Aaah, that’s been a nice break from coding. Four weeks with no commits pushed to Phoo. It’s a shame I left it in a broken state. I haven’t the slightest idea why it’s broken — but then again, all the other times Phoo broke, I never knew …

Over the weekend I joined the conwaylife.com forums because I am interested in cellular automata. I find watching the mechanisms mesmerizing, and building them exciting.

I also have an interest in music, and so a year or two ago I tried to generate music from cellular automata. I used …

Last time I had just announced that Phoo was finished. Well, it’s still finished — except for the fact that the online console no longer works. I tried porting the shell code to Phoo, but that ended up breaking the shell!

It was pretty much a line-for-line translation, so I …

…Gosh, I just realized that I haven’t posted anything in weeks. I really don’t want to fall prey to the obsession of posting everything online. I hope I’m not.

Anyway, I just finished up the first draft of the documentation of Phoo. The generator script is Python …

I am currently working on an online console for Quackery that is using the Pyodide in-browser Python interpreter. The only bad thing is, Python’s input() function blocks until input is provided, which can’t be done in the browser because everything is asynchronous. The only way for it to …

Several years ago I discovered the wonderful world of cellular automata.

After some Googling I discovered a cellular automata called Wireworld that is designed to simulate electronic circuits. Each of its square cells can be in one of four states, “empty” (which always stays empty, and is shown here in …

Today I managed to submit my first ever Github pull request. In developing Phoo I made some changes to the meta-words from its predecessor Quackery, and they seemed backportable to Quackery. So I forked Quackery and submitted a pull request with those changes.

In the name of trying to bootstrap …

A few months ago I stumbled upon two old 1990s-era Armdroid 1000s in the back of my engineering teacher’s storage closet. Naturally, being someone interested in robotics, I wanted to see if I could get them to operate.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know diddlysquat about how they worked. So …

I am a high school student, and so while I am at school I have to use the school-provided computers. The school district chose to give us Chromebooks. And anyone who needs to do some serious coding (like me) knows that Chromebooks are utterly useless.

Thankfully I have access to …

In developing Phoo today I was unpleasantly presented with yet another reason why I prefer Python. It was when I was working on the new Importer API for loading external modules into Phoo that I accidentally did this:

class Importer { /* stub class */ }
class FetchImporter extends Importer {
    constructor(basePath, fetchOptions = {}) {
        /* no …