General update on the current state of my life

Hello everyone!

Thought I'd give something of a general overview of my current October "2016" (but is it really, etc.). Life updates are something I'm really, really bad at, and I thought it would be nice if I didn't just have 140 characters or a broken platform to play with. Not that Google isn't a total joke.

Maybe I'll move this blog over to my real website, which uses Let's Encrypt, which is a free SSL certificate vendor, and offers an automatic client to refresh (since oddly it only gives 3-month certificates).

Job hunting is sour. I had really hoped to be able to carry on getting people to contract me to make websites but I haven't had anything for going on 7 weeks now (gosh, I sound like a mother telling you the age of her child). My usual contract profession is that I build websites for people at home (If you happen to know anyone who needs it, please get in touch), but I am also an avid musician who plays the guitar and keyboard mostly, and am interested in perhaps joining a local band.

I'm making a plethora of new software (mainly because I like coding and I'm often bored, see my GitHub). I was inspired by Matt Parker in his video about letter to number relationships, so I tried to build something automated to see if I could find more. I do love maths and have made a bunch of programs to do a few maths-y things (here are some more!). I've even got myself onto the Online Encyclopædia of Integer Sequences (twice!), and made a Node.js library for accessing it.

A few things I've made that I'm particularly proud of are Project Chaplin (edit 2021: archived) (code) the first free software video sharing website, a half finished social network manager, an automated Apache vhost manager, a clever command-line Omegle client, the beginnings of a first person shooter, with its inspiration in a set of software-rendered demos. I have also made a DeviantArt and Pinterest photo scraper, and had yet another thought about how universal packages should be built.

A few more toys (I wouldn't call them big projects) I've created are a dumb wordoid generator, a Pastafarian finite state machine, a program to play cricket with the input stream to teach me a bit of C++, a few spacey gravity simulators, an equation-based synthesiser, a webcam-based tone generator, a third-party Jamendo audio player, and even a edit: 16, 32 and 64-bit OS, to teach me assembler and C.

Although hardly started, I seem to love gamepads so much, I made something that looks almost like a game (with free pictures taken from the Internet) that basically does nothing but allow you to test a gamepad.

On the useful scale, I decided I wanted to see how up-to-date a few popular GNU/Linux distributions were, so I made a little tool to find out. I might extend it with something or add automation later.

In the future, I will probably re-make my static silly Linux-based distribution into something more sensible (stay tuned), make something to do fun things with Wolfram Alpha (I haven't decided what yet), and make an automatic web page categoriser based on string matching of page structure, as I did when I used to work for an analytics platform.

Entertainment-wise, I finished marathoning most of the Star Trek (all series) episodes ever. I thought that series 3 of Enterprise was total gobshite. 4 was alright though.

I'm marathoning Doctor Who. It's fantastic stuff, I haven't yet gotten past the lost episodes, but there are plenty of clever reconstructions from photos, occasional surviving clips and the existing (I think?) audio. At least it sounds like the real Doctor (I've gotten up to Troughton, if you're interested). Maybe he's got an impersonator? Who knows.

I play computer games more than usual (which I know is an important life skill). My favourite at the moment is Skyrim. Let me know if you want more on that.

I research my family history. I've gone back about 500 years, I'm sure I could even find you. I use Ancestry for that kind of thing and have almost 1000 people in my tree. It's very interesting to me and one discovers pretty crazy things about one's own heritage!

I'm going to see if I can blog a bit more, as it gives me a bit of free reign. Maybe I should do regular segments like discoveries of the week. Yes, I'm definitely a podcast. In fact, I'd rather like to do a tech-related podcast with someone. Any takers?

Ta-ta.

Comments

No comments yet...

Answers to the big questions

Permalink | Author: Dan Dart | Published: 2009-06-29 12:30:00 UTC | Tags: answers creation how life robots truth universe where why

Questions like "Why is the universe made mostly of matter?", "Why are we here?", "Is there a god?", and "Is there life on other planets?" are answered scientifically here.

Why is the universe made mostly of matter? Simply because it had to have matter and antimatter to come out of pure energy. Antimatter, doubtless, is hanging around somewhere, perhaps it's the "dark matter" or locked up in that "dark energy" that scientists are theorising about so much. But the fact remains, if we are here to question it, there must be one type of matter primarily in the same region of space as us. Otherwise we wouldn't be here to ask. If there were matter and antimatter in the universe, one would annihilate the other and we wouldn't have got here.

Why are we here?

This question is quite vague. By "why are we here" I mean, why did humans exist in the first place? Not "why am I living here specifically".

Imagine the early universe. Googolplexes of things bashing into each other at phenomenal rate. One is bound to create an atom of some sort. In a universe of such ridiculous amounts of matter, one somewhere is bound to create something useful. So chances are, one is bound to create life. Now this life may or may not die out almost instantly, so it needs a way to duplicate itself if it's going to survive. It may or may not care, but the important thing is, that if a life form is created during the early time of Earth, only life forms that do reproduce actually get to evolve. And evolution, obviously, is tiny changes in genetic structure, randomly happening. So, only the life that evolves into the "right" kind of life gets to stay reproducing. Granted, other forms of life mutated too, but only the "best" kept its longevity. So random life just happened to appear our of the primordial ooze of the early Earth. It was of course bound to happen somewhere. So up and up went the forms of life that were best suited to surviving. Eventually, humans evolved out of those plants and animals. We discovered machines, and they help us to do what we want. In fact, some believe we are going lower and lower on the evolutionary ladder, because we are getting more and more used to technology helping us along, and become less and less needy of the things we are born with naturally.

Now, so why did we have to be HERE, specifically? Well, we'd be asking that wherever we were, because if we weren't here, we'd be asking the same elsewhere. It's all just a factor of chance.

Is there a god?

Since we've gone this far from randomness alone, and what pretty randomness it is, there is unlikely to be an external force needed, except for whatever the big bang was created out of. People have created imaginary deities in their mind, tried to believe there was a familiar "being" that could not be explained or argued against, and that we were at the centre of the universe, and let others believe this too. This was to stop them from going mad, because if anyone knew the truth about how insignificant we were, or how we didn't matter that much, cosmically speaking, they would, to put it bluntly, not be content,

Are there other forms of life on other planets?

Almost certainly. In the random beginnings of the early universe, there was bound to be more than one life form that evolved. Some believe close planets such as Mars may have contained life at some point, but do not now. In our theory, life as we know it has to have water as one of its important constituent components. But who says all forms of life have to have water? For all we know, planets might be alive. But here, we do not quite know what defines as life. Maybe a different form of life has some of the forms of life as we do and not others. We wouldn't classify it as life. Just as we wouldn't classify robots as life, aliens might do. They reproduce (create other robots), eat (electricity), excrete (fumes), move, and all manner of things that might be attributable to life. Even intelligence is not necessary in life. Just look at plants. We do not think they are particularly intelligent, but if they've survived this long, they must be doing something right. So to me, it's almost a certainty that life exists elsewhere, it's just a matter of us understanding what life is.

Next time, how many dimensions are there? How many universes are there? How far can we perceive?

Comments

No comments yet...

General update on the current state of my life

Comments

Post a comment:

Answers to the big questions

Comments

Post a comment: