July 2026

• Beaten by a 17 year…

  Chocolatier: Decadence by Design is a game released in 2009. It was a fond memory for me, along with the boom of resource management/strategy games of the era like the Tradewinds series. Once in a while, I get bored and decided to play the game, which surprisingly, is still happy to run on Windows 11 (as of Jul '26), provided you do not ask it to render at full screen. It gets weird then. The game's story is you, the player, an outsider, trusted to helm the fledgling Baumeister Confections, formerly a great and global confectionary conglomerate spread across the world, as the CEO searches the world for her husband, lost after the Second World War. Anyways, at a certain point of the game, you are asked by the Board Members of the company to "prove yourself capable" by producing certain variants of confections. Notice the still-incomplete quest: Have 100 cases of Blended Varietal Cacao Pumpkin Truffles in your inventory n.b. ignore the custom confection name, i did not name…

  Permanent link to “Beaten by a 17 year-old game, a lesson in RTFM.”

• Vibe Coding…

  Intermittent Fasting might be familiar to you. It is a method of reducing caloric intake by limiting when you eat. There are also claims that it helps your body enter ketosis or autophagy, although I have been unable to find published journals about this. Tracking the time, however, is not as simple. The reality of social life is just that sometimes you are enticed to eat Mie Aceh at 8pm, long after your usual 8-hour "feeding" window. The solution to this irregularity is, of course, simply using a timer. It lives on your phone. However, it is not the most instantaneous. You can't really have a preset for 16 hours in most Android clock apps. There are, of course, apps in the Google Play Store for this, but this being the 2026 post-dotcom bubble, everything has ads. It's not exactly fun to have an ad for an online personal loan service blasted at full volume during a business lunch. Therefore, being the man with confusing priorities that I am, I decided to just... make an app…

  Permanent link to “Vibe Coding & Simple Applications: Not everything is so simple!”

• Claude Fable: An…

  With subscription access to Claude Fable ending today (well, if Mr. Dario the Beloved by the Gods does not make me eat my words for the fourth time this month), I would like to offer a retrospective. This might be different, and somewhat useful, as my use case with frontier models is kinda... weird. Yea, of course I code with them; who doesn't? But also, here's a novel use case for you, Mr. Samuel Human Alternative and Mr. Dario the Beloved by the Gods: Large Language Models as a highly capable (however expensive) improv team member: humanity's final "yes, and?" This all started with my undiagnosed autistic brain going haywire over the launch of miHoYo's Honkai: Star Rail. Despite never being a gacha guy (I resisted registering for Genshin to this day, and I wear it with pride), the promise of "combat that does not literally make your head spin" enticed me. Also, cool, anime in space! Long story short, I began wanting to talk to people about it. Not that I have…

  Permanent link to “Claude Fable: An entirely unscientific and unserious review”

• Wake on LAN

  Being a believer in the "put everything in your PC so you don't carry around a gaming laptop" mentality has its downsides. Sometimes, you need to be away from your PC for an extended period of time. Work, school, family, and other social obligations—the works. But sometimes, during these away-from-keyboard times, you suddenly need to access your PC. Not necessarily to game, mind you, but to retrieve a file, log in to a service whose password you only keep locally in a browser, start a download with a totally legitimate file-sharing protocol, or edit photos on Lightroom Classic because you refuse to give Adobe money for cloud features. You know, simple human stuff. You can just leave your PC on for days on end and remote in via AnyDesk, Chrome Remote Desktop, TeamViewer, or Windows RDP, but what if you are gone for days? Weeks? Months? Epochs? All those electric pixies would just be wasting away, heating up an empty room. Well, the solution is, of course, Wake-on-LAN! Wake-on…

  Permanent link to “Wake on LAN”

• Silent Shooting on…

  Not many people still use the Canon EOS 6D mk. II, a 2017 camera in the big 2026. Fewer still use it with vintage manual lenses that are old enough to vote. The 6Dii still uses an optical viewfinder. Nothing wrong with it, really, but you can't really zoom in to help with focusing. It also does not have the focusing screen that cameras designed to use these lenses have. The only way out, therefore, is Live View, which does, in fact, have a digital zoom to help with focusing. This is fine, but when using lenses with ridiculously short depth of field, like my NIKKOR 180/2.8 ED* AI-s, I always seem to misfocus, no matter how sure I am when using LV. Canon EOS 6D Mark II, 1/250s, ISO 160. NIKKOR 180/2.8 ED* AI-s, f/2.8 Lynae from Wuthering Waves as portrayed by @atheliese_21 Reference "Sharpness": Canon EOS 6D Mark II, 1/500s, ISO 100. NIKKOR 180/2.8 ED* AI-s, f/2.8 Matikanetannhauser from Uma Musume: Pretty Derby as portrayed by @sweet.jelliesss It feels 50/50 most of the time…

  Permanent link to “Silent Shooting on the 6DII”

• The Pacil Matkul…

  Five years ago, some less-than-occupied students from the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of Indonesia were thinking about how hard it is to plan semesters, especially as freshmen. For posterity, this is what the academic website looked like back then: feast your eyes upon SIstem AKademik Next-Generation (SIAK-NG) The story concerning SIAK-NG shall come at another time. Anyways, if you were to plan courses, you had two options: Read the entire academic handbook (>280 pages!) Read the "Jejaring Mata Kuliah" how yours truly planned his courses. yes, that is figjam So, what is the problem? Reading 280 pages is just... no Reading only Jejaring Mata Kuliah won't let you easily see the non-mandatory classes This was back when LLM-based AI was nowhere "there" yet. So, having just graduated from the web programming and design course, the solution was, of course, ein web app! Initially committed in June 2021 ChatGPT's release is... a year away from the…

  Permanent link to “The Pacil Matkul Tree”

• Hello world!

  At the insistence of career advisors (and an invented psychologist), I have finally stopped putting off making this... blog thing. More, as usual, to come.

  Permanent link to “Hello world!”