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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. |  |
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| GCC 15 is only 7 months old; if you're getting 13, you chose an Ubuntu release that's 18 months old. The two releases after that have 14 and 15 respectively. It's not a conspiracy to deprive you of new compilers. |
| YOOO have fun with Blue Prince, I had to drop it when i started taping notes to my wall. I recommend getting an app that you can drop screenshots into and draw over and write yourself notes. Its easier to pick up on more interesting puzzles when you have all the relevant info at your fingertips. |
| Can't wait for the new video! |
| Blue Prince is a gem. Have a great time, and happy holidays! |
I agree it's not a conspiracy, but I did install the newest LTS version! Maybe this is the wrong strategy, but I truly don't understand why they are so conservative with the compiler releases. The language already makes such a fuss about the ABI compatibility, and I think the compiler releases tend to have a high standard for correctness. Even on Windows (msys2) I'm on clang 21.1 without doing anything special.
I'm definitely getting into Blue Prince! I'm sort of in yarn wall territory now but I haven't looked anything up. Hopefully something on my short list of remaining theories will pan out, though... |
| New video at "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pG8_bWpmaE" |
it's pretty good that the majority of traffic, even to non-secret sites, is TLSed though, right? because it makes "secret"/"nonsecret" traffic inseparable to all the fallible intermediaries (ISPs both near and far, network monitoring, guy MitM-ing your hotel wifi, etc) i mean, i imagine if enough publicly accessible resources were still available over HTTP, your local wifi operator could firewall whitelist port 80 and only let cleartext through while still providing a usable Internet, and boom, there goes any hope of secrecy at the presentation level :(
also, woah, your own http server?! exciting :o |
| I played through Blasphemous and Blasphemous 2 recently. Very good combat and pretty good Metroidvania. Probably more Vania than Metroid, but the combat is extremely fun. |
Anon: Secrecy is certainly sometimes important, and I agree that having a lot of encrypted traffic does normalize it, which is good! My main beef has to do with the certificate management and complexity of a constantly moving target. I wish it were more like SSH where I could just turn it on in a totally self-sufficient way (e.g. self-signed certificates). I understand the issues with MITM, etc., of course.
LRT: Yes, I enjoyed Blasphemous! #2 is on the list. |
| nonsecret traffic is a great band or album name |
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