#funny thing all the files are on a separate usb because the computer is so bad it cant have anything on its actual system

[thedrotter]

today my computer has felt in a pranksty mood ! it felt funny and goofy and decided to not let me save anything and when i tried to open my file it said it was corrupted or didnt exist...☺️☺️ hours... of work...☺️☺️ and just a few days ago it deleted multiple hours of work on another file ! ☺️☺️

dear computer🩷 i will put you in the microwave throw you at a wall and crush you

[smorbee]

iBook Pyramid Behind the scenes!

This is a long one. Also keep in mind we made this a year ago so were going completely off of memory at this point BUT we do have the files. Unfortunately we didn't save specific versions of it really early into its creation so all the blender files close to being finished.

We have an intense appreciation for funky old computers. People correctly identified inspiration from the Thinkpad 701C. Less obvious in the final design but something that almost certainly influenced us as well was the 12-inch powerbook g4.

There is something very satisfying about nearly-square shaped laptops.

Others mentioned the JVC 3100R pyramid TV which, you'll be surprised to learn, we had never actually seen until after working on this project. The resemblance is uncanny and yet, entirely coincidental. Honestly if we had seen this thing, it probably would have had an effect on our design because the way that hinge is set up is beautiful. Our thought process was simply just comically emulating the form factor of a modern laptop but with a giant CRT.

We're pretty sure the idea started out as simply wanting to design a full profile keyboard into a macbook-like laptop because funny, and at some point the butterfly keyboard came to mind and we said Screw it and implemented that into it as well. Heres the keyboard separated into the different sections.

Sorry to say that the keyboard does not actually contain any switches. (You'll see that this computer was modeled to be viewed a limited angle)

Heres the keyboard from the top.

Once we got going with it, the whole thing was turned into a big joke of course, clashing many different eras of technology into one. Such as this massive beige tank of a "laptop" having a single USB C port as its main I/O.

And same with the software. This is the texture for the display, Which was taken from our real (unfortunately not crt based) macbook setup at the time. Except not quite, as the original screenshot was 16:10. We simply edited the image to make it 4:3. This is running mac os 12 with a majority of the icons changed to early osx equivalents.

We'll be real and admit the animation is not very intricate, theres no real "rig" for the model, parts are just parented together because we did all this in about 2 days. That said, we had loads of fun animating it still, trying to imitate the motion of someone struggling to lift the heavy top up before it swings open with an inaudible, but easily imaginable "Thud". Making the whole body shake and the trackball jump slightly was the finishing touch to make it complete.

The wire for the trackball was made using a circle with the screw modifier and then applied to a curve. Here's what it looks like with each modifier applied sequentially.

And then making the trackball itself a handle for the curve, we can have the cable be dynamic. (Yes, we notice that the trackball in fact has no mouse buttons. No good explanation for that, I think we just forgot lmao.)

For the screen, we make use of a location transform on the UV mapping for the satisfying detail of the screen distorting from the impact, which we swear we've seen before but no matter how hard we (safely) bumped our CRT monitor we weren't able to recreate it. Nonetheless even if its not entirely realistic we wouldn't remove it for anything.

speaking of which, an utterly useless detail considering the resolution and distortion of the final renders and yet we added anyways just for our own amusement is that the display has a shadowmask, simply done by just multiplying it over the base screen texture.

Combined with a glass material over the inner part of the screen, it utterly destroys low sample count renders of the screen and makes the project at least 3x as prone to crashing so thats cool! (it crashed on us while we were writing this section)

We've learned since in future projects that trying to optimize polygon count and materials is still very important even for offline rendered content. We can never be truly free from the constraints of memory limitations 😔

the final step was getting a more authentic less "polished" look in the compositing. This step can get very complicated based on the specific look were going for, but for this render its really just basic color correction and some blurring and sharpening steps. We used the default fake jitter node in blender at the time, though in more recent stuff we use the non-denoised image with filters applied to it instead, so its less uniform between images and more uniquely degraded looking.

Though we'd do a number of things differently now were still pleased with the final result. especially in animated form.

Heres an overview of the scene:

This is the bezeled apple logo in polygon form. Its simply an alpha texture with a normal map:

Thats all for now! Thank you for reading!

[tonystarktogo]

Finally, the second part of Part II: [Or read the whole chapter on AO3]

Most of Tony’s tech — the really good, impressive stuff that would be illegal to keep in your basement if anyone knew that Tony keeps it in his basement — is locked away in his workshop. A hidden room in the basement — because clichés have survived for a reason and Tony would build himself a laguna filled with flesh-eating piranha if he thought he could get away with it — that can only be accessed via a biometric scan, four separate passwords and a security question posed by JARVIS. [The answer to said question is irrelevant, considering acceptance depends on voice recognition, voice modulation and the fact that you have to sing your answer. Not that Tony is paranoid or anything but JARVIS.]

continues below the cut

But because Tony is a sensible person [and would rather carve out his own heart with a screwdriver than lead some unknown assassin with unclear motivations straight to his best, most precious inventions, his family] he’s stuck with the official computer in his office. It’s as up-to-date as can be, of course. Even has some nifty improvements and upgrades that probably violate some terms of agreement or another, but it’s still not the same thing. It can’t match JARVIS’ processing power, for one, and also, it doesn’t joke back. 

Tony has nothing if not high expectations when it comes to his tech.

The USB stick Agent-Definitely-Not-J has handed him is a bit of a nightmare — that’s the only bright side on this whole disaster of a night. Say what you want, but Tony delights in a challenge and the program on this USB stick presents him with one. There aren’t just multiple layers of encryption Tony has to crack, there’s also two separate failsafes in place that will wipe the information if triggered. It’s decent coding — again, Tony is a bit of a snob when it comes to these things — and makes good work of the onion concept. Tony could probably lose himself in this, play around a little with the code, see what else it can do, if he wasn’t hyper-aware of the armed asshole glowering at the screen over his shoulder.

Harry Tasker Version 2.0 doesn’t appear to be as fluent in coding as Tony is — few people are, and the guy wouldn’t be here in the first place if he didn’t need Tony’s help, that much is clear — but Tony suspects that he gets a lot more than he lets on. Not stupid, this guy. Not stupid at all.

It’s a shame his manners are a lost cause.

[There’s a gun aimed at the back of Tony’s head that he’s doing a marvelous job of pretending not to notice. Cleary, Red October has never learned how to play nice. Still, this isn’t the first time Tony’s been held at gunpoint. It’s not even the first time someone has been stupid enough to threaten Tony in his own home. And he would have retaliated already, except— 

If Steve’s really in trouble — is dead — then Tony needs to know. Getting the information home-delivered is a lot easier and less traceable than alternative methods he’d have to use. And besides just because you have a few aces up your sleeve doesn’t mean you shouldn’t play along when it suits you. Because contrary to what Mister Stane liked to accuse him of, Tony is anything but stupid. This James guy has shown up out of the blue, grief and fury at war in his eyes, but that doesn’t mean anything. That doesn’t mean James might not be the person that killed Steve — or is currently hunting him.]

“Who was Steve working for?” Tony asks eventually, leans back into his seat with a sigh and watches his latest program work its magic.

Wannabe-Bond has been careful not to let any names slip so far. On the one hand, that seems like a sensible precaution, if what Tony suspects turns out to be true. [There’s many ABC agencies civilians aren’t supposed to know more about than the occasional rumor or scandal. And then there’s SHIELD, the governments’ preferred way of keeping their hands squeaky clean and burying all their ugly secrets and inconvenient truths in the seedy underbelly of an organization that doesn’t even exists. Not that Tony would know anything about that one, of course.] On the other hand, the truth will likely come out anyway once Tony gets his hand on the data on this stick. And there’s no question that he will get the data— only how long it will take him and how hard he’ll have to work for it.

Tony can feel the Mission-Impossible-Character’s calculating stare on the back of his head, measuring him. He refuses to turn around and meet those cold eyes. It’s easier to keep his voice even when he doesn’t. 

“You don’t want to know.”

And well, that’s not exactly an answer that inspires confidence in you. It’s also a pathetic threat as far as those go. Tony narrows his eyes. If there’s one thing that ticks him off, it’s not being taken serious. So this is how you wanna play it, big boy? Fine. Let’s play.

Opening another three taps almost simultaneously, Tony starts typing again. Faster this time. He switches back and forth between the different programs — most of them trying to isolate the program on the USB stick, ensuring that it doesn’t do anything, attacking the outer layers of the encryption. One of them though is a tiny program Tony has designed to be compatible with every computer system he could think of — and all it really does is communicate with JARVIS. Because, as Tony likes to remind Rhodey regularly, what’s the point in building Skynet if you don’t have it on your side? For some reason, his bet friend doesn’t find that joke as funny as Tony. But then Rhodey knows him better than most people— knows what he can do.

"What’cha doin’?" Wannabe-Bond’s drawled question interrupts Tony’s internal ramblings. He does’t look interested in the answer though, isn’t even looking at the screen any longer. Though where he pulled the knife from that he’s flipping around with his left hand, Tony doesn’t want to know.

"What does it look like I’m doing?" 

The words come out too sharp, too harsh. A testament to his fraying nerves perhaps. Either way, Tony bites his lip, but refuses to take them back. He’s not a pushover, and it takes more than a home visit from an assassin to change that. Besides it’s not like spending time with Steve felt anything less than juggling flamethrowers while standing ankle-deep in gunpowder.

"Are you all bark or can you actually back that big mouth of yours up?" Killer-Cat asks. The fun part is that he doesn’t look angry, just curious. He’s still playing with that knife, twisting and spinning it around his fingers. There’s a not-quite-smile on his lips that looks out-of-place— or maybe out-of-practice. Tony wouldn’t know. He’s leaning against the wall next to Tony’s desk, all loose lines and relaxed muscles. It’s probably not a coincidence that he’s also blocking the door that way.

Not that Tony would use the door if he wanted to get away.

"Let’s hope you won’t have reason to find out," Tony snipes back, not once stopping to type. It’s one thing to play games with an isolated program — though that does require his attention, he doesn’t have JARVIS to secure it, has to do the legwork himself — it’s another to simultaneously coordinate a hack with his precious JARVIS without tipping the trigger-happy time bomb he calls his guest off.

On the bright side, it’s still a challenge. Tony loves challenges.

*

Gaining access to the data on the stick is a painfully slow-going process. It’s far from impossible — Tony doesn’t think the security measures were meant to keep anyone with decent programming abilities out, only to slow them down — but without JARVIS to take over the boring parts, the process drags on. It’s not that Tony can’t do it, but he’s forgotten how much he relies on JARVIS for the parts he doesn’t want to be bothered with.

Oh well, this is still preferable to introducing Double-0-Nothing to JARVIS. Tony would have to kill afterwards — and he doesn’t think the murder strut would suit him as well as his quiet companion.

To be honest, it’s the silence that’s bothering Tony more than the tedious coding or even the fact that he has a killer in his home. [Ha! Like that’s new.] Tony doesn’t do well with silence. There’s a reason the radio is always turned up when he’s working, rock music echoing from the walls, hard enough to envelop him in sound. And it’s not because he aims to be deaf at fifty, no matter how many pointed comments Pepper throws his way.

Still. Two bottles of coca cola — fresh out of the refrigerator this time — and fifteen variations of "Are you done yet?" later, Tony pulls up the files on the stick.

"Well…" he says slowly, not sure what exactly it is that he’s seeing.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Wannabe-Bond jerk around. The next moment, he’s leaning over Tony’s shoulder, his cheek almost brushing against Tony’s, gaze flickering over the different documents that Tony keeps on opening.

"Mission logs." The murmur is barely audible, but nonetheless distracts Tony from his internal musings of the pretentious secret agents’ smell — a little like dried sweat, a little like rain, a little something else entirely.

He’s right. But that isn’t everything. Oh no. Some of the documents have been scanned, others photographed. Some bear SHIELD’s insignia, some are signed by officials — some names Tony recognizes, most he doesn’t — some have no official capacity. Notes. Scribbles. Sketches. Pictures. Security footage.

Tony inwardly thanks the gods for his eidetic memory as he shifts through the stream of data. Someone would probably kick up a fuss about what is clearly sanctioned kill orders for a couple of high-up foreign politicians, but what really makes Tony twitchy is that none of it is blackened. The agents involved. The addresses of SHIELD’s offices. The handlers. The victims.

It’s all there, black on white. The sort of information a white hat hacker would sell his soul for — and so would a black or grey hat, now that he thinks about it.

"This makes no sense," Jamie McJameson says after they’ve scrolled through a dozen more reports — everything from a psychiatric evaluation of Barton, Clint after a level 7 mission in Luisiana of all places to an order for new pencils by Hill, Maria, personal assistant of Director Pierce.

Tony isn’t sure he agrees. It’s certainly nothing dramatic like he half-expected — evidence for a huge conspiracy that has been working towards turning the entire US into a totalitarian regime, for example — but. 

Information is a tricky business. It doesn’t always reveal its true value at first glance.

"That’s a lot of sensitive information," Tony states. Because Are you sure it isn’t worth killing someone? seems like an impolite thing to ask outright, considering the circumstances.

Wannabe-Bond shakes his head, too long hair flying everywhere. "It’s not enough."

"If you say so."

Maybe the case isn’t up to his usual escapades? Imagine spending your whole life living in an action thriller, only for your friend to get killed over a mundane robbery. That would drive Tony mad for sure.

Tony is about to suggest they run a couple analysis programs, see if something stands out or any information has been embedded in the data — the photos maybe, you never know — when he notices something odd in the meta data. 

"Wait." Tony narrows his eyes and leans closer towards the screen. "All these files are copies and they’ve all been created at the same time — two weeks ago, on Thursday."

It’s the kind of odd JARVIS would’ve pointed out within moments of accessing the stick, but Tony tries not to think too hard about that. Steve would forgive him for not investigating his apparent death with his full capacity. Probably. It’s hard to say, Tony and Steve spent most of their time together arguing.

"Someone pulled all this data on the same day?" The furrow between Fake-James’ eyebrows deepens.

"Looks like it. And not just the same day, within the same three hours. I— Oh." Tony bites his bottom lip. 

"Oh?" There’s a dark undercurrent in Wannabe-Bond’s tone that one word that makes 'killer' sound real for the first time.

"It’s not all data, just the first part. There’s— bundles of it, I guess you could say." Tony murmurs, hands flying over the keyboard. "Around five gigabyte of it, dated from every Thursday of the last month." Tony skims a few more briefings, a budget plan, a handful of complaints for inappropriate workplace behavior. "These files were copied from internal SHIELD servers. Maybe it’s not the information itself that’s valuable at all. Maybe—"

"SHIELD’s been hacked," his murderous guest states with a sort of calm certainty that sends a reflexive shudder down Tony’s back. "Repeatedly. That means-" He abruptly cuts himself off, lips white from how tight he presses them together.

Whatever it is that has just occurred to him, he doesn’t share and he sure as hell doesn’t look happy. So he does what Tony always does when he’s nervous: He babbles.

"It looks like they were just randomly copying stuff. Might not have even been a person at all, maybe an algorithm. But that implies that they’ve been in the system for a while."

"Can you find out who it is? Backhack them?"

Tony tilts his head. Considers it. "It depends. But to even attempt that, I’d first have to hack SHIELD myself."

Wannabe-Bond — because Tony is getting tired of trying to come up with new nicknames and he’s fond of this one — raises an eyebrow. It looks unfairly cool. Tony may or may not want to kick him in his stupid face for it. "So?"

"So I’m not hacking an international secret agency with half a dozen secret prisons across the world from my home computer," Tony says slowly, and yep, that’s a sentence he’d never thought he would say out loud. [Okay, there was that one time when he was fifteen and drunk, but they’ve all unanimously agreed that that was Loki’s fault.]

Wannabe-Bond crosses his arms, handsome features turned to stone and looking about as yielding.

"Let’s find another computer then," he says like it’s really that simple, and oh, Tony can see how Steve and this guy must get along. They’ve got the same brand of insane stubbornness that makes Tony want to run around in a circle screaming or alternatively ram his head against a wall.

Fucking wonderful.

[evilroda]

The Art of Losing and Regaining Privileges

So on Thursday, I ended up losing my sudo privileges. Friday night, I gained them back. What am I talking about? Welll...

Okay, so Thursday morning, I looked at my Pocket CHIP and realized I hadn’t used it in a while. Looking to change that I turned it on and tried to run an update. It was then that I realized I had forgotten the root password, so I thought I would just reflash it and start over.  Now, to reflash your CHIP, you use a piece of software called CHIP Flasher, which is a Chrome app. On Linux, use of this software requires a one-time setup process involving a change in your permissions, outlined here. First mistake was assuming the instructions were just generically for Linux. They were not. They were actually specifically for Ubuntu; I am running Solus.

So I run the first command. That works. Then I run the next command. It says that the plugdev group is not available. At this point, I am listening to music on my headphones, connected to my laptop via a USB headphone adapter because my headphone jack on my laptop broke. So I realize the commands are for Ubuntu, and decide that I finally should get around to reinstalling Linux Lite on my netbook. I unplug my adapter because it’s so bulky, I can’t plug anything else in (my mouse is occupying the port on the other side), and try to plug in a thumb drive to make it a Linux Lite live CD. Computer doesn’t recognize it. I try again with a different thumb drive. Nothing. I plug it into my netbook with Solus booted up. Works on that one. What? I try my headphone adapter in my big latop. Doesn’t work. Shit.

At that point, I realized I was pretty fucked. After trying the complete instructions in a desperate attempt to see if that would fix the issue (it didn’t), I hopped on the unofficial Solus Discord and got help from a South African dude. We started troubleshooting, and apparently I had fucked with the groups? I’m actually still not entirely sure what the initial issue was. For future reference, to see what groups you’re in, you type in groups, and the output should look like: 

evilroda@hpav ~ $ groups  evilroda dialout audio video cdrom lpadmin sudo fuse

Basically, you need to be in the dialout group to use USB devices. Now, I was still in dialout, in fact, what you’re seeing there is the exact output I pasted into the Discord chat, so I have no idea what the issue actually was. However, after a while trying to troubleshoot this, I looked at the man page for the usermod command and found this little gem:

-G, --groups GROUP1[,GROUP2,...[,GROUPN]]]           A list of supplementary groups which the user is also a member of.           Each group is separated from the next by a comma, with no           intervening whitespace. The groups are subject to the same           restrictions as the group given with the -g option.           If the user is currently a member of a group which is not listed,           the user will be removed from the group. This behaviour can be           changed via the -a option, which appends the user to the current           supplementary group list.

I thought, hey, maybe if I just did the same command, but without -a, once to take me out and once to put me back in the group, it might work! And to my surprise, after logging out and back in, it did! Unfortunately, there was another issue. I’ll let what I posted in the Discord chat explain it for you...

So I fixed the USB problem. We may have another issue, though. evilroda@hpav ~ $ groups evilroda dialout Kill me. evilroda@hpav ~ $ sudo nautilus Password: evilroda is not in the sudoers file.  This incident will be reported. PLEASE KILL ME

Yes, that’s right. I revoked my own damned sudo privileges. As the man page posted above explains, when you use -G without -a to put yourself in a group, it takes you out of every other group. I was even more fucked than when I started.

For those of you who don’t know, the command sudo stands for “super user do,” and allows you to do administrative level tasks, like installing software, or running updates, or accidentally wiping your hard drive. Note that even if you use a program like the Solus Software Center, if you do not have sudo privileges, then you can not install software, as it still uses those privileges to bar access from people who shouldn’t have access to your system. So basically, I could still use my computer, I just couldn’t administrate it. This is a pretty big issue.

Funny enough, this is actually an easy fix, as there’s loads of guides on how to do this! Just reboot, and on the GRUB screen, hit shift and... Stop. I’m not using GRUB. Much to my dismay, after looking up how to fix it and rebooting, I saw not the GRUB bootloader screen, but a UEFI bootloader screen. Basically, GRUB loads your operating system, and, if you’re running multiple operating systems, lets you choose which one you want to load into. Most Linux operating systems have a recovery mode in GRUB that will let you fix your lack of sudo privileges. However, there is no UEFI bootloader that everybody uses, as far as I know, whereas everybody not on UEFI uses GRUB (or LILO, but usually GRUB). Now, Ubuntu’s UEFI bootloader has a recovery mode, I know this because I looked it up and saw how to get into it (you press escape). I don’t even know if Solus’s UEFI bootloader has a recovery mode; if it does, I can’t find it.

So at this point, I went out with some friends to hang out and play Magic at our local gaming store. Before I did, I post on the Solus forum about the issue, After I got back, I went through some troubleshooting with a Norwegian on the Solus Discord, nobody had posted on the forum thread as of yet. His solution involved booting into a live CD and chrooting and stuff I didn’t really understand, and, long story short, didn’t work. I was thinking about just reinstalling the whole damned OS, which, while I could do it, and do it without data loss, would be a pain in the ass.

However! Friday night, I got back home from work and saw there was a reply from someone on the forum thread! All I needed to do was boot into a live CD, mount my hard drive, find the group file, and edit myself into the sudo group! After looking up some instructions on going about all that, it worked! You can find a complete walkthrough of what I did on the thread here, but I’ll just leave it at the fact that it worked and I can administrate my system again.

Now, I’m sure some people are going to point to this and say, “Hah! You see? Linux IS hard! You don’t have these issues on WINDOWS! OR MAC!” And to that I say, you’re full of shit. I’m just some average guy. When I first started using Linux, I didn’t know a thing about it, and now people look at me like I’m a computer wizard when I talk about this stuff (I actually am a computer wizard, an evil one, but that’s beside the point). My point is, all I did was read up on this stuff. Everything you do wrong on Linux, you can recover from, even if it involves reinstalling the system. Depending on the distro, I can install it in a snap, and I can definitely install Solus with no issue at all. Hell, I can even back up my data right before I reinstall using the live CD. I don’t know what the process is for reinstalling OSX, but Windows is hard to install. I mean, it’s easy initially, but it takes a long time, and then you have to hunt down drivers and do all this setup, it’s just a pain, and for a system that doesn’t tell you everything. Linux does. Even if you don’t understand it, somebody else does and can help you. So if you read this and got scared of using Linux, don’t be. I can assure you that, while I have had problems with Linux, I’m not going back to Windows, and I’m definitely not buying a Mac. In fact, let me put it this way. Windows (and, for the short time I used it, OSX) made me feel powerless. Linux makes me feel powerful.

[nooklet-crossing]

How to hack your AC:NL town!

 hello, beautiful children! do you want to know how to hack your town on animal crossing new leaf? then ya’ve come to the right place. there are a few things to note before you start hacking...

1. yes, this can ruin your ac:nl game file. if you take away something like the town plaza or do something extremely irregular with your town, the gamefile will corrupted and all sava data will be lost. but, as long as you backup your save file ( i will show you how to do that in a bit ) you will be fine, and you can fix whatever mistake you made while hacking. easy peasy!

2. this can also ruin your 3ds too i think? i’ve only heard of it from a handful of people, but they’ve all told me that you REALLY have to try hard to actually ruin your 3ds. but again im not too sure cause’ i’ve never ever seen it before.

3. this is not a competitive cheat to do. ac:nl is not a competitive game, and is meant to relieve stress and more, so please note that this is totally okay and anyone who hates on you for hacking just needs to open their eyes, and they can’t dictate how you play <3

4. this is totally safe for everyone. trust me, kids, im a really nervous person. i was SO scared to start hacking. but, just remember, people have been hacking for a long time, and nothing has happened to their computer or anything. if you’re worried about viruses.. stop :3 cause’ it’s totally fine! i am v scared of viruses and stuff so i am extra tip top careful and just look at me hacking my town left n right. no worries, bbys!

5. this only works with i believe 9.0 to 11.3, so if you are 11.4 or above, i am sorry but you cannot hack and you are stuck unless you spend 20-40$ on freakyhax or ninjhax or whatever.

now onto the actual tutorial. please follow the steps accordingly and follow them closely!

step 1. take out the sd from your 3ds and pop it into your computer. there might be a little slot somewhere in your computer. you just need to look around for it. funny story actually, i could’ve hacked for a while now but i was unaware of the little slot because it was hiding at the bottom of my laptop. if you are sure you don’t have one ( although most computers do ) then you will need an sd thingy where you plug the doo hickey into the usb drive and pop the sd into the little doo hickey (im such a grandma ignore me). 

step 2. open up your file explorer and go to the sd folder. next, go to this website here: https://github.com/nedwill/soundhax                                                               find where it says “installation” and click on “homebrew starter kit” and drag all of it’s contents onto the root of your sd card. what “root” means is do not put it in another folder on your sd card, just drag n drop. now, that means you have homebrew on your sd card. but youre not done yet. 

step 3. next you need a save manager application which will snatch your save file out of your game which makes you able to hack. it is: https://github.com/J-D-K/JKSM/releases                                                                                                    you want to click on the first download on the screen, which is the one that starts with JKSM. the two other files are completely irrelevant to hacking, so you dont need to pay any attention to them. now, unzip it and grab the first two files, which is the 3ds file and the JKSM.cia file. next you’re going to drag n drop the two files onto the root of your sd card. it may ask you if you want to merge the 3ds files, but it really doesn’t matter. if you wanna, go for it, if you wanna keep em separate, thats up to you. 

step 4. now go back to the first link i gave you: https://github.com/nedwill/soundhax                                                                scroll up to the top of the page and download the file that corresponds with your 3ds. if you have an old 3ds, you’ll choose an old 3ds file. if you have a 3ds from korea, you’re going to choose the korean file. if you have a 3ds from america you’re going to choose the american file. click on it and then click on “download”. now you’re going to want to drag the file onto the root of your sd card. 

step 5. next youre going to want to go to this link: https://smealum.github.io/3ds/   now, scroll down to the “otherapp/ropbin payloads” and fill out everything according to your 3ds firmware. you can see the firmware data on the system settings page on your 3ds. next, click on the download otherapp and it will download that onto your computer. unzip the file, and then drag it onto the root of your sd card. then, rename the file to “otherapp”. if you have any problems with this, rename it to otherapp.bin

step 6. okay, now this is the hard part. you have to take out your sd card and pop it back into your 3ds. took me years to master this, guys. v hard indeed.

step 7. now that you have animal crossing new leaf and the sd card inside your computer, go to the “Nintendo 3ds Sound”. then, go to the /sdcard file that should pop up on your screen. then click on the nedwill sound file and it will then transition into homebrew. do note that it WILL go through some sketchy lookin screens. it happens to everyone, and don’t worry. 

step 8. next, scroll down to “JK Save Manager” and click on Animal Crossing New Leaf. Then it will go through a few more weird screens before you get to a new screen. next, go to save data options and select export save. then press new and put in your town name. 

step 9. now open up your sd card folder and you’ll find a new folder called JKSV. then click on the saves folder, then animal crossing new leaf. and then the folder that contains your town names. (for example when i press animal crossing new leaf, it brings me to “drizzle”. i need to click on that) now look at your garden_plus.dat file. this is your actual save file. now, in case something goes wrong, drag and drop it onto the background of your computer. this is backing it up, so if something doesn’t go quite right, you can use this and your data wont be lost. 

step 10. go to the save editor which is here: http://www.marcrobledo.com/acnl-editor/                                                                                                                       go to the bottom of the screen and click “choose file” then click the garden_plus.dat file on your sd card. do not click the one on the background of your computer, because that is your back up. 

badda bing badda boom. you’re done. du bist jetzt fertig. (im half german btw lol) now you can edit your town all you want! i probably won’t be doing a tutorial on how all of that works, but i will leave that to a youtuber named Mischa Crossing to explain. If you have any questions about hacking, go bug her.

Link to all her hacking tutorials:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYIOPlcKdetmc8jgZUmXHwvpqTRYrBRKl  

Link to a visual tutorial:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LMTwOPhz5k&t=500s&index=14&list=PLYIOPlcKdetmc8jgZUmXHwvpqTRYrBRKl                   

[naughtygals]

day 2

today was difficult to get out of bed. i wasn’t sure if i was sick or just dealing with more anxiety, but either way it was a challenge. eventually got myself vertical and got out the door, timed perfectly to land right in the middle of a heavy rainstorm on my bike. had planned to get a coffee at abraço before, but was already totally drenched and knew i’d be having a hard time no matter what happened.

regardless, i got Tidal Cycles setup first thing, which funnily enough meant installing Haskell. at some point i hope to investigate a bit further just how related the two are, and hopefully this seemingly crazy syntax won’t be just another random tidbit to try and forget. the sounds seem fun though and it’s amazing what you can get out of a few simple audio samples. the method of creating rhythms simply by dividing a measure into nested fragments is something i was aiming to do with ‘just waypoints’, but clearly this is a much smoother implementation than possible in max. looking forward to explore some dense and poly-metric rhythms where there’s no clear ‘one’. anyway - day 1 - i’m sure there’s a lot to learn.

i’m somewhat interested in the idea of an embeddable player for these scripts. i have a vague memory that someone had done / started this, but wasn’t able to find anything with a cursory search. more to investigate later - could perhaps be a good project to work on with a haskell-er here at RC once i have a clear vision of what that would look like.

i spent some time with another programmer today and got a little runthrough of Lua, and it’s visual engine Love2d. somehow this turned into a funny lesson on object-orientation which was actually super exciting & i feel like i had some good learning moments / mental shifts. particularly the idea of the constructor/desctructor functions(?) and the way the class definitions seemed a lot like run-time code to me, but is actually just ‘preparation’ in some way.

this is to say i’m really excited to learn lua over these next months. it feels like a fantastic language for me with a lot of possibility for use in the future, and writing much better control-level code. i got luasynth up and running (made by a previous recurser in 2013!) and modifying some audio files. it’s only running offline for the moment, but feels good to have built it from source and be looking at / touching the sourcecode already. it already feels like it’s going to be a great toolkit to start working on game projects, but also more fully fledged interactive audio projects too.

i’m not sure if luasynth is even still in development or worth considering trying to expand the library (does anyone use it?) or take it as inspiration to work on a new platform that could have potential embedded options. tomorrow i’m hoping to get some kind of realtime version running with the ‘knobs’ modifiable from the command line.

this angle led me to a few thoughts. the first being that i honestly do have a big interest in embedded programming, and i shouldn’t completely shirk this while at RC. rather, i should find ways of bringing in my interest in higher-level programming to the platform. lua seems a great option for this as it’s object-oriented, super fast, and still functional (which seems the limit of my capacity right now).

my uncertainty is along the lines of what kind of embedded system i should be focussing on. first thought is of course to look at the rpi - it’s cheap, available, and accessible. my concern here is that i can’t really imagine working at the no-os (or tiny os) level with these super powered processors! perhaps it’s easier than i think, but i have a feeling i’d end up running a super barebones linux install and then just using it as a low-powered computer.

second idea is instead to look into the new-generation stm32f7 discovery board. if there is one with a touchscreen and sdram it could very likely be a good platform to focus on. that would give me reason to spend some time on low-level drivers for the f7 (something i want to do regardless of rc) and also build a tiny os that would host a text-editor interface to lua. this could then be a super simple, cheap (~$40?) & self-contatined system. all you do is bring a usb keyboard and you have a little lua console w/ visualization. it would also give me a chance to try using love2d in a tiny screen, plus explore my window-manager desires for linux. even if that window manager code can’t be directly compiled across to linux, it would be a good exploration into what it means to build such an os tool from scratch.

the above project could be expanded to have a backpack with better audio codec, battery power, speaker etc.

//

a lot of today was about remembering that i need to be who i am. just because i don’t necessarily fit in with what everyone else is doing doesn’t mean my work is less valid or interesting - it’s just that i need to get to a stronger point before i start trying to share my ideas with others.

a lot of the first day jitters for me were couched in issues of not knowing what i want to do with my time at rc, when it felt like so many others had very clear ideas. i realize now that as a result i spouted off a bunch of gibberish to different people (i was interested, but nothing felt clear) which makes me realize a lot of others who ‘seemed to know’ could very well have been doing the same. point being, i just need to give myself a few days to feel comfortable and start settling into the routine of coding *every fucking day* which in hindsight is absolutely a new thing to me. there’s been times when i’ve done this, but it’s usually been forced by days of bug fixing which really isn’t the focus of rc - i’ve gotta push harder and climb those learning curves!

i’m also accepting that it’s going to take some time to get to know my batchmates, and i don’t have to be friends with every person. there’s probably 40 people that come and go in the space throughout a day and i’m sure there will be folks that i do and don’t get to know, and some that i do and don’t see eye to eye with. that’s totally fine, so long as i keep an open mind about meeting people and make sure i’m not closing myself off. i’m sure there’s a lot of great people, and all it takes is one good conversation to get the ball rolling.

thankfully i didn’t feel quite the need for escapism tonight. sure i ate a burger and had a smoke and am drinking mezcal, but this is on a seemingly ‘normal’ level for me, and not a stress reaction. towards the end of my day at rc i really started to feel comfortable and a large part of that was bc a lot of folks had started to leave. i could have stayed a good deal longer had i not needed to go and pick up my bike with the fixed flat. i think i’m going to try and stay until the 9-9.30 point for the next few days to get a feel if that’s better timing for my body & schedule.

i had a lot of great conversations today, but once i did break off and do my own thing for a while i really did make some headway even if i spent 15 minutes trying to figure out $PATH variables for a tiny lua dependency. i should try better to have this separation of parts of my day.

that’s it for now, and i’m going to try and find / order a good stm32f7 discovery board... also to email brian!