Michcioperz

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My nuclear take on modular phone design

1214 words, ~6 minutes

For some time now I’ve been exploring alternative approaches to smartphones. In February 2020 I wrote a little bit about Nokia 800 Tough, which was a modern attempt at a feature phone with smartphone-ish features, but turned out to be not very great and useful, although pretty well built, which I think could be useful for attending protests cough cough I mean, taking long walks across Warsaw. The full review is over here: Lessons learnt from dual phone wielding.

An uncritical analysis of extracurricular activities in anime vs. my experience with education

1456 words, ~7 minutes

Warning: After reading what I wrote I am not-so-happy to inform you, the reader, that this is kind of a rant. A few days ago I skimmed through my long-abandoned plan-to-watch list of anime, and through an educated guess decided to watch the series titled Irozuku Sekai no Ashita kara, which also goes by Iroduku: The World in Colors (which confuses me greatly, cause I’m not seeing where the du came from).

Playing FE3H the John Wick way

1195 words, ~6 minutes

John is a man of focus, commitment, sheer will… When Fire Emblem: Three Houses (referred to further in this document as FE3H) was released, seemingly everyone in my Twitter feed who had a Nintendo Switch was enamoured with it. Some of those feelings even found their way to me, which is how I ended up buying a Flayn sticker, and how I was programmed into calling every Friday a Fish Friday.

Atmega8 programming, part 1: the backstory and how to not-blink an LED

1678 words, ~8 minutes

This post has, for the time being, unsatisfying conclusion. You have been warned. Last Sunday I was planning to take a break from programming. Maybe start solving one of those 1500 pieces jigsaw puzzles. Unfortunately my dad did not realize it, and started throwing vaguely formulated project ideas: You know what would be cool? If you could somehow put Spotify and that new cool Polish internet radio and maybe some other internet radios in my old boombox.

Fediverse, or a double-edged sword

1799 words, ~9 minutes

For many years my favourite social media site was Twitter. I’m not entirely sure why: was it the character limit on the status updates, or the ease of meeting new people, or maybe something else; either way, it was my favourite. However, for the last three years my social media attention has been split between Twitter and the so-called fediverse. I’d like to explain a little about what the fediverse is and what’s good to know before joining.

Lessons learnt from dual phone wielding

1192 words, ~6 minutes

In October 2019, I became a lucky owner of a just released new amazing phone, a Nokia 800 Tough. What sets it apart from my previous smartphone (a Motorola Moto G5S) is that it’s not a smartphone – instead it’s a feature phone with no touch screen, just some keys. From day one I knew the transition from one phone to the other would not be easy. So I decided to carry both of them in my pocket and hopefully some cool natural habit would come out of this.

Adventures in SIO2: the many ways to add LaTeX to quizzes

1011 words, ~5 minutes

SIO2 is Polish Olympiad in Informatics’s automatic grader (the insider term, I hear, is “online judge”) for competitive programming contests. If you wanna try it out, I recommend the Olympiad-run public instance for training, Szkopuł. But SIO2 is not just about submitting code solutions. The internal APIs are abstract enough to support, for example, quiz type contests. They haven’t seen much use over they years, though. But quizzes have always been a heavy part of the Polish Junior High School Olympiad in Informatics, and while the junior high schools are gone now following an (in my opinion) awful education system reform, some of the tradition is to be continued by Polish Junior Olympiad in Informatics, now for primary schools.

Spotify confuses me

777 words, ~4 minutes

My first Spotify playlist dates back to February 2013. It’s over 2000 tracks long at this point, and most of my time alone I just put it on shuffle. At first I was only listening on my desktop and my Android phone. I made use of the free tier for a year, before Spotify realized it had near-zero revenue in Poland and started pushing for Premium subscriptions aggressively by cutting down features.

So you wanna federate your anime list?

972 words, ~5 minutes

With MyAnimeList down for days now, I’ve been seeing people turn to other alternatives such as Kitsu and Anilist a fair deal recently, and although I have long since done so, it is a new for at least three of my friends. But even with Kitsu being a libre alternative to MAL, I’ve been kind of disappointed with how centralized it is, and how if it falls down, it falls down, just like any centralised social network.

HTTPSing me softly

273 words, ~2 minutes

EDIT: the demo is no longer available. I spent a while today morning making a proof-of-concept-ish of soft HTTPS enforcement without JavaScript. You might look at it and think it’s completely idiotic and ask why would anybody want this, but I have a Nokia E51 and I constantly run into websites that force HTTPS on everything and my phone doesn’t understand either TLS or SNI (can’t remember) so the only thing that works for me is Google, not even Wikipedia.

Late introduction of Weiss

587 words, ~3 minutes

I figured out it’s about time to give some of my projects a write up, and I’m pressed by time, so it seems like a perfect opportunity. A few months ago, as my dear friend and Crystal fanatic RX14 decided to shut down his file hosting of worldwide fame, aww.moe. Most precisely, it wasn’t shut down, it was changed to private-only, and while he did offer me an account, I didn’t feel like depending on somebody else to host my precious files.