Today's hack-a-day project was Pokétrace. Did you ever, as a little kid, trace stuff you liked? It's how we learn art! I made this as a way to relax for adult (and for kiddos, of course!). And to improve my art skills.

You can trace pokemon in your browser. Let me know if you want any generations other than the first one, or show me any fan art you make! I'd love to see it.

This one should work on phones and tablets. Let me know if you run into any problems.

You can save your finished pokemon as an HTML file, and it should save progress (but only on your computer).

Open offer: if you trace all 150 pokemon, I'll make it into a coloring book version for everyone. And if you draw fan art of all 150 pokemon, I'll send you a poster of your art! (as long as you don't live somewhere with crazy shipping for me)

Enjoy!

Today's hack-a-day project was the Cookbook 2.0. I wrote a collection of my recipes in 2020. I've updated it with what I've learned in the last 5 years. Among other things, it has 57 new recipes.

You can read it online in a couple formats.

Enjoy!

Today's hack-a-day project was the Pokédex -- the fictional companion that tells you about pokemon in the game. My main goal was just to get the info into a reasonable database format, but along with way I built a little viewer too.

The plan is to make some kind of art game where you do pokemon fanart, a coloring book, or even a tracing game in the coming days. And now I'm ready, with art of each pokemon on hand.

Today's hack-a-day project was the German Language Reader. It shows you the text of "German Legends" by the Brothers Grimm. Yes, the same brothers known for "Grimm's Fairy Tales" and perhaps less-so, the first dictionary.

If you highlight a word, you get the definition in english.

You can try it online. As usual, source code is on github.

I had hoped to have a German mode, but the German wiktionary API has been down for a week!

If you're technically inclined, it's not too bad to substitute in your own book. You'll need it in TXT format (to extract the words), and HTML format (to display).

I'm happy with this project, although I am posting it on the 10th, quite a bit late.

I had some minor help from Claude.

Enjoy!

Yikes, been having some back pain, and the past few days it's been tougher to work. I've started four projects in four days, without too much to show for it.

• Day 01 project is waiting on computation to run; overall I'm happy with it but will post when I get the results.
• Day 02 project I barely started and won't finish, most likely. It takes a photo of a Go board and tries to output the game. I'd learn some image processing doing it, but I'm sure there's plenty of existing and better tools to do the same thing.
• Day 03 project was a bit ambitious. Will post it if I finish (and hopefully I will, it's cool!)

Today's hack-a-day project was Reverse Vibe Coding. I sometimes use LLMs such as Claude for "vibe coding", mostly on throwaway type projects. It didn't seem fair for that to go only one way, so today I offered to vibe code for Claude -- it picks what I should make, and I code it up for Claude.

The result is the Conversation Flow Visualizer. This graphs when new topics come up in conversation, and what they are.

Frankly I think it's dumb and useless, but Claude is the boss, so there ya go! Can't pick who you work fo... okay, I guess I could this time.

In any case, it was pretty relaxing to be a junior dev and just do as I'm told for a bit, honestly. Easy win.

I honestly think this would be a good way to learn a new programming language or a new library.

Peace out!

Hack-a-Day is my self-imposed challenge to do one project a day, for all of November.

How do you render 3D graphics? Here's a picture of a cube:

But when you draw it on paper or a screen, it's flattened. All you see are these three faces.

In fact, if you turn off your brain, it's just three weird polygons. And we can figure out the corners of the polygon. For example, I figured out these with a ruler, measuring they they are on the paper in centimeters.

So to draw a cube, we just need to draw polygons. That's the essence of today's project.

Here's a minecraft world.

Here's the same thing in my voxel engine. If you squint, you might be able to recognize they're the same thing. Ignore the stripe at the top.

Here's a much simpler scene. If you click, you can explore it online

The source code is on github.

This hack wasn't perfect. There's some significant problems, and I worked on it 3 different days. Oh well, live and learn! I had fun.

Thanks to Claude for the code to extract minecraft data -- that was not the exciting part of this project.

The board game Go has been revolutionized in recent years by computer play. In 2016, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, a top Go player. This was the equivalent of what happened in Chess in 1997.

Since then, computers have continued to outstrip human players, but we have been learning a lot from Go engines. In this article I did some investigation using KataGo, which I understand to essentially be an open-source clone of the AlphaGo architecture.

This article assumes familiarity with the board game. If you're not familiar, I encourage you to give it a try sometime! Find a local try, or play online.

We have only one operation we can do. We can ask KataGo to analyze a position, and tell us how good that position is. That's the only operation we'll use in this article. And we're supposed to tell KataGo what the komi is.

KataGo returns two pieces of information for a position. An estimate of the score, and a percentage win chance.

The estimate of the score is determined (according to my very poor understanding), using an estimator which looks at the board, but doesn't try any moves. This is a fast, but low-quality metric.

On the other hand, the win rate is detemined by, simplifying some details, trying playing the game a bunch of times really fast and seeing how often black wins. It's slower, but more accurate.

Our first question is: How much should komi be?

Using only our one tool, let's figure out what KataGo thinks.

Well, in theory, what does a "good" komi mean? It means black and white should both win about 50% of the time. So let's just guess every possible komi, and find the one with the closest to 50% win rate.

Or, we could use the fast score estimator on an empty board with zero komi. If it thinks black is ahead by 6.0, maybe we could set komi to 6.0.

It turns out both methods give similar results. We're going to use the win rate method going forward, because in general I've been told it's more accurate for many board positions.

In fact, we can use the same method to evaluate any board position accurately. We can figure out what komi would make that board position 50-50 for white or black to win. And then we can treat that as the "value" of the position.

For the rest of the article, we're going to simplify, and only ask the value of board positions. We don't care which method we use, but I'll mark the fast-and-simple method as "neural", and the winrate method as "komi" or "winrate" in pictures.

Our next question is, what are different starting moves worth? Well, let's just play every one and see what KataGo says the score is.

Note that all scores are relative to +6.5 for the empty board, which is why some values are negative.

Okay, easy enough. What about different numbers of handicap stones? Using standard placements, we get:

Now let's make things more spicy. I keep winning every 1-stone game, but losing every 2-stone game. I want a 1.5 stone handicap. Well we can't add fractional stones, but we can look for something worth between 6.5 and 20 points.

Or, let's find something worth 0.0 points. I want a board position we can start with and not need that dumb komi rule.

Let's do the full analysis. Every possible starting board positions. Then we'll look for one that KataGo says is worth around... say, 12 points.

Of course, we can't really analyze every board position, so I just did ones with up to 2 stones. I included ones with white stones, because why not?

Here's what the ones with two black stones on 19x19 look like. It might take a bit to load, and you'll need to zoom in.

The full set of pictures is online.

• 19x19, 1-stone positions (black) winrate neural
• 19x19, 1-stone positions (white) winrate neural
• 19x19, 2-stone positions (black-black) winrate
• 19x19, 2-stone positions (black-white) winrate
• 19x19, 2-stone positions (white-white) winrate

• 19x19, positions closest to exact point values winrate

• 9x9, 1-stone positions (black) winrate neural

• 9x9, 1-stone positions (white) winrate neural
• 9x9, 2-stone positions (black-black) winrate
• 9x9, 2-stone positions (black-white) winrate
• 9x9, 2-stone positions (white-white) winrate
• 9x9, positions closest to exact point values winrate

You can also get the raw score of 2-stone (and lower) positions on 9x9 and 19x19 boards. The code to do analysis and generate the pictures is on github, as are details on exact software settings used.

Thanks to Google for AlphaGo, and to lightvector for Katago (and Katago support).

Addendum.

After doing this project, I found it had already been done (better) at katagobooks.com. Apparently what I've done is called an "opening book", even if my goal was a bit different.

I'm not sure what the correct name for these parts organizers is. I usually call them "Tackle Boxes", even though that's not quite right. People tend to use them to store tiny screws and so on. I use them for electronics.

Today I designed little paper insert to go into them (in CAD), so I can label which electronics are which and find them more easily.

Sadly, US letter is not quite big enough to cover the whole box.

Printable PDF is available in A4 or in US letter. You can also see the SVG I was given originally which inspired this.

I recomment holding the paper in place with double-stick tape. If you don't have that, the usual trick is to roll normal tape into a small loop facing outwards.

P.S., to crop a PDF from A4 to US letter (assuming everything fits on both) without inflating the file size, use:

# Keeps all physical dimensions the same
pdfcrop --bbox "0 0 792 612" smallthing-on-A4.pdf smallthing-on-usletter.pdf

I got a copy of The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book. It's a nice book that has 40 different one-page and two-page RPGs by a wide variety of authors.

I'm running a local event where we play a new game, and I wanted to quickly find which RPGs in the book are suitable for the number of players at the table. Unfortunately the indices at the back do not include this option.

Here's my custom index for the book. You can print it easily if you want (9 pages, one for each of 1-9 players).

Sometimes I try to figure out what to do in a given week, and my first step is to think "what are my long term goals?". Then I realize I have no long-term goals. I sit down and think, "Hmm, what do I want to do with my life?" Eventually I give up, depressed, and go make breakfast or something.

Recently I tried going the other way, with much more success. I call this exercise telescoping. It takes 7 minutes, and is performed as follows:

1. Open a text document or grab a piece of paper. Grab a kitchen timer with an alarm, or your phone's alarm app.
2. For one minute, answer: What do I want to happen today?
3. For one minute, answer: What do I want to happen this week?
4. For one minute, answer: What do I want to happen this month?
5. For one minute, answer: What do I want to happen this year?
6. For one minute, answer: What do I want to happen this month?
7. For one minute, answer: What do I want to happen this week?
8. For one minute, answer: What do I want to happen today?

I found this a bit enlightening. Here's an early example (I type fast):

2. Today

   • Enjoy myself, do some intention journaling.
   • Make at least a little progress on the zorchpad
   • Socialize with someone enjoyably
   • Become a little more long-term coherent

3. This Week

   • Work on the puzzle contest with XXX
   • Hang out with YYY
   • Get enough sleep!
   • Maybe get exercise

4. This Month

   • Make a prototype zorchpad and start carrying it around
   • Release qr-backup with no scary warnings
   • Continue to learn about electronics a bit, possibly
   • Have some kind of new social thing in my life

5. This Year

   • Get an income source where I don't have to do anything, and relax
   • Have a satisfying version of zorchpad
   • Learn electronics
   • Continue to learn programming languages
   • Spend a bunch of time chilling with friends
   • Get a boyfriend

6. This Month

   • Make a prototype zorchpad and start carrying it around
   • Keep my focus on zorchpad and intention journalling through the puzzle contest
   • Make 1 new friend -- might be hard, so at least attend social events in a more friend-condusive way

7. This Week

   • Breadboard a zorchpad
   • Hang out with XXX
   • Work on the puzzle contest with YYY. Wait, would she actually enjoy it? A: Yes!
   • Help someone with their quest!

8. Today

   • Work on breadboarding a zorchpad
   • Order zorchpad parts -- at least buffers/shift registers!
   • Write up telescoping in a blog post
   • Possibly, think about long-term planning a little maybe perhaps
   • Think about how to get sleep consistently, maybe?

I realized went from "Make progress on the zorchpad" to having a specific list of parts to order, and noticing I needed sleep. It helped me prioritize what I wanted to do.

I think it's more helpful to think about outcomes (What do I want to happen) rather than tasks (What do I need to do?), although I usually try to do both.

I did this two or three times, and kept finding it helpful. I decided to find out what happened if I did it every day.

Two weeks of doing it daily, I will report: it was neither super helpful nor a waste of time?

Basically, it was pretty helpful to think through things I hadn't. The main benefit of doing this every day was keeping long-term goals in sight, but I was no longer thinking through new things much.

The most surprising thing for me was that one minute quickly became too long. I reduced it to 30 seconds per step.

On the one hand, it's not that helpful. On the other hand, it takes 3.5 minutes, and it's a nice way to orient to the day. So, might or might not keep doing it.

The most useful part is that I can see my long term goals. Each day, they can shift. Do I want to keep working toward this thing? Have I had a long term goal that I haven't been working toward? Writing it anew each day is a much different feeling than glancing at a to-do list and either crossing it out or ignoring it (and feels much healthier).

Overall I'd recommend trying it at least once. I don't think it's for everyone, but I suspect it will help people like me that don't have clear goals.