tinker.ph

Two cool things people made

Here are two cool things I found on the internet today. These kinds of things only exist because of people who let their mind wander and then subsequently following up to validate their ideas.

First is Slices: early versions of the shared XR experiences we have today. The idea is finding a shared common space in our environments by slicing through the room and matching them with another, and then subsequently recreating the shared space in XR.

Wait a second. @GregMadison, who works at Unity which builds tools and platforms for creative people (60% of all video games are built with its platforms), cut his living room up into volumetric pixels.

Billions of them. Each representing a millimeter of space.

And then gave… pic.twitter.com/ntItvOr00x

— Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) May 19, 2024

The other is Non-euclidean Doom: what happens to a game when pi is not 3.14159, which is…self-explanatory.

$250 7+6 DoF humanoid arm

I came across @lethic1 who seems to be building the same things as me, albeit at a much faster pace. Check out his progress on the arms below.

Nothing much to see this time, just stress testing, tons of problems, will redo the whole arm this weekend! Perhaps open source in a few weeks pic.twitter.com/pqvXNUIr8m

— Lethic (@lethic1) May 15, 2024

30 days of WhatPulse

The 30 days are over, and here are the final stats for my F-key measurement exercise. Turns out, I made an error with my 15-day measurement by not being on premium and not selecting the All Time option.

Despite the mistake, all the F-keys netted under 0.1%, with only the escape key being 0.6%! My most pressed keys are Space with ~35k presses. Needless to say, I think I’m ready for a 65% keyboard.

In other news, I just settled in to my new terminal today:

Animated equations on the web: Part 2

I got around to working on animated equations on the web again, just out of sheer procrastination and refusal to do the things I should actually be doing.

Here’s my idea:

• Convert LaTeX to HTML using katex ✅
• For each equation, generate a diff of the dom between the current and the next ✅
• Generate the transition dom between the current and the next, using revealjs to animate.

So far, I’ve gotten to the diff part, and the only thing left is to assemble the transition, but my brain is fried from work, so I’m taking a break for now.

Side note, I am really loving my Astro setup. Each entry is essentially its own playground with my own vanilla JS just running, so I wrote code above literally inside this entry as I was writing it.

See what I'm working on

I am used to knowing every detail of every layer of a product, but in my current role, it seems like I am at a point where it is becoming too much, and I have to compromise keeping up-to-date with one area in order to keep tabs on another. It seems like this happens to even the best engineers:

I probably had my personal “moment of truth” around the beginning of Doom 3’s development, when it became clear that it is no longer possible to deeply understand every single part of a modern application. There is just too much. Nevertheless, I found that I could still enjoy my work when confined to a subset of the entire project, and I have thus remained committed to the high end. However, the appeal of smaller systems still lingers.

-@ID_AA_Carmack, taken from his Nov 02 2007 .plan

For me, it’s the opposite. I still thirst for learning new things at the lower level.

I was inspired to start incorporating .plan files, outdated as they may be, into my routine. I primarily use Windows because I find it tedious to keep switching between the Mac and Windows when I am in video game mode and building mode. So I started by implementing my own fingerd in Rust for use in Windows, as well as incorporating it into my Obsidian/Astro workflow. Although I ended up dockerizing this into a very small linux container and deploying to my k8s cluster, the code runs and compiles on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and would run on bare metal as well.

Now you can keep tabs on what I’m currently working on by just running:

finger [email protected]