Befunge is a classic esoteric programming language. The idea is that it's a bit like a Turing machine, but instead of the instruction pointer moving along a one-dimensional tape, it moves around a two-dimensional grid.

A happy image occurred to me of the instruction pointer as a tractor, driving around a field.

So I decided to make it happen!

I found a really nice pixel art editor called Pixelorama, which I used to draw a v v shonky tractor, patches of grass, and bales of hay representing numbers on the stack.

It's cute!

The controls were more complicated than I expected. I wanted everything to feel as "in the world" as possible, so the program should be edited by interacting with the graphics rather than typing in a code box. I ended up giving the caret a direction, so it's just as easy to type upwards or backwards as it is left-to-right. To avoid having a "reset" button, you can just pick the tractor up and move it, and right-click to empty the trailer.

Other Life stuff came up before I was completely finished with it, but I'm quite happy with my cute Turing-complete tractor.

It's online at somethingorotherwhatever.com/tractor-befunge, and the source code is on GitHub.

Somebody sent me their slides for a talk as a collection of .png images.

I wanted to collect them into one PDF. It turns out that ImageMagick's convert tool can do it:

convert slide-*.png slides.pdf

I had to change a security policy in ImageMagick which was apparently instated due to a bug in Ghostscript.

I used Kdenlive to make a new Numbas demo video.

I was pleased with how easy it was.

• Wrote a script, using the old video and the text from the Numbas front page.

• Did some screen recordings to cover each of the bits.

• Made 1920×1080 images using the drawings from the front page.

• Recorded the script in gnome-sound-recorder.

• Dragged all the files into kdenlive.

• Cut out just the bits I wanted from the videos and the sound by making zones: play a clip, press I to set the start point, and O to set the end point, then Ctrl-I to save that as a zone.

• Eventually realised V inserts the selected zone into the timeline.

• Dragging things around on the timeline is easy. The move tool with M shifts a contiguous block of things around to make space.

• Worked out that you can trim bits by dragging their sides in the timeline, and add fades or wipes by clicking the dots that appear in the corners of a clip.

I used the new screen recorder in ubuntu 22.04 (I think it's really the Gnome 3 built-in recorder) to record my screen, then wanted to share it on twitter and mastodon.

It produces a webM file with a lot of missing metadata, so I had to convert it. A lot of searching finally got me something that worked.

First, make an mp4 with a fixed frame rate:

ffmpeg -i recording.webm -c:v libvpx-vp9 -minrate 2M -maxrate 2M -b:v 2M -pix_fmt yuv420p -r 16 recording.mp4

This makes something that mastodon will accept. Twitter won't, so you need to convert that. I also had the problem that my video was an odd number of pixels wide, so I did this:

ffmpeg -i recording.mp4 -vf "pad=ceil(iw/2)*2:ceil(ih/2)*2" recording.twitter.mp4

Since I'm probably going to do this a few times, I've put these steps in a script in ~/bin/convert-screencast, which finds the most recent recording and converts it to mp4:

#!/bin/bash

LATEST=`ls -tr ~/Videos/Screencasts/Screencast*.webm | tail -1`
OUT=${LATEST%.webm}.mp4

ffmpeg -i "$LATEST" -c:v libvpx-vp9 -minrate 2M -maxrate 2M -b:v 2M -pix_fmt yuv420p -r 16 -vf "pad=ceil(iw/2)*2:ceil(ih/2)*2" "${LATEST%.webm}.mp4"
echo $OUT

I'm in a "document everything" mood at the moment, so I've decided to resurrect this blog to store notes about the things I'm doing that aren't maths or work related.

checkmyworking.com has always been powered by WordPress, but every now and then it’s fallen victim to annoying hacks that manage to write some spam nonsense at the top of all my PHP files. From what I can tell, WordPress and the few plugins I use are such a labyrinthine mess of code that going through and closing security vulnerabilities would be a sisyphean task.

So, I’ve taken the nuclear option – this site, as served to the wider web, is now entirely made up of static files. Hopefully, that’ll stop the hacks – there’s no PHP to abuse, leaving only any vulnerabillities in Apache or Media Temple’s account management as potential ways of getting in.

The static files are generated by Spress, which seems to be one of the least opinionated static site generators I’ve come across. It was very easy to make it produce pretty much exactly the same pages WordPress does.

I still wanted the nice editing interface WordPress provides, so I’ve made a plugin which exports posts from WordPress to the Spress source directory whenever I update them. I’ve got the WordPress installation hidden somewhere private, behind a very simple login script which stands in the way to make sure that nobody else can run WordPress code. This way, I can write posts in WordPress, and the plugin automatically rebuilds the site for me. The one compromise is that I can’t do comments any more – my current line of thought is that I’ll write a script to add comments to the WordPress database which would be simple enough to satisfy myself that it’s more secure than going through WordPress itself.

For the moment I’ve kept the layout of the site as it was, but it’s looking very old now so I’d like to redo it at some point. I don’t really post here any more, so it’s entirely possible that this’ll still be the top post in a few years’ time.

Next job is to do the same thing to The Aperiodical, which will take a lot more work!