rkachowski

[rkachowski]

lovely

[rkachowski]

ai dungeon is awesome

You are mistuh wasrd, a wizard living in the kingdom of Larion. You have a staff and a spellbook. You finish your long journey and finally arrive at the ruin you've been looking for. You look around and see that it's not much different than when you left it. The only thing is now there's a giant skeleton standing guard outside

ask the skeleton about the news

The skeleton looks up from his book and stares at you. He looks like he could kill you with one hand tied behind his back, but instead he just nods. "I heard about this place". He says.

ask him what he heard

"It seems that some people are trying to take over the city of Rask by force". He replies.

ask the skeleton how he feels about the economy of Rask being dominated primarily by slave trading and that perhaps "some people" might actually be good

"Well I don't know anything about it". The skeleton responds.

thank the skeleton and then cast level 60 bone blizzard

You cast bone blizzard on the skeleton and he is frozen solid.

throw the mighty iris into the frozen skeleton

You toss the mighty iris into the frozen skeleton. It breaks through the ice and flies out of sight.

gaze fondly upon the disappearing iris and then walk to Rask

You turn around and look at the frozen skeleton. You can hear the sounds of battle all around you. You wonder if you should head towards them or stay here.

walk to Rask even faster

You run as fast as you can towards Rask. Soon you reach the gates and see that they are already open. A few guards stand outside ready for any trouble.

ask the guards if they prefer wu-tang or dr dre

The guards look at each other and nod their heads. They both seem to be very popular drinks in Rask.

consult the book on how to proceed

You quickly read the book and decide to try something different. You think you will make a deal with the guards. If you help us we won't attack you when you enter Rask. We promise not to harm you and we will give you free passage back to your home town

reluctantly help the guards

You agree to the deal and they let you pass. You feel so happy that you almost cry.

actually cry

You feel so sad that you almost want to die. But you decide to keep going and eventually you arrive at your home town.

kick in the door and shout "MOM I'M HOME"

You rush inside and find that Mom has been dead for months now. You immediately start crying again.

cast level 60 bone resurrection blizzard upon the remnants of mom

You cast bone revival on the remains of mom. She is resurrected and you feel better.

shout "MOM I'M HOME"

You continue to travel to Rask. Eventually you get there and find that the town is under siege. You watch as the undead hordes surround the town. You are too late though. Your mother is dead.

resurrect mother again

You attempt to revive her, but she dies once more. You are devastated. You never got to say goodbye to her.

resurrect mother for a third time but this time for realsies

You attempt to resurrect her yet again, but she dies once more. You are devastated. You never got to say goodbye to her either.

resurrect her and then very quickly say goodbye and where are my legos

Woops that action caused the model to start looping. Try a different action to prevent that.

bring mother back to life

You bring mother back to life. She looks at you with tears in her eyes. She doesn't recognize you, but she knows who you are. She hugs you tightly and tells you that she loves you

tell mother goodbye and leave the house

You return to the house where you had left your sister. You tell her that she shouldn't worry because you are coming back soon. She smiles and kisses you before leaving the house. You don't know why, but you do.

activate the self destruct sequence

You activate the self destruct sequence and everything goes black

announce loudly "DORMAMMU, I HAVE COME TO BARGAIN"

You scream "Dormammu! I HAVE COME TO BARGAIN!" and then you begin to laugh maniacally. Everyone in the room hears your laughter and begins to panic. Suddenly the walls begin to shatter and the ceiling begins to fall in.

hold the infinity stone high above your head

You hold the infinity stone high above your head and everyone else in the room follows suit. You suddenly stop laughing and everyone is terrified. Then you unleash a wave of energy that destroys the entire room.

rewind time until dormammu appears

You rewind time and see that dormammu is standing right behind you. He sees that you are afraid and decides to play along. He starts laughing hysterically and says

unpause

You pause time and see that dormammu is still standing behind you. He laughs even harder and says

throw knives at dormammu

You throw knives at him. The blades hit him, but he dodges them all. He runs forward and punches you in the face. You collapse backwards onto the floor. You hear screams from the people in the room and realize that you are being attacked by several ghosts

unleash the proton pack at the ghosts and have star platinum punch dormammu's stand

You unleash the proton pack at the ghosts and have star platinum punch his stand. You also blast him with a burst of light from the infinity stone. He falls backward off the wall and explodes into a million pieces

lean backwards in a powerful homoerotic pose and say something cool

You lean backwards in a powerful homoerotic pose and say something cool. Everyone in the room is impressed by your bravery

have the speedwagon foundation take dormammu's remnants to a sunny beach for disposal

You have the Speedwagon Foundation transport the remnants of dormammu to a sunny beach for disposal. Everyone is pleased with your work

[rkachowski]

advent of code 2019! I might even make it past 15 this year

[rkachowski]

what the infoinfoinfo

story time

for jovial mirth and hilarity i made the choicely purchase of the domain name infoinfoinfoinfoinfo.info some time ago. naturally I setup the email address more-info@infoinfoinfoinfoinfo.info amongst others.

i thought this was some stupid and unique thing with which i could make peoples lives difficult by giving them a ridiculous email address, until i started receiving mail. specifically email from java recruiters

and only java recruiters

how the hell is this possible? how did they find me? if the registrar was selling emails then there should be all kinds of garbage, not just java developer recruitment stuff.

welp, after some research it turns out that some _other_ java programmer had this domain name and email address, presumably doing the same thing as me before me.

sometimes the world is a strange and scary place and the only one constant that unites us is fucking with dns.

[rkachowski]

have you ever crashed xcode so hard that it crashed whilst it was crashing?

[rkachowski]

2ds hacks are awesome, you literally play a malformed audio file that bugs out the audio driver and the payload gets root access

[rkachowski]

t-online dns hijacking 😂👌

[rkachowski]

haha! your technique has no chance! i have studied the art of chiptune under the mighty chipzel herself!

[rkachowski]

How to kill a 14 year old pain in the ass

Today I start on a long overdue quest and kill a 14 year old pain in the ass. I am referring to this May 2003 issue of Total Guitar magazine.

I bought this magazine as a precocious teenager, always intending to at some point sit down and learn how to play everything in it. For whatever reason I appear to have kept it with me in embarrassingly pristine condition ever since.

This includes taking it with me over all the various places I have lived in the past 14 years. A multitude of different apartments and across international borders, this guitar magazine has remained a secret albatross within my belongings.

As I approach 30, I realise that I will soon reach the point where I will have owned this magazine for longer in my life than I have not owned it. I am not too sure about the laws in Germany but I think after that point in time it will legally own me and inherit all my belongings and steal my girlfriend (Guitarrenfreundinstehlgesetz Art. 70 Abs. 1 GG).

To stave off this crisis, I now commence on the journey of learning to play these songs. I hereby announce my intention to learn, play and record the following tracks from this magazine.

acdc - what you do for money honey

the cars - my best friend's girl

buzzcocks - ever fallen in love

red hot chili peppers - can't stop

guns n roses - paradise city

fuck linkin park and the other guys

I managed to buy the backing CDs on ebay from some vintage magazine nerds, so the performances shall include 2003era imitation artists.

If I don't manage this by 2018 then everyone I know gets free beer whenever they mention this failed initiative[1].

[1] terms and conditions apply.

[rkachowski]

we are robots

[rkachowski]

MGSV goes all over the place after you defeat Zorro Voldemort. You immediately start doing new missions which are the same as the old but with more restrictions.

It reminds me of the Spielberg AI movie. I heard that Kubrick had left him the script - half finished - in his will. Spielberg then wrote the rest of the script before filming the movie. And sure enough, there's a very clear divide between where the robot gets rescued from an eternity of bleakness frozen at the bottom of the ocean searching for his mother, by magic aliens that are drawn to the power of love (or something just as disjointed).

In the same way you can see the split between Kojima's vision and the "get this shit out the door we gotta shift some units, goddamn it" vision of Konami. Also Kiefer Sutherland must have some of the most expensive voice acting fees because Snake spends almost the whole game silently agreeing with everyone and doing what he's told without objection, only to occasionally break that silence for a tortured dialogue about the horrors of war.

but the dog is cool

[rkachowski]

[rkachowski]

Flashing esp8266 with nodelua on osx and wtf i forgot everything i ever did

A few months ago I bought a ton of esp8266 chips because they were the cool new thing and only cost like 2 dollars each, and I thought they'd be the cool new thing except the spacing between the headers is 2mm instead of the commonly used ~2.5mm. This means you can't plug them into a breadboard or perfboard or any common prototyping surface unless you do some crazy hacks to get around this.

A dirty hack like this

so yeah, i'm not doing that for 10 chips. anyway, i found a vendor on alibaba that sold breakout boards for like 0.20 each, which is totally worth it.

so now I can actually connect stuff to it, but i need a non crappy firmware on the chip to get started. this turns out to be a bit of a pain.

1 - Get all the usb drivers and stuff

fwiw i'm running el capitan 10.11.6

I have an oldschool ftdi-usb-ttl cable i got in 2007 or so which converts usb into something you can throw into gpio pins on a device. Unfortunately, all the changes in osx over the years make compatibility somewhat of a nightmare. After a few false starts I found this driver (thanks sparkfun) which comes with an installer and is pretty painless.

2 - Get the new firmware and setup the chip

nodelua has a pretty cool tutorial on how to set stuff up for your first time, unfortunately steps 2 and 3 are too complex for a doofus like me.

Once you have grabbed the firmware download, you need to prep the chip to recieve the new firmware. I'd completely forgotten which pins on the cable mapped to which usage so i had to hunt this down for a while. Here's a bad photo of how everything maps

In addition to this, you need to connect GPIO0 and GPIO15 to ground and GPIO02 to vcc in order for the chip to boot up in a mode where you can provide a new firmware.

3 - flash the sucker

There's a pretty cool python utility available on github which lets you just throw your firmware at a script and have everything automagically transferred to the esp. you will probably need to install the serial module via pip install pyserial (or easy_install or whatever) if your python skills are as bad as mine.

Once you have this installed, you'll need to know the address of your usb device, as the script will assume it is at /dev/ttyUSB0 and you'll get an error which says serial.serialutil.SerialException: [Errno 2] could not open port /dev/ttyUSB0: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/dev/ttyUSB0' if it could not open the port because there is no such file or directory named '/dev/ttyUSB0' (this actually makes sense)

If you run ls /dev/tty.* you'll get a list of whats attached, for me it turns out that my usb cable was on /dev/tty.usbserial-FTFDGFQ5

the esptool command accepts an optional port so you can override the default one, for me this looks like

$ ./esptool.py --port /dev/tty.usbserial-FTFDGFQ5 write_flash 0x00000 ~/Downloads/nodelua_8266.fw Connecting... Erasing flash... Writing at 0x00044c00... (100 %) Leaving...

and now everything is peaches!!

[rkachowski]

i've made a few docker images, but still find it hard to answer the question.

it's like a virtual machine, but it's not a virtual machine, but it does require a virtual machine to run on osx.

it's like the inside of a car, and instead of getting new cars you just change out the interior - and the car might be a virtual machine, so by switching out the upholstry you can ride inside a mercedes even though the vehicle was made by ford.

except noone uses this car in production.

and you can download cars from dockerhub, but they might crash.

[rkachowski]

When someone commits with the tests not passing

by @uaiHebert

[rkachowski]

[rkachowski]

get your mutt working with smtp gmail + 2fa (eudyptula restart)

I recently decided to restart the eudyptula challenge, because my life is too easy and I miss the passive aggressive pithy comments that take weeks to arrive from supposedly impossible to anger scripts.

However, it's been way too long and once again I remember that the setup of the surrounding environment takes more time than a lot of the coding effort.

Case 1 - no html email can be used

Gmail's web client automagically adds html to the message and there doesn't appear to be an easy way to turn that off. A lot of high level linux nerds hate html and the linux kernel mailing list rejects it anyway so at least it accurately reflects the stubborn and awkward nature of kernel development.

Whatever - I used to use mutt for commandline email, but google has since changed it's requirements and we gotta change the config. Also using two factor authentication presents another pain in the ass but it's not too bad (just use an app password instead of the regular password)

tl;dr - if you screw it up, it'll look like this

[2016-04-24 09:49:42] 7< 535-5.7.8 Username and Password not accepted. Learn more at [2016-04-24 09:49:42] SASL authentication failed

Use this config

set ssl_starttls=yes set ssl_force_tls=yes set imap_user = 'YOUR GMAIL ADDRESS' set imap_pass = 'YOUR 2FA PASS' set from='GMAIL ADDRESS' set realname='YOUR NAME' set folder = imaps://imap.gmail.com/ set spoolfile = imaps://imap.gmail.com/INBOX set postponed="imaps://imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Drafts" set header_cache = "~/.mutt/cache/headers" set message_cachedir = "~/.mutt/cache/bodies" set certificate_file = "~/.mutt/certificates" set smtp_url = 'smtps://<GMAILADDRESS BEFORE @ SYMBOL>@smtp.gmail.com:465/' set smtp_pass = 'YOUR 2FA PASS' set move = no set imap_keepalive = 900

I actually generated a second app password for the smtp_pass param as I ended up trying a whole combination of features from various articles i found over the past 5 years.

The notable changes are 1. smtps protocol instead of smtp in the url 2. only including the first part of the email in the url (some articles recommend putting the entire email in) 3. using 2fa app passwords instead of the gmail account pass

For posterity and future googlers, this setup works for me on April 2016.

now let's get frustrated!