Happy things thread!

[Man in Space]

Bought my sister’s birthday present just now: The Clue OST on audiocassette—Funko, of all people, is printing a limited run (and Janko is still collecting numbers). Kitschy, something she likes, still has my thumbprint on it.

[Travis B.]

I translated a BBC Basic program to do raytracing into Forth running under zeptoforth on the Waveshare RP2040-LCD-0.96, with a few modifications (e.g. using green for the ground and red for the sky while taking advantage of the ST7735S display's 16-bit color mode, when the original used a single dithered gradient, on top of four available colors, for both ground and sky). It also only takes a few seconds to run when then the BBC Basic original took about 12.5 minutes to run (albeit on a larger display). You can find the source code here.

[Raphael]

Earlier today, I had a brief phone conversation with a low-ranking government official who was polite, friendly, helpful, knowledgeable, and competent, and provided me with useful information. And now I've managed it to fill out and send in a fairly long and complicated online form.

[Travis B.]

I have now implemented turtle graphics (think LOGO) for zeptoforth on the RP2040-LCD-0.96. Below you can see a Koch snowflake drawn with it (note that the original Koch snowflake code is not mine; I just changed its size and depth and colored it red so it would show up better on my phone's camera).

[alice]

I'm really jealous of you being able to do all these things!

[Travis B.]

I'm really jealous of you being able to do all these things!

The hard part really was writing all the graphics routines behind the scenes, which I had done about few months ago. The raytracing demo itself was really just a near-direct translation of someone else's code written in BBC BASIC (with the main differences being ripping out the dithering and making the sky red and the ground green). As for the turtle graphics, I had already written the line and circle-drawing routines so it was mostly an exercise in using sine and cosine routines. Mind you that writing line and circle-drawing routines is harder than it sounds (the circle-drawing was for creating "brushes" for drawing lines thicker than one pixel), and the most complex part of the turtle graphics itself was actually implementing drawing the turtle, which has to rotate.

[Travis B.]

zeptoforth 1.5.0 is out! Now you can execute conditionals and loops from the REPL without explicitly declaring words and executing them manually, and without wasting any RAM, as it temporarily compiles anonymous words to RAM, executes them, and then forgets them completely transparent to the user.

[WeepingElf]

I am no longer unemployed!

[Raphael]

I am no longer unemployed!

Congratulations!

[WeepingElf]

Thank you (and all others who will congratulate in the future)! It makes me feel much freer in my off-work hours, and helps very much keeping my days in order.

[Travis B.]

I am no longer unemployed!

Congratulations!

Seconded!

[Man in Space]

I am no longer unemployed!

Band practice went well today.

[WeepingElf]

I am no longer unemployed!

Band practice went well today.

Good! I am planning to form a band myself later this year.

[kodé]

I am no longer unemployed!

YAAAAAAAAY!!!

[Raphael]

I got a lot farther with a pretty important project today!

[alice]

I got a lot farther with a pretty important project today!

By a bizarre coincidence, so did I!

[Raphael]

I got a lot farther with a pretty important project today!

By a bizarre coincidence, so did I!

Congratulations!

[doctor shark]

This past Monday, the European Commission announced the results for this year's Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship grant program. I applied back in September to go back to Luxembourg, because why not, plus it was a project that interested me greatly on fiber spinning and wearable technology incorporating some of my favorite things (liquid crystals).

The funding cutoff for the panel I was in (Physics) was with evaluation scores of 92.8 or better. I got a 99.4. So... I'm getting funded to move back to Luxembourg for a fun project. And just in time with the end of my contract here in the Netherlands at the end of March! (Meaning the job seekers' visa I applied for is now more a "vacation while I'm waiting for paperwork to be handled" visa: I'll likely be able to move at the end of June if things go well with the immigration procedure in Luxembourg.

Exciting times.

[Man in Space]

ROCK’N’ROLL, as WeepingElf likes to say.

[Raphael]

Congratulations, doctor shark!