Leave a legacy in Portland
Want to leave your mark on Portland?
Buy a brick with your name on it for Pioneer Square ($150), or get a park bench dedicated to you or someone you love ($1500/bench).
Dysfunctional papal elections
History was made in the election of the American Augustinian as Pope Leo XIV.
While this election was fairly straightforward, people love to take for even the most minor signs as indications scandals and diabolical cover-ups.
As anyone who has studied history knows – the truth is far, far more crazy than anything conspiracy theorists have come up with. For those that think the world has never been worse off, perhaps take a moment to hear some real events the Catholic Church has gone through.
As Hilaire Belloc said, if the Church were not of divine origin, it wouldn’t have lasted a month.
Lessons from Automotive Security
It’s a bit dated (2017), but Josh Hammond on IOActive presents some of the things he learned from automotive vulnerabilities.
Making and breaking codes for fun
I loved codes as a kid. I think I checked out every book on writing codes from the local library and even took a cryptography class during my college computer science courses.
While I usually stay away from social media, some of the non-political areas are decent. Reddit has a codes forum where users post different codes that they have made or run across and try to solve them.
Links:
Current state of GPU programming
Fire watch cameras
An amazing site is ALERTOregon which hosts a lot of statewide cameras and even includes links to ODOT road cameras too.
Recently PGE is now publicly hosting wildfire detection cameras it has in the Pacific Northwest. For good or ill, it is one of the reasons we no longer need those old-school fire towers.
3D ASCII rendering
Unusual rendering styles has become very popular lately. In this video, Acerola tries to write an ASCII based 3D rendering shader. Very interesting.
Amazing Text rendered arcade game
Effulgence was just announced and brings some amazing 2.5D rendering to the table – not using blitting or rendering – but drawing text. Check out their Effulgence Steam page or Andrey Fomin’s YouTube channel for more cool looking development videos.
Generate a massive prime number in seconds
PurpleMind demonstrates how modern algorithms generate giant prime numbers in just seconds. The key is they don’t actually check if it is exactly prime, but can do so with very high confidence using certain properties of primes. Bonus points for the fact he gives code too.
Mahoning Drive-in Theater
“At the Drive-in” is a free movie on Youtube about a group of quirky movie buffs work to save a dying drive-in theater. They end up sleeping on the floor, jury-rigging solutions, and holding it together all with their free labor.
Besides saving a theater, it speaks more about a group of individuals that become serious friends and fight to regain a sense of community and simpler times that is increasingly lost. We may be connect to the entire world by the internet but people feel more lonely, isolated, and anxious than ever. One of the folks working there even calls it feeling closer to God – even though he doesn’t know what that is.
Parish communities fill this need for community and belonging – but maybe they should engage social events like this even more. I know that the weekends my parish puts on picnics and events together – they become some of the most joyful and rewarding parts of my week.