nycki

using an android phone running retroarch, an 8bitdo Zero Two wireless controller, and this 3D printable mount https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5998094 .

works pretty good for gb/gbc titles, and its much smaller than other controller attachments! I've been using it for some gba stuff too, like Game and Watch Gallery 4 or Pokemon: Too Many Types, which don't require the L/R buttons.

if this makes you want to buy a controller, I recommend the 8bitdo Micro, which is the same size but with two extra buttons.

based on https://sona.pona.la/wiki/sitelen_pona

inspired by The Best Way To Count.

made this to demonstrate mermaid flowchart generator

Homeworlds is a pure strategy game played using a set of colored pyramids. The colors and sizes represent different resources, and the goal is to build an interstellar supply chain to destroy your opponent's home planet.

Because the game is pure strategy, there's a risk of the meta becoming stale someday. Chess and Go are intimidating to new players because you basically have to study centuries of meta before you can do anything new in them.

So I've been thinking about ways to modify Homeworlds to be "imperfect strategy". This is my favorite pitch so far: the Secret Weapon.

When building your homeworld at the start of the game, each player also secretly places a 12mm dice under a large opaque pyramid. I'm using black 'mids here because they're not used for any purpose in game. The number on the hidden die represents one of the four resource types: 1 = yellow (warp), 2 = red (steal), 3 = green (replicate), 4 = blue (transform).

Once per game, without costing an action, you may reveal your Secret Weapon. Immediately take any piece of that color from the bank, and build it at your homeworld.

I haven't playtested this yet, so let me know if you do. I'm hoping it would lead to situations in the early- to mid-game, such as "hmm, I think it's safe to build a large piece, because you can't steal it this turn... unless your secret weapon is red, of course." The bluff and counter-bluff would make it impossible to play perfectly, so the meta would always have room to evolve.

I'm just not interested in hearing what bullshit FAANG is up to, I want to talk about linux kernel patches and raspberry pi revisions and maybe hear what people other than grifters are doing with neural networks.

I'm currently trying to set up a homebrew cassette tape storage format, but trying to use existing tech where possible. I was excited to see that minimodem already exists for converting an audio stream to a byte stream, and is even available in termux for android, so I could decode cassettes with my phone! However, I'd like some sort of higher-level tool to encode and decode "packets" or "slices" so that I can add error correction. I'm sure this sort of thing must exist for amature radio purposes.

I could write a script that cuts a file into slices, with checksums and redundancy for each slice, and then pads them with null bytes so I can isolate each frame when decoding. What I want is to find out if that's already been done. I've heard of AX.25 packets but I can't find a tool that does that with stdio.

This article says that NASA uses 15 digits after the decimal point, which I'm counting as 16 in total, since that's how we count significant digits in scientific notation. If you round pi to 3, that's one significant digit, and if you round it to 1, that's zero digits.

I know that 22/7 is an extremely good approximation for pi, since it's written with 3 digits, but is accurate to almost 4 digits. Another good one is √10, which is accurate to a little over 2 digits.

I've heard that 'field engineers' used to use these approximations to save time when doing math by hand. But what field, exactly? Can anyone give examples of fields that use fewer than 16 digits? In the spirit of something like xkcd: Purity, could you rank different sciences by how many digits of pi they require?