Somebody got into my Wordpress site and messed with it a fair bit. Of course it was my fault for not updating Wordpress for so long, but still. I've decided to remove just about everything on the server; I never liked Wordpress much anyways.

If you'd like to find me, there's a couple places you could look:

• On GitHub. This is where I do post most of my projects.
• On Scratch. I'm pretty active here.

- Liam Long, long ago

I wonder how reliable this site is? Let's see how long it's going to stay on the internet. Need to make web archive backups.

- Liam July 1st

Bad news first: BasicEdit is gone.

Good news: BasicEdit was terrible, I don't like it, and I don't think I learned that much in the process of making it!

(Hi Wettining!)

Oh yeah, there's also this which apparently I still have on the server. It's not great, but at least it's something I made a long time ago that was better than BasicEdit.

- Liam July 4th

Well, it isn't yet, but by the time you read this, it probably will be.

But it's fun to have an old place like this, right? Where you or anybody in a million years can see what I'm doing?

Too bad web browsers will probably be irrelevant.

- Liam July 4th

Sometimes booleans (Booleans?) cast to numbers, and when they do, you can do some pretty interesting things. Here are generally the boolean casting rules:

1. If a boolean's value is false, it will cast as a number to 0.
2. If a boolean's value is true, it will cast as a number to 1.

Recently there's been an online project a bunch of people have participated in where you need to pass a color given an X and a Y position, using only one line of code. Boolean to number casting is allowed and it makes for a pretty useful tool.

For example, here's a piece of code that returns 100 assuming x is in range 20, 60 and y is in range 40, 90, and 50 otherwise:

50 + 50 * (x >= 20 & x <= 60 & y >= 40 & y <= 90)

The important part is the "50 * (condition)" part. If the condition is true, it'll be interpreted as "50 * 1", so 50. If the condition is false, it'll be interpreted as "50 * 0", or 0. Add 50 to that and you get 100 for positions in the range and 50 for numbers not in the range.

So to translate some pseudocode into inline-math-boolean-code:

condition ? x : 0

..is this:

x * condition

Changing that 0 is more difficult. This:

condition ? x : y

..gets turned into this:

x * condition + y * !condition

If condition is true, use x; if NOT condition is true, use y. (I'm not testing any of the code here. Yay logic!)

Let's say we want a pattern more or less like this:

00000000000
01010101000
00101010000
01010101000
00101010000
01010101000
00000000000

It's a checkerboard from 1,1 (excuse the starting-at-index-zero) to 7,5. Here's the checkerboard code - again, it should work, but I haven't tested it:

(1 + x + y) % 2

Here's the range condition:

x >= 1 & x <= 7 & y >= 1 & y <= 5

Put together:

((1 + x + y) % 2) * (x >= 1 & x <= 7 & y >= 1 & y <= 5)

(Parenthesis are to remove ambiguity.)

And that's with a binary black/white screen, people have made much more amazing programs using colors - there's actually a 3D sphere render entry! But if I'm understanding the programs correctly, drawing colors (probably generated by the program) based on range conditions (also probably generated by the program) is generally how the programs work.

I could be absolutely wrong though!

- Liam July 5th

..but my pixel art skills aren't great. I made an isometric bridge maker thing today, and then I tried to make a duck with it.

Amazing?

- Liam July 6th

By "Untrusted" I mean this cool game. In essence you're put into a room and you need to control objects, the environment, and yourself using code. Here are some of the more clever (in my own humble opinion) code entries I used.. (In GitHub Gist, because I'm too sensible to rewrite my code all escaped!)

Link!

(Update: pastes didn't quite work as well as I'd like them to. Blame the code editor in that project! It messes with indentation!)

- Liam July 6th

(The original title of this was going to be "DS Hack using microSD to connect to other devices idea", but that was too long.)

You know how there are fancy homebrew/emulation tools for the DS like the Supercard DSTwo 4-in-1? I got one of those recently and I've been using it a lot, and just now I got an idea - what if you hacked the microSD to take information from a network (and store that in a file)? It could be used for basic messaging from the DS to another device, such as your computer, as well as the other way around. Might be an interesting project.

Of course first you need to figure out how to hack the microSD. I have no idea how. Thankfully it looks like somebody else has already done that! ..But that's with an SD card, not a microSD. Hmm.

Here's something else.

I highly doubt that an ordinary microSD is going to come with some method of connecting to a network (or maybe whatever bluetooth is - I know nothing about it!) though, so.. good luck with this idea.

And it'd need to be an actual hack of the microSD hardware - you aren't going to be able to use an adapter of any kind blah blah, because then it won't fit in whatever homebrew DS card you're using.

Apparently you can send code to run over wifi to a microSD? I haven't read into it much but if that's possible perhaps you could get it to run some file-write code, for the DS program you made to read.. Dunno if that's only on boot-up (is that a thing for these cards?) though.

- Liam July 6th

Let's find out! I've been working on a big project in Minecraft recently (you hackers on Xx_LeeterHax0rzOnG4mes_xX-YT probably know about it, maybe I'll write about it here at some point?) that involves lots of redstone and command blocks, so I think it's an appropriate test case.

Before learning how to use 1.9 command blocks:

After learning how to use 1.9 command blocks:

I'll let you decide which to use.

Did you know you can hold your mouse still over images to get a little tooltip text?

- Liam July 8th

Looking for old terminal commands is fun! I like to do a simple history | grep:

- Liam July 14th

Using the horrendous monster called PHP, I made an RSS feed everybody can use. Yay.

Also you should keep an eye on the table of contents. Occasionally I put things there.

The table of contents still isn't automatically updated, though. Yay!

- Liam July 14th

- Liam July 14th

xargs -r "printf > (file)"

(If you're on a Mac, like me, the -r flag is implied, and will actually throw an error, so make sure you remove it.)

It sends errors to your terminal and success to a file.

It's really handy for a program I'm making right now that fetches data from a webpage and outputs the data, which I want to send to a file.

- Liam July 22nd

const f = n => { return {
  valueOf() {
    return n
  }
}}

let k = f(32)
k=f(++k)
k=f(++k)
k=f(++k)
k=f(++k)
console.log(+k)

It was an accident, I swear! (Not literally.. :))

(Context: responding to this StackOverflow question.)

- Liam July 25th

I'm still alive!

This is going to be a little long just because I feel like rambling, so.. sections!

- Liam August 18th