Ask Lemmy

I made a random party generator for Final Fantasy Rennaissance, a FF1 fan game built from scratch with the stated goal of including as many classes as possible from across the franchise.

I also built a random team generator for Fire Emblem Engage.

Lots of things, but I think my strawberry shortcake soap is the last thing I made that I was truly proud of.

I've made an android app for splitting expenses. I was so frustrated when I was in charge of the excel sheet with my friends geoup New Year"s trip expenses, that I started working on it and I pushed it in production in the end of July. Which is especially great because I have a sizeable graveyard of things that I was burning for and then completely abandoned.
It's called WEREVEN, it's free, has no ads (maybe I will monetize it in the future, but I don't want to annoy 20 people who use it), and I don't collect your personal data.

I made ice cream a few times. Nothing else I've ever made has been as cool.

I made music under the name "The Cool Side of the Pillow" in high school, but the site I submitted everything to died in like 2009 and I never kept any backups.

I have a bunch of mods for Skyrim, New Vegas and Arma 2 and 3 on the nexus and Steam workshop. One of my New Vegas mods was extremely popular when the game was new; I added and moved all the fast travel points to limit load times. Like putting one for each segment of the strip so you didn't have to go to Freeside and load 2 or 3 times just to get to the NCR HQ. Tho I only had the base game for the longest time, and never updated it for any of the DLC.

Love to a woman.

I've made a few games.

Oh wait, something cool? Well darn...

I made a human once, turned out well

Many years ago I wrote a program that accepted DECWriter print jobs, parsed the escape sequences, and output them as PostScript.

We had an application that ran on an OpenVMS system. The application could only support DEC printers, so we couldn't use any modern devices. The DEC printers were no longer made so all our printers were either purchased refurbished, or Frankenstein printers one of our guys assembled from the carcasses of dead printers.

My program could be used as a print filter in a Linux LPT queue. This allowed us to replace DEC printers with any printer that could natively support PostScript and any printer that had ghostscript support.

When I first started in the job, my predecessor told me about the issue with the printers and it seemed like an interesting project.

First test was to ensure I could convert barcodes in the print jobs. The print jobs for the DEC printers sent the barcodes as SIXEL graphics. SIXEL graphics were bitmaps sent as rows of six vertical pixels.

Once I verified that could work, it was just a matter of writing the parser for all the rest of the escape sequences that controlled the formatting. That and learning how to produce the PostScript.

At the time I asked my boss if he wanted me to implement it, but he said we were going to migrate to a new system very soon, so it wasn't worth the effort.

I still thought it was an interesting project, so I kept working on it on my own.

Several years passed, and we were still using the old system. The man who maintained our printers died, which led to a problem. Without him to maintain the printers, they started failing faster than we could replace them. In a meeting to discuss how we would respond printer issue, I mentioned that I had continued working on my filter at home and I only needed a a few weeks of focused effort to get a functional print filter. This time my boss told me to proceed.

We very quickly replaced all our old DEC impact printers with modern laser printers.

We had some forms on tractor feed paper, so I converted the forms to PostScript and added that to the filter. I was also able to get it working with Zebra label printers.

I had a problem with the barcodes. My script generated perfect barcodes, but our barcode pens couldn't scan them. After looking at the barcodes that the DEC printers made and comparing them to what my filter produced, the only difference I could see was that the DEC barcodes looked like crap. Jittery dots instead of perfect, straight lines. So I modified my script to make the graphics produced look just a little bit worse, and they started working.

That print filter continued working flawlessly in production for several more years until we finally managed to migrate to the new system.

I got into home distilling during the pandemic. Fun, and damn fine sipping. Done gin, whiskey and vodka I'm proud of. My rum was a failure, but only in the sense that it tasted like whiskey. The congeners for rum are too hard for my setup. Aged in an oak barrel and everything.

I made a an excellent coffee liqueur with my magicks, home roasted beans used in a cold booze-pressed espresso and a vanilla bean then aged on oak and applewood.

It was the inspiration for my username - you can "correct" any coffee based drink with quality booze. Yum.

My personal project since the beginning of COVID has been a programming language/data manipulation tool.

At some point I realised that not writing a program is better than writing one (juat like how if a Unix task is simple, you'll just type the command in the shell rather than writing a script). The the aame vein, if you can write a few characters to map the sum of an array of values with maximum value in a nested list of numbers in some column of a 2-dimensional array, why should I write a program to do it?

The result is Kap: https://kapdemo.dhsdevelopments.com/

I know my explanation seems overly generic, but I've already gone on for too long. If you're curious, check the examples and videos on the web site. Please feel free to ask questions, I could talk about this stuff for way too long.

I've gotten quite into making food. I mostly find recipes but I'm good enough now to modify or combine them as needed. Most recently I (quite successfully) tried to copy a restaurant meal I had: fried rice with veggies and fried chicken, with a special sauce. The main ingredient is Gochujang, a pleasant rich spicy type chile paste you can get from the store.

Tomorrow is taco soup night!

I’ve made a lot of stuff, but it doesn’t always fit in community art channels because its usually not a single visual.

For years in school/college I made Garry’s Mod / SFM animations. I was slow at it, and the subject matter was often something dumb, but a few times I made big hits. I had large gaps where I didn’t have inspiration for big lengthy animations and instead uploaded silly gameplay clips or whatever seemed funny at the time, but my old channel is visible here:

https://www.youtube.com/Katana314

I finally decided I didn’t want my whole creative legacy to be based around manipulation of a single game company’s models, so I wrote a book. It’s on Nook, Kobo, and several other sites (not Amazon) and called Rangers of the Frostscape.

That said, slow feedback and low visibility hit me maybe more than it should have. I’ve seen many artists make things for the joy of creation, which I had to admit wasn’t what I was doing. Fighting purely for popularity is a doomed venture these days.

A fractal calculator where each non-operation buttons are calculator themselves once you zoom in, and the result in that calculator becomes the number it puts as a button, in C.

Literally the coolest thing I've made was a beer fridge when I was home brewing. Outfitted a standing freezer with a CO2 manifold and taps in the door. Three homebrews on tap and I could even use it to make eisbocks.

A startup sound and a shutdown sound, about 20 years ago.

Just 2 short drum fills, made in LMMS or something.

Had fade-in on one, and panning effect thrown in on the other.

I liked them.

Can still kind of replay the shutdown one in my head :-)

I made a skin for Winamp 2.

Today i made a "toddler-stopper" from the side of an old cupboard. Now the little goblin can't crawl through the loom (yes, loom) and get to the nice book shelf on the other side of the room.

I made a tensegrity table similar to this: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2Foriginals%2Fae%2F17%2Ff5%2Fae17f5be987f05a170f6dc84ef54544e.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=d25b8ea019ed112df8de7a0f38d1180627aed20690f1b0319af7c26ba2af5535

made some baby toys for my friends a while ago, those were pretty cool

took some hardwoods, printed a template, rough cut on the band saw, route the profile with a guided bit, make some neat wheels out of laminated hardwoods and a hole saw and sanding. they came out quite well

I made a copper guillotine at school from scrap copper they had laying around and i was allowed to take. And as soon as i was done they didnt allow me to take any more copper :(

One day it also "suddenly" vanished at my parents. Hmmm yeah lets be honest they threw it out

A simulation vein for my preceptees out of the soft face part of the O2 tubing full of cranberry juice for the vein, a knot on one end and an IV / syringe on the other for pressure, and a mepilex over it for the skin / soft tissue. I can make sure they know how to get the needle in and out and activate the safety properly before I let them stick me a couple times for practice before moving onto a patient.

We have enema bottles full of mineral oil that I use to grease hinges and wheels. Really the hospital supply room is macgyvers wet dream it's one of my favorite parts of night shift nursing.

Also my dog chewed out the back of my zip up hoodie so I used Elmer's as basting glue and put the inside of an upholstery style pillowcase from goodwill on the inside, sewed a fun shape around it, then made a cutout back patch. And the reason that hoodie even has a zipper is because I had to put one in after the EMTs scraped my drunk ass out of a ditch and cut it off.

I made a ton of ebook readers out of stuff that shoudnt be ebook readers. Its fun.

A server rack fan controller circuit. It's not finished yet, as some wiring remains. I'm currently waiting for my 3D printer to finish a mounting block that will hold the thermostat relay, the fan capacitors, as well as cover up the terminals under the breakers, as I don't want any exposed 230V.

Getting a DIN rail mounted in a 19" rack was a bit of work, but everything now has a compact mounting location at the topmost rack position.