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Entries from May 2025

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Technically it is on a stovetop (31 May at 23:15)

Heya,

Earlier this month I spoke at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science's PhD hooding ceremony! The "distinguished" "speaker." I feel that that was quite an honor, and hopefully I did it justice. I'm certainly comfortable giving a talk but usually it's because I have something I want to talk about. These students are very talented and privileged and will do okay, but it's also a really precarious time to be starting your career (in the US especially). I don't just mean the chronic problems (out of control climate change, growing economic inequality, unenlightenment, and too many Star Wars movies) but acute problems like the US "government" trashing our research institutions, and technological monsters of our own creation. So I tried to give them some advice about how to maybe survive and maybe save the world. Alas, I don't believe it was recorded, and I just now tried to find any photos of it online and instead got sidetracked for an hour into reading old chess articles, so you'll just have to take my word that it happened. (If you happen to have photos, please send them; my mom would be happy!)

That was a proper distraction from putting together this darned video that I'm still working on. I finished my "big math" cloud analysis, and then running it again when I came to discover that I had incorrectly written "min" instead of "max" when trying to interpret the results. So that was an expensive cube. But the fixed results do look cool and I figured out how to render it in Blender (which information I'm very confident I will not retain). I really just need to sit down and narrate this thing with a screen recording at this point, but I keep procrastinating that for some reason.

A less justifiable form of procrastination: My 3D printer's site for sharing models is currently running a coffee-themed contest, and I noticed a conspicuous lack of coffee makers among the entries. So I made one. It looks like this:

Technically it is on a stovetop

You can see the project page for "instructions" (which abruptly end before any flame). It has all the internal parts and would work except for the fact that it's made from plastic; this is satire! Some people have tried to argue with me that you could boil water in it (referring to some possibly real demonstrations where you boil water through a paper cup), but keep in mind: A proper moka pot would need to generate steam pressure to force steam through the grinds; the walls here are a mesh filled with air bubbles and so they are a good insulator; although the melting point of PLA is higher than water's boiling point, its glass transition temperature is only like 65°C, so it would quickly deform. Also I turned the flame on to make a short video and it immediately scorched the bottom. I used glow-in-the-dark PLA for bonus points in the contest!

Also this month I started and finished Tunic, which was an excellent Zelda game. I think probably they could have done a little more with the combat (or just make you not have to do it so much), but everything else about it was great. The instruction manual thing is just a brilliant way to do the "Metroidvania" progression, and I was extremely impressed with the art/design work in the manual itself (from the half-width forms to the halftone screens). I definitely recommend this one if you like an adventure Zeldoidvania.

(4 comments — a day ago) [ comment ]

Entries from April 2025

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May the 7th be with you (30 Apr at 23:59)

When the beginning of May came around, I seem to have forgotten that a new month was occurring, and then I was putting off this blog post (which would have been -1,000 points), and then I thought it would be funny (but really it was just procrastination) to try to lose a record number of points. Let's call it -7,777 points; this post was backdated a full week, from May the 7th! Anyway, I am all right, at least as much as anybody is all right these days.

After submitting my paper to SIGBOVIK (you can read it) I have been working on a video, but actually I have been continuing to work on the problem (but really it was just procrastination). Right after writing the paper I had some good ideas that I wanted to test out and show in the video, and it seemed wrong to not give them a fair shake before presenting them. I think the story is converging and I just need to do a modest-sized expensive computation, so tonight I'm struggling with Cloud Infrastructure. It's so boring, but not as boring as waiting for my computer to run it for ~60 days. And only related because it sucks and is boring in the same way, I have made some of the first steps towards trying to get this server to support https. I like cryptography and don't hate https, but I also do not see the need for the complexity and downsides of https on a website like this and so I resent this very much, but: Chrome has finally "succeeded" in making http too annoying and scary for regular people now. (There is still no https on my site. I'm just saying that I'm working on it again.)

I am itching to get back to other projects! I upgraded my 3D printer so that it can dry spools of filament, so now I can use some exotic materials. I printed a replacement door handle out of carbon fiber ASA (which supposedly has good outdoor durability):

Right parenthesis

The old one was made of metal but it just broke off! So even though this one is plastic, I think it may compete with the quality of the previous. Very satisfying to pull on that big guy.

(7 comments — almost 6 days ago) [ comment ]

Entries from March 2025

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SIGBOVIK deadline makes the doppler noise as it rushes past me (31 Mar at 22:38)

Hi! Bad deadline timing here: I'm going to stay up late finishing my SIGBOVIK paper for the real extended deadline, but this uses exactly the same minutes and the brain sugars that I would use to write a blog post. So I'm going to conserve those for the paper-finishing.

I will, however, preview that I will put the paper here: tom7.org/ruperts when I submit the conference version. Spoiler alert: This is not some epic hack; I tried to solve an already known math problem (but one that is appealing and upsetting) and (surprise) didn't succeed. Since it's a geometry problem, the visuals are fairly important and the video will probably be the best way to consume it.

(8 comments — a month ago) [ comment ]

Entries from February 2025

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Points intact! (28 Feb at 23:59)

Ha! I avoided losing 1,000 points by remembering at two minutes to midnight, during a heated round of Call-olostomy Doodie Oops 6, which game I am still suffering, that February has 28 days and that I "need" to write a blog post. The way this thing works, when I start the draft it gets timestamped, and that is forevermore the time of the post. This also means that in a pinch, unfinished drafts like "Unexpectedly pleasant discoveries in listenquest 2008–2009" which I started and abandoned almost in AD 2009 while I was in the process of listening through every single CD in my collection (again) can be posted more than 15 years after the fact, and show up in the blog's calendar and keep the grid tidy. For this reason, you can never really be sure if I have lost 1,000 points, even if the next month comes 'round.

Speaking of unexpectedly pleasant discoveries, maybe this post I will tell you about some music I have been listening to recently instead of only telling you boring things. First on my mind is Aesop Rock, who I was listening to exactly at the same moment I saw an article comparing the size of the vocabularies for various rappers. (It's the count of distinct words in the first 35,000 words of their lyrics. Perhaps entropy would have been a little better?) And lo and behold, he easily "won" the chart with 7,879. (I am not a huge rap fan, but there are some artists I like, and I was not surprised to find that this scale was pretty correlated with my taste. For example, Blackalicious was at 5,741). Anyway, I would like to recommend Aesop's album Spirit World Field Guide the most, but I also like Skelethon (especially the opening track Leisureforce) and Integrated Tech Solutions (especially Aggressive Steven) and probably will find that I like others. I also recently enjoyed Allie Goertz's Nine Inch Nails cover album Peeled Back (more than I expected). Rosie Tucker's UTOPIA NOW! would probably also score highly on a language entropy scale and their album has several gems on it (especially Unending Bliss). Then there's this person who does Nintendo 64 covers of beloved Radiohead songs (etc.) called on4word, and their Aphex Twin cover album Selected Aphex Works N64 seems like a joke that should not be good, but yet...!

I have been trying to finish this programming/math project, I guess for a SIGBOVIK paper but also a video. I keep getting distracted by relaxing aspects of the problem (including e.g. spending most of my vacation implementing exact constructive solid geometry so that I could make really accurate figures) but the deadlines are coming up fast so I'm hoping that will induce me to wrap that bad boy up. Speaking of which: There has not been an official call for papers yet for SIGBOVIK, but from activity on the organizers list it seems very likely to occur. You can write a paper!

(7 comments — 2 days ago) [ comment ]

Entries from January 2025

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Still: Winter is a time for hibernation. (31 Jan at 22:59)

Helloooo. Despite the crushing weight of the World, I actually did a whole lot this month, mostly on one of two concurrent secret projects, both of which have gotten a bit out of hand. But this is a fun programming problem for me and I've learned a bunch of math. It seems like I should make a video about it, since I think it is an interesting topic, although I also feel that my escalating standards demand an actual solution (which I definitely do not have) or at least a contribution (dubious). In any case I need to transition into paper-writing and/or video-making mode soon, since the SIGBOVIK deadline is approaching quickly. We are going on a relaxing vacation shortly, which occasion usually leaves me with a significant chunk of time for writing (but never enough!).

Otherwise, I've been continuing my demented quest to reach the highest level of Ops in COD of Ops 6: Black Duty VI which has been complicated by them exposing new unlockable and unlocking the mysteries of UFO 50. Now that I've played about half of the collection I can confidently recommend this game to anyone who likes classic NES games, or maybe even just likes games and has a little patience.

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

... Jan 2025 continued

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