The Quail's Nest

Well, it finally happened. I finished a project for the first time in my life. I never thought this day would come. I have so many people to thank. First and foremost, Frankie, with his soulless eyes, kept pushing me to achieve far and beyond.    That's the look of utmost happiness The Python Snake game project was my Grade 10 Final Project submission. Back then it was just a rudimentary shell of what it is today. It only implemented the single-player mode of the game, and it didn't have any of the bells and whistles it does today.  So here's my final post on this topic. Initially, I didn't plan on working on this project. I didn't feel like creating a game for the second time and decided I wanted to do something with a real-world value.  My plan was to expand on the idea of the COVID Calculator I had mentioned in one of my previous posts. With all this stuff going on in the world right now, what could get more 'real-world' than a program that predicts the ...

I was debating whether to actually write on this topic or not because I'm not sure I have much to say in the matter. But I decided to anyway because I wanted to. There are two types of word editing styles: WYSIWYM and WYSIWYG . They're both obviously acronyms, otherwise it would mean humanity was unstable enough to create humans who thought words like WYSIWYM and WYSIWYG were okay for human speech. WYSIWYG: What you see is what you get This is the one that most people are familiar with. You type in something, and when you publish or export that text, it's gonna look exactly the way you typed it in (hence the name). Stuff like MS Word, Google Docs, Apple Pages, LibreOffice Writer are all WYSIWYG editors/softwares. WYSIWYG is more widely known compared to WYSIWYM because it gives you an easy view of what you're typing in. You can add images and format the document while you type in the content. WYSIWYM: What you see is what you mean This one is a bit different. When you t...

I got something better to put here, but I thought this would look funnier. This is just a side post talking about a few applicaitions I discovered this year, that I think are pretty cool in-concept. Ferdi: Ferdi is actually a fork of another program called Franz, but both serve the same function. They're browser clients that host all your social media accounts in one place for easy access. Franz is paid while Ferdi is free.  Now I don't have many social media accounts (the less you have, the better) , but the program did allow me to host all my services in one place: Whatsapp, Gmail, Reddit, Discord, etc. You can also add custom websites that are not offered in-built by Ferdi, which allows me to check up on websites that aren't even social media sites. Now that I'm maining Linux, I just set Ferdi to autostart in a designated workspace everytime I start my computer, and it justs sits there allowing me to check in on it anytime I want without having to use my main browser...

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm  I switched to Manjaro XFCE last Wednesday. Needless to say, the experience wasn't great. Don't get me wrong, XFCE is a great DE, but at that point I had gotten too attached to the AO in GNOME. I switched to Manjaro KDE next, but I realized that GNOME had casted some kinda spell on me and I couldn't escape its grasps. So I finally caved in and switched to Manjaro GNOME. That achieved a pretty good result. I was very impressed by the features offered. They allowed you to switch between different GNOME layouts seamlessly.  I had heard that Arch-based distros offered the best package manager. Arch has this thing called the Arch User Repository (AUR) which houses every package under the Sun. This made the software installation in Arch-based distros so simple and easy compared to other Linux distros. And I can confirm firsthand that all of it is true. However, my installation did not last. Pamac (The GUI for installing software) had become VERY slow. Like unbeara...

'Unleash your potential!' Pop_OS! is probably the distro I will return to the most in the future. It's the best combination of aesthetics and functionality for me. Pop (I can't be bothered to write the entire name every time) uses the GNOME DE, and I gotta say, first impressions are not always the best impressions. In my inital research, I had dismissed GNOME as a restrictive DE. Everyone complained about the lack of total customization it had compared to KDE Plasma and how resource-hungry it was. GNOME is the most popular Linux DE, but I had already dismissed it before even trying it. When I first switched to Pop, I was annoyed to learn that I had to install additional extensions to have basic features that KDE Plasma had out-of-the-box.  Okay, side-tangent, I need to rant about something. Is it just me, or does the gnome extensions store suck? Like it almost never works, You can never be truly sure if it will work or not. You click install, and nothing happens. I'...

Ubuntu is actually an ancient African word I'm a HUGE customization freak. I just love tweaking things and making the aesthetics look better and picking out color patterns and icon packs and themes.....   So it's no surprise that my first distro was Kubuntu. Ubuntu is the distro most Linux newbies start out with and KDE Plasma is the most customizable DE. When you combine them together, you get Kubuntu. Kubuntu was such a blast. That inital excitement was so fun. Since I've never used MacOS, I customized Kubuntu to look exactly like the MacOS desktop everything from the dock to the topbar. I generally got a sense that MacOS's desktop looked and functioned much better than stock Windows desktops. I wish I had screenshots to show, but I didn't have this plan to blog about Linux so I never saved any screenshots. I used this neon city skyline wallpapers and set them up for slideshow. I used the sweet theme made eliverlara and the candy icons included in that theme. It r...

You gotta agree, if there was a battle of operating system mascots, Tux would easily defeat a window and an apple. So, before I start, I gotta say, Windows and MacOS are honestly great operating systems, I haven't used MacOS (too broke) but Windows has been pretty good to me so far. I see many people who initalliy switch to Linux complain about how much Windows telemetry and forced updates are ruining their lives. Nothing of the sort has ever happened to me, and I'm thankful for that.  From what I hear, MacOS is an amazing operating system being bogged down by limited hardware Apple provides. Plus, it's also UNIX-based, so it's a lot closer to Linux than Windows. Also, I should probably do a brief introduction to Linux for those of you who who have no idea what I'm talking about. The techies among you can skip this if you want.  Or you can read this and tell me how wrong I'm in the comments or something. GNU/Linux is the operating system that many people refer t...

Watch this movie, it's great. You know those guys? The guys that follow the tech world and its glamorous news cycles feverishly and watch a hundred different reviews of a product when it gets launched. They're the real tech geeks of our world. These people are the ones who everyone consults when they're considering a tech upgrade. They know the specs of every product released in the last 5 years. They know the pros, the cons, and they're the tech superheroes we flock to when we have any doubt regarding our smartphones with features we barely know about. Every friend group has a guy like that.  I'm not that guy. So as I sit here, late into the night, rewatching Steve Jobs (2015)  [Great movie btw], thinking about the various changes in my perception of the tech world, I say to myself, Huh, this would make a half-interesting blog post. Flashforward to three weeks later: Yeah. I procrastinated writing this blog post for three weeks. So, I have no idea where to start. D...

Say hello to Frankie. He doesn't do much. Yeah. I kinda realized how I never ended up naming the project. I wanted something like EDITH, but I wanted it to be different enough to feel like its own thing. So we're gonna stick with EDDIE for now. As always, I have some new plans in mind for the project. That's the thing with us procrastinators, we're really good dreamers, but when it comes to execution, we rarely give our full 100% effort. On a side note, Tim Urban has really good posts on the topic of procrastination over on his blog Wait but Why which you should check out if you've got some free time and want to have a good laugh at people like me. Tim Urban's Ted Talk Ok so, in my first post, I mentioned how I was basically trying to recreate a project from one of Jlaser's videos.  I also kinda made fun of myself in my earlier post for basically copying most of my projects from other people's existing projects. As I've gotten slightly more experien...

I literally have no idea where this picture is from. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to CHEAT! , the only game show where you're rewarded for cheating! I tried doing a gameshow host impression but since I don't watch any TV, I have no idea how gameshow hosts act. Okay so yeah. Not really a game show, but I did come up with an idea for a verbal game. Before I get into the specifics on how the game is played, it's better to define some terms first. Host - This is kinda self-explanatory. The host is the one who'll be asking questions. Except for this time, the host isn't permanent. Every round the host changes. Players - Players. Nothing else to it. Candidate - The player who is being questioned by the host. The way the game works is that a player is selected to be the host. This can be completely random, or it can be turn-based, that part's up to you.  Once the host is selected, he/she now has to think of a topic or an activity in which it would be difficult and/o...

A totally REAL and true cake. Now, I'm not natively good at creating games. I only know marginal Unity and I've never dabbled in anything outside that. But videogames are what got me INTO coding and programming so I wanna keep that spirit alive. I haven't really created many games outside of Python and PyGame. I tried learning Unity a while back and that didn't really go anywhere. But I plan to reignite that candle and look into this in my 'free' time. SECOND PERSON NARRATIVE GAMES: I saw a  Youtube video . Nick points out how there's a big gap in the market for second-player narrative videogames. He also mentions how 'Driver: San Francisco' is a game from his childhood that dabbled into the design possibilities of having such a game structure.  Now I don't normally play a whole lotta racing games (except for Forza Horizon, I still love you), but I LOVE games with gimmicks, so this one checks that box for me. This game allows you to switch bodies...

This is a quail's nest. A very rabid quail. This blog serves to document my projects and my slow descent into insanity. If you're into that kinda stuff, you could follow, but honestly, why would you want to? 

This is a tangential post. So I know I said in my last post how I was probably going to relaunch the E.D.D.I.E. project under Raspberry Pi instead of Arduino, and well.....I did. So let's run this down, old-school-style: Hardware: 1) Raspberry Pi Zero WH ( I specifically selected this so I could have the glasses not be bulky with an oversized board mounted on it.) 2) There's no other hardware.....except for one SPECIAL thing, but I'll introduce that later. Software: 1) Nothing special, just the standard Raspbian image download thingy. (I'm super duper professional, trust me, you guys.) Also, if this post sounds kinda unpolished, its because I'm typing this late at night and I really don't feel like staying up longer. I don't know why I'm doing this, no one is forcing me to do this, but I'm doing it anyway.  Well, I guess I can just edit stuff later if I want to. So now, we get into the meat of this post.  You know how the Raspberry Pi requires a disp...

This is a different type of Django. The hardest part of writing these blog posts is deciding the picture to go along with them. You know what's the fun part? Creating labels. I discovered Blogger allows you to categorize posts using labels and I've been using them vehemently ever since. I'm a sucker for alliteration, and using it on creating labels is by far the best thing Blogger offers. It was probably a bad idea to create this blog using Blogger. Now don't get me wrong, I love the innate simplicity of Blogger, and this thing isn't supposed to be professional anyway, but Blogger is so old that people don't realize that blogs can be followed to get updates on new posts. Even I didn't know that until like a month ago.  But I guess the purpose of this blog isn't to attract followers, it's to give me a platform to document developments on my ever-expanding list of incomplete projects. What new thing do I have now? Well, I got interested in web developm...

ooooh, its corona! Ahh, yes. It's been approximately a week since my last project launch, so it means I have something else to start now while all my other projects are pending completion. I swear I'm not this spontaneous and erratic irl; it's just that quarantine has been blessing me with ideas so plentifully that I'm afraid this waterfall will come to an abrupt end. Better make the most of it and jot all these ideas down! So, this time the idea is specifically related to COVID-19. I entered a competition called the Corona Code Zone which was part of the Amity Youth Festival Forum that Amity University was holding for High school students a few weeks back. As the name suggests, the Corona Code Zone required us to create a program that takes in user input data like body temperature, age, and medical history to ascertain their likelihood to contract COVID-19. Admittedly, the competition was a lot less polished and refined than what the participants were lead to believe. ...