GB Studio is a free and easy to use retro adventure game creator for Game Boy available for Mac, Linux and Windows. For more information see the GB Studio site
https://github.com/chrismaltby/gb-studio
make your own Game Boy game
Michelin Guide Restaurants in Tokyo
You are likely aware of the existence of the “Michelin Guide“.
Michelin Guides are a series of guide books published by the French tyre company Michelin for more than a century. The term normally refers to the annually published Michelin Red Guide, the oldest European hotel and restaurant reference guide, which awards up to three Michelin stars for excellence to a select few establishments.
Wikipedia
You might also be aware that Tokyo is the city with the highest density of Michelin star rated restaurants. Nice, eh?
A purchase of this guide is recommended in any case but these days people also need something they can intuitively use and which integrates into already existing workflows.
These people, like myself, need a map and maybe more details in a machine readable, filterable spreadsheet.
And as time goes on it might be quite useful to have all the sources that lead to these great tables and maps. Sources that allow you to crawl and grab these information.
A script that crawls Tokyo-based michelin guide establishments and saves it into a JSON file. I personally did this project so I can plan my tokyo trip based on the cheapest and most-renowned restaurants,
Michelin Guide Crawler on GitHub
Swappiness is a thing, as is cache pressure
We know that using swap space instead of RAM (memory) can severely slow down the performance of Linux. So then, one might ask, since I have more than enough memory available, wouldn’t it better to remove swap space completely? The short answer is, No. There are performance benefits when swap is enabled, even when you have more than enough ram.
Why you should almost always add swap space
vfs_cache_pressure – Controls the tendency of the kernel to reclaim the memory which is used for caching of directory and inode objects. (default = 100, recommend value 50 to 200)
swappiness – This control is used to define how aggressive the kernel will swap memory pages. Higher values will increase aggressiveness, lower values decrease the amount of swap. (default = 60, recommended values between 1 and 60) Remove your swap for 0 value, but usually not recommended in most cases.
https://access.redhat.com/solutions/103833
As I’ve now brought up the topic, go ahead and read the complete story at the source.
procedural generated traditional Chinese landscape scrolls
{Shan, Shui}* is inspired by traditional Chinese landscape scrolls (such as this and this) and uses noises and mathematical functions to model the mountains and trees from scratch. It is written entirely in javascript and outputs Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format.
https://github.com/LingDong-/shan-shui-inf
This is quite impressive and I am thinking about pushing that into the header of this blog :-) It’s just too nice looking to pass on.
RSS is here. Use it!
RSS aka RDF Site Summary aka Rich Site Summary aka Really Simple Syndication is a standardized web format that works for you.
At least it would work for you if you would use a a tool which would allow you to “subscribe” to RSS feeds from all sorts of websites. These tools are called feed-reader.
The website you are reading this on offers such a link. By subscribing to its feed you will be able to see all content but without having to actually go to each of your subscriptions one by one. That is done by the feed reader. This process of aggregation is it why feed readers are also called aggregator.
Invented exactly 20 years ago this month on the back-end of a feverish dot-com boom, RSS (Real Simple Syndication) has persisted as a technology despite Google’s infamous abandonment with the death of Google Reader and Silicon Valley social media companies trying and succeeding to supplant it. In the six years since Google shut down Reader, there have been a million words written about the technology’s rise and apparent fall.
RSS is Better Than Twitter
Here’s what’s important: RSS is very much still here. Better yet, RSS can be a healthy alternative…
I am using Liferea as my feed reader on desktop and Reeder on all that is iOS/macOS.
I’ve found that by using RSS feeds and not following a pre-filtered timeline I would not “follow” 1000 sources of information but choose more carefully whom to follow.
Some do not offer any feeds – so my decision in these cases is wether or not I would invest the time to create a custom parser for their content to pull in.
After RSS being just another XML format you quickly realize that HTML is just another XML format as well. There are simple ways to convert between both on the fly. Like fetchrss.com or your command-line.
Of course RSS is not the only feed format: ATOM would be another one worth mentioning.
a terminal for Windows
As Windows lately tends to make an effort to stay out of the way as an operating system and user-experience it seems that it regains more attention by developers.
For me this all is quite strange as I’ve personally would prefer switching from macOS to Linux rather than Windows.
But for those occasions you need to go with Windows. There’s a Terminal application now that gives you, well, a good terminal. Try FluentTerminal.
archive your slice of the web
Many use and love archive.org. A service that roams the public internet and archives whatever it finds. It even creates timelines of websites so you can dive right into history.
Have a piece of history right here:
You can have something similar hosted in your own environment. There are numerous open source projects dedicated to this archival purpose. One of them is ArchiveBox.
ArchiveBox takes a list of website URLs you want to archive, and creates a local, static, browsable HTML clone of the content from those websites (it saves HTML, JS, media files, PDFs, images and more).
I’ve done my set-up of ArchiveBox with the provided Dockerfile. Every once in a while it will start the docker container and check my Pocket feed for any new bookmarks. If found it will then archive those bookmarks.
As the HTML as well as PDF and Screenshot is saved this is extremely useful for later look-ups and even full-text search indexing.
nicer color palette for the web
if you need a bit of Windows 95
The times of Windows 95 are long gone. But some projects try to keep it alive. This project uses some system virtualization to bring you Windows 95 almost on any platform with almost no dependencies.
This is Windows 95, running in an Electron app. Yes, it’s the full thing. I’m sorry.
Felix Rieseberg
Miataru – open source location tracking
Not a lot of things are more private than your location.
Yet sometimes you wish to share your location with friends and family. May it be during an event or regularly. Maybe you want to
To allow the tech-minded audience to be in full control of what data is aggregated and stored regarding these needs I’ve created Miataru back in 2013 as an open-source project from end-2-end.
With the protocol being completely open and ready to be integrated into any home automation interested users can either utilize the publicly available (stores-nothing-on-disk) server or host your own.
Everything from the server to the clients is available in source and there’s a ready-to-go version of the client app on the AppStore.
OpenSource drawing: Krita
I just recently learned about Krita. An open source drawing application that allows you to… oh well… do free-hand drawings.
Krita is a FREE and open source painting tool designed for concept artists, illustrators, matte and texture artists, and the VFX industry. Krita has been in development for over 10 years and has had an explosion in growth recently. It offers many common and innovative features to help the amateur and professional alike. See below for some of the highlighted features.
Krita highlights
Taking a look at the gallery yields that I cannot draw. Frustration about that is limited because there’s so much nice drawings to gaze at!
Also this is a multi-platform application. It’s available for Windows, macOS and for Linux.
pushing your myfitnesspal data to MQTT
MyFitnessPal is a great online service we are using to track what we eat. It’s well integrated into our daily routine – it works!
Unfortunately MyFitnessPal is not well set-up to interface 3rd party applications with it. In fact it appears they are actively trying to make it harder for externals to utilize the data there.
To access your data there’s an open source project called “python-myfitnesspal” which allows you to interface with MyFitnessPal from the command line. This project uses web-scraping to extract the information from the website and will break everytime MyFitnessPal is changing the design/layout.
Since the output for this would be command line text output it is not of great use for a standardized system. What is needed is to have the data sent in a re-useable way into the automation system.
This is why I wrote the additional tool “myfitnesspal2mqtt“. It takes the output provided by python-myfitnesspal and sends it to an MQTT topic. The message then can be decoded, for example with NodeRed, and further processed.
As you can see in the image above I am taking the MQTT message coming from myfitnesspal2mqtt and decoding it with a bit of javascript and outputting it back to MQTT.
![var complete = {};
var sodium = {};
var carbohydrates = {};
var calories = {};
var daydate = {};
var fat = {};
var sugar = {};
var protein = {};
var weight = {};
var bodyfat = {};
var goalsodium = {};
var goalcarbohydrates = {};
var goalcalories = {};
var goalfat = {};
var goalsugar = {};
var goalprotein = {};
var caloriesdiff = {};
var ttopic = msg.topic.toLowerCase();
var firstobject = Object.keys(msg.payload)[0];
complete.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].complete;
complete.topic = ttopic+'/complete';
sodium.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].totals.sodium;
sodium.topic = ttopic+'/total/sodium';
carbohydrates.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].totals.carbohydrates;
carbohydrates.topic = ttopic+'/total/carbohydrates';
calories.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].totals.calories;
calories.topic = ttopic+'/total/calories';
fat.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].totals.fat;
fat.topic = ttopic+'/total/fat';
sugar.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].totals.sugar;
sugar.topic = ttopic+'/total/sugar';
protein.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].totals.protein;
protein.topic = ttopic+'/total/protein';
weight.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].measurements.weight;
weight.topic = ttopic+'/measurement/weight';
bodyfat.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].measurements.bodyfat;
bodyfat.topic = ttopic+'/measurement/bodyfat';
goalsodium.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].goals.sodium;
goalsodium.topic = ttopic+'/goal/sodium';
goalcarbohydrates.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].goals.carbohydrates;
goalcarbohydrates.topic = ttopic+'/goal/carbohydrates';
goalcalories.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].goals.calories;
goalcalories.topic = ttopic+'/goal/calories';
goalfat.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].goals.fat;
goalfat.topic = ttopic+'/goal/fat';
goalsugar.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].goals.sugar;
goalsugar.topic = ttopic+'/goal/sugar';
goalprotein.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].goals.protein;
goalprotein.topic = ttopic+'/goal/protein';
caloriesdiff.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].goals.calories - msg.payload[firstobject].totals.calories;
caloriesdiff.topic = ttopic+'/caloriedeficit';
daydate.payload = firstobject;
daydate.topic = ttopic+"/date";
return [complete, sodium, carbohydrates, calories, fat, sugar, protein, weight, bodyfat, goalsodium, goalcarbohydrates, goalcalories, goalfat, goalsugar, goalprotein, daydate, caloriesdiff];](https://www.schrankmonster.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Bildschirmfoto-zu-2019-03-22-14-13-41.png)
In the end it expands into a multitude of topics with one piece of information per MQTT topic.
And with just that every time the script is run (which I do in a docker container and with a cronjob) the whole lot of pieces of information about nutrition and health stats are being pushed and stored in the home automation system.
This way they are of course also available to the home automation system to do things with it.
Like locking the fridge.
beautiful code (screenshots)
Every once in a while I need to make a good looking screenshot of code. Like really good looking and well colored.
Like this one:
There’s the great “carbon” tool for that now! It’s browser based and you can access it either here or it’s source here.
indoor location tracking with ESP32
This project uses the same approach that I took for my ESP32 based indoor location tracking system (by tracking BLE signal strength). But this project came up with an actual user interface – NICE!
(https://github.com/jarkko-hautakorpi/iBeacon-indoor-positioning-demo)