gothink

Looks like this is available (since Go 1.21 [0]), so no need to build from source anymore. Just did a quick 'hello world' test to verify and it worked:

    GOOS=wasip1 GOARCH=wasm go build -o main.wasm main.go
    wasmtime main.wasm

If you're interested in wasm/wasi and niche hardware with Go, you should check out TinyGo [1] if you haven't already.

[0] https://go.dev/blog/wasi

[1] https://tinygo.org/docs/guides/webassembly/wasi/

Wow, this is very tragic. I was actually just reflecting on the influence Howstuffworks.com had on my life and interests. Quick story:

My first introduction to programming was building a Geocities website in HTML (using notepad, of course) at a science camp in 1999. They also showed us the "How HTML Works" web page as a resource, which became my first technical resource. I remembering struggling with something on my website and eventually emailing my question to Howstuffworks, not expecting much back. Not only did a very patient and informative woman respond to me, she continued to answer my questions and offer helpful guidance to this very eager kid for the rest of the summer. Without that positive experience, who knows if I would have stuck with it. It's been on mind a lot since I just realized that was 25 years ago.

I hope Marshall knew how much people valued the things he created and the impact they had.

I feel like it's worth mentioning icanhazip.com [0] as well, since it's now run by Cloudflare [1]. Until recently switching to a custom CF worker, that's been by go-to for ages.

[0]: https://www.icanhazip.com/ [1]: https://major.io/p/a-new-future-for-icanhazip/

I had an amazing science teacher in high school who brought a potato cannon he had built into to class to show us. Except he called it a "sock cannon" and had loaded it with a large tube sock that he had rolled up. He explained how it worked, how he built it from a few basic plumbing parts anyone could get at the hardware store, how the fuel was just hairspray and how we definitely shouldn't build one ourselves.

Naturally, I went home and decided to construct a much bigger version of the one he showed us. After convincing my parents to drive me to the hardware store, I picked out what I needed -- including 7 feet of PVC. The clerk immediately figured out what I was building and that was the first time I heard the term potato cannon. They seemed concerned that my mom was on board with the whole thing, but I stuck to my guns and said it was a science project and was for shooting socks. I had figured I could wrap the sock around a smaller projectile, but that clerk made me realize I didn't even need the sock.

My friend and I put it all together pretty quickly the next day and set it up in my backyard for testing. I think we probably started with socks, but I honestly can't recall. What I do remember is taking a hacky-sack I had lying around that fit perfectly into the barrel to try and fire it at our back fence. We were using a piezo igniter from a lighter I had disassembled, and it took some trial and error to get the fuel to air mixture just right. It took both of us to operate: one person aimed the barrel, the other operated the trigger. This time, I was aiming and he was lighting. But it just wasn't lighting... so I turned around to try and help and BOOM the cannon went off like, well, a cannon. Except I wasn't pointing at the fence anymore, but well above it. The hacky-sack tore through the branches of several trees before exploding on the metal siding of the house on the opposite side of our block. The sound could probably be heard for blocks.

We both just looked at each other with a mixture of delight and panic before immediately running back into my house. We saw someone come out of the house we hit looking utterly confused, trying to figure out what just happened. We started laughing uncontrollably, realizing how close we were to causing a lot of damage, or possibly injuring someone.

Luckily, nothing every came of that incident, and we made sure later tests were done in a nearby park. We never did attempt to put an actual potato in the thing. Perhaps 7 feet was a little overkill...

PS - Dr. Vince, if you're out there, thank you for being one of the best teachers I've ever had. I'll never forget that class, or that "sock cannon"!

I had left the tab open, so I checked the console and there weren't any exceptions, just the output generated from the game being set up. I refreshed the page to test again, and selecting "small" brought up the same puzzle that I previously confirmed the bug with. This time, everything worked as expected though!

I'm using Firefox on Linux which could very well be the culprit here -- I recall an issue with drag and drop that was fixed in a recent changelog. I'll reach out if I run into the issue again.

This is a really fun and novel word game! Thanks for sharing it.

I did find one small bug while playing: if you drag a letter off the grid, it doesn't properly update the squares on the grid for that group. The space where you removed the letter stays blank, and the remaining places don't show the recently removed letter as a possibility. I noticed that it works as expected when right-clicking to remove the letter, however.

Slime volleyball is immediately what I thought of when I tried this. We played a lot of that (and slime soccer!) on the lab computers at school (Canada).

I had no idea Pikachu Volleyball existed, but apparently it predates (1997 [0]) Slime Volleyball (1999 [1]) by a few years. I never realized it was essentially a clone.

[0]: https://github.com/gorisanson/pikachu-volleyball [1]: https://oneslime.net/kb/A_Brief_History_Of_Slime.html

If you do make it configurable, it's still a good idea to make the default `127.0.0.1` for the reasons @ggpsv mentioned. Since the link automatically opens at `http://localhost:PORT` anyway, it's an easy security win.

I'm not a React dev, so I can't comment on the project itself. Something I noticed on the blog post, though: The image at the top of the page is served uncompressed at a whopping 18.5MB (9751px * 6132px)! Seems a bit extreme for what amounts to a simple logo and some text.