Additionally, here is a treasure trove of about half a gig compressed of unreleased custom Sims objects, including the Simprov Wedding Play Set stuff like Cupid (who makes you instantly fall in love with anyone you want, even cats and dogs) and Buddha (who makes everybody happy and not piss themselves and fall asleep in their own puddles of urine during parties) and the Crowd Sitter (to make your guests all sit down and shut up for the wedding ceremony, also useful for assembling and controlling cults) and lots of beautiful SimFreaks objects and skins.
Please subscribe to Zombie Sims to thank and support Heather and Steve for all their great and generous work, which they've updated for the recent 25 year anniversary release of The Sims Legacy Collection. Then you can spice up your wedding by inviting zombies!
DonHopkins on Jan 23, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: A guide for playing The Sims 1 on Intel and ARM Ma...
ZombieSims is a mind-blowing, brain-eating, tour de force Sims 1 fan expansion pack by two of the greatest Sims user created content artists and programmers: Heather "SimFreaks" (who created SimFreaks.com and much of the beautiful content for Sims 1 at http://www.simfreaks.com/index.php including themed play sets like http://www.simfreaks.com/themes/storytime/pirate/index.shtml ) and Steve "SimSlice" (who created SliceCity: SimCity within The Sims at http://simslice.com/Slicecity.htm by programming many interlocking objects in SimAntics, and also many other amazing Sims 1 objects like the weather machine at other cool stuff at http://www.simslice.com/Objects-Electronic.html ).
Heather and Steve were both early Sims 1 fans who each published their own popular web sites with downloadable objects, met through the Sims 1 modding community, then eventually moved in together and got married, and now they've combined their extreme art and programming talents to make an intricately intertwingled collection of Sims 1 Zombie objects, with a whole lot of original artwork and programming!
Check out some of the crazy menus that pop up -- this demo barely scratches the surface!
DonHopkins on Jan 23, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: A guide for playing The Sims 1 on Intel and ARM Ma...
(In Professor Farnsworth's voice:) Good news everyone!
I asked Heather permission, and she says it's OK for me to give away the huge collection of custom Sims objects I have that includes an archive snapshot of many classic SimFreaks objects, as well as all the unreleased SimProv Wedding Playset objects that Heather and Donna and Steve and I created years ago but never finished and released, and a whole bunch of other stuff like the Transmogrifier object that randomly changes your body, the Dumbold voting machine that sometimes makes you accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan, Satan who shows up when you're depressed and offers to buy your soul, the Crowd Sitter that makes everyone gather together and sit down on chairs, and the Cupid that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood, and the Buddha that makes everyone happy and not piss themselves and fall asleep in their own puddles of urine during parties.
I don't have time to actually support and debug any of this stuff, but at least I recently updated the Cupid to be compatible with the Pets expansion pack, so it now lets you fall in love with any pet in the neighborhood. (You just can't actually marry them -- not that there's anything wrong with marrying cats and dogs, but we didn't have the animations for that!)
If you want to express your appreciation, then please subscribe to Zombie Sims for a $9.99 lifetime membership, and then you can play around with inviting lots of Zombies to your weddings and see how that works! (Or don't invite them, and they will crash your wedding anyway!) But no guarantees or warranties that it doesn't devolve into a bloody mess!
Here's my special collection of Sims 1 downloads, including the unreleased and not quite finished "SimProv" wedding Playset and handy "Cupid" that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood (including pets)!
Speed Dating With Cupid: A demo of Speed Dating with Cupid, part of the SimProv Wedding Play Set for The Sims 1. Programming by Don Hopkins. Graphics by SimBabes and SimFreaks.
To find the Cupid and other Simprov items, go into buy mode, press the last icon of three dots for "Miscellaneous", then press the first icon with a pool table for "Recreation". The main item of the Simprov wedding playset is the "Hope Chest", which has a "Help" item that explains what to do next, and it summons a wedding consultant (who you can dismiss and call back if you don't like her hanging around in your bedroom forever). Then you can click on the hope chest to make other objects like the Cupid, and click on the wedding consultant to make catalogs of other items (most of them are just placeholder programmer art right now, but some of then configure things like what kind of wedding you will have and who will officiate it), but the idea was that you could order lots of items through the catalogs that you couldn't get through the normal shopping interface. But for now most of the wedding items are still in the build mode shopping catalog. The Simprov Wedding Playset video above walks through how to use most of the objects!
Also be sure to check out Donna's beautiful wedding beds, the luxurious buffet with ice dolphin sculpture, gold inlaid glass dining table, fancy dollhouses, elegant dolls, and many other premium objects identified as Simprov, SimBabes, and SimFreaks in their catalog descriptions.
The crowd sitter and the Dumbold voting machine are included in the collection. (Just kind of hard to find since there are so darn many objects!)
The Sims 1 Crowd Sitter
When I was growing up, we lived within 6km line of sight from a powerful AM broadcaster on 660KHZ.
By some stroke of fortune, our woodstove smoke pipe and the tinfoil backed insulation of the house,
Along with the grounded base but rusty bolted on top of the woodstove created some kind of resonant receiver at that frequency. It would generate sufficient voltage to deliver the occasional electrical shock, which was very mysterious because we had no idea how this stove could shock you, even when the mains were turned off.
The mystery of the source of the power was shocks when we built a wire drying rack above the stove, which acted as a sound transducer. With the glove rack, we were treated to 24/7 programming, mostly community oriented stuff like “problem corner”(community issue discussion) bush relay messages for remote listeners outside of telephone reach, “tradio” (call in radio Craigslist, basically), news shows, talk shows, and some occasional music.
To me, it was just completely normal, never having known anything else besides electrocution hazard wood stoves and radio show mitten racks lol. It did fuel a fascination for electronics, though, so by the time I was seven I was an avid reader of popular electronics magazine. Forrest Mims. What a treasure of an engineer.
This article is confusing two different things: "unbuffered" vs "line-buffered".
Unbuffered will gratuitously give you worse performance, and can create incorrect output if multiple sources are writing to the same pipe. (sufficiently-long lines will intermingle anyway, but most real-world output lines are less than 4096 bytes, even including formatting/control characters and characters from supplementary planes)
Line-buffering is the default for terminals, and usually what you want for pipes. Run each command under `stdbuf -oL -eL` to get this. The rare programs that want to do in-line updates already have to do manual flushing so will work correctly here too.
You can see what `stdbuf` is actually doing by running:
I note that while E is more common than A if we're counting letters appearing anywhere in a word, A is substantially more common than E if we only count first letters of words:
$ egrep -o . /usr/share/dict/words | tr a-z A-Z | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
235415 E
201093 I
199606 A
170740 O
161024 R
158783 N
152868 T
139578 S
130507 L
103460 C
87390 U
78180 P
70725 M
68217 D
64377 H
51683 Y
47109 G
40450 B
24174 F
20181 V
16174 K
13875 W
8462 Z
6933 X
3734 Q
3169 J
2 -
$ cut -c1 /usr/share/dict/words | tr a-z A-Z | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
25170 S
24465 P
19909 C
17105 A
16390 U
12969 T
12621 M
11077 B
10900 D
9676 R
9033 H
8800 I
8739 E
7850 O
6865 F
6862 G
6784 N
6290 L
3947 W
3440 V
2284 K
1643 J
1152 Q
949 Z
671 Y
385 X
This also explains the prevalence of S, P, C, M, and B.
I have "increment" and "decrement" bookmarklets, that look for the last-most number in a url and make it go up or down by one. I'm always surprised at how often it's useful. Oh, and I have this one called "kill sticky",
javascript:( function(){ let i, elements = document.querySelectorAll('body *'); for (i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) { if(getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position === 'fixed' || getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position === 'sticky') { elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]); } } document.body.style.overflow = "auto"; document.body.style.position = "static"; })()
Which deletes those annoying page-covering popups like "sign up for my newsletter" or "you need to log in (even though the content is right there*)"
I have a slightly longer one that also makes gets rid of the various `overflow:hidden` stylings since it seemed like I'd often kill an annoying popover with the content _right there_ to find that I couldn't scroll down anymore.
Moreover, I find Shinzen Young's reframing helpful: "Amazingly, it’s possible to get a good night’s rest without necessarily sleeping much or at all. Two things are required: (1) that the body get rest by lying very still and corpse-like. (2) that the consciousness get rest by engaging in a systematic focusing technique." https://www.shinzen.org/help-for-insomnia-yet-another-use-fo...
Now wait, let not be too hasty here. We should whiteboard this out. There are a lot of moving parts, and shutting down an idea too soon, would be wrong.
So to start, uh, just wondering, which politicians? Also, what would they be wearing?
I often cite this diagram: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Netfilte... as my favorite picture. It shows the logical flow of packets through Linux. I'm pretty sure my career would be on a very different trajectory had I not discovered an earlier version of it back in ~2006.
You could say that Mark Russinovich is a hacker's hacker, the foremost Windows hacker, and a reverse engineering wizard. It was he who discovered and blew the whistle on the Sony rootkit scandal, for example, after finding and reverse engineering it on his machine.
He extensively reverse engineered and documented "Windows Internals" details before joining Microsoft (and before being "encouraged" to change the name of his business to Sysinternals).
His writings and talks on "The case of..." are master classes on reverse engineering.
I think you might like to watch this YouTube Video on "How The Best Hackers Learn Their Craft"(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vj96QetfTg). David Brumley speaks about his experience with getting students integrated but the skill grid he shows might be what you're looking for.
At some points, it is just getting to the answer no matter the method (algorithm, memory, quick trick etc.) At the end of the day, it's still just problem solving and learning existing tools better.
Instead of Pattern in the collection, play a variant of picross/nonogram with hand made levels, much more satisfying. Picross3d is similar but 3d, really good.
Sherlock and Honeycomb, two variants of hint games where you deduce what is where. Like "x is to the left of y".
Willa's Walk. Create a loop through rooms, but can never walk straight. All three can be found here for desktop and mobile https://www.kaser.com/mobile.html (they look funky but play well)
I remember the thousands of interesting and weird pages listed on StumbleUpon - directories of obscure topics, avant garde art projects and detailed field specific blogs - many of them both pretty and thoroughly made.
Mind expanding stuff.
I feel like today all of that has moved to silos like tiktok and instagram, in extreme short form formats that are easily disposable - so almost no one creates truly great "compilations" of stuff, directories, blogs, galleries or whatever - it's all just streams of disconnected content free floating towards oblivion in a few days.
This has made everything bite-sized and fragmented everyones attention as nothing is getting polished or curated to perfection.
I miss people polishing stuff, then just letting it sit out there for people to enjoy. Today everything is hidden after a few days - so the rare gems disappear too while the algorithms and search engines favour the easily devourable in the first place.
We need something like Stumbleupon back, does that exist? I wonder why it wasn't viable.
For example I have allowed only my mail servers for Thunderbird. And then I have discovered that Thunderbird sends filenames and SHA-256 hashes of all received email attachments to Google (browser.safebrowsing.downloads.remote.url, https://brmlab.cz/project/spyzilla#thunderbird) and that it sends telemetry saying "you have disabled telemetry" when you disable telemetry.
It also allows you to deny all internet access per-app. For example, should there be an exploit for a MP3 parser in Audacity (presume that Audacity has no use for internet normally -- at least that's my use case), it will probably try to download a second stage from the internet, and you want to block this. Unfortunately, OpenSnitch probably cannot detect "Audacity has spawned wget and you have allowed wget, but only as a child of bash in your terminal launched from your DE startup script, not as a child of Audacity".
As another real-life example, I have discovered that Stardict scans clipboard by default and tries to translate what it finds there using an online dictionary. This includes passwords in your clipboard. https://jenda.hrach.eu/w/et#stardict (the linked page contains several other less severe examples discovered about 2014-2016; I'm not in infosec anymore, so I'm not looking for this that much)
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments/TheSimsDe...
Additionally, here is a treasure trove of about half a gig compressed of unreleased custom Sims objects, including the Simprov Wedding Play Set stuff like Cupid (who makes you instantly fall in love with anyone you want, even cats and dogs) and Buddha (who makes everybody happy and not piss themselves and fall asleep in their own puddles of urine during parties) and the Crowd Sitter (to make your guests all sit down and shut up for the wedding ceremony, also useful for assembling and controlling cults) and lots of beautiful SimFreaks objects and skins.
Please subscribe to Zombie Sims to thank and support Heather and Steve for all their great and generous work, which they've updated for the recent 25 year anniversary release of The Sims Legacy Collection. Then you can spice up your wedding by inviting zombies!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34485103
DonHopkins on Jan 23, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: A guide for playing The Sims 1 on Intel and ARM Ma...
ZombieSims is a mind-blowing, brain-eating, tour de force Sims 1 fan expansion pack by two of the greatest Sims user created content artists and programmers: Heather "SimFreaks" (who created SimFreaks.com and much of the beautiful content for Sims 1 at http://www.simfreaks.com/index.php including themed play sets like http://www.simfreaks.com/themes/storytime/pirate/index.shtml ) and Steve "SimSlice" (who created SliceCity: SimCity within The Sims at http://simslice.com/Slicecity.htm by programming many interlocking objects in SimAntics, and also many other amazing Sims 1 objects like the weather machine at other cool stuff at http://www.simslice.com/Objects-Electronic.html ). Heather and Steve were both early Sims 1 fans who each published their own popular web sites with downloadable objects, met through the Sims 1 modding community, then eventually moved in together and got married, and now they've combined their extreme art and programming talents to make an intricately intertwingled collection of Sims 1 Zombie objects, with a whole lot of original artwork and programming!
https://zombiesims.com/
Twitch streaming videos:
https://www.twitch.tv/simfreaks_heather/videos
Highlight: Zombie Sims - Beta - Everybody Dies
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1049524221
Check out some of the crazy menus that pop up -- this demo barely scratches the surface!
DonHopkins on Jan 23, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: A guide for playing The Sims 1 on Intel and ARM Ma...
(In Professor Farnsworth's voice:) Good news everyone! I asked Heather permission, and she says it's OK for me to give away the huge collection of custom Sims objects I have that includes an archive snapshot of many classic SimFreaks objects, as well as all the unreleased SimProv Wedding Playset objects that Heather and Donna and Steve and I created years ago but never finished and released, and a whole bunch of other stuff like the Transmogrifier object that randomly changes your body, the Dumbold voting machine that sometimes makes you accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan, Satan who shows up when you're depressed and offers to buy your soul, the Crowd Sitter that makes everyone gather together and sit down on chairs, and the Cupid that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood, and the Buddha that makes everyone happy and not piss themselves and fall asleep in their own puddles of urine during parties.
I don't have time to actually support and debug any of this stuff, but at least I recently updated the Cupid to be compatible with the Pets expansion pack, so it now lets you fall in love with any pet in the neighborhood. (You just can't actually marry them -- not that there's anything wrong with marrying cats and dogs, but we didn't have the animations for that!)
If you want to express your appreciation, then please subscribe to Zombie Sims for a $9.99 lifetime membership, and then you can play around with inviting lots of Zombies to your weddings and see how that works! (Or don't invite them, and they will crash your wedding anyway!) But no guarantees or warranties that it doesn't devolve into a bloody mess!
Here's my special collection of Sims 1 downloads, including the unreleased and not quite finished "SimProv" wedding Playset and handy "Cupid" that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood (including pets)!
https://donhopkins.com/home/DonsSims1Downloads.zip
Simprov Wedding Play Set: Demo of the Simprov Wedding Play Set for The Sims 1. Graphics by SimBabes and SimFreaks. Programming by Don Hopkins.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwt5LJlrMe8
Speed Dating With Cupid: A demo of Speed Dating with Cupid, part of the SimProv Wedding Play Set for The Sims 1. Programming by Don Hopkins. Graphics by SimBabes and SimFreaks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVUP9OXmHTM
Transmogrify Self: A quick demo of The Sims Transmogrifier personified in The Sims 1. Graphics by SimBabes, programming by SimSlice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsTbs7IL5EI
To find the Cupid and other Simprov items, go into buy mode, press the last icon of three dots for "Miscellaneous", then press the first icon with a pool table for "Recreation". The main item of the Simprov wedding playset is the "Hope Chest", which has a "Help" item that explains what to do next, and it summons a wedding consultant (who you can dismiss and call back if you don't like her hanging around in your bedroom forever). Then you can click on the hope chest to make other objects like the Cupid, and click on the wedding consultant to make catalogs of other items (most of them are just placeholder programmer art right now, but some of then configure things like what kind of wedding you will have and who will officiate it), but the idea was that you could order lots of items through the catalogs that you couldn't get through the normal shopping interface. But for now most of the wedding items are still in the build mode shopping catalog. The Simprov Wedding Playset video above walks through how to use most of the objects!
Also be sure to check out Donna's beautiful wedding beds, the luxurious buffet with ice dolphin sculpture, gold inlaid glass dining table, fancy dollhouses, elegant dolls, and many other premium objects identified as Simprov, SimBabes, and SimFreaks in their catalog descriptions.
The crowd sitter and the Dumbold voting machine are included in the collection. (Just kind of hard to find since there are so darn many objects!) The Sims 1 Crowd Sitter
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-sims-1-crowd-sitter-1f478b...
Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims 1
https://donhopkins.medium.com/dumbold-voting-machine-for-the...
Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs
Demo of The Sims Transmogrifier, RugOMatic, ShowNTell, Simplifier and Slice City.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imu1v3GecB8
Transmogrify Self
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsTbs7IL5EI
Speed Dating With Cupid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVUP9OXmHTM
Simprov Wedding Play Set
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwt5LJlrMe8
FreeTheSims Sims Character Animation ActiveX Control Demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzz0cFSmgiM