Astelor

Engineer. Programmer. Skill Issue haver. Tech whisperer. Twitch chat dweller. Chronic yapper. Speaker of bad takes and questions. aka Aster.

[astelor]

Hello there! The name's Aster (any pronouns). I like cyber security and I am in my twenties.

Languages I speak:

Natural language: English, Mandarin (I'm from Taiwan)

Programming language: C/C++, Python, Assembly, Verilog, Lua

I blog about but not limited to:

Ongoing projects

Programming

Science and Technology

Noita (modding)

Fountain pens and inks

Feel free to ask me things, and please correct me if I am wrong in my posts. Interaction is welcomed, this is the Internet. I hope you have a wonderful day *waves* 👋👋🙋

Cool lists:

Useful Resources: Websites/tools that I frequently use. They are generally very useful.

Content tags:

back burner: project ideas (I'd LOVE to know if you did any of those)

fixing my skill issues: learning & progress (aka me showing what I am working on. ongoing projects are usually posted under this tag)

new file.txt: yapping (usually things without specific topics)

resources: good tools or websites

photography: I take photos from time to time

My works in public:

Github, HackMD, Steam Workshop

Fandom and random things blog: @astersbookmark

[astelor]

after numerous debugs... it finally works...

the bugs were very silly and I think I'll talk about it later, but for now let me bath in the glory of functional Verilog code.

[astelor]

When I was changing the ink in my new TWSBI ECO Rosegold, the piston was stuck. Like stuck-stuck. The internet said I should remove the feed and push the piston out. Here are a few things I learned

The feed is fricking fragile, one of the fins was slightly bent (but not destroyed) when I was trying to remove the feed. I gave up on removing the feed. (btw holding down the sides of a steel nib will not damage it, I tried it with a piler on my other fp misadventure)

The piston mechanic is quite similar to a ballpoint clicking pen

You can partially insert the end of the stub and leverage it to pull the piston out

I applied silicon grease to the back of the piston and the walls. Hold the barrel with my hand hoping to warm it even slightly, and I dipped my pen in water. And kept trying until whatever vacuum gave in.

I wish I learned this with a cheaper model but alas.

[astelor]

success!

[plasmodiophora]

Getting the piston stuck in a TWSBI has to be one my most annoying fountain pen experiences. I have somehow managed to do this twice, and each time it took me FOREVER to get it out again, even after watching tutorials. I‘ve never had any issues with cracking barrels or anything, and I love the fact that you can completely disassemble them, but a stuck piston is NOT fun.

[astelor]

I applied some silicon grease to the piston rubber so it'd behave better. Hopefully that's not going to degrade it. I got the pen today and I complained to TWSBI official retailer's shopee DM (their own office in New Taipei City).

It really is strange that the piston can get stuck in the barrel.

[decomposedmaw]

Pixel post dividers for everyone! It's not much, but feel free to use them if you'd like. I don't know the ideal size for these, so let me know if they're too tall. I can make them a bit shorter next time.

[astelor]

When I was changing the ink in my new TWSBI ECO Rosegold, the piston was stuck. Like stuck-stuck. The internet said I should remove the feed and push the piston out. Here are a few things I learned

The feed is fricking fragile, one of the fins was slightly bent (but not destroyed) when I was trying to remove the feed. I gave up on removing the feed. (btw holding down the sides of a steel nib will not damage it, I tried it with a piler on my other fp misadventure)

The piston mechanic is quite similar to a ballpoint clicking pen

You can partially insert the end of the stub and leverage it to pull the piston out

I applied silicon grease to the back of the piston and the walls. Hold the barrel with my hand hoping to warm it even slightly, and I dipped my pen in water. And kept trying until whatever vacuum gave in.

I wish I learned this with a cheaper model but alas.

[astelor]

success!

[astelor]

When I was changing the ink in my new TWSBI ECO Rosegold, the piston was stuck. Like stuck-stuck. The internet said I should remove the feed and push the piston out. Here are a few things I learned

The feed is fricking fragile, one of the fins was slightly bent (but not destroyed) when I was trying to remove the feed. I gave up on removing the feed. (btw holding down the sides of a steel nib will not damage it, I tried it with a piler on my other fp misadventure)

The piston mechanic is quite similar to a ballpoint clicking pen

You can partially insert the end of the stub and leverage it to pull the piston out

I applied silicon grease to the back of the piston and the walls. Hold the barrel with my hand hoping to warm it slightly, and I dipped my pen in water. And kept trying until whatever vacuum gave in.

I wish I learned this with a cheaper model but alas.

[astelor]

everytime someone refuses to put their phone on mute on a public transport, my urge to play cringe pop music at max volume increases

[halfbaked00q]

my phone force updated and it (1) shortened a bunch of buttons? like instead of spanning the whole bottom theyre stupid small and centered?? (2) added a stupid countdown to snooze notifs and got rid of where it tells me. which alarm it was?? (3) added a bunch of dumb shading to shit, like icons (4) added stupid iridescent overlays to shit that don't need it? makes a bunch of other shit more distracting looking and also as if they added AI to it. cuz the tell tale is the stupid gradient washes right. ugh.

....i wonder if I can turn some of these off w accessibility settings, actually. or if itll go to much for what I want. sigh

my stupid photo app is all diff now, every default app is diff. and its all stupid and bad. clock is so bad. ugh.

[commodorez]

HP 2113E minicomputer and 87XM micro – Mike Loewen

"The HP 2113E minicomputer from 1976 was part of the second series of 21MX machines, and used semiconductor RAM instead of core memory. The system on display has a 2748B high speed paper tape reader (500cps) which is used to load software into RAM. Paper tape BASIC will be loaded, after which BASIC programs can be loaded from the interpreter. A 2645A terminal is used for communication. Also on display is an 87XM personal computer from 1983 with dual diskette drives. The 87MX has built in BASIC with graphics capability."

I spent some time programming in BASIC on the HP2113E (which is a model in the HP 1000 line), but before I could Mike had to load BASIC into RAM first. He had a cleaver method of rewinding the tape using a power drill.

[michaelmoonsbookshop]

just some of the the changes in design for the Penguin Symbol on old Penguin Paperbacks 

[dinkywinks]

he did a little dance and for this crime he was imprisoned in a bubble

[luxflora]

They liked his little dance so much they gave him a spotlight

[anasandorpygoscelis-deactivated]

family album

[delgrosso]

[sensationaltrainreading]

[astelor]

so I tried to compile my ncurses snake game on Termux, the terminal emulator on Android.

g++ told me "you don't have addwstr" but I am using the ncursesw/curses.h header, it does not make sense.

Upon a closer look, apparently ncursesw uses the default curses header, linking directly back to the previous directory. I couldn't find more nuanced packages for curses, so I replaced addwstr with addstr and voila. It works

[algebraic-dumbass]

happy pride month, be gay do math

[algebraic-dumbass]

turns out, it wasn't the drag queens indoctrinating children, it was the math teachers all along

[plasmodiophora]

[merklehellman]

Opened a bunch of Magic the Gathering boosters for the first time in my life and had plenty of fun doing that - even got a handful of cool and relatively expensive cards (still net negative on the whole ordeal though lol).

Then i spent like 4 hours meticulously inserting all of them into my collection on archidekt. I guess i did not really have to input Set and collection number for every land and card but i did it anyway, for some reason i enjoy cataloguing stuff like this. Perhaps helps that the cards have some nice art.

I also went to a local game store for the first time and picked up a few singles from a binder. I was super stressed about that, especially once i saw some people playing in the shop, but my partner helped me get past the stress and everything went smoothly.

Also, for the record - i know and fully agree that buying singles is the way to go when building a deck, however besides building a deck i also wanted to GAMBLE.

Apparently there is a Pauper league being organized by people for people in my area and a guy from my commander group is in on it. I'm seriously considering trying it out since i've only had experience with commander and i know 60-card formats are a whole different thing.

[entropy-game-dev]

The Research Revamp

Well, it sure has been a while since my last post! As an aside, that post somehow got flagged as being mature, and I can't see the button to appeal it. Doesn't matter too much to me but I really wonder what on earth the algorithm saw that caused it to flag my post!

In any case, I've been keeping very busy, and I've gone through almost everything programming related on the lists I previously posted. My sleep schedule has been somewhat iffy so after each day I'd feel too tired to make a blog post, weeks turned into months, you know the drill! I have a bunch of topics written up so I think I'll be good going back to a weekly posting schedule.

With that out of the way, welcome to my new research user interface! A lot of the text is placeholder because I have completely revamped my research projects to fit in nicer with the other systems (like the AI matrix) and progression within the handcrafted dungeons/campaign.

Nevertheless, the UI is fully functional - we have a nice prominent list of current research instead of two dinky tacked on left/right arrows which were hardly visible, first and foremost. The list of materials in the bottom shows the newly-added scrap cost for research, doing away with bars that would tick up over time to show research progress, as research is now instant.

Finally, you have the somewhat simplified main window. Most playtesters found that the scientific-paper-style I wrote the research in was overwhelming and very text heavy, even when I highlighted the important bits. Now I'm going to keep it to a couple of lines of prose, a succinct description of what you unlock, and maybe repeating the materials/scrap cost within the window, as it is quite big and might otherwise look too empty.

In the video, you can see me accept a bunch of research, and see new ones appear in the list as you clear their dependencies. And of course it's completely navigatable with both mouse only, keyboard only, controller only, or some unholy combination of the three.

Thanks for reading, look forward to more big changes!

[kitty]

i dont care what you’re doing take 1 minute out of your day to watch this you wont regret it YOU NEED SOUND

[astelor]

I think I can write a abstracted module for circular queue without the ordeal of timing, or at least make it so that timing is simpler. But idk why I am making it complicated :')