iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/10/2026

on this caturday morning, please enjoy this picture of Rondin trying to eat a saw #caturday

A white/tabby kitten biting the nose of a handsaw, looking quite silly. The saw is hanging into the kerf of a wooden beam it's being used to cut,which rests on an old log, which the cat is also sitting on.

an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/10/2026

About a year ago I forged a reproduction of an ancient japanese carpentry tool called a yariganna, or yarikanna. It may not look like it but it's a primitive form of the handplane, used to shave thin slices to give a smooth finish. It may not be quite true […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Hand-forged yariganna laying on a board that it was just used to plane, with a bunch of corkscrewing shavings scattered about. The tool has a blade made from a leaf spring with a shank that's press-fitted into a white oak handle, encircled with a steel ferrule (made from a section of fence post) to counter the outwards force of the shank being forced in the wood. This contained pressure grips the shank very tightly, which so far has kept it tight despite the lack of adhesive or other fasteners.

The handle is carved rather than turned so noticeably irregular, and it is roasted and oiled.

Close-up of the yariganna's business end, showing the upwards curve and leaf shape of the blade.

Close-up of the board, showing the scalloped finish that the yariganna's curved blade and freehand usage tend to generate. The wood is still very smooth to the touch.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

Making good progress on my porch rebuild, undoing a lot of botched work and building it to hopefully last this time. Made some special brackets to drive deep into the sill logs, which'll make for a very solid setup (hopefully). Doing it this way accommodates […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A pair of hand-forged brackets meant to hold two-by lumber, along with a matching pair of iron spikes, resting on a blacksmith's anvil.

Close-up of one of the brackets from the previous pic, driven into the sill log of a smol late 19th century french canadian house (not pictured).

Close up of a wooden column painted burgundy, resting on a concrete pier, with a rough-sawn red pine joist butted against it by a blue ratchet strap. one of the iron spike from the first photo has been driven a short distance in at an angle, showing the way it will fasten the two by going through the joist, out its bottom corner, and into the column. This arrangement is advantageous as downward loads will push the joint tighter.

A joist fully installed, with the bracket fastening one side to the house and the iron spike fastening the other to a column. Another such joist was later added.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/10/2026

I feel like I don't talk about it all that much here but I'm pretty big on appropriate technology and sustainable building methods and that type of stuff. One thing I do is take logs from trees that get downed by railways and power lines, and mill them into […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Bicycle leaning on a tree in forest, with a utility trailer hitched. On the trailer are two small logs, and in the background are yet more logs scattered about from a tree that was cut down a while back.

The same bicycle after towing the trailer home, though this time it has just one big log strapped onto it (there were multiple voyages and I'm not good at remembering to take pics). Behind the bike is another log, propped up and waiting to be milled into slabs. The ground is littered with sawdust and wood shavings.

Two logs, one laying on the ground and one propped up on another pair of logs (to be themselves milled eventually...).

A bunch of wood slabs leaning against a house, right beside the door. The slabs are the result of milling the logs from the previous pics with a chainsaw mill.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

me whenever I let my cat out of his travel cage

Scene from Clash of the Titans where Liam Neeson says "Release the Kraken" but the caption says "Release the Kitten"

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/09/2026

I just optimized the blur influence field array and it's about a fourth the size now 😁 There was lots of waste in computing all six faces of the heightmap separately, since in theory the arrays from all faces could be extrapolated from those of any single […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Two files, 8_9.02.ifa and 8_0.02.ifa.old. The former is 27.7 MiB, created three minutes ago, and the latter is 103.7 MiB, created yesterday.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2026

@moriel I like when actual real-life penguins are portrayed as linux enthusiasts.

Two photographs, both featuring a team of arctic researchers out in the field and a penguin standing nearby and looking up at them. In the first panel, the penguin says "Excuse me" and in the second (where all the researchers are looking at it) it says "Do you have a moment to talk about Linux?"

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026

Starting to get half-decent results with the hydraulic erosion sim, thanks to the gaussian blur thing working out. Some nice gullies are starting to appear, though there's still lots of improvements to make. #gamedev

Virtual hill that has been "eroded" by simulated raindrops, showing small gullies.

Same picture as before but with red arrows drawn along the gullies to highlight them.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026

I installed KmPlot earlier today and noticed that the Sweet KDE theme doesn't appear to have an icon for it, so I made one 😁

Crop from my KDE Application Launcher, showing a custom icon for KmPlot that matches the "neon" theme of the other icons.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/08/2026

On this caturday, please welcome Rondin into your home feed. His name means "log" in his new dad's native french. His hobbies include dashing around the house like a maniac, attacking cords of all sorts, and snuggling up for naps when he gets exhausted from the other two things.

A dangerously adorable kitten sitting on a window sill

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

I haven't actually done the blur itself yet, though I don't expect it to pose much additional challenge - the hard part was getting the influence field calculation to be fast. Up to now I've been testing by painting vertices contained in the influence field […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

The files are kind of huge, which in some strange way is kind of beautiful to me, cause even though they're this big every single byte in there carries meaning. It's just a lot of data. I generated two files, both for maps whose square faces are of width 2⁸ […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

File explorer screenshot showing two files and their sizes, "8_0.02.ifa" which is 122.5 MiB, and "8_0.03.ifa" which is 275.1 MiB.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

> article headline claims that "experts say [such and such thing]" > I look inside > "a conservative think tank has published a study" > mfw

Hannibal Buress in a state of confused disappointment, caption says "Wack"

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

And then I tested it with actual erosion yesterday and it still kind of looked like ass. We're getting there but as it is now gullies often get dug way to deep and make everything look jagged and weird.

Erosion gully that looks like a mishapen, jagged mess.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

I wrote the code for that. And then I did code to interpolate within a square once it's found, for the normal and the height of a point. And I was able to make a much much much better model of hydraulic flow:

Yellow line smoothly following the slope and contours of a mountain.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

This did its thing but also highlighted an issue that edge vertices are duplicated across grids, and so I needed to have logic that would check if a vertex has duplicates, and apply any changes to it to its one or two duplicates as well. The pic below shows […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Shitty magenta stream "cascading" down virtual mountain face. There are two breaks at the start from incomplete code that doesn't handle edge cases.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

So I wrote some methods to reliably get neighbours of given points, which entailed much fussing around and honestly was probably the least fun thing to write of this entire project, but I got it working. This allowed me to easily calculate normals for each […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Smooth hill with surface normals rendered as green lines.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

It does, however, have the disadvantage that the position of vertices in relation to their neighbours is not constant across the surface of each grid. The grid is basically square at the center but that changes to a diamond shape at the corners, and then at […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Surface squares, nice and square at the center of a grid.

Surface squares, not nice and not square at the junction between three grids.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

Okay back to work on the erosion sim now, I'm gonna try using The Void as a rubber duck, which means I'm about to info-dump to the ninth circle of hell up in this motherfucker. To start, I'm working on a world editing tool for a game I'm working on that […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Screenshot of a purple, cyan and green virtual landscape whose horizon curves up because it's the inside surface of a sphere.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

Well, good news is the results on the hydraulic erosion simulation test came in a good 20 minutes earlier than expected, bad news is they kind of suck 🤣 This shit pretty hard ngl Probably not the erosion itself since there's lots of example code available […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Same 3D landscape but with simulated hydraulic erosion, except it's not right at all.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/08/2026

@wendypalmer humanity: we would unite against a common enemy [a common enemy manifests itself in the form of climate change] humanity:

Pawn star "best I can do is x" meme, x in this case being "fascism"

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

Trying to implement hydraulic erosion simulation for my spherical heightmap editing tool and unfortunately it's kicking my ass. This took like a half hour to generate and still looks like crap 😂 but I will endure

$Image of a virtual landscape (created from fractal perlin noise) which has "gullies" from simulated hydraulic erosion. Unfortunately the gullies don't look right at all.$

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026

Nerd flex: trying to make a meme using an online tool and realizing I do not have the Impact font because I don't have the non-free repos enabled on my linux install

1st panel: Godzilla and King Kong squaring off in a destroyed city. Godzilla says "S-Q-L" and King Kong says "SEQUEL"

2nd panel: both are running away from a giant shiba inu with a baseball bat that says "SQUEAL"

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/07/2026

Karma smiled back today. A couple weeks ago I was digging a hole to replace my house's water line, and I gave a bunch of cans to a scavenging man who passed by. He was happy and said he'd help me with my work later on. I wasn't gonna hold him to that but […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A four-foot-long concrete pier, laying on the ground next to the hole out of which it was just pulled. A chain is wrapped around the post and ties it to an orange chain hoist, itself chained at the apex of an improvised A-frame made from steel fence posts.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/07/2026

Finally reached a point where I can generate terrain geometry from Bézier curve. Still a good ways from done - had to scaffold a few things to make it testable which is why it's so jagged - but I'm super happy, this was hard as hell if I'm being honest 😂 One […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Inner surface of a sphere, with a magenta light/dark checkerboard surface. the components of a Bézier curve are overlaid in yellow, and underneath there is a green trench cutting through the surface that follows the curve.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/07/2026

Couldn't work on the game for the past couple weeks but I'm back on it now. Still working on Bézier curves, today I added raising and lowering control points using the mousewheel. It works but I still need to tie it into the undo buffer. Part of the […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/06/2026

Been working on implementing a Bézier curve tool that works on a spherical surface for almost two weeks now, was a surprising amount of work but I got the core functionality working just now. This is for the map editor for the game I'm working on, the intent […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/06/2026

Making steady progress on the world editor, I can now add hills of customizable radius and height in real-time, with a simple preview (also real-time). Some polish remains of course but the goal of quickly and efficiently specifying topography is taking shape […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2026

[Epilepsy] Still working on my map generating tool, added colours as a function of height. It's just a spherical heightmap but seeing it in action as I build it makes me think the finished game is gonna be hella trippy 😂 #gamedev

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/06/2026

[disorienting, moving checkerboards, grade-A epilepsy fuel as I understand it] Working on a tool to generate maps for my game, which consist of hollow spheres with geological features along the inner surface. Right now I got my sphere and I'm able to […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/06/2026

Praise be to the opengl line strip primitive for letting you know your vertices are right before having to also define your indices, normals, vertex colors/uvs and all that crap

Black wireframe of a sphere, constructed from the six faces of a cube "blown" outwards, on a gray background.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/06/2026

Rainy day today -> game dev. Got shadows working and just finished getting the Sun to look good (IMO). Getting pretty close to completion for the code that generates the game world. Next up is a topography editor so I can properly shape the terrain (so that […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/05/2026

#forgeposting time :D Finished a new hardy today, that was a few after-work sessions spread out over the past few weeks. It's a real workout to shape thick pieces like this, even my hammer's handle gave out at some point and I had to replace it 😆 On the […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Two hot cut hardies laid on a blacksmith's anvil. The one on the left was made by me about a year ago as one of my first blacksmithing projects, and it's very roughly made. The one on the right is larger, has a longer and more even post, and is generally of much better craftsmanship (still nowhere near perfect but I think it shows good progress).

Can you guess where the hardy goes? That's right! It goes in the hardy hole.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/04/2026

Broke my hammer's handle yesterday, re-hafted it today. I love spring.

A blacksmith's hammer with a newly-fitted handle made of white oak. In the background, the goodest girl.

A blacksmith's hammer with the head broken off being held over and anvil. On the anvil, the hammer's head and a still-hot piece of metal that was being banged on when the incident occured.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/04/2026

Useful tip: you can completely block the eggregious google sign-in popup by adding a custom filter against "accounts.google.com/gsi/*" in uBlock Origin's settings: *This is probably only viable if you don't ever sign into a google account.

Screenshot of uBlock Origin dashboard, under the "My filters" tab. In the list, there is an entry that reads "accounts.google.com/gsi/*"

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/04/2026

For frozen chicken wings, I know the box says to put them on a tin with aluminum foil, but screw that. Put them right on the oven rack, and turn on the top and bottom coils at 450F. No need for convection. No need to turn them over halfway through. Trust me.

View of the inside of a toaster oven with both top and bottom heating elements on, with chicken wings laid out directly on the rack.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/04/2026

Me when I figure out what the bug in my code is but it's getting late and I'm tired af

GIF of Kylo Ren from star wars saying "I know what I have to do but I don't know if I have the strength to do it".

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/03/2026

Lately I've been poking around customizing my computer's UI, something I'd been leaving mostly untouched my entire life. Today I added a per-CPU-core usage meter, RAM usage meter, and a CPU temperature monitor. I did this for reasons that make sense to me […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

closeup of my computer's task bar, with a usage meter for each core of its CPU, a RAM usage indicator, and a CPU temperature reading.

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an actual bus @renardboy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/03/2026

Working on getting a character to be able to move along the surface of an inverted sphere and have gravity working away from the center. Learning tons about vector math. I'm having fun.

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