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Last month, ( Visual cipher / morse code-ish ); wanted to practice reading morse code.

Now, even though it's sorta messy and hard to use, I have a script that takes screenshots as input, and outputs modified screenshots where known characters are replaced by morse equivalents.

script [pastebin]
genesis [imgur], genesis [postimg]
colors support [imgur], colors support [postimg]

A support directory of about 25 - 300 tiny screenshots and replacement images, is necessary for functioning. And obviously, it only works on monospace fonts, in a single size, without antialiasing. Nothing modern.

Two weeks ago, on 02015/08/30, a desktop that I had been relying upon for the past 6 years, died very suddenly. No gradual instability, just suddenly dying out of nowhere.

Since all usb ports were dead, I optimistically expected that it was a PSU problem. If the 5v rail were missing, the usb ports would probably all die, too.

Connecting a voltmeter to a spare molex connector, saw that both the +5v and +12v pins were good. So it's not a PSU problem.

Life's not fair. 6 years is too young for a desktop to die. I'm used to laptops being fragile and breaking occassionally. But desktops are supposed to be immortal.

After a week or so of feeling totally fucked, began pricing out a few options; and the cheapest was . . . buy a completely identical computer, swap all the drives, and it should work ?

I didn't expect this to be possible. I bought it used 6 years ago, so at least 7 years old overall. No consumer electronics aside from 555 timer chips have a production life that long. No such completely identical computer would exist.

But, inbetween 5 or 6 pages saying "out of stock" / "discontinued", there were still exactly 4 copies left. One seller on ebay, had 4 of them. Only 85 dollars (140 incl. shipping . . . it's a desktop)

It arrived surprisingly quickly (only 2 or 3 days), and after 2 hours running memtest86, 1.5 hours swapping all the drives, 2 more hours running memtest86, 0.75 hours listening to angry beeps of "error: hardware changed", boot device order being screwed up and rebooting constantly . . . everything works perfectly. Not even a single pixel out of place. Unbelievable.

Partly for sake of privacy, I recently resurrected a dead project of trying to replace my normal handwriting with morse code. I had earlier, decided upon a 2d representation where time flows in a zigzag fashion.

hello world -> .... . .-.. .-.. ---   .-- --- .-. .-.. -..  ->

#  #  #  #  ##    #  ## #  #  ##
#     ## ## ##    ## ## ## ## #
#     #  #  ##    ## ## #  #  #
#     #  #                 #     

(That's prettier in unicode, but might not display.

▎  ▎  ▎  ▎  ▎▎    ▎  ▎▎ ▎  ▎  ▎▎
▎     ▎▎ ▎▎ ▎▎    ▎▎ ▎▎ ▎▎ ▎▎ ▎
▎     ▎  ▎  ▎▎    ▎▎ ▎▎ ▎  ▎  ▎
▎     ▎  ▎                 ▎     

)

And, in my handwriting, punctuation and numbers are written normally, because it's too hard to remember how to write them, and even harder to tell them apart.

So far, this has been fun, but sorta slow and difficult to use.

Thus, maybe it's time to attack the problem from the other direction ? Practice reading first ?

There are certainly several different ways of approaching the problem of either shrinking the above ascii art by 4x (so it's the same size as a normal character) or blowing up nontranslated characters (punctuation and numbers) 4x, so that they're the same visual size and can be mixed just like they can be in handwriting.

But, having gotten this far, I suddenly have cold feet. I can't answer the voice of doubt that asks "why spend effort deliberately making your own computer, harder to use ? Shouldn't you slowly back away from the screen and get a girlfriend already ?"

A given audio stream (such as myself talking) can be compressed without noticable loss of fidelity, to an mp3 between 32 and 256 kbps per second. (Depending on how much of a crazy audiophile you are.)

Presuming that I'm speaking in english, that 32 to 256 kbps per second of audio, could be further compressed to 0.015 - 0.05 kbps per second of transcripted text. Perhaps with a few emoticons tossed in ;) ?

That's not really enough to accurately convey, a foreign concept. It's more like, words are enough to transmit an index into a list of concepts.

From the pigeonhole principle, it's impossible to disambiguate between more than 2^N different concepts, using an N-bit message. Collisions are unavoidable.

The above paragraphs, refered to about 8 different concepts, using a total of about 4500 bits, probably even less. Even if you can infer the meaning of an unknown word from context, that's an average maximum of 560 bits per concept.

2^560 is certainly a big number (about 10^169), but rather small compared to other huge numbers.

If I believe in the multiverse or I believe in infinity, then I believe that among an infinite number of readers armed with an infinite number of dictionaries, there's a greater infinity of incorrect misinterpretations of what I just wrote, than a paltry, tiny, insignificant; lucky 2^560 who managed to read it correctly.

:(

Reflecting on my life so far, it felt as though time passed differently before I was 18. As if, "goof off all you want, it's not as though anything matters yet". Exploring the world after I turned 18, it took a few years for stuff to click together and form a coherent whole.

If I ever have children, I don't want to have to say to them, "uh . . . for now, just kill time and play WoW for 18 years, then goof off in the real world, make lotsa lotsa mistakes; and then real life really begins, when you're 26".

While erasing age-based restrictions all at once might be too sudden, maybe we could be kind to at least some children, and raffle off fake age tickets by lottery ? Maybe give out
      500,000 tickets for 16 years = 18 years old,
        50,000 tickets for 14 years = 18 years old,
          5,000 tickets for 12 years = 18 years old,
and then see what happens ?