The miti.today website is my attempt at making a minimal calendar that gets me the Nepali date without any fluff or ambition.
My requirements for the website were simple:
So I came up with a system where I host a static website on Cloudflare Pages. And every 24 hours at 12AM Nepal time, a cloudflare worker triggers the deployment again, updating the page.
Haven't we all lived some form of the diagram below:
Your real server is behind a reverse proxy. But all ingress traffic comes through a different gated proxy not in your control that locks everything behind it with a Basic Auth.
I finally got the Playdate. This little yellow machine is nice to look at and quite fun to play with, but it doesn't yet have the kind of games I like to play. No problem, I'm writing them myself.
Meanwhile, I have 3d printed a stand for it, and it sits on my desk acting as a unique clock.
Now that I have a stand and a really cool memory LCD display which barely needs power to display static images, I can display anything on it while it sits on my desk.
So a friend was building a device which had an array of 6 seven-segment-displays. We were thinking about some cool idle and loading animations we might be able to program into it.
I didn't ask for the specifics but it was clear that the display unit had an arrangement of one shift register (probably a 74HC595) per digit. The 74HC595 is a nice little chip that can be fed one byte serially, and it outputs that byte in parallel. It also latches onto that byte for however long we ask it to, and it can be daisy-chained. So it is a cheap way to drive a huge amount of LED lights with a few micro-controller pins.
sleep tight good night is when the world stops and the universe is a box of cyan walls inside which you will find me with fever intense and endless and with my body hollow and transparent and just a little candlelight for heart which is hard to see, actually, for all these incandescent bulbs unnatural and nauseating but necessary, indispensable actually, these lights that burn my soul with their uncaring intensity they bind me they destroy me.
In keeping with the spirit of the times, I've started playing in the Nepali Stock Exchange playground. It is a strange, distorted world for someone like me who's used to the determinism of the computer realm. And so far, it has just proved to be a more fashionable way of losing money. But it's addictive!
If you've ever had to use Nepal Stock Exchange's Trade Management System (often called just TMS), you probably hate it. It is at best an incompetently made software with many glaring issues, hosted over a woefully underpowered infrastructure that cannot even handle the most predictable of traffic spikes. On more than one occasion I've oversold or undersold shares because it's UI was out of sync with it's database.
I started making this thing as a one-day experiment: a fun little browser-game I could craft before committing to the everlooming neverending self-judo one-man-deathwrestle called exams. But it instead ended up spreading out sparse as intense hour-long coding sessions throughout the Quarantine months.
I keep on waiting
for a relief; she'll come barefoot
Like the wind she'll
blow out the candles I've lit
and like the wind she'll
whisper in my ear
I'm waiting for that
whisper in my ear ...
Meet Flappy Millennial. He's an average guy in his mid 20's and the future looks bleak for him. With the threats of climate change, mass-extinctions, rising authoritarianism, economic depression, unprecedented wildfires and so much more ever-looming, nihilism has become his background music.
But worry not. For he has an antidote—well, not so much an antidote as a sedative. He has his phone! Come help this Flappy Millennial ignore reality while he scrolls through Instagram or something. You should play this game not because it's good or anything, but simply so you too can pretend that things are okay for a while.
I've been working on and off on a Nepali programming language with my friends for the last few months. It's called मनसा (IAST: mansā) and I think it's ready for an alpha release. If you'd like to try the language out, visit mnsa.cc - the official website. You can play around with the language right in the browser without having to download anything, not even a Devanagari keyboard layout.
This post is a collection of random things I want to say about the language, including how the idea came about, the interesting things I learnt making the project, and the problems faced.