Import 2022-11-27 18:16 Hackrocks / HackArmour May 2022 CTF Firstly, this was our first CTF we had entered, and with very little preparation. I want to fully acknowledge the amount of effort the organisers have to put in, and the support that they have to give during the competition. Being new to CTF, I have my opinions on how
Architecture Invalid Entry Infrastructure Architecture The building of a community Discord bot grew rapidly into an entire, more formal definition of the Invalid Entry architecture. Firstly, discord bots are easy to make, and its very tempting to make some kind of monolithic spaghetti code monster where the bot itself is doing everything, but I wanted
Antiscape Antiscape Development #1 A while ago, we started work on a game which we're calling Antiscape. Originally it was codenamed 'sillyness' and you might see that occasional screenshots. Going for full indy mode, part of the experiment is less in a fully playable profitable game, but more in the architecture and design decisions
Maths 3d Printing Fractals (1) This blog post goes alongside the video: So going back a little bit to the fractal slicing blog here I wanted to move to generating 3d printed fractals. The first step is to 3d print a 2d fractal - so we can use the 'escape' level as the height, and
Helpful Things Remote Wireshark Sometimes you want to run Wireshark on a remote connection, and it is relatively simple. This works on Mac and Linux, and probably other nux devices (BSD, Hurd etc). Steps 1. Prepare the remote computer - on the remote computer, you need tcpdump installed. So with your favourite package manager,
Nerd Sniped Discovering Bezier Curves Recently there has been a staggeringly good video about bezier curves, and its something that I never really understood (because I had never looked at them), and yet also found it was something I've always been in love with - growing up I've done a lot of 'maths pictures' and
minispacepig MSP Water Rocket Launch Platform Theres a great website http://www.raketfuedrockets.com/en/3dprinting.htm which has some excellent designs for a 3d printed water bottle rocket - but I found that the base plans didn't withstand a lot of force - either because I had my infill set way to low when I
Recycling Recycled Cardboard Plant pots (1) We get a large number of parcels, and they all come with a lot of brown card which we just throw into the recycling. But at the same time, with our small vegetable patch getting better, it would be nice to have our own, home made recycled plant pots. I've
Import 2022-11-27 18:16 Minecraft Ore Locations (1) Caveats: this analysis was done on a MC Amplified 1.17 Vanilla code base. :. Some of the analysis may be incorrect. Method 1. Create a blank world, and use the preloader fabric mod to force the server to generate a large number of chunks (262k chunks), but the analysis was
Import 2022-11-27 18:16 OLED HUD Development To begin with, we run the basic example OLED code, and accelerometer code on the same setup to make sure that the wiring and devices are ok and there's no conflict. This might seem a waste of time but allows us to confidently move onto more complex code knowing that
Nerd Sniped Death Army Robot Firing Squad A couple of weeks ago I was watching youtube and I watched the first part of a video about this puzzle, and I felt (when I finally watched the second half) that he didn't do it justice in trying to solve it himself - he presented the problem, possibly not
Project Scribble Path Optimisations Maths One of the subproblems I found with the whiteboard plotter was that it didn't like a lot of small movements and that my SVG to Path process would often generate a lot of tiny steps which could be consolidated into single steps without a lot of 'visible' changes. Firstly, let's
Project Scribble Project Scribble - Spirographs I recently uploaded a longer video about this, but here is the code (and maths) that relates: The main bit of maths is working out the (x,y) coordinate for a location for a point on the circle, based upon an angle. From our high school maths, that's done by
Project Scribble Project Scribbles - Coordinate Maths So this topic presented as one which is worthy of a page. When we're driving the robot, we want to be working in X/Y coordinates and not in A/B lengths. So the easy answer is to convert between the two. Assuming we have an origin of the top
Project Scribble Project Scribble - Arch and Code The next phase of the build was to write the control code for the module. That can be seen in this video here, and this document is the first half of that (the arch and programming): For those not wanting to scroll through the same thing a second time, here
Project Scribble Path Optimisation for Project Scribble This was an interesting sub-problem that I discovered in the Project Scribbles: when deciding what route to take, the pathing is important. There are a few factors to take into account. If you're cutting, then cutting internal holes before external ones are important, if you're drawing, less so, but your
Project Scribble Project Scribble - The theory craft Many many years ago (we're talking circa 2000) I read an article in a book about a V plotter used to make mammoth pictures - sheets of cloth hung on the side of a building, spray can dangled between two wires. It used Autocad to generate the path, and then
Import 2022-11-27 18:16 Minecraft Stats - Empirecraft Jan 2021 Bit of a slow day today, which means I can pull the stats for January. Theres not a lot I can publish just yet (because some of them will require a bit more work). So as a brief teaser, using the Tableau public: This starts the inspiration for playing #nodeathfeb
Import 2022-11-27 18:16 Isometric 3d Fractals Let's do something that I don't think anyones done before. Let's draw them isometrically. That is, we are usually trying to make every pixel correct, and frustrated by the fact that there is this space between the pixels that we don't know. So our life is zooming into those gaps
Import 2022-11-27 18:16 Making Colour Gradients Perhaps you have some digital art (cough, fractals) or some data infographics and you want to translate a number into a colour. BUT perhaps you don't necessarily know the range, or know things like 'good vs bad'. Think false colour electron microscopes or something, where you have a 'value' for
Import 2022-11-27 18:16 Performance Art Fractals When I was about 7 or 8, my dad got a book on fractals with a CD program to generate them. At the time we had a 486, which was insanely fast compared to the authors 386, so some of the renders the author explained would take hours, we could
Import 2022-11-27 18:16 Featured New Home & Starting Post It's always hard to write the first post for a blog, and express where you're going with this site and the things that you want to do. It started actually with our gaming channel, where I wanted to talk about more technical posts and ideas, and made a video called
