Jul 2nd: Someone has ported the original You Don't Know Jack to run in the browser. There's also a blog which dives into the internal workings and file formats [via matt s]
I've been playing Minecraft again lately, and one of the more complex mechanics is around enchanting tools and armor. The order in which you apply and combine enchanting books can be the different between costing 20 levels, and being too expensive to even complete. There's a hidden formula (the prior work penalty) that goes into it. I was looking to see if anyone had built a tool to solve it for you, but I just found other people asking the same question. So I created one.
It's called Minecraft Enchantment Ordering Tool and the source is on GitHub.
May 18th: This write up on finding arbitrary code execution in ExifTool is interesting both because it's Perl code that I used almost 20 year ago (and is still the best way to do it!), and that it's a great explanation of finding and exploiting vulnerable code.
May 9th: While researching the different colored bands for bundles of American bank notes, I found this fascinating page about the rules for US currency deposits.
I thought my geography was reasonable, but I only hit 52 of the 150 largest countries by area. You get a few tries per country.
The harder version has all 193 members of the UN.
May 4th: It's been three and a half months since I got PHP CI working on Travis, so of course it's now broken. Github Actions are the new hotness, so I figured out the right magical config to run multi-version CI for PHP over there instead, and it runs much faster too.
I'd seen the photo a few times, but this is the first I'd read about what was actually being wired up. Turns out it's a semi-mechanical pre-computer for accounting and it's even more interesting than it first looked.
Apr 19th: More in the single-serving-webapps-for-games category - a lovely little app for exploring the artifacts in Egg Inc. The web is such a good platrofmr for developing and delivering these micro-apps.
Mar 31st: If you're playing Stardew Valley (there's a been a bit of a resurgence with the recent updates), then I recommend using Stardew Profits. I love these little single-serving webapps that do exactly what you need and are served from github.io.
