regus

The Game Genie code that is forever etched in my brain is PIGOAP, it lets you swim in any level in Super Mario Brothers 1.

https://youtu.be/yjBsHyJlkRE?t=16

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There is a guy on Youtube called "Displaced Gamers" that explains how NES games work. There is an interesting episode where he breaks down how a certain item in the game Faxanadu behaves.

It's a pendant that is supposed to increase your attack power, but when you get it does the opposite. In the video he explains exactly what is going on in the code: the game was shipped with a bug.

He then goes about crafting a Game Genie code to fix the bug. It's a fascinating video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeemO9yW-hs

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If you are curious as to how the Game Genies works, watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C86OsYRACTM

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If you are curious about the origins of the Game Genie, watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOm4qR4fFDA

The reason I've heard why it is more expensive is that color development has been completely standardized. You put the rolls in the machine and the negatives come out the other end with little interaction from a person.

They never standardized black and white photography development so it all has to be done by hand, which is more time consuming.

As for 35mm, yes it's true that it is cheaper, but I got into this for the larger negative, so this is a self imposed financial hit.

I have also been playing around with film photography. I am old enough to have actually developed film in college so it's not a new novelty for me.

For whatever reason I got the idea into my head that I should get a medium format camera (perhaps it was the youtube influence). I've always wanted to play around with one of these cameras, so I dropped $350 on a Yashica Mat 124-G TLR camera.

I wish I had done this years ago because film photography is now a rich man's hobby. The prices of everything is shooting through the roof right now.

Cameras that nobody wanted now cost over a thousand, film that you could have gotten for $6 is now $15 per roll. Fuji and Kodak either discontinue their film options or raise the prices of existing ones.

Let's do the math (based on my local camera store):

- 1 roll of 120 Portra 400: $14

- Develop and scanned at high resolution: $41

- Sales tax: $3.64

- Total: $58.64

When you shoot medium format you only get 12 shots, which means that each shot costs around $4.88 dollars!

Did you know that it actually costs more money to have a lab develop black and white pictures than color? Which means that if you want to save money you need to develop your own photos and scan them yourself.

Which means buying more stuff and having to deal with chemicals.

Oh and by the way, apparently all home film scanning options are considered to be junk compared to scanners used at the lab. So you either need to spend a lot for a fancy scanner, or rig up some elaborate contraption where you take pictures of your negatives with a DSLR.

Thinking about this gives me buyers remorse.

I like the idea of AppleScript, but every, single, time, I try to use it I walk away frustrated. I can never accomplish the goal I set out to do. Instead I end up wasting hours and hours fiddling around with this language.

The syntax is just odd, since it has this conversational style ("tell app to do this") I constantly fall into the trap of trying to write out something that I think should work, but it does not. This happens all the time.

The other day I wanted to automate something on my new M1 Mac. SURPRISE! The latest version of the app I was trying to use no longer supports Apple Script!

Trying to automate stuff on Mac is so frustrating.

Don't even get me started on Automator!

I tried playing around with the new Shortcuts app, but that thing is also difficult.

I agree with you completely about the templates. When I first used Hugo I was not well versed in Go, nor did I have any idea how it's templating system worked.

Reading the docs lead me to believe that the templates were invented by Hugo. It would of been helpful to make the distinction because I could have looked up how the templates work. I'm not sure if it would have helped though because Go's templates are incredibly confusing and frustrating to use.

Wow I’m excited to try this! I use a kinesis split keyboard. I like it but it is a bit bulky and has a bunch of keys I never use. I love that it is split and tented, both of these aspects helped with my shoulder and arm pain.

I tried to use the advantage 2 but because it was neither split nor tented it hurt my shoulder and arm so much that I couldn’t use.

This seems like the best of both worlds.

I was considering building a corne keyboard but now I can try this instead.

I've always been intrigued by the HHKB, if I ever got one I would get hasu controller and modify the layout so I could get vim style arrows.

However my keyboard journey has lead me to the conclusion that I prefer split keyboards.

Using standard keyboard layouts gives me a lot of pain in my arms. I noticed this pain when using the standard mac keyboard, an ibm model m (this one hurt my fingers as well), or a 60% board.

Right now I'm using a kinesis freestyle 2 and it's tenting feature helps alleviate the pain.

Are there any split keyboards that use topres?

>> The argument I’ve heard is that a Christian only answers to the authority of Christ but Catholics answer to the pope

I believe the Catholic response to that would be that before Christ returned to heaven he created a church, and he gave that church the authority to preach, to teach, and the forgive sins. It exists the continue Christ's mission on earth.

Christ then selected Peter to be the leader of the church and granted him authority over all the faithful ("I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.")

At this moment Christ instituted the office of the Papacy.

Whoever holds this office has authority over the universal church. This authority does not come from the man who holds the office but comes directly from Christ himself.

The Pope is not above Christ, the Pope answers to the authority of Christ. The Pope is just a man like anyone else.

So to summarize, why do Catholics answer to the Pope? Because that's what Christ wanted.

Papal infallibility does not mean that every word that comes out of his mouth is true. It means that he can not bind the faithful to believe error. So when he officially exercises his power and declares that something must be believed by all the faithful then he will be divinely protected from teaching error.

>>It’s really hard to be a Catholic, or a Christian

Catholics are Christians. Perhaps you mean Catholic or Protestant?

We recently had our first child and finding a name for him was extremely difficult. We tried using books and apps but they weren't that helpful.

Part of the problem was that we wanted a name that would work in both english and spanish, and wasn't too popular or trendy.

I found that I hated most boy names, especially the ones that are trendy today (Aiden, Jaiden, Zaiden).

Feel free to name your kids whatever you want, but here is my advice to anyone who is trying to name a child:

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1. Do not tell anyone what the name will be before the child is born. They will try to talk you out of it.

2. If your family is not a native speaker of your language then present them with a list of a bunch of names that also includes the ones you want. Then ask them to pronounce all the names. That will let you know if your family will be able to accurately pronounce the name.

3. If you are going to give them a middle name make sure that their initials don't spell out something embarrassing like Carl Otis Winslow.

4. Do a google search of your child's first and last name so you don't accidentally name them after a serial killer or some other controversial person. Also google their initials so you don't accidentally name them after a company or a chemical.

5. Consider how their first name can used against them by other kids. Does it rhyme with something? Is there some famous fictional character with the same name?

6. Try to delay giving your child a name for as long as you can before leaving the hospital. This will give you time to decide which name best fits this person who is now in the world. (I thought I would name my son one thing, but decided that he didn't 'look' like some one with that name)

7. Do not leave the hospital without naming the child (unless you have a good reason to do this). I know some one who waited a month to name their child and they wouldn't recommend doing this.

8. Consider how popular the name is. Most of the names in the top 10 are popular for a reason, they tend to be good names, but do you want your kid to have a unique name, or just another kid among the other 10 Liams and Olivias in their class?

9. People are going to give your kid a nickname the instant they are born, whether you like it or not. Are you okay with people calling your kid Bobby, Danny, Mikey, etc? If not then consider a different name.

If you decide to keep all these toy cars you can reuse them when your son is older to play Gaslands.

https://gaslands.com/

I used to think that movie reviewers were out of touch with the common man. The fact that they would give movies like Transformers a low score but rave about obscure boring movies would always annoy me.

But several years ago I worked on a side project where I reviewed a movie every week for two years, and when it was over I became much more sympathetic towards movie critics.

I agree with this blog post when he says that movies are repetitive. The same gimmicks and tropes are used over and over. It really does become boring and annoying to see different shades of the same thing again and again.

This is why critics rave about the obscure weird movies that you never heard of. They have to sit through thousands of hours of generic crap and anything that is different is like a breath of fresh air to them.

Something really exasperates this problem of generic movie making that wasn’t touched on in the article is the soulless Hollywood factory system that is currently cranking out worthless junk that was designed by committee.

Look no further than the recent Star Wars trilogy for evidence of this.

Very rarely to we see movies that a result of a singular vision, directors are now just replaceable cogs that have to bend completely to the will of the studio or they will be replaced during production (like the Han Solo movie) Ok

In a past life I used to do mindless work that allowed me to listen to podcasts all day, but once I switched to being a programmer I quickly realized that I couldn’t work and listen to anything that demands your attention.

At first I tried rain noises and other forms of white noise but that gets old fast. Then I moved on to ambient music. I can’t listen to anything with pianos or guitars in it. There are guys I work with that listen to EDM all day, I don’t know how they consintrate with that blasting in their ears.

These days I’ve moved on to something new: Gregorian chant, because I don’t understand Latin I can tune it out and focus.

Hey Kayce! How come you no longer do the chrome dev tools update videos on YouTube?

This reminds me, I did a little investigation into what the actually URL length limits are per browser. Here is the blog post in case you are interested:

https://joelregus.com/posts/url_length_limits/

What is missing in Safari? According to the chart on this site Safari is stable:

https://www.webcomponents.org/

I used to make my diagrams in draw.io but I find that I spent way too much time fiddling with the way the diagram looked rather than the thing it was modeling. Also it is a huge pain to have to go back and make revisions to the diagram. After presenting diagrams to stakeholders they would always ask for changes and I would end up having to redraw everything.

I recently stumbled upon code to diagrams tools like app2code and plantuml. I really enjoy this because I can focus on the model and not the aesthetics. Also making revisions to code is a lot easier than fiddling around with draw.io.

Does any one have any tools like this they can recommend?

Although Constantine legalized Christianity the claim that he created the Catholic Church is misleading.

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/constantine...

> My relation with it is almost identical to my relation with any bash scripting more than a one-liner: I have to relearn it every time I want to engage with it.

This is how I feel about jq, every time I want to parse some JSON I have to re-read their documentation. Their API is not very intuitive (at least to me).

If you decide to go to https://www.lingscars.com/ do yourself a favor and right click the site and select "View Source".

spf13, thank you for your vim config, I have been using it for years!

In regards to Hugo, I enjoyed using it at first, I loved how fast it was, but I kept running into issues so I decided to make my own SSG.

I've used Go's templating a few times, most recently I used it in my own static site generator.

For me the most difficult thing about it is that it is another language grafted on top of Go, and it does not always do what you expect it to do.

The documentation is hard read and not always clear on how things are supposed to work.

For example:

- If I pass in a struct that contains a map of structs, how exactly can I access this data?

- How can I use the boolean output of a function within an if statement?

- How do the if statements even work? "eq"? "=="? What is the correct syntax here?

I ended up losing a lot of time having of to wrestle with the templating engine because it often would not behave the way I expected it to.

I though this was about the wedding registry site at first.

Anyway, I liked this line from the Github:

> Hugo gets ehh for the template engine because while it is probably the most powerful template engine in the list (after Jinja2) it personally drives me insane, to the point of writing my own template engine and static site generator. Yes, this is a bit biased.

This seems to be the life cycle of static site generators (SSG). It works at first, but you end up wanting to design your own custom SSG once you run up against something that goes against your mental model of how things should work.

I did this exact thing when I got frustrated with Hugo. I made my own custom SSG in order to create my blog.

The other thing that tends to happen with SSGs is that it can be a lot more fun to play around with the tech than actually writing blog posts!

If you're interested you can read here to see how I made an SSG for my blog:

https://joelregus.com/posts/blog/index.html

I consider secrets of the javascript ninja to be one of if not the best books on javascript. The section on functions and closures are a must read.

I love this idea.

It would be great to have this as a command line tool.

I can envision a lot of cool features for this, like being able to add color via text markup, or being able to use circles instead of boxes for the nodes.

How was your experience teaching Sidereal to people? I've only played it once but it was really difficult to get people to pay attention and to understand all the little nuances.

I ran into the classic "if you had told me this I would have played differently!!!" complaint, even though I did mention the thing they were complaining about.

We also didn't finish the game because it got too late.

I'm curious, which variant of Mahjong are you playing? Chinese, Japanese, American? I've learned how to play Japanese Mahjong which is fun, but the rules (especially scoring rules) are so complicated that I do not look forward to having to teach this game to any one.

In regards to the Monopoly comment, to this day I still bring up the time some one screwed me in a game of Star Wars Monopoly back in 2001. So yes, these kinds of things tend to stick around in people's memories.

I’ve always wanted to play this, however a few things hold me back.

Experience has thought me that it is very difficult to wrangle a lot of people to play complicated games. Simple party games are easy, but the moment you try to explain anything complicated to a large group all their eyes glaze over.

Then there is the issue of the extreme play length. The people in my play group will complain if something takes an hour to play, I doubt they could handle 8 hours.

The closet I have come to this is Sidereal Confluence which allows for up to 9 players and can takes up to 3 hours or more to play. Explaining that to such a large group was a nightmare.

And finally there is the “take that!” aspect of this game that I find worrying. People like to say “don’t get mad it’s just a game!” But this isn’t javascript we’re taking about, these are real people with real feelings. I’ve been involved in games were people explode in anger or other times were people burst into tears, this is not fun.

As the host of the game night it’s my responsibility to make sure people have a good time, not to have them fight with each other and break up their friendships.

I am currently decluttering my house, which means getting rid of old books, board games, etc. I have a GIGANTIC box filled with DVDs. It is a big clunky and heavy box and I find the prospect of having to cart it around during my next move to be very unappealing.

I'm not sure what to do with it. Should I just dump the whole thing at the good will, cherry picky only the best ones and get rid of the rest or maybe throw the cases away but store the disks in a binder?

Going through this process of decluttering has made me seriously rethink the unbridled accumulation of stuff that I have been doing for the past few years.

Hoarding a bunch of VHS tapes seems unthinkable to me.