Media - Page 14 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of our TV in the living room showing Plex's preview screen for Hackers.

Oh man, tonight we watched Hackers (1995) which I'd never actually seen before. SO GLORIOUSLY TERRIBLE, everyone is just totally hamming it up, and oh man the quotes. "Set your computer to receive a file!" I think wins my award for the best one. I also love how a little PowerBook with a shitty LCD ("With active matrix!" Crash Override exclaims) is somehow projecting what's on its internal display onto the faces of the people using it. 😂 And the "Hack the Gibson" scene at the climax went on so unnecessarily long I feel like they must have made too many computer graphics sequences but decided they HAD to use them. I'm always amused by TV shows whose main characters are allegedly high school students, and yet the students all look like they're at least 30. I feel like Derry Girls has probably gotten the closest to "These people could actually be in high school", with the exception of Michelle (and even she was borderline). Man, what a killer soundtrack though.

our house darkroom tv

Posted on 25 May 2024, 21:33

A photo of a small microcontroller circuit board sitting above a window, with a bunch of wires messily coming out of it.

The ESP32 hacking continues apace, I soldered together a two-into-one ground wire so I could have both the outdoor temperature sensor and the outdoor air quality sensor attached to the one ESP32 board, instead of needing two separate boards! (The boards I'm using have a 3.3V power pin and a 5V power pin, but only one ground pin.) I also fixed up my MicroPython code because it turns out it wasn't ACTUALLY asynchronous, it only appeared that way. 😬 Until now all the boards that had multiple sensors were checking both sensors at 30-second intervals which masked the problem, but while the temperature sensor is checked every 30 seconds, the air quality sensor is only every three minutes. The end result was that the temperature sensor would be read, 30 seconds later the air quality one would be, and then three minutes later the temperature sensor would be read again, then after another 30 seconds the air quality sensor again, etc. Oops.

our house diy darkroom esp32

Posted on 22 May 2024, 11:29

A screenshot from Starfield of an abandoned lab, the lighting is very moody, it's dark red emergency lighting towards the left and more brighter greener light at the right, there are chairs sitting away from their desks like people left in a rush, and a bunch of notes and papers scattered on both the desks and the floor. On one wall is a whiteboard with a bunch of drawings on it.

I started a new game of Starfield because the big update came out recently and I'd completely lost track of what I was doing in my last game (I don't think I've played it since last October) and man, I'd forgotten how GOOD the environmental design is in this. Everything feels properly lived-in no matter where you are, there are great little details and bits and bobs everywhere. It really feels like somewhere that would exist for real, rather than your stereotypical clean sleek sci-fi minimalism.

screenshot gaming starfield

Posted on 20 May 2024, 22:06

A photo of our TV showing the very start of a game of Guitar Hero, with the two scrolling tracks side-by-side. The song is Whiplash by Metallica.

Just spent the last three hours playing Guitar Hero: Metallica with the seventeen year-old. 🤘🏻 They're big into Metallica and Megadeth and all the old-school bands like that (and they're currently wearing a Rob Zombie t-shirt) so it was extra fun. I started out on easy difficulty and was doing very well, so moved up to medium where you add in the fourth button on your fretting hand. Unfortunately I realised that all my bass guitar practice had made that very difficult because when I'm using my pinky finger together with my index finger on an actual bass, you really have to stretch out the pinky to reach the correct fret, and I kept duly doing that and ending up on the orange button instead of blue. 😛 I gave it a red hot go and then bumped it back to easy again at the end of our session, haha. I had also entirely forgotten just how noisy the old consoles were, the Xbox Series X and its utter silence has completely spoilt me!

our house lily darkroom gaming guitar hero

Posted on 18 May 2024, 18:25

A photo of a dark blue rectangular upright box with two little plastic wheels on the bottom on one side. It says "Ecosa mattress" on the side, and while there's nothing for scale the website informed us that it's 43x43x110cm.

Mattressinnabox anyone? It even has wheels and a handle on top! (It was delivered at 5:30pm tonight and you're meant to give it at least ten hours to expand once you unpack it so we're going to take it out first thing in the morning tomorrow.)

our house darkroom mattress

Posted on 6 May 2024, 18:58

Metal Tones in A Minor Pentatonic

I made another short little song! This one is 100% me playing all the instruments (guitar, bass guitar, drums, keyboard) rather than doing it via loops, and I'm very pleased to report that I didn't need to quantise the drums at all, I smashed the timing (the same can't be said for the guitar and bass guitar, they both need a _little_ bit of nudging, though I didn't realise they needed it until I had recorded the drums). The guitar was a bit frustrating to get right, I had most of it but the little "solo"-esque bit in the middle required quite a few takes. I also subsequently realised that if you have the loop mode on and are recording something, it'll just keep looping over and recording the whole looped section as a different take, so I did that for the drums and ended up recording it like nine or ten times through then listened to them back and picked the best. The guitar and bass sounds come from Two Notes' "Genome" software (https://www.two-notes.com/en/genome/), I had quite a bit of fun dialing in the sound, and I used my Epiphone SG Standard rather than the JIVA for a bit of change.

guitar drums audio epiphone sg standard bass guitar midi keyboard two notes genome

Posted on 5 May 2024, 15:05

A photo of a small scruffy blonde dog lying on a balled-up dark blue blanket on the floor, when he has his dog bed right next to him.

Beanie very carefully had to remove his top blanket from his bed and lie on it _next_ to his bed.

beanie our house dog darkroom

Posted on 3 May 2024, 23:39

A photo of two blue circuit board modules (a BME280 temperature/humidity/air pressure sensor and an ENS160 indoor air quality sensor) that are 2.5cm by 2.5cm, and two of the Adafruit microcontrollers that are packed full of little components and are even smaller, 2cm by 2.5cm.

Moar microcontroller goodies! (20¢ coin for scale.) These are Adafruit's QT Py RP2040s and oh my god they're so tiny, they're even smaller than the PiicoDev sensor boards! I'm going to use them with the 3x LED module boards I have to give us a status light for each of outdoor dew point, outdoor air quality, and indoor air quality. (Update: Oh goddammit. I'm so used to playing with my ESP32 stuff that I completely blanked that not all RP2040 boards come with wifi, and these don't. 🤦🏻‍♀️)

our house darkroom new toys nerd shit microcontroller

Posted on 1 May 2024, 14:41

A screenshot of a Grafana dashboard showing a gauge panel with the air quality index at 3 (it ranges from 1-5, 1 being good and 5 being very bad), and two spark graphs showing the equivalent CO2 (currently 761 parts per million) and the total volatile organic compounds readings (currently 258 parts per billion).

My ESP32 hacking has continued and I've updated my code (https://github.com/VirtualWolf/esp32-sensor-reader-mqtt) to support the ScioSense ENS160 indoor air quality sensor! It measures eCO2, total volatile organic compounds, and gives an air quality index value based on those two readings. Given that you can daisy-chain I2C devices to connect more than one to a single board, I also changed how my sensor reader repo works and now you can specify multiple sensors and it'll read from all of them and send each reading to a different MQTT topic. So now we have the BME280 temperature/humidity sensor AND the ENS160 air quality sensor hooked up to the ESP32 in the lounge room, and of course I've added a section on my Grafana dashboard to display the data. 😁 My next stop is to bodge together some wiring so I can use the outdoor (nice STEMMA QT connector) BME280 sensor on the same board as the outdoor (standard pins, not I2C) PMS5003 air quality sensor, and not have to have two separate ESP32s for the both of them.

diy screenshot nerd shit esp32 grafana

Posted on 27 April 2024, 21:59

A photo of our dining table with a Warhammer Quest game set up on it. There's lots of cards and dice everywhere, and in middle are a bunch of variously-shaped tiles connected together that look like the inside of a set of buildings. There's four hero miniatures at the right (one heavily-armoured warrior woman with a sword, a vampire hunter with a long leather coat and a big hat, a steampunk dwarf, and a priest with a rich red robe and a big staff) plus two groups of hostile miniatures at various points on the board (a group of four skeleton warriors plus a huge zombie thing in a Mongolian hat and wielding a MASSIVE axe).

A photo of our four heroes miniatures standing next to and being positively LOOMED over by the Vargskyr, which is a massive hunched over demon/bat hybrid thing twice the height of the heroes, with red skin and brown fur down its arms. It has blood around its mouth and dripping from its claws and there's a pile of skulls on its base.

A photo of Dagnai my dwarven hero, he's a steampunk-looking dwarf with an axe and a harpoon gun thing, facing off through a doorway against three shambling zombies and four skeleton warriors in rusty armour and wearing rotted red cloaks.

A full two months after the last game (oops), we had @wobin over for another Warhammer Quest game! We did another Deliverance journey, where you need to stay ahead of the Suffocating Gravetide curse and warn the citizens of its approach, and we absolutely smashed it despite the Vargskyr making an appearance. We found from the last one of these we did that as long as you can get sufficiently ahead at the beginning it's not too much trouble to keep clear of the Gravetide, it's when you get stuck fighting hostiles and can't make any forward progress that you really end up in trouble. To be fair, @yayKM's character was VERY heavily wounded in that fight, but thankfully I had a very convenient healing potion equipment I was able to give her and she rolled very well and was able to recover all the wounds she'd lost. We did a lot better this game, everyone ended up inspired, and my dwarf Dagnai singlehandedly faced down an entire room of zombies and skeletons and took most of them out, barely taking a scratch in return! The next game is going to be a rough start though, I rolled EXTREMELY poorly on the event table at the end of the game, and THE big bad, Radukar the Wolf, is going to make an appearance at the beginning of next game despite him ordinarily not showing up until we're Level 3 (we're Level 2 right now). 😬

our house darkroom gaming games workshop warhammer quest

Posted on 25 April 2024, 22:13