Interests: programming, video games, anime, music composition

I used to be on kbin as e0qdk@kbin.social before it broke down.

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: November 27th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure if I’ve ever fallen in love with a completely imaginary dream person, but I did dream about my ex once years and years after we broke up. I don’t remember what I dreamed about exactly, but I do remember waking from it. The happiness fading as the realization set in that it was all a dream – I was by myself in bed and none of it had been real. I’m usually pretty good at dealing with solitude, but that moment… that was the most intense loneliness I think I’ve ever felt.




  • I wrote something like this before for academic researchers to load data sets on display walls by using their cellphones. I approached it by building a simple website. When the user logs in, they’d see a table of entries (from a directory listing on a shared file server that they could drop their data sets onto) and could click a button that made a form post to the server which caused it to run whichever programs were needed to load the data set they wanted (or run a couple of other handy commands – like turning the monitors on/off, etc).

    You can do something like that too in Python if you want:

    1. Learn how to start and stop programs from Python scripts. This can be done with the built-in subprocess library. If you know how to launch the programs you want from the command line, it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out how to do it from Python by reading the documentation. It will take some more effort to figure out how to interact with it (e.g. to stop it from user input) without blocking your script, but this can be done.
    2. Learn how to write a simple program that can respond to HTTP requests in Python. There are a number of libraries like tornado, flask, cherrypy, etc. that can do this. Pick one, read the documentation, and write a tiny page that allows you to submit a form and then trigger an action on the server in response to an HTTP POST. You should be able to interact with it by pointing the browser on your computer to localhost (possibly plus a port) or from on your LAN by putting the IP of your computer into the address bar.
    3. Figure out how you’re going to organize the entries you want to be able to load. You could just do something trivial like putting the files in known folders and running os.listdir, or something more involved like tracking the entries with a spreadsheet or database or JSON file that lets you associate custom metadata with each entry (like a custom name to show or an icon to display or when it was last launched, etc.)
    4. Generate a web page based on that data collection. I recommend using templating – e.g. with mustache, or jinja, etc. Basically you write some HTML-like text that lets you indicate places to fill in data from your program and it will do the conversion of symbols like < into &lt; that are needed for HTML output and also repeat patterns using entries from lists you provide to build the rows of tables and such for you.
    5. Set up some security (e.g. a simple log in system) and polish it up as much as you care to do.

    Good luck and have fun!


  • You might find writing guides relevant to your interests. For example, “How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy” by Orson Scott Card contains some details about how the author came to write Hart’s Hope and other novels. “Scene & Structure” by Jack Bickham might also be interesting – I don’t remember discussion of specific books in it, but it might scratch a similar itch for how-it’s-made style content.

    Some books also contain introductions/forewords/afterwords with details about how the book was written. A bunch of OSC’s novels (like some editions of Ender’s Game) come to mind specifically – I read those back when I was curious about maybe trying to become a writer, so that’s the most prominent example in my mind, but I’m sure there are others. I’ve also seen translations of a number of works where the translators include really long introductions explaining some of their choices – and sometimes criticize earlier translations.


  • Everything I’ve set in Settings is forgotten: Default Listing reverts to All, Default Post Sort reverts to Hot, and so on.

    mlmym (the “old” interface) stores its front-end specific settings in your browser via cookies and local storage. The way it’s implemented works for the most part and probably makes the front-end simpler, but has some downsides like not retaining your choices between logins. There’s an issue open for this in the bug tracker: https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym/issues/104

    I’m not sure why it forces a logout periodically even when you’re using it regularly though. (I mean, the cookies are probably not being updated and just expire eventually – but I don’t know if that was a deliberate choice or not.) It might be a good idea to open an issue for this?







  • Personally, I prefer it when people do one of the following:

    • upload the file to catbox.moe and link it here (for clips up to 200MB)
    • upload the file directly to their lemmy instance (if their instance allows it)
    • self-host it on their own web server (with no bullshit crappy JS interface, please – just give me the file; I’ll play it with VLC if it doesn’t work in my browser)

    PeerTube is also a reasonable choice – although I don’t like its UI very much.