PS5 Scalper

 

Sometimes, you just have to  wonder if there's a limit to human stupidity. I, for one, refuse to buy anything more expensive than retail price. 

104 WPM

 

I was able to type very fast. I keep wondering how I did that because I wasn't able to type this fast on 10fastfingers.com and yet I was able to do it here consistently. 

About the only thing that I can think of is that I spent a lot of time beta testing my typing program and that loosens my fingers somewhat. I definitely noticed smoother typing, not as jerky as before.

All things considered, I'm happy to type a consistent 100 WPM. I think I'll finish the Typing Tutorial program.  I already had the finger lessons done. It only took a couple hours to do. 

100 WPM Goal Achieved!

 

And this is the result of the different evaluation method. 100 WPM effective. 

Using word based scoring,  I typed 10 words wrong.

Using character based scoring,  I typed 8 letters wrong. Seems like I typed "R" character wrong 3 times. 

Quite a big difference in scoring.  I would've scored 91 WPM using word based. Character based yields 100 WPM. Honestly, this is the first time I hit over 100WPM raw. I'm happy with this performance. 

Oh, I didn't bother setting the date. So, that's an old date.

Not a bad result going from 77 WPM on Sep 29 to 100 WPM on Nov 18.

DIY Typing tutor

 

The Typing Tutor program is coming along well. I have finished making up 21 lesson plans, and daily practice will come from there. Quotes will need some quotations, like typeracer. Badword is words you mistyped. Custom will be like custom lessons similar to keybr. Retry is basically repeating the practice without it creating new text.

Another improvement is that the timer won't start until you start typing. It is very desirable behavior. I still can't believe that it's possible to be done in bash.

So far so good. I still have to decide in file/directory structure. I will also use some hidden files. Maybe also change the scoring,  instead of word based, it'll be character based. That will give me higher scores.

Coding it isn't really that hard. Design, that's hard.

Lunch Journal #8

 

Simple breakfast of Egg, potato, and mashed ground beef. I think I need some veggies. Well, that's what multi vitamin tablets are for.

Eaten right off pan for ease of cleaning. 

Bug in MagPi pdf files?

 

I am trying to convert pdf files to images, and trying out different resolutions as well as jpg and png formats. Somehow, the jpg format is rendered incorrectly. Not all of them, though. So it looks like the conversion will fail with sophisticated multi layered pages.

I can make do with png format, but this was disappointing. 

Looks like a lot of MagPi magazines have faulty pdf format in there. I get a lot of errors when reading them using command line pdf tools.

Lunch Journal #7

 

Rice, Tilapia fish, kimchi, egg. People told me that Tilapia is a bad kind of fish, but it's cheap. The alternative of not eating it would be fish oil capsule.

DIY Typing Tutor in Bash

 

So, when somehow the 10fastfingers.com broke on me, I was left with no good way to practice typing. Well, I decided to write my own. Using BASH. That's shell scripting. 

I learned quite a bit about shell scripting, but there's more to do still. The biggest problem is not the coding. Actually, the biggest time sink is the design. I'm on my third design and still going on. 

The whole scripts is only about 4K. So, recreating this should only take an enjoyable afternoon. There's some advanced manipulation there, though.

Since this is done on Raspberry pi, I use pdftotext to extract texts to create my dictionary.  Turns out it's relatively quick, even on my RaspiZero. 100 most popular Project Gutenberg texts, however, took about 20 minutes to process all dictionary, the longest being top 100, 200 most common words.

I will update this later. I got some ideas about vt100 terminal cursor manipulation. 

Raspberry Pi 400 is Released

 News from early this morning: 

https://youtu.be/P1E5xszQqV8

That's Christopher Barnatt from Explaining Computers who is obviously very excited to share the news. Rightly so.

I'm comparing this to Spectrum Next and its successor Spectrum Next 2, and Raspi 4 wins hands down. It's an excellent value for the money! Not to mention that it is in perfect shape to include in your bug out bag, for those of you prepping for the apocalypse. I'm holding out for an 8 GB model, since I'm an artist and we deal with RAM hungry apps all the time. The only time VM is acceptable is when doing USB boot with SSD.

http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/im-booting-my-raspberry-pi-4-usb-ssd

Jeff Geerling has done a fantastic job detailing the process, and I'm sold! I will be seriously thinking about adding SSD to the stable.

Most people who have seen it agree that it's a nice device with cool form factor. Some people have a little bit wish for a slightly different form factor. I'm no different. Let me tell you that the fact that this exist really warms my heart. It's as close to perfection as can be.

I do wonder why they still use micro HDMI instead of regular size ones? I think there's enough space, so probably cost and manufacturing concerns. No big deal. I'm just curious. 

Lunch Journal #6: Staple meal

 

Rice and hotdogs. Add Sriracha for taste. Eggs if I didn't eat it for breakfast. Vegetables, kimchi in this case, optional. Vitamin pills if I don't eat veggies. 

If this look simple and boring, that's correct. This is staple food that I eat every day, 6 days a week. I sometimes treat myself on Sundays. But I need staple food to get me through the week: simple, quick, and cheap.

Most people warned me about consuming hotdogs long-term, and they're right. Mystery meat pink goo and all that. But they're really cheap. Regular meat is $5 per lbs. Hotdogs are half that.

The answer is that I alternate between foods. Hotdogs and meat. Rice, ramen, and bread. Something like that.