Today was the day we spent visiting people we know in London. Both of them. The first was our cousin Mary, who came here a while ago to go to college. The second was some colleuges from a job I had a while back.
We woke up at a reasonable time to meet Mary for breakfast at the pub where the exterior shots for the new Sherlock series was filmed. As we should have guessed from the day before, it was cold and rainy on the way to the station.
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Art museums are, in general, themselves a piece of art. Modern Tate was no exception, except that it used to be a power plant. This gave it a vast open atrium and plenty of room for art.
Unsurprisingly, the younger boys were not particular fans of the modern art. There were classic pieces by Dali (tentatively Ellen’s favorite), Mondrian (Dad’s favorite), Rothko (my own favorite), and many others.
Among all of these artistic greats, I would definitively say that the younger boy’s favorite was a wall made of carpet.
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Our first full day in London. What to do?
Sleep, apparently.
I slept in until noon. Jason slept in until 3 in the afternoon. I suppose that’s the result of a combination of jetlag, exhaustion, and staying up late. At least he slept in. Ellen, Kayla, and I played various forms of solitaire, while Ryan played video games on a smartphone.
Once Jason woke up, everyone ate breakfast (at 4 in the afternoon), and we headed out to take a bus tour.
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Once, while on a trip with my highschool robotics club, my roommate was the one who answered the 5:30 wakeup call (in robotics, the early bird gets practice time on the field, and often we were up until midnight the previous night). He picked up the phone, said “scramble the fighters!”, and promptly went back to sleep. I had no idea what was going through his mind.
Now I do. I was holding a phone in my hand in a dark hotel room, wondering where I was and why I was so tired.
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Today I learned that the Germans are pretty much the nicest people in the world. If we had been traveling through America, or maybe any other country, all six of us would be sleeping on the floor of some airport terminal in some faraway land without my luggage. Instead I’m residing in the most expensive hotel I’ve ever eaten in, having just finished possibly the most expensive meal of my life (25 euros - I’m not a fancy diner), all for free.
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So Minecraft introduced rocket-powered Elytras, which are the single-best thing to be in Minecraft since they introduced trees. These allow long-distance travel unlike anything practical previously - where a 20km journey would previously take potentially several hours of game time, now it can be accomplished in under 10 minutes.
Powering these elytras take firework rockets, which require resources to build. Thus it’s only practical to take a finite number of them on your journey, and wasting them is bad.
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I have a small band of people who have occasionally thrown LAN parties for various games. One of these games is AssaultCube, the free-and-open-source first-person shooter game. The LAN party is structured much like any other - I run a server on my laptop, and the three of us play.
In one sitting, we may play multiple games of AssaultCube. Each game is a combination of a map and a gamemode, and the set (and order) of games we play are determined by a “map rotation” file.
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My brother was talking about crypto, and got around to claiming that he could design a crypto algorithm that I couldn’t break.
Of course, I have a little bit of experience with cryptography, so I took him up on that bet, under a simple indistinguishability attack. The rules of the game are simple - He, the challenger, provides me the algorithm. I choose two messages, and . He randomly chooses one of them, without telling me which, and encrypts it, giving me back the ciphertext.
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It was Pi day this week, and what better way to celebrate than to build a cluster of Pis? (No, I didn’t compute π with it)
But, to celebrate, I built my very own Raspberry Pi cluster.
It has eight Pi 3s, all connected to each other via 100mbps ethernet. Each one is about 1/8th as powerful as my laptop, so combined they’re about as powerful as my laptop, which is considerable - I’ve long thought of Raspberry Pis as being closer to a Teensy that can run Linux than a computer with GPIO ports.
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So, I made a game dynamic simulator for Risk: Star Wars Edition. The usual rules, it’s a WIP, it’s not hardened, if you use it to control a nuclear power plant then it’s at your own risk.
The code’s at: https://github.com/lkolbly/sw-ksirk
The rules and API are on the GitHub page, so I won’t mention those here. But I will mention a few quick results that one can get just by statically analyzing the game.
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