I made a survival Minecraft server for my friends and me a little while ago. We restarted the world today and since I love graphs, here’s a graph of of the size of our world save over time!

Someone has a domain name which I want. They don’t seem to use it, there is no site hosted on it, but I did find their contact info on whois.
Any tips on how to aquire this domain from him? I don’t have much money, so I can’t make a crazy offer or anything...

I just got my first set of D&D dice! I know it’s just some metal polyhedra but I’m really happy to have them!

I don’t live in the EU, but hearing all the complaints about article 11, 13, etc. is really vexing me.
Article 11 in particular.

Why the hell would you force companies to pay taxes for linking? Why the hell would you tax websites for including sources? Do you want no sources? Do you want misinformation to become a bigger problem? What the hell is wrong with whoever proposed that bill!?!?

The internet is a place for relative freedom. A place of message boards and communities we’ve created. To impede that (beyond making sure it doesn’t facilitate hanious crimes) is just plain wrong.

I was setting up the firewall on a computer... remotely... and I didn’t set ssh correctly rule correctly. Yep I firewalled myself out!
I was out of town too, so I had to wait until I got back 😥.

Today Facebook reveled that they stored millions of people’s passwords in plaintext in a database accessible to thousands of employees... shocking. And what’s more? Today their stock went up. Seriously guys!?!? Hold companies accountable! Make them pay!

Everyone, including me, feels a sense of gratification when dfox ++’s their rant. But at the same time... He ++’s a lot...

Happy half-off chocolate day!

Dungeons and Dragons!

I just spent an hour working on solving a problem that it turns our I don’t actually have... :/

My teacher’s Duckspear
Or maybe it’s Hamduck...

My god the wall looks really punchable right now. Let me tell you why.

So I’m working on a data mining project, and I’m trying to get data from google trends. Unfortunately, there have been a lot of roadblocks for what should have been an easy task.

First it won’t give a raw search volume, only relative “interest”.
Fortunately it lets me compare search terms, which would work for my needs however it will only let me compare a few at a time. I need to compare 300.

So my solution is simple: compare all the terms relative to one term. Simple enough, but it would be time consuming so I figured I’d write a program to get the data.

But then I learned that they don’t have an official api. There’s a node module for this very thing based on a python module that reverse engineers the api endpoints. I thought as long as it works I’d use it.

It does work... But then I discovered that google heavily rate limits the endpoints.

So... I figured I’d build a system to route the requests through different tor nodes to get around the rate limit. Good solution right? Well like a slap to the face, after spending way to much time getting requests through tor working, I discovered that THEY FUCKING BLOCKED TOR IPS.

So I gave up, and resigned to wait 5 hours for my program to get the data... 1 comparison at a time... 60s interval between requests. They, of course, don’t tell you the rate limit threshold, so this is more or less a guess (I verified that 30s interval was too short and another person using the module suggested 60s).

Remember when I said the discovery that the blocked tor came like a slap to the face? This came as a sledge hammer to the face: for some reason my program didn’t dump the data at the end. I waited 5 fucking hours to get nothing.

I am so mad right now. I am so fucking mad.

I have just released my first browser extension! It's a YouTube ad-skipper.
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/...

I did it mainly as a learning exercise but I hope some of you can find it useful!

Worst architecture: the stack compiler I wrote. I basically just made my own shitty webpack.

The idea was simple: Babel to minified JS, Scss to minified CSS, and HTML to minified HTML. Made in Node JS, of course. (perhaps that’s where I went wrong!)

The thing works... and I use it... but boy is it bad. It even broke on my current project (which is for a client so...) and I’m having to work around my own god damn code.

I really need to revisit it and redo it.

Google.
They’re doing amazing things but they are just too big now... Too much of a monopoly and the data is scary too.

I am really thinking of switching my main computer over to linux. I’m getting pretty tired of windows bugs and I keep finding myself wanting to use linux commands. The only reason I haven’t switched is MS Office products and video games, but I suppose I could make a new windows image just for that and dual-boot...

Don’t take a job you don’t want.

That has worked for me pretty well so far.

Instead of worrying about API rate limits I made my code manually parse the html from a website.

And the code still works great!

At school we have a little maker-space and there are a group of students who come in all the time just to play video games on the computers. Not only are they not doing anything productive, they’re loud and clutter the space with people watching the play.

Today I wiped the computer and installed arch linux (with a desktop environment but not set to automatically go to the desktop environment. I hope this will solve our problems.

Spec sheet vs implementation.

(lateral pull down machine at my school’s gym)

Boss: I saw your last commit, great work!
Dev: But... You told me to delete all the features I added...
Boss: Yes, fantastic improvements!

!rant
I met a student at my school who is in a grade a couple years lower than me and was interested in learning about Perlin Noise for a game he’s making. Yesterday I spent a couple hours working on reminding myself how the algorithm worked and teaching him how it worked. Best few hours at school I’ve had in a while!

Any players of the amazing “game” Eve Online here?

MURICA!!!!!

Sister: *walks up to me at my desk* Hey, I was wondering if you can undo what you did to the internet and put it back and make it work better in my room and also make it faster
Me: Sure

Yeah, I’ll get right on it and go hit the fucking magic button in the router settings called “enable extended range and make it go faster”.

Friend: Can you write me a discord bot?
Me: Sure, I guess.
Me: *thinking* I can probably do it in 2 hours or less*
Me: *2 hours later* why does this API work like that and why the fuck is my node module folder so big???

Finally set up my home server and port forwarded it so I can use linux everywhere even as a window pleb.

Now just to make a solution for not having a static IP address...

I wrote a program a few years ago which needed to fetch data from a website. Instead of using the API, I used a html parser and extracted the data myself.

The code still runs flawlessly.

I am building a website for someone who insists on having an online checkout on the website even though the business is entirely in person. I’m not convinced anyone visits the sight to begin with.

How do you like my setup? Ubuntu laptop on the left, windows laptop on the right.

(And giant rubber duck upper left 😼)