Being creative is hard work, let’s go optimizing instead! My graphics engine dye was pretty naive about displaying text, and it was wasteful. Let’s see how I made it all better with this one weird tip.

Disclaimer: Even after a few years I’m still very much an OpenGL newbie. Please don’t hit me with crowbars.

Once upon a time, OpenGL was easy to use - and also falling out of relevancy as far as high-performance 3D graphics were concerned. But it wasn’t all bad! You could basically pick up any library out there and integrate it with your existing GL project. Not that it’s a good idea, but it usually just worked.

However, January ended too soon, and, sleepless nights notwithstanding, I had to resolve to publish something completely different. It was a good occasion to get to know Twine.

What’s infuriating when letting others play an early prototype is that you hear constantly the same things. Some bugs are non-trivial to fix, some you’re just not motivated to fix now… sometimes you just have your head elsewhere, gotta focus, or are elbow-deep in some other piece of code and the damn walls can wait.

Hello all, and welcome back to Advent of Code 2020, featuring Cool Bear.

Hey y’all!

Let’s get right to it.

The problem statement for Day 3 is as follows: we’re given a map, that looks like this:

And we imagine that it repeats infinitely to the right, like so:

I was not planning on doing anything specific this December, but a lot of folks around me (on Twitter, at work) have chosen this Advent of Code to pick up Rust, and I’ve got big FOMO energy, so, let’s see where this goes.

I’ll be doing all of these on Linux, so there may be some command-line tools involved, but don’t worry about them - the code itself should run on all platforms no problem.

A couple months ago I made a loudness meter and went way too in-depth into how humans have measured loudness over time.

Today we’re looking at a spectrogram visualization I made, which is a lot more entertaining!

We’re going to talk about how to extract frequencies from sound waves, but also how my spectrogram app is assembled from different Rust crates, how it handles audio and graphics threads, how it draws the spectrogram etc.

I’m pretty sure it’s possible to cross-compile for Linux on other OSes, seeing as everything is open-source, but I have never done it - and why would I want to? Linux is the friendliest to build on, so it’s better to use it as a build environment.

Being a “content creator” (sorry for those who hate that term) is a job, for sure, and many people do it, successfully, full-time, they pay rent with it etc.

Platforms like Twitch & YouTube would have you think that, if you put in enough effort, you can grow your channel from nothing to 🎉 profitable ✨ in just a few short years.

We kinda left the locat crate stubby, it doesn’t actually do any IP to location lookups. It doesn’t even have a dependency on a crate that can do that.