chrisparton1991

I decided to buy one when the smoke from the Sydney bushfires blanketed my town.

In my bedroom I could see and taste the smoke. The air purifier struggled, but it cleared the air around my computer quite well. I have dividing curtains in my room that I was able to close, which made it easier on the purifier.

All in all I think it was definitely worth the buy. FWIW I picked up a secondhand Kogan SmarterHome air purifier for AUD$60.

So devastating that such a brilliant mind and wonderful person is gone. I've used FastLED for a lot of projects, and it's always been a joy to work with. Daniel was always present in the community, friendly and patient.

When you look at the library code, it's amazing to see how much complexity has been abstracted away behind such a simple interface.

Gone too soon, he will be missed by many.

When I skimmed over the title, I thought it said "KKK has acquired Corel". That was going to be one of the more interesting reads for the day!

I previously used mine to drive my synchronised Christmas light display. It worked great one year, then for some reason the next year, retrieving the playback position of an audio file in Java was taking nearly a second (previously it was practically instant).

I never figured that out, so I bought a second-hand Mac Mini to power the display instead.

reCAPTCHA pushed me over to DuckDuckGo. I use a VPN, and a fair number of my Google searches are blocked by a reCAPTCHA with 5 or more challenges.

Now, I use DDG and fall back to Google search with !g if I can't find what I'm looking for.

You can get an Arduino Nano clone for considerably less than $5 on eBay. The cheapest price I can find a local Pi Zero for on eBay is $24 AUD (without an SD card).

I use Arduinos and similar boards to drive addressable LED strips. A lot of these strips require extremely precise timing, which is difficult or impossible to get from a Pi for some strips.

From another perspective, the limitations of the Arduino boards (e.g. RAM measured in kilobytes) force you to think harder about how you want to solve a problem, which can be quite an enjoyable challenge.

I wasn't feeling fulfilled by my work either, so I started working on a side project to scratch my creative itch.

Over the last few years I've been building a sequencer (https://github.com/sparkled/sparkled) that synchronises LEDs to music. I love both the artistic and architectural challenges it presents.

In my day job, I love it when I can add tests to existing code or refactor code to be more readable/maintainable/performant. I'm currently working as a contract software engineer, so I get to move between projects quite a bit, and I find that helps to keep things interesting.

I rewrote my reducers with Immer as well. I had some pretty complex nested updates that became super simple with Immer, love it!

In a similar vein, Android has Log.wtf, which stands for "What a Terrible Failure".

Yep, source maps do the trick.

> Unlike JavaScript in the browser, or Java with a powerful IDE like IntelliJ, you can’t just set breakpoints everywhere

I'm using IntelliJ to set breakpoints everywhere in a Node application at this very moment. It's super easy to set up, you just create a Node.js run configuration and hit the debug button.

I prefer ESP32 boards myself. Super fast, cheap and they have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built in.

There are some pitfalls, such as the ESP32 using 3.3V logic whereas most LED strips use 5V logic, but once you figure out how to use them they can be very powerful little beasts.

You don't have to tell me twice! I have a giant box full of the things.

This is a fun article, I enjoyed reading about the reverse engineering aspect.

These days you can easily buy 5 metres of dirt cheap addressable LED strip and control them with an Arduino and FastLED. You don't get same learning experience though!

Evergreen looks quite nice, but their website isn't responsive and that gives me pause when considering it for my own projects. The components themselves may work fine, but I can't be sure without digging in further.

Just something to consider if you're looking at using Evergreen.

Old-school Winamp. I use Spotify these days, but man it was fun to customise skins and play with the awesome visualisers.

Half-Life 3 would also be nice, but I guess it was never "around" to begin with.

Cool, I understand it's more important to get an MVP up and running before applying optimisations. It's good to know that it's on your radar though :)

Thanks for answering my question, and best of luck with Hyperfiddle!

Thanks for sharing your work!

Your demo app has a 1.7MB payload after gzipping (the main.js file alone is 9.5MB before gzip). For me, this alone would be a dealbreaker.

Do you have plans to reduce the payload size?

I'm definitely keen to collaborate once my core features are a bit more stable!

I'm working hard on a stage editor at the moment, I'll send you a video sometime soon :)

Nice to see you on Hacker News Ben! This is Chris a.k.a. ChrisLights, I spoke to you about Sparkled on one of your videos a while back.

It's awesome to see you getting some recognition for your excellent work on Pixelblaze, keep it up!

I know what you mean about libraries. There are so many out there that cover 80% of my use case, but they're all missing 20% in different areas.

I think I've finally found what I'm looking for in Raphael.js + Raphael.FreeTransform though.

For one of my websites (a static page with some pretties), I challenged myself to remove as much cruft as possible without degrading the experience.

I used Fontello to strip out unnecessary FontAwesome icons and uncss to remove unused Bootstrap styles, replaced some Bootstrap JS with vanilla JS and made use of SVGs (optimised with SVGOMG) for backgrounds and the logo.

The resulting site is a total of 178Kb when viewed in Chrome (down from over 1MB), including bootstrap, analytics, some screenshots, a custom font and animated logo. There's plenty more I could do to trim off size, but I had more important things to do.

There are so many ways to make webpages smaller and more efficient, and it can be a really fun learning experience.

This is really neat, good job!

This reminded me of "Code" by Charles Petzold, which I saw you reference in the About page. As a software engineer with an interest (but no professional training) in hardware design, I think it's useful and interesting to have at least a basic understanding of how a CPU handles logic.

Can I ask what library (if any) you used for the canvas interactions? I'm looking for something similar for a project of my own.

I'm about a quarter way through this book and I'm enjoying it so far. This line, however, didn't resonate with me:

> To encourage 8-10 productive hours, serve dinner 8-10 hours after morning stand-up.

As a person who enjoys life outside of work, the idea of having a job where they were serving me dinner every day is baffling. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

The only commits from Tim himself are some documentation and a typo fix: https://github.com/solid/solid/commits?author=timbl

The project doesn't look particularly active from a commit standpoint, though I can imagine a whole lot of non-implementation work has to be done.

Best of luck to Tim and the Solid team!

You should be able to print it as a PDF via Chrome.

I sort of slipped into contract work this year. After ~5 years of full time work I'd had enough, and I quit my job in January to do more things that I wanted to do (spend time outdoors, work on side projects etc.)

A few months ago I was contacted by a previous employer, asking if I'd be interested in a short-term contract gig (similar pay to what you're describing, but in Australia).

I'm coming to the end of this contract and I have another one lined up once I'm done, working 4 days a week from home and making my own hours.

I have to say that I love the freedom and extra money contracting has given me. Of course, there are a lot of extra costs to consider (no paid leave or superannuation, need public liability and professional indemnity insurance), but even considering all of that I'm better off financially that I was at any previous full-time job.

I wouldn't recommend contracting if you're only just living within your means (e.g. paying off a hefty mortgage and supporting a family) where being let go would leave you in an untenable financial position. Contractors generally have far fewer rights than a full-time employee, and my current agreement states that my contract can be terminated with a day's notice (YMMV).

I hope you have the same experience I've had, all the best!

From doomstat.h line 60: // Game Mode - identify IWAD as shareware, retail etc. extern GameMode_t gamemode;

I haven't done a deep dive on the code, but it looks like gamemode is set based on something in the WAD file.

And it comes at the cost of having to process all of those pixels. I think I'd rather have a cooler laptop with longer battery life than a very marginal visual improvement to my screen.

That said, I'm all for progress and cramming that many pixels into such a small space is impressive, so kudos to BOE for that. This would be useful for VR.

There are so many interesting tidbits tucked away in the code, things the devs had to consider that have never crossed my mind whilst playing.

For instance, the idclev cheat handling in st_stuff.c has to check if the game is shareware and restrict level changes beyond a certain range.