Tom 7 Radar

				x Other ways to read Tom 7 Radar: RSS feed for aggregator software

Entries from February 2026

p
e
r
s
o
n
a
l

Can stop losing points for tardiness (Yesterday at 19:51)

Ha! This time I feel pretty confident that I'll lose zero points, or perhaps even gain a small number of bonus points, for posting from OGG Airport before a red-eye back from vacation, even though this requires that I post far before the end of the day here due to time zone. OGG Airport is Maui, Hawaii, USA, where they exclusively use the Vorbis audio codec.

I did do some normal vacation things on this vacation. But I also spent a lot of time sitting on a beach, balcony, pool, or airplane with my PiePad working on projects from exotic locales. I'm almost done with my SIGBOVIK paper, which is good because the first deadline for SIGBOVIK XX is nearly upon us. Actually I didn't do that much writing; mostly I was indulging myself in improvements to BoVeX, which I often fail to get to because I'm usually so behind on the paper due to Relentless Vigor of Expanding Project's Scope, or Surely I Can Write The Whole Paper and Implement Footnotes The Night of the Final Deadline, or etc. Now there is actually decent support for footnotes and floating figures. I fixed a bunch of layout bugs that were causing very bad choices (mostly relating to me not actually reading Knuth's paragraph-breaking algorithm that carefully and just reinventing it from the general idea). I also sped up all of the expensive phases of the compiler with indulgent algorithmic and data structure improvements, so compiling a conference-length paper is now at least 2–3x faster end-to-end.

Since I was recovering from being sick (for more than a month!) I hadn't done any long runs (or even moderate runs) since AD 2025. But on a trip I insist upon doing adventure running. In Maui I ran south from the hotel zone until the road ended in an apocalyptic lava field:

I smoke lava rocks

Maui was generally a good place for running, with light traffic and decent pedestrian infrastructure. It did however get very hot as soon as the sun was overhead, and down where I was, there were no gas stations nor water fountains nor any other source of potable moisture, so we had another one of those heat stroke hazards where I was just crawling along for the last five miles or so trying not to die. I was proud of my run's name, Magma Man 2: Dr. Wailea's Revenge. Anyway, with that 15-miler I consider myself back on the wagon and I'm looking forward to getting back home for (a) some longer runs, (b) a full-size keyboard and (c) Baldur's Gate III.

OK, plane is boarding imminently!

[ comment ]

Entries from January 2026

p
e
r
s
o
n
a
l

Can't stop losing points for tardiness (31 Jan at 23:59)

Oops! You can tell that I'm getting old when I don't even notice the end of a month coming and going. Also that I thought, "I should add a template on my blog for when post late and need to award myself negative points. It should be called {{penalty}}." and then when I go to make that template, I find that it already exists: -1,000 points

I spent the entirety of the month of January sick (presumably the H3N2), which means I haven't run at all since Christmas, which is no good for the spirit or the dad-bod. It does leave me with some additional time (if not energy), and I think my main accomplishment was to attend to a corner of my basement shop, which was an old rickety 2x4 stand that came with the house, covered in crap like sawdust, used COVID-19 tests, neoprene foam, and offcuts with impossibly useless shapes that I am nonetheless hoarding. I have no good "before" photo, but I can show you this picture of the crumbling sandstone foundation that was part of the impetus:

(c) 1906

The main problem here is that this 120 year old pile of rocks constantly sheds sand, spalled stone, and efflorescence. That's not a big problem for a basement shop, but what I wanted to do here was make a permanent home for a CNC gantry, and having sand continuously shitted into the ways, gears, and motors is just not good for the mechanism. But I also needed a nice sturdy surface for it and I wasn't benefiting much from the pile of used COVID-19 tests, so I built the rickety 2x4 stand into this nice chonky workbench:

Upgrade!

In the back we see the fixed-up wall. I repaired the mortar using the appropriate lime putty (don't worry; I'm a mortar chemistry snob now) and cleaned it up with a few coats of limewash. I've never used limewash before, but it is pretty cool for this kind of application (you can't use paint, since this old foundation needs to be able to absorb and exhale significant moisture). I particularly appreciated how easy it is to clean the brush compared to latex paint. The details of the bench are mostly not visible, but let me reassure you that its internals are high quality, with 3D-printed shock-absorbing TPU feet, mortise-and-tenon joinery on the 2x4s, and removable bolts into threaded inserts for the top, which also sits on two dados for registration. The joinery was cut on this CNC I was foreshadowing:

BenchPilot

I've had the Shaper Origin since launch but I may have never talked about it here. It's a handheld CNC router that uses optical registration (these domino markers) and can only move itself within approximately a 1" diameter circle; you do the coarse motion yourself with your big clumsy hands. It's a great little tool for a space-constrained shop and it can do things that other CNCs cannot (e.g. make some bowtie repairs or inlays in your hardwood floor), but it is not fast if you're trying to do something like cut eight mortise and tenon joints for your workbench build. The apparatus pictured above is their new BenchPilot gantry, which can move the normally-handheld part around coarsely, much like a traditional gantry CNC. Other than the modest working envelope, it seems like the best of both worlds to me. Here it's set up cutting some finger joints for some new drawers that will no doubt show in a future episode of Tom 7 Basement Shop Projects Radar.

One of the other excuses for forgetting the current date is business travel, conveniently scheduled during the enormous snowstorm that we covered the entire Eastern US this week. By coincidence I ended up flying on Southwest, which as the staff excitedly reminded us, was switching to assigned seating the very next day. (Southwest, the largest domestic airline, was distinguished by its unusual "open seating" approach where passengers vie in a strangely polite but clearly cutthroat mind game to appear as the most odious potential seatmates in order to score a solo row.) Since I did an 8:45 PST flight, it was one of the very last ever open seating flights ever. When we landed, these guys were already carting away the iconic line-up obelisks like so much fresh garbage:

Southwest ends open seating and immediately throws away their obelisks

I also made some progress writing up my most recent project, which seems like it'll be my SIGBOVIK paper and next video. It decidedly non-epic, but I think I need more non-epic projects in my life. I made a bunch of improvements to BoVeX in order to procrastinate that.

Over break my little brother convinced me to play Baldur's Gate 3 and I'm now 70 hours into that. Good for H3N2. I'll save my final verdict for when I'm done, but I definitely see what the fuss is about with this one!

(3 comments — a week ago) [ comment ]

Entries from December 2025

p
e
r
s
o
n
a
l

2025 BEGONE! (31 Dec 2025 at 20:54)

2025 is ending imminently! I am so happy that having made it through this year, we won't need to think about Donald Trump or AI any more.

I posted a surprise video that may not be that surprising to close-followers of Tom 7 Radar:

Mathematically extra-complicated secretest santa 2025!

This is my Secret Santa protocol; the latest in the series following Matt Parker's video from last year, which I am in. The video and liner notes explain pretty much everything, and you could also try out my browser implementation at santa.html. It's very much a Tom-style video, but higher than usual on wholesomeness and mediumer than usual on unhinged shitpostingness. I am sorry for making two math videos in a row! Next video, which's project is essentially done now, will have more mischief and less math, but it's still about cryptography to keep up the combo.

Speaking of Matt videos in a row, I'm in this recent Standupmaths video about Noperts.

(Unfortunately the holiday travel made me a bit sick, so I'm going to just use that as an excuse to keep other updates in storage for next month, and get myself to bed.)

Category: videos

(6 comments — almost 2 weeks ago) [ comment ]

Entries from November 2025

p
e
r
s
o
n
a
l

Spacebar.org 2025 (30 Nov 2025 at 23:57)

I almost forgot it's the end of the month!

One thing I accomplished this month is finally moving all my sites over to a new server. All of this was precipitated by wanting to use C++17 and later features (like std::format) in my various code, but the version of Ubuntu I was using on linux still had an old-ass GCC that did not support this. (I don't understand why it's so non-standard to have recent compilers on linux? Isn't it supposed to be developer-oriented?) The in-place upgrade wouldn't work, so I migrated everything manually and now I have GCC 13 (current is 15, thx a lot Ubuntu). The most "fun" part was that my website is so old that its databases predate the widespread success of Unicode (!) and many old records contained invalid UTF-8 or mojibake created by incorrect encoding/decoding of various scripts, and this prevented me from making a modern MySQL database that I was going to be happy with. There are some tools like ftfy that can usually decode the mojibake, but I prefer to expand my personal libraries and understanding, so I dared to port that Python code to C++ (fix-encoding.cc). Now these 20-year-old messages on my old rotting message boards and blog posts can live to see another day:

Unbaked 'moji

The majority of the text I fixed was either (a) spam or (b) my weird internet friends (e.g. from untitled.gif) mimicking spam!

ALSO: This gave me the opportunity to add https for my sites. I got too many people being scared off by the confusing interstitial messages that Chrome now puts if you dare to go to an http site. But I did not fully cave: I wrote my own https server, and I did this a weird way. More on that soon. Let me know if you notice any issues with it. I still recommend using http for this public, non-secret website.

I finished Silksong 100%. I think the Act 3 bosses are worth it, but I did feel ready to be done by the time I finished all the extended chores, especially e.g. the circus. Great game, though! I also played through Ultros, I guess craving more Metroid. This one has an amazing and memorable art style (imagine if the guy who did the art for Hotline Miami illustrated Aeon Flux, which is more or less what actually happened here) and good music. The gameplay is a bit unpolished, but I did find it compelling once I discovered the "living network," and overall liked this one. I also finished Öoo, a small puzzle game that takes about ~2h by the same people that made the excellent ElecHead. This one was very elegant. It feels like exploring coverage tests, in a good way. I'm now onto Blue Prince, which seems fine although it's infuriating that they don't have a way to customize controls ("coming soon")??

Two new video projects well underway! One of them should land by the year's end, at least.

(10 comments — almost 2 months ago) [ comment ]

Entries from October 2025

p
e
r
s
o
n
a
l

Hold your gratitude, little one. The dead are stirring. (31 Oct 2025 at 22:23)

Hello again,

I'm enjoying feeling no deadline pressure, and trying out a few new secret projects with no particular commitment to a "next" one, and playing some video games.

Re: the previous project (spoilers), there was this Quanta article First Shape Found That Can’t Pass Through Itself about the success (not mine) on that problem, and I'm in there. I think Quanta is great and I read their stuff a lot, so this is a fun sighting for me. I'm happy that this article (and the similar one in Scientific American have canonized my "Nopert" as the proper term for these polyhedra!

I really spent most of the month on Silksong, the sequel to the excellent Hollow Knight. This game is also great, clearly one of the best in the genre. I managed to finish the main game and a lot of the post-game content without getting any hints or spoilers. It turned out that this was making my life inadvertently hard (in a game that is already very hard), since (spoilers) if you fail to find some things like sword upgrades you can end up doing a lot of boss battles on extra-hard mode. Now that I'm in the endgame (90 hours in!), I'm using some what-to-do-next and how-much-damage-does-this-thing-do-? kinds of hints. There's an excellent webpage silksong-completion.info where you can upload your save file (my impression is that it's happening clientside) and it will show you what's left in the dependency graph just like you'd want. Very good, and it is making me want to now play this game, which I will do.

(6 comments — almost 2 months ago) [ comment ]

... Oct 2025 continued

2
0
2
6

Posts from 2026

Feb Jan

2
0
2
5

Posts from 2025