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grantmnzon Desmos Animated Graphing Calculator

Some crazy hacker has even used the calculator UI to implement a Sudoku game: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/vg3vye1rvm

grantmnzon DB48X: High Performance Scientific Calculator, Reinvented

Apparently, for security reasons, your server needs to add certain headers if you want to use SharedArrayBuffers.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/07/safely-reviving-shared-mem...

grantmnzon Creating a Git Commit: The Hard Way

It was learning about the topics in this post that enabled me to create this repo:

https://github.com/grantm/no-more-f-s-repo

Parental Advisory: Contains strong language.

grantmnzon Understanding and avoiding visually ambiguous characters in IDs

This post has some overlap with work I did a while back on a "coupon code" system that is optimised for users taking a code printed on paper and entering it into a web form. A number of measures were employed to avoid/correct transcription errors.

Example, docs and links here: https://www.mclean.net.nz/cpan/couponcode/

grantmnzon The SHA256 for this sentence begins with: one, eight, two, a, seven, c and nine.

grantmnzon Unicode Is Awesome

If you'd like to explore Unicode characters, you can use the Unicode Character finder, a web app I built some years ago: https://www.mclean.net.nz/ucf/

The app allows you to paste in a character to find out more about it, or to search the database of character descriptions to find what you're after.

You can link to a specific character to share with your friends and family: https://www.mclean.net.nz/ucf/?c=U+130BA

grantmnzon $17 smartwatch sends something to random Chinese IP address

Had a scare in a data centre once when the UPS started trying to connect to an IP hosted somewhere in China. Turned out when it did a DNS lookup for the SNMP server (or something - sorry about hand-waviness) the first response it got back was an IPV6 address (DNS AAAA record). And since the crappy TCP stack on the device had no IPV6 support, it was just interpreting the first four bytes of the AAAA record as an IPV4 address. One of our super smart sysadmins worked out what was going on and tweaked the DNS to return A record first - problem solved.

grantmnzon "Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

I am disappointed to learn that you feel I have attacked you in the past. I apologise unreservedly for any offence I caused you. I always try to be civil and professional in my interactions and to be mindful of the difficulty of conveying the intended tone over an electronic medium.

If I have voiced some criticism of your code it is certainly not because I wished to belittle your efforts or to make any value judgements about your worth as a person.

grantmnzon Map of CPAN - The Movie

If you go to mapofcpan.org and click on "Need more help?" it explains more about what the map is showing you.

Only namespaces that contain 30 or more distributions get a colour and a label - to keep the map from getting too cluttered. The remaining modules are submerged under the light blue "primordial soup".

Since the individual distributions are arranged alphabetically and laid out along a Hilbert curve, adding an extra distribution to 'Acme' pushes every other namespace along.

And yeah - the Hilbert curve probably isn't ideally suited to being animated :-)