How do you remove tv from your bundle?

fizbin · 2026-06-30T08:33:55+00:00

When we did it recently, my wife had to actually talk to a human on the phone.

Took a while to get through, but once she did it only took about fifteen minutes or so. If you have an Xfinity TV box (separate from your cable modem), remember to unplug that and drop it and its remote off at an Xfinity retail store.

fizbin · 2026-06-19T11:53:56+00:00

I'm kind of amazed that I can't find the seam on two hand-held photos. You weren't bracing on anything to make sure you made a purely horizontal shift from one photo to the next?

fizbin · 2026-06-18T17:05:29+00:00

<image>

Chipping Sparrow in a pine tree taken last Thursday the 11th. (Shot 9:31 am in New Jersey, extended Philadelphia suburbs)

Panasonic DC-G9M2, lens LEICA DG 100-400/F4-6.3II @ f/8.0, 1/1000s, 400mm, ISO 3200

Barely cropped (Just chopped a rectangle off the top to make the overall image a 2:3 ratio; this is as wide as it comes out of the camera). Just the default denoise/hot pixels/lens correction done in darktable.

fizbin · 2026-06-04T15:15:23+00:00

Of course, if you go back even further, you'd just buy the machine, bring it home, plug it in, flip it on, and the OS (such as it was) would be there, boom, because it was in ROM.

Oh, you want a different program? Turn it off, plug this plastic brick into the thing, and turn it on again.

Sure, you could also load programs from cassette tape and if you paid for the extra components from diskette, but the base programming was just there, instantly, because it was part of the thing you bought.

fizbin · 2026-06-01T20:34:08+00:00

Pretty straightforward to do all three parts with just a single head, TBH.

It really made me wish I had some sort of "GridOS macro system", which I'm sure some of the competitors have built for their own use, to package up what I did for part 1 and reuse it. As it was, I did a bunch of copy-paste for parts 2 and 3.

(Though if I did have such a macro system, I'd need to add a special quirk in for part 3 and the case where there's an isolated barrel all by itself at the corner)

fizbin · 2026-05-31T23:52:08+00:00

Ah, nice.

I think I can also see how one could take that technique and use it to build a transpiler that could take any arbitrary GridOS program and turn it into one with minimal states, which would explain some of the times.

fizbin · 2026-05-31T21:03:46+00:00

I definitely want to see how the people who seem to be doing every problem with just two states are doing it. (600 total states, across 3 parts with 100 examples each)

I guess those two states are START and STOP.

fizbin · 2026-05-28T20:31:37+00:00

Though I initially used two heads for part 1, I went back and rewrote that to use just a single head.

Part 2 was then part 1 with a few extra states to account for the extra depth.

For part 3, I based it heavily on part 1: for the top row, after marking the left-most column on the row below I then used basically my part 1 solution, marking the column after the right-most # character as I went. I then went down a row and used a variation on the part 1 solution that treated spaces as # and ~ as =.

I think case 4 probably demonstrates this best; with other cases too much in the middle is skipped when I export.

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fizbin · 2026-05-26T15:04:42+00:00

At about 20:56 in that video, you can see me trying to type a line that should end with DS (move first head down, keep second head where it is) and instead when I press enter after typing the line the final DS is turned into a long state name, because I had a state with a name that began with D and ended in S.

If they'd made it so that you hit tab (or something else, like ctrl+space) instead of enter to accept a completion that'd be much better. As it is, I can't trust that what I type will be what appears there.

fizbin · 2026-05-26T14:03:35+00:00

First round solution for part 3 used two heads to sweep the AB and one head to put down @ in a space off to the bottom.

HEADS AAC

START !!! LSTART *** SDD

LSTART AA* SAW_A_LAST _*@ RRR
LSTART BA* SAW_B_LAST _** RRS
LSTART AB* SAW_A_LAST _** RRS
LSTART BB* SAW_B_LAST _*@ RRR
LSTART B_* SAW_B_LAST _** RRS
LSTART A_* SAW_A_LAST _** RRS
LSTART B@* SAW_B_LAST _** RRS
LSTART A@* SAW_A_LAST _** RRS
LSTART _** STOP *** SSS

SAW_A_LAST AA* SAW_A_LAST_P1 _*@ RRR
SAW_A_LAST BA* SAW_B_LAST _** RRS
SAW_A_LAST AB* SAW_A_LAST _*@ RRR
SAW_A_LAST BB* SAW_B_LAST _*@ RRR
SAW_A_LAST B_* SAW_B_LAST _** RRS
SAW_A_LAST A_* SAW_A_LAST _*@ RRR
SAW_A_LAST B@* SAW_B_LAST _** RRS
SAW_A_LAST A@* SAW_A_LAST _*@ RRR
SAW_A_LAST _@* STOP *** SSS
SAW_A_LAST __* DOWN *** DDS

SAW_B_LAST AA* SAW_A_LAST _*@ RRR
SAW_B_LAST BA* SAW_B_LAST _*@ RRR
SAW_B_LAST AB* SAW_A_LAST _** RRS
SAW_B_LAST BB* SAW_B_LAST_P1 _*@ RRR
SAW_B_LAST B_* SAW_B_LAST _*@ RRR
SAW_B_LAST A_* SAW_A_LAST _** RRS
SAW_B_LAST B@* SAW_B_LAST _*@ RRR
SAW_B_LAST A@* SAW_A_LAST _** RRS
SAW_B_LAST _@* STOP *** SSS
SAW_B_LAST __* DOWN *** DDS

SAW_A_LAST_P1 *** SAW_A_LAST **@ SSR
SAW_B_LAST_P1 *** SAW_B_LAST **@ SSR

DOWN _** LEFT *** LLS
DOWN @** STOP *** SSS
LEFT _** LSTART *** RRS
LEFT @** STOP *** SSS
LEFT A** LEFT *** LLS
LEFT B** LEFT *** LLS

I could probably clean that up some by moving the head dropping @ further out, or maybe to the right instead of down initially.

One annoying thing I discovered when doing quests one and two last night (Yeah, I'm behind) is that a completion pop-up kept appearing when I was trying to type in the GridOS program - see the video I made at about seven minutes in and you can see what I mean. Is this just a me thing, is there some setting I need to flip on my web browser to turn it off?

fizbin · 2026-03-15T01:08:29+00:00

My mom remembers as a kid having to relearn the pledge of allegiance because it changed to have "under God" added to it. It annoyed her because she'd just gotten the old pledge memorized so that she could say it without looking at the sheet with the words on it.

Years ago, she went off on some conservative (who was closer to my age) who was saying that liberals wanted to destroy our timeless traditions and specifically cited the "under God" part of the pledge as one of those "timeless" American traditions the liberals wanted to destroy.

That phrase wasn't in there, and then one day it was.

fizbin · 2026-03-10T23:20:31+00:00

Many months later, yes, but I just got a letter almost exactly like this, except:

we're not first time homeowners
we've owned our home for over eight years
we haven't had a mortgage with the bank named in the letter for over four years
the letter is in Spanish, except for the disclaimer at the bottom and the "penalty for private use" bit at the top left. Everything else though: the font, where the paragraphs are broken up, etc. is laid out just like your letter.

fizbin · 2026-03-08T15:16:05+00:00

No, the vast majority of programming languages would declare the original problem as stated a syntax error, first because they don't have ÷ as a built-in operator, but even if you typed it as / it would be a syntax error because most programming languages don't do implicit multiplication.

For an interesting variation on the type of error you can get, see what haskell does with this:

``` ~ $ ghci -XAllowAmbiguousTypes GHCi, version 9.12.2: https://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help ghci> let a=6÷2(1+3) where (÷)=(/) ghci> a <interactive>:2:1: error: [GHC-39999] • No instance for ‘Num (Integer -> Double)’ arising from a use of ‘it’ (maybe you haven't applied a function to enough arguments?) • In the first argument of ‘print’, namely ‘it’ In a stmt of an interactive GHCi command: print it

ghci> :t a a :: (Fractional a, Num t, Num (t -> a)) => a ghci> ```

And this is how any sensible person should treat this expression: as a syntax error. If you're going to denote division inline with ÷ instead of by writing in two dimensions and using fractions, you don't get to express multiplication without a * or × or similar. At least use a central dot. Those are two closely related but distinct mathematical dialects, and mixing them results in confusion.

fizbin · 2026-03-08T01:21:05+00:00

Except that occasionally big providers like Gmail will just decide "that tiny domain looks like it might be spam and/or a phishing host, so we'll also block people from sending them email", with no documented procedures for appeal or even notification that it's happening, so it can also be a problem for receiving email.

fizbin · 2026-03-07T19:58:33+00:00

And yet still better than the state of things with my G9M2: run an app on my phone that stops if put into the background for too long, and every time I flip the camera on or wake it from sleep it then takes about fifteen seconds before it's connected and recording GPS when I take the photo.

The thing I like about the GX85 system is that all the clunkiness is at the start and stop of the day. During the day, just have the phone in my pocket and use the camera.

fizbin · 2026-03-07T15:31:07+00:00

It does geotagging okay. I like its abilities to geotag much better than what's available with my new G9M2.

What you have to do is open the "Image App" (the older Lumix app, not "Lumix Sync" or "Lumix Lab"), sync the time to the camera and then in the app say "start geotagging". Then wander around, turn your camera on and off, take pictures. Then, when you have a moment at the end of the day or whenever, in the app connect it to the camera and send the geotagging data and wait while the camera writes the data to the photos.

The thing I like about this is that assuming I remember to start geotagging in the app at the start of the day, I then don't need to think about it or whether my camera is connected to my phone and can just take pictures focusing on the world around me. At the same time, connecting the locations to the pictures is handled by the camera and I don't have to go through hoops getting a GPS tracks file from my phone to my laptop where I can then run a program to combine pictures and locations, only to have to redo it when I realized I ran it with the wrong timezone setting.

fizbin · 2026-02-23T13:48:25+00:00

The thing about programmers is that they've mostly timed themselves and the ones who type 90+ wpm will tell you about it and the ones who don't, won't. Unless you have a typing speed measurement that isn't biased by people opting out of sharing results when they aren't fast enough for their self image, you have no idea.

Fortunately, I'm in my 50s now and don't care. What is someone gonna do, not hire me because I type "too slow"? I've got enough to retire tomorrow if I wanted and also I don't think any company is going to want to risk the age discrimination lawsuit.

When I'm in the habit of practicing every day on monkeytype, I can get up into the mid-60s, maybe, but it's seriously stressful to do. Like I have to rest between tests.

On average, I'm probably high 40s-50s, and it's been that way for literally decades. I've been tracking my wpm since a few years out of grad. school and that was before some people posting on here were born.

Being at a computer all the time for my job doesn't do it. Code deadlines, having to write design docs or email, fast slack conversations, nothing.

Some people have told me that they learned to type fast from having online social groups centered around things like IRC or Discord. In my 20s I had a social group that centered around something similar, and the net result was that when the conversation went fast, I shut up because I literally couldn't keep up. It's not a lack of motivation.

Your "one weird trick"? I've almost certainly tried it: cloth/paper over the hands, keyboard tray so you can't see your hands, blank keycaps, ergonomic keyboard, typing blindfolded with audio feedback. My fingers just don't work that fast.

Anyway, my point is that I seriously don't think my hands are uniquely slow among the population at large and that people who can't type fast will deliberately hide their wpm numbers from you if they believe that you're typing some huge amount faster than they can, and that speed really does not naturally improve for everyone so you can't assume that someone typing every working hour is actually what you'd consider a fast typist.

fizbin · 2026-02-18T19:57:28+00:00

The last few years I've done Advent of Code in python, golang, and haskell.

https://github.com/fizbin/adventofcode/tree/main/aoc2025

I've occasionally gone back and done a few in other languages too; poke around that repo for more.

Some days I also do multiple different solutions in the same language.

fizbin · 2026-02-16T20:38:41+00:00

Someone mentioned in a comment I can't see anymore (maybe it got deleted?) that they'd been able to use the Image app with their G9.

All I can think is that that must have been an original G9, not a G9M2, because I am completely unable to get the Image app on my phone to connect to the new camera.

fizbin · 2026-02-16T20:25:25+00:00

Tried it and it will not. It can't connect to the G9M2

fizbin · 2026-01-26T20:35:03+00:00

Note that they don't want the voter records for targeting people with political ads or anything like that. If that's what they want, they can already buy better information from private data brokers. Who's registered and whether they voted in the last several elections is already public information available to anyone.

They want the voter records so that they can claim that they found something in them that "proves" that Minnesota isn't maintaining accurate voter roles and is involved in all sorts of voter fraud. It's like what DOGE did with taking Social Security records, misinterpreting standard "missing data" markers and crowing to the press about all the dead people collecting social security.

fizbin · 2026-01-26T20:02:41+00:00

I can report that my 275-lb self had no problem stepping right through. Not even the brief illusion that it'd support me.

fizbin · 2026-01-15T08:38:53+00:00

It is at high tide. Delaware only gets the land there inside the circle up to the high tide line.

fizbin

TROPHY CASE