saw the finish line, then I did everything possible to avoid actually recording. One might ask, "TemTea, is that because you have negative amounts of vocal skills?" To which I would reply... yes. But also because Earthbound taught me the power of being the 3rd out of 5th strongest mole.

It is in the interest of aggressive mediocrity that I did one take at the last minute, segmented where shortness of breath required. Please place this work on the refrigerator of your hearts using the adhesive of my shame.

I set up a site that has the footnotes/audio link working, but I'll add it here as well.

Buds

Audio

Thanks @kfwyre for organizing this and so much else for the community on Tildes, and for all the others participating!

Pentominoes on Surfaces

I intended to spend the first week of October finishing this project that I started in September (technically in June, but just like 10 lines of code and then nothing for a few months). But.....instead I kept finding more and more things to do, and I spent the entire month working on this. So this was a two-month-long project, not a month-long project.

Code is here

During this time I also wrote two blog posts:

• Serialization woes, about the way I'm serializing current state into the URL slug
• Surfaces with pentominoes, about the extremely weird graphs created when you try to embed a grid onto a surface (sphere, projective plane, etc)

I got a huge amount of help in the form of UX feedback & feature requests both here and also in a Discord server that I posted the project in a few times, and this project is sooooo much better because people suggested things like:

• Show the tile you've selected while hovering the board
• Suggestions for tweaking the wordmark
• How to make it work on mobile
• There should be a "random board" button
• Show icons for the actions instead of writing Rotate Right etc
• Make the "current pentomino" window interactive

This game would suck a lot more without your help.

Here are links to some of my favorite solves I've made during the past month:

• the I piece in the middle on this board
• same, but the other middle row
• this board was kind of frustrating but also kind of fun, especially on surfaces
• that same board, but rectangle
• the first legit solve I did on a surface (i.e. the surface is used in both directions, and I pre-placed terrain
• this board is ridiculously hard, and I found this exact solve like 7 times omg

The Spellswapper

A roguelite game -- it's a bit like a tower defense game, but you are the single tower. or like Vampire Survivors, but instead of only moving and not shooting, you only shoot and don't move.

You can play the game on itch.io (use the password timasomo), or you can watch a video of some gameplay I recorded today on Youtube.

I first started making the game in the last Ludum Dare a bit over a month ago. Afterwards thanks to Timasomo I worked on the game for the whole duration, making at least some progress every single day! I am super happy with how productive I was on the game.

The itch.io version here is most likely the last version I'll put up for a while now, at least until I have a demo on Steam (if I'll do that). I'll probably also take down the itch.io page in about a week, just so I don't have to worry about mainlining that page.

I secretly hoped I'd fully finish the game by the end of the Timasomo and have it up on Steam. Sadly, it's not fully done, but I did manage to go through the process of becoming a Steam partner and I do have the game running on Steam now! So I am fully invested in releasing this thing for real! Working with Steam is pretty cool -- I spent a solid part of this last week integrating my game with it. I never did stuff with Steamworks by myself before and I learned a lot already, even if the game flops I think this is some very valuable experience that I can put on my CV. I even have some achievements setup for the game already! It feels cool to have achievements from my own game on my steam account haha.

All in all, I am just very happy with what I managed to do. And as always, I'd like to thank @kfwyre for running Timasomo -- participating really helped push me to do all of this!

Island

is a simple strategy game about building up an island and making your islanders happy.

Download the Windows version here (Updated 10 Nov). Unzip and run Island.bat to play. (Please let me know if it doesn't work for you.) Other versions are in my update post below.

Here's a video of the game being played. (Edit: Link fixed, thanks for the heads-ups.) There are more detailed rules in the Github readme.

It doesn't look very exciting! Text-only, game is played using only the keyboard and the display flickers because it's rendered line-by-line through the Windows console. The gameplay is similarly simple but functional.

I code occasionally as a hobby but I've always struggled with lots of problems. This project was meant as something simple and fun to just focus on improving how I write code and not worry about visuals or GUIs.

I'm happy with what I gained from it. I felt a lot less anxious and frustrated about dealing with problems, agonized less over decisions (and accepted more 'eh, that's good enough'), wrote code more quickly than before, had a lot more fun than frustration, and it didn't turn out a sloppy mess. I actually journaled while I coded, whenever I was stuck on something big, I'd switch to Notepad and start writing. Frankly I've held on to lots of unproductive and unhealthy ways of programming (and doing many other things) for far too long and making this helped me let go of some of them.

I'm also satisfied with the game itself. It's nothing novel or deep; but it's quick and snappy and I enjoyed playing it. Have interesting ideas for a much meatier version, if I ever make that it'll be with graphics.

This is also the first time I've shared my projects publicly. (I'm kinda flailing around with Github.) It was really cool seeing the community work on their projects, getting a glimpse of how different folks go about things.

Mille Apres Tomorrow

A medley of a couple of Canadian classics.
Listen here

I've been an amateur musician for a long time, but I usually avoid recording for a couple of reasons: First, I have terrible self-censure, and second, I've always enjoyed the act of performing and listening live.

This year, I had a little health scare, and my wife and son asked if I'd consider recording a couple of songs, "just in case" - how could I possibly say no?

What I chose to record is a blending of a couple of well-loved Canadian songs about life on the road:

• Mille Après Mille by Gerry Joly - a country song originally written in both French and English. The latter largely faded to obscurity, but the former was popularized by Willie Lamothe in 1971 and has remained part of the cultural consciousness ever since.
• Maybe Tomorrow by Terry Bush - originally written as a TV theme song (for The Littlest Hobo) in the late 70's, it wasn't until 2000 that he recorded and released it as a single. By virtue of having been heard by kids coming home after school across the country, "Maybe Tomorrow" is as engrained as "Mille Après Mille".

I took some pretty serious liberties with each of the two songs to make them line up a little better, and took about five runs at the act of recording, with slightly different settings and mic arrangements. The one linked up top is the "take" I'm happiest with, and I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it!

EDIT: Fudge it. Here's the other track I worked up. It gives more of the live-music vibe that I like doing.

Torch Drive Spaceflight Simulator

Project goals in Roll Call, and dev logs in Update 1, Update 2, Update 3, and Update 4.

This project a prototype of a spaceflight simulator built around the idea of torch-ships: spacecraft using a main drive that can burn high accelerations for days or weeks on-end. The Expanse is probably the most popular franchise that uses such spacecraft, but it's certainly not the only one.

I've built this without any game engine, since I've wanted an excuse to dip back into low-level graphics code for a while now. The game is written in C++, using GLFW for window management, OpenGL for graphics, entt for ECS, and ENet for networking. This did make everything a bit harder than it probably needed to be, but I enjoyed getting into the machinery of things – especially the networking parts.

Something I want to explore with this is the real scale of space, so I've set everything in the real Solar System, with real distances and speeds. It was tricky to do, but I imported real data from NASA JPL's public datasets. To keep travel times reasonable for gameplay, I'm using a fixed 60:1 simulation timescale, where every minute of gameplay is an hour of simulated time.

I want space to feel big, so I use a fixed timescale. There is no time warp and no fast travel. Travel times between moons might take 1-5 minutes, but travel times between planets might take 10-40 minutes depending on their relative positions.

I also want players to feel free to travel wherever they please without extensive planning. I did some analysis on the torch-ship rocket equations to create special HUD elements to help the player intercept their target. I think the fundamentals for these are good, but they still need some polish before I'd call them intuitive. I can already use them to select and intercept any planet, moon, or spacecraft without planning ahead. The HUD elements let me course-correct along the way.

Flying around Saturn
Visiting Deimos. Hey Deimos!
Venus to Earth - Uncut 28 minute journey.

That long journey is boring in this pre-alpha stage, since there's nothing else to do. I had the game running in the background for most of it, but I didn't realize that would corrupt the video during those periods I didn't have the game focused. Mouse cursors everywhere! I'll re-record and re-upload that same journey later this week.

✅ The Orrery - Positions of planets and stars.
✅ Networking - Multiplayer synchronization.
✅ Spacecraft Physics - 60:1 timescale and motion of spacecraft.
✅ Spacecraft Controls - Player controls for spacecraft throttle and orientation.
✅ Navigation Indicators - Target selection and trajectory planning.
⬜ Weapons - Ballistic projectiles, missiles, and laser weapons.

My last goal for Timasomo was to implement a few kinds of weapons and defenses, so that I could get some play-testing to figure out general ideas for balancing weapons and defenses. I didn't acheive that.

I'll keep working on this for the next few weeks, and once I get weaponry and a few quality-of-life changes complete I'd consider the game ready for this play-testing. I'll throw the server up on a free EC2 instance or something and hopefully get some people flying around the solar system and shooting at each other. To be clear: this play-testing is meant to get ideas about weapon balancing, to get feedback on controls and UI, and to get a sense of compatibility issues on other people's hardware.

Once this is ready I'll make a new post here on Tildes; I'd probably tag it on ~games, ~creative, ~space – but if anyone is particularly interested, please let me know and I can ping you directly once it's ready.

A belated update: after some advice I've decided to keep this private for now. I am still working on the project but things still have a lack of polish that I think would not be appropriate to "release" even with all the caveats about the very early pre-alpha state of things.

Photo Zine: Overworld Underworld

EDIT: The printed zines have arrived! Check out my comment below if you want to see some pictures of the results.

Overworld Underworld is a zine I made compiled from black and white photographs I made in the past several years. The above link is to the digital version, but a print version is with the printer now. It's going to be in newsprint, which I thought was a good medium for B&W, and I sort of like the ephemeral nature of it. I'll update here when the print copies arrive, which I'm really excited for.

The theme "overworld underworld" arose naturally from reviewing my photographs. It wasn't the only theme that I came up with, but the collection that makes up the zine ended up being the perfect size for a one-month project. The photos contrast what lives above and what lives below (visually and metaphorically). I could ramble on about the thought process for each choice, but I think the photos do speak for themselves in regards to the theme. Primarily they are tied together aesthetically, without any extensive context or statement. In short, these are photos that I like and say similar things, and altogether constitute a very small body of work that I want to share!

I'm pretty happy with how the whole process went. My original, ulterior goal was to have an excuse to (finally) review all my photographs and get started on putting together a proper portfolio. I completed that goal, though still have a lot to cut down. The zine wasn't the first time that I did the sequencing and layout for a photo book/zine. But before I did it was with a class, so it was my first time on my own. The biggest challenge was actually the tool that I used: Photoshop. InDesign (or similar) would have been much better suited to the job, but I wasn't willing to give Adobe more of my money just for this one project. Everything went pretty smoothly and gave me a lot of confidence to tackle similar, bigger projects with my work. I even worked up the courage to submit some of my photos to an open call for a group book. Don't know where that will go, but I hope to do more in the future.

I think that's enough from me. Feedback is welcome. I'm sharing the zine with a CC license. Feel free to use any photo for non-commercial purposes with credit. Now I'm going to take a look at what everyone else accomplished. This was fun!

A Chess Board... With Magnets!

How original! Nobody has ever made this before! Unfortunately I don't have any super glue, so you'll just have to trust me that the magnets do fit in the pieces and the board, and the little piece holder on the side works perfectly. I tested it with the magnets taped to the pieces, but that's ugly. I may end up making yet another version where the print can simply pause so you can drop the magnets in, but then again these little guys are strong enough to jump out of the holes towards each other if they aren't adhered in place.

I forgot how much fun it is to make something in F360. Seeing a circle turn into a cylinder, seeing that cylinder's bottom edge become rounded, seeing the piece art extrude out the top, and being able to modify anything at any time and have everything that came after it update along with it was tremendously satisfying. Idunno why I default to Tinkercad when I want to make something.

It occurs to me just now that you could make this stick to the fridge, so I'll include a version of the board body that doesn't have little holes for hanging with pins (whenever F360 stops crashing). You could also just put it on a table or something, no magnets required (although at that point there are better boards you can download). If anyone has any easy modifications they want me to make (change the size of the magnet holes, remove the piece holder on the side, etc.), let me know and I'll probably get around to it

I never did get around to making the turn indicator yet. Check back in like a week!

EDIT: I just found the source of the piece art!!! Colin Burnett, my absolute hero!

4WD Tercel Wagon Suspension Setup

Showcase: Two weeks of delays resulting in little/no work results in last minute issues being unresolved and the ultimate goal remaining out of reach

As mentioned last week, which also mentions the week prior, progress stalled largely due to no fault of my own.
Since progress stalled, I made up my own rules and decided to use the showcase finishing touches time to actually get some work done.

Popped the wrong axle out of the driver's side (no picture as doing so already requires three hands and a foot), installed it in the passenger side (same process/pictures as last week), only this time also involves inserting the drive end into the knuckle and tightening the nut to hold it in place. Also a castle nut, also requires a cotter pin, also conveniently missing from the box, glad I have a box of spares for this exact reason.

Next install the struts by lifting the knuckle into place and inserting the two bolts. The gap at the top bolt is where the camber adjuster will sit, but I need to open it up for the larger than stock bolts (14mm vs 12mm) now used, so it'll be installed later before I torque everything to proper specs. The bracket hanging off the back of the strut is for the midpoint of the new long brake lines that fit the new larger brakes, also to be installed later. It's honestly a bit of a stupid design because struts wear out far more often than brake lines do, so you have to disconnect the brake lines to replace the strut, which requires bleeding the lines as well, which is often a pain in the ass. Thankfully being all new parts on a 40 year old car, means they'll likely outlast the car itself, so won't be a big issue here.

Part of the ToDo List was Finish front suspension polyurethane bushing installation which does need to be done, but the last bit of that is for the sway bar which isn't entirely required (it is in the case of this car to drive safely, but I'll expand on the differences and why in a future weekend post) for the goal of this TiMaSoMo and I needed to do some rust prevention that has to sit for 24 hours, so no swaybar.

Properly mounted the big brake setup, installed the first wheel, and noticed a reluctance to turn. The new wheels have a different offset and shape vs stock or any normal steel wheel. The back of the wheels are about as flat as the front, compared to the stock steel wheels that have a concave back to clear the brake calipers. This resulted in the new larger brakes coming in contact with the back of the new wheels, as evident by the white scrape on the caliper bracket seen here. Spacers will be needed to push the wheel out further to clear the brakes, just a matter of finding out how thick they will be.
In short, stack some washers until the wheels doesn't hit any longer, then measure the clearance you have. Since the face of these wheels is so closed I can't stick my hand through the spokes to check, in these cases you use an not-oft-mentioned but regularly used trick of putting clay (from your wife's crafting supplies) onto the offending surface, then run the wheel across it to find the clearance. The thinnest area has a clearance of 0.6mm, the washer stack is 10mm (the wheels have a recess on the back that is removing about one washer thickness from the calculation). Generally speaking you want about 3mm of clearance, right now with a 10mm stack I have 0.6mm so I need a 12.4mm spacer to get to 3mm clearance. Off the shelf spacers are generally made in 5mm increments, so a 15mm spacer is what will likely be used unless I have a custom set made which I'm considering. To confirm the measurements I'm going to 3D print a spacer sometime this week.
A spacer will also necessitate longer wheel studs as the thread length on the stock studs is 25mm, with a 15 mm spacer and a wheel that somehow folds space to have zero depth (read: impossible) there'd be a maximum of 10mm of thread engagement, which is too little. You always want a minimum thread engagement that is equal to the thread diameter, in this case 12mm.

Technically speaking, the camber adjusters don't have to be in place to mount the struts, the front swaybar doesn't have to be installed for the wheels to go on, the wheels don't have to turn without interference to put it on the ground, and I could even toss on temporary 3D printed spacers to give it the look of being finalized, so my TiMaSoMo goal is technically achievable, I just choose not to do so for a photo that I will consider hollow knowing that things aren't as they seem.

1. Install outer tie rods
2. Install steering bellows
3. Install ball joints
4. Install knuckles
5. Replace transmission seals (all are out, requisite two are installed, the third isn't needed to reach the goal)
6. Remove mistakenly installed front axle
7. Install front axles correctly
8. Install front struts
9. Finish front suspension polyurethane bushing installation
10. Install larger brake setup with new brackets (from MR2), calipers (from Celica), and rotors (from VW Golf)
11. Finish rear suspension
12. Modify and camber adjusters
13. Install spacers
14. Install wheels
15. Achieve TiMaSoMo goal of putting the Tercel on the ground on it's own wheels, even if only temporarily!

H20Bot

Raspberry Pi Plant Watering System (its got what plants crave)

Not my first or second choice of title (Growbot and Robotanist are already taken), so I think I'll change its name when I can think of anything better than Roger the Shrubbot.

Goal

This system was designed to take readings from a series of capacitive soil moisture sensors and activate a series of water solenoids when the sensor's moisture reading is above a certain threshold. The system should be solar and battery powered, with filling up the water reservoir the only regular human input required (no plumbing on my balcony).

The primary goal of course was to learn some stuff and in that regard I'd say great success! I have no formal training in programming, and wouldn't put myself far above caveman level where the electronic design is concerned, so from leaning Python to how to create basic circuits I've picked up a lot.

Level of Completion

Overall I would say the project is ~70% complete, it looks like this video of the animations here (it looks much nicer IRL, the flickering is in the camera and while the image is still diffuse it's more clear than that. The main thing that absolutely needs work is the cable management, which wouldn't be close to water resistant enough and therefore shouldn't be left outside. I'm also running the solenoid relays off mains power which I'd like to be battery powered ultimately. Of course there are many other parts I'd like to improve on and my intention is to continue adding sensors and solenoids until all my plants are covered.

Process

First steps

My first goal was just to read the value of one capacitive sensor through the Pi. I needed an analogue to digital signal converter for this and that required soldering. I've only soldered a couple of times before so I was a bit nervy about getting something wrong. Fortunately a friend let me use his setup as well as gave me some tips and that all went pretty well.
Next task was to activate a solenoid. I'd ordered a Waveshare's Pi Relay Board so the software side of it was easy, but again with the electric side I was pretty adrift. The aforementioned friend gave me the right plugs for the terminals and a simple circuit design I could use with a 12V adaptor.
With the basic concept demonstrated I could now move onto the overall design.

Designing

Pi

I started by assembling the Pi's various components. PiSugar battery on the bottom, relay board on top and eventually a Unicorn LED hat on top that I saw in a shop and couldn't resist. This added a complication of needing to split the GPIO, but I found a header that made that easy while rotating the pins 90º, putting them opposite the relays as an added bonus. Now time to design an enclosure.

Enclosures

Part of the reason I picked this project was to put my new printer through its paces, so I was looking forward to this stage.
The first thing that occurred to me was it would need to be reasonably water and UV resistant. A little searching showed that ASA was the obvious choice of filament so I got some of that on the way and started working on designing the enclosures. I've made a few Pi enclosures so this wasn't entirely new to me, but there were several cases needed:
• Pi
• Soil sensor
• 1 Solendoid / More solenoids
• Signal converter
• Mounts for water tubing.

As things progressed I added in some brackets to mount the enclosures to my balcony railing quickly and without risk of damage (rental), a reservoir and some fittings for the water tubing. I'd originally planned to buy those last two but I couldn't find anything that was exactly what I needed.

Generally I start by modelling the components, creating a mounting system and then modelling the case around that and any ports I'm using. As I expected to be pulling the Pi in and out a lot as I worked on it I mounted it using brackets that kept it secure with the lid on but made it easy to slide out with the lid off. My approach to water proofing was to have all joins overlapping and ports as covered as possible. I also used TPU to make some inserts for the ports, but as I kept adding cables they need to be re-designed. I'm not really sure how water tight they'll be but I think they're worthwhile.

Designing all that was definitely the most time consuming part of the project and there's still improvements I'd like to make, but I don't want to waste too much time and plastic on it at this stage.

Assembly

I printed the parts as I went, with almost everything needing a revision or two. All the printed parts snap or slide together, no bolts or glue required so it can be put together quickly and easily.

Wiring on the other hand is a bit of a dogs breakfast. I ended up buying a handful of tools and bits which helped me towards a more refined setup, but each wire has several soldered joins as I modified my design or mangled wires. Ultimately I will replace some wires with multicore and just get some long heat shrink tubing to cover it all up.

For the water side I bought some water fittings and printed the parts I wouldn't be able to source before the end date. I printed the reservoir with fittings on it which I felt was a pretty good idea. The threaded fittings do leak a bit so they won't be kept long term.

Programming

I'm relatively new to Linux, Python and the Pi, but overall they're straightforward and well documented so I didn't face any significant challenges here. The Pi based hardware all comes with handy libraries.

The main program is quite simple, it loops through polling the sensors and activates the relevant solenoid. It keeps a log and runs seperate scripts for each LED design and then shuts down the Pi when it's all done.

The battery has its own clock that you can use to power on at a specific time, so I set that to late afternoon after it should have a good charge and it seems to work fine.

For the LED array I created the designs in Photoshop and then used ChatGPT make a script that converts each pixel to an X,Y coordinate and its RGB value and then modify those for the animations.

Final Results

Overall I'm very happy with result, though there's still a ways to go before it's finished. Given it's designed to work once a day I haven't really had a chance to actually test how useful it will be over time, but as I dial in the watering amounts for each plant and the sensor readings and placement I think it will do exactly what it's supposed to: water the plants that need it.

What Next?

As I mentioned above I will be expanding it as far as I can and working towards the tubing and wiring being more refined. I'd also like to move to 5V solenoids that will be easier to battery power. My mum said she wants one so I'd also like to come up with a mounting method that remains as easy, but can be used in any other settings.

Closing Thoughts

This post is much longer than I'd expected, but I suppose that mirrors the project which required a lot more work than I'd thought originally. I finished my single solenoid version ahead of the actual end date, but only assembled the 3 solenoid version today! I've learnt a ton and overall I found Timasomo very rewarding. It's great to see the projects that have been submitted so far.

Also the lorikeets seem to like it which is nice, I was a little worried they'd tear it pieces.

Thank you @kfwyre and Tildes for putting it together.

I'm happy to answer any questions or provide the files to someone thinking of doing something similar.