Miscellaneous Web Blog

03/09/2024 - New RISC OS Page

A new page has been added for RISC OS Projects here!

02/27/2023 Minor web construction

This is a WebDAV test :) - laur 12/6/23

I haven't updated in a while because I've been embroiled in both a new job and learning RISC OS development as a challenge to myself. I got a bit stuck on some of the things I've been working on so I've gone ahead and worked on validating the HTML on the website. Despite what it may appear, I am still alive and online.

9/20/2022 scaly - a simple scale library for Pure Data

I've spent a few now working on my first attempt at writing a Pure Data library, to hopefully improve my C skills - here are the results. It's just a simple little thing with 3 objects, which can generate some common scales from presets, generate custom scales from scale definitions, or snap notes to a scale. I'm sure it's been done before, but like many things, I didn't check because I wanted to make it just for the learning experience. Maybe later I can put it in deken if I can make it stand out enough? Forgot to put it in the README, but big BIG thanks to Katja Vetter for making pd-lib-builder.

Download it here or view the repository here. It's been prebuilt for 64-bit Windows or Linux, anything else and you'll need to build it yourself. It's been built with the standard build packages on Debian 11 for Linux, and with MinGW on Windows. It has been tested with Pure Data 0.51.4 and higher. If you use it and have any difficulties, please email me! I probably missed something!

8/15/2022 My first LFS build

I finally took advantage of some downtime I had to go through Linux From Scratch. I did the systemd version because of course, systemd based systems are what I'm used to and I'm not really too concerned about the politics of init systems. I barely configured the kernel because the first time I tried to do it it died spectacularly, and I need to rebuild the kernel anyway because it's currently running the package versions straight from the book instead of up to date ones. Of course, I did it all in a VM since I don't have a spare box laying around right now. My current to do list:

• Update all packages according to security advisories
• Get wget, lynx, and sudo working to make further building easier
• Get X11 working with at least just twm
• Maybe do it again, but with sysvinit?

This screenshot here isn't much to look at, but it's a big deal for me:

Did I learn something? I think so. I mean, I hope so.

8/5/2022 NYT Spelling Bee Solver

A single file Python script for generating possible answers to today's New York Times spelling bee puzzles. Just enter the possible letters and the center/required letter and it will give you some words to try. Of course, since you won't be using the same dictionary as the NYT, it won't be identical to the answer key, but it's something. Requires a plaintext dictionary; the one I used is the wamerican-huge package in Debian. Otherwise just paste it into a .py file, replace the example dictionary file with yours, and run it with a Python 3 interpreter, as it has no dependencies.