Tom 7 Radar

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

Entries from November 2025

p
e
r
s
o
n
a
l

Spacebar.org 2025 (30 Nov 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.

(3 comments — 3 days 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 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.

(5 comments — 2 weeks ago) [ comment ]

Entries from September 2025

p
e
r
s
o
n
a
l

And now I am 46 (30 Sep at 23:56)

Hmm! Yes! I turned 46 years old, which was predictable. Also predictable, and predicted, is that I finished that darned video:

Rupert's Snub Cube

I also updated the project site with more data and links. I should have just posted this blog-post earlier in the month when I uploaded it; I don't know why I always save it to the last minute and risk losing 1,000 points. I guess I figure I might get several more projects done in the month. I did not: Instead I played Silksong (which is excellent, and you don't need me to tell you about this game) as a reward for finishing project, and since that is sometimes too hard to be relaxing (I do love how hard it is!), I also installed Cult of the Lamb which I bought at some point. The latter is charming and has great art and music, but I don't think it's a must-play. For some reason I expected it to be more like an action roguelike (a la Hades, say) but it's a bit more like a tech-tree resource-management farm-sim. The combat in the main loop is just not quite interesting enough yet. But I will finish it, I'm sure.

I have begun on my next projects, several of which involve cryptography.

I also made this 3D-printed file handle:

stderr

stderr

This began as a purely practical thing (I needed a handle for a file), and I actually assembled the original file before realizing my missed opportunity for a pun, and then decided that the right solution was to buy a second file!

Category: videos

(8 comments — a month ago) [ comment ]

Entries from August 2025

p
e
r
s
o
n
a
l

Scoopert! (31 Aug at 22:34)

OK! I am better now. Let's strive to keep it that way.

I spent my free time this month continuing work on the proof described in the previous post, basically a big custom numerical search which was a neat blend of geometry (a little bit outside my comfort zone but I can wrap my head around it) and high-performance systems stuff (rational interval arithmetic) which is up my alley. It was actually going quite well (and maybe we will try to finish it, or an improvement upon it) but a couple days ago we found out that somebody beat us to it! A convex polyhedron without Rupert's property just went up on arxiv.org last week, and it demonstrates a synthetic convex polyhedron that is not Rupert (cannot fit through a proper hole in itself). Ah! I proved plenty of things for my Ph.D., but nothing that anybody but me cared about, so I was getting fond of the idea that we might crack an open problem. But at the same time I am happy for the authors (they emailed me about my paper in April; I probably should have written back! Do you know how bad I am at e-mail? If you have ever e-mailed me then you probably do know!) and happy that we have a resolution to this problem.

The other thing I'm happy about is that I finally know how the video ends (😵‍💫 but 😂) and I feel motivated to finish it forthwith. It's up to 45 minutes now, but the end is in sight! I'm in the phase now where even my procrastination is high-productivity (e.g. I have been repointing and repainting my house) instead of something like anxiously reformatting source code, so that is a good sign.

While I was sick I started DOOM: The Dark Ages, which is pretty fun. They did a good job with the combat, which is good because that's all there is, and it is quite hard (mostly fair). It's incredible how incoherent the "plot" is, though, almost like it's satire. I also played through Shantae and the Seven Sirens. It is very silly, as expected, but has great music and the writing was pretty funny. I've liked all the Shantae games that I've played, but this one was not my favorite; I think just too much of it took place inside underwater tunnels for my tastes.

(10 comments — almost 3 months ago) [ comment ]

Entries from July 2025

p
e
r
s
o
n
a
l

I got sick, but my computer was fine (31 Jul at 23:24)

Hi,

Dammit! I got sick again. This time it was definitely Covid-2025 and it was pretty rough (I had a very bad sore throat, which I hear is characteristic of this strain) and it knocked me out of commission for a week during which I was expecting to have quiet time to myself to finish off this video! Instead the things that felt right to do were (a) play the new Donkey Claus for Switch II and (b) keep trying to prove that the one shape can't go through the other shape. I have One Last Approach here that I'm currently feeling pretty hopeful about, but also I wrote a lot of that code with Covid brain so who knows. (The real goal would be to produce some machine-checkable proof; no need to worry about virus-induced fallibility!) I'll talk about this in the video with some other results; I've got like 25 minutes finished at this point. On the upside, the computer has been completely healthy this whole time, almost like the problem was simply a bad driver 25 year-old webcam driver and it cannot actually be sympathetically infected when I fall ill.

I probably got Covid-2025 in JFK International Shithole, or maybe the humid undergrounds of New York City's Subterranean "Way" system, or in crowded comedy club, or etc. when I went to hang out with my YouTube buddies and also go to work. It's been 3 years since I got it last, so that's not a bad MTBF I guess.

Speaking of work: Exciting for me is that I am switching to "part time" (4 days a week) for the sole reason that I like my job but I also like having time for my gonzo programming projects and math holes, and would all else equal like to have more time for the latter. So starting this monday I will be 50% more funemployed and 20% less employal!!

I vow not to use my additional "free" time to just play video games, but I did play video games when I was sick especially. I am enjoying the Donkey Kong Bananza more than I expected. It is a very easy game, but also very fun. I am almost done with Tevi, by the same people who made Rabi-Ribi, which I enjoyed many years ago. It's a solid exploration platformer that I would definitely recommend to genre fans who are sick with Covid-25. For observant game design connoisseurs who have played the Metroidvania genre a lot, or too much (e.g., me), there are some subtle and smart mechanics to appreciate. Probably next... DOOM?

(6 comments — almost 4 months ago) [ comment ]

... Jul 2025 continued

2
0
2
5

Posts from 2025

Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan

2
0
2
4

Posts from 2024