Good cable management isn’t optional (or is it?)

Mibi88

Tue, 11 Nov 2025

My PC’s cable management was until recently really messy. When rendering the time-lapse of my participation at the 58th Ludum Dare, I decided to tackle this issue as my computer was really noisy, which made the long hours of encoding a 3000×1920 video very painful, especially as it hadn’t finished before I wanted to go to bed. The issue was that my computer was vibrating a lot, which produced a lot of noise as it sits on my desk.

So I wired things nicely, except the EPS cable as it was too short, it still had to uglily run over the whole motherboard. I hadn’t connected my old hard drives back as I rarely use them, and the thermals had improved, even if I’d noticed that I had mounted my CPU’s cooler the wrong way around after having repasted it a while ago. Seeing this huge improvement I bought some fancy new individually sleeved cables from Corsair, as it’s my PSU’s brand, to have a longer EPS cable, an easier to bend ATX cable (actually it became really painful to let the new cable correctly on the back of the case while still being able to close it), and a PCI cable without the little daisy-chaining dongle.

Once I had finally managed to close the case and all the cables were wired nicely, I booted my computer ... and was very disappointed that it was noisy, as I had tested it before being fully done and everything was quite quiet, and the thermals were good as well. So I quickly noticed that before, I hadn’t connected the hard drives, and I found out that one of my hard drives was vibrating a lot. So I took it out of the computer and noticed that it was only held by a single screw—I really don’t know what I had thought when I had screwed it down with a single, with a unique screw! I added 3 more, but it was still vibrating a lot. The weird thing being, that the other one, which is older, is completely fine. I haven’t investigated it that much more. I didn’t know before that hard drives spin even if they aren’t mounted! So I tried to set a timeout after which they spin down, but it didn’t work, so I just disconnected them, as I rarely need them, and now everything is fine.

So actually I don’t really know how useful good cable management is (lol). A positive aspect is that my computer now runs a little cooler, after I repasted my CPU to put the cooler the right way around—what a dumb mistake!—and flipped my PSU upside-down, as I can mount it both ways around. I had let it take air in from the inside of the computer case before, which probably wasn’t a good idea, so I mounted it so that it takes the air in from under the computer, which should keep it cooler.

At least now it looks nicer, and it probably helped a little as I’d seen with my first try at improving the cable management, to keep it a little cooler.

Making my website statically generated

Mibi88

08/11/2025

GitHub Pages imposes a big restriction on how pages can behave as they need to be static, which can be quite inconvenient. To make my website easier to modify I was using some JS to load the articles in the main page. However, it was therefore limiting it to browsers supporting / with JS enabled, and it isn’t very scalable, as when there will be more and more articles, the website will have more and more articles to fetch and display. it was also quite annoying to write new articles or just update the project list as I had to write HTML, and I have an obsession of wrapping my code on 80 columns :D (actually 79) which doesn’t work very well when writing HTML.

That’s why I wanted to generate my website statically with a script. I wanted to write an article about how I struggled trying to fix my computer’s cable management, but I decided to fix my website first. Originally I wanted to use python and something else like markdown, but finally I used bash, sed and groff (it’s a bit cooler :D). I’m also calling LyX to convert the older articles. My script is still a bit messy, but it works nicely. It loads the lists of articles and “projects” (the sections where all my projects are listed by category, e.g., “Games” or “Libraries”, I don’t really know how to call them), where the paths and the IDs (for articles) or the titles (for “projects”) are separated by semicolons. The most recent articles are listed first. My script then walks through these lists and generates the HTML code with the appropriate tool. Then I use sed a bunch to remove all the superfluous HTML that would make the generated HTML invalid (when viewing the source code via Firefox, it seems to be unhappy with the header and footer, but that’s because my template HTML code itself is incorrect—I’m not writing HTML very often—and I didn’t know that <header> and <footer> must be inside <body>). Then I use sed again to replace {<name>} tags with the appropriate generated HTML, such as {article_list} which gets replaced with a list of links to all the articles. I should run sed over the articles and “projects” as well to replace curly braces with an escape sequence to avoid such tags to get replaced in the articles’ content, but I’ll fix that later. I’m also generating PDFs of the articles because I can (lol), but I don’t include them in the git repo. I’ve already an idea of a little Easter egg that I could add with a little bit of JS, but I’ll do it later.

So that’s how I statically generate my website without using a premade solution. In the end it took me way longer than I expected, but it was quite fun! roff is fascinating, maybe I’ll code my own implementation of it at some point....

Trying to port Micropython to Mega 2560 clones

CROSS_COMPILE ?= avr-

typedef intptr_t mp_int_t; // must be pointer size
typedef uintptr_t mp_uint_t; // must be pointer size

typedef long long mp_int_t; // must be pointer size
typedef unsigned long long mp_uint_t; // must be pointer size

// HACK: Awful hacks with the types
typedef long long mp_int_t; // must be pointer size
typedef unsigned long long mp_uint_t; // must be pointer size

typedef long mp_off_t;
typedef long ssize_t;

// HACK: Really awful hack to get things compiling
#include <math.h>
#undef nanf
float __nanf(const char *tagp);
#define nanf __nanf
float __nearbyintf(float n);
#define nearbyintf __nearbyintf

// HACK: More awful hacks to get things compiling!
#define SEEK_SET 0
#define SEEK_CUR 1
#define SEK_END  2

#define STDIN_FILENO    0
#define STDOUT_FILENO   1
#define STDERR_FILENO   2

// NOTE: Actually IIRC those FE_* defines are useless
#define FE_DOWNWARD     1
#define FE_TONEAREST    2
#define FE_TOWARDZERO   3
#define FE_UPWARD       4

float __nanf(const char *tagp) {
    return 0;
}

float __nearbyintf(float n) {
    return roundf(n); // It seems like mpy only uses it for rounding
}

#define MICROPY_GCREGS_SETJMP (1)

Simple 3D rendering in Python

Rotation

Around the $x$  axis

$y\text{'}=y\times cos\theta -z\times sin\theta$ and $z\text{'}=y\times sin\theta +z\times cos\theta$ . $x\text{'}=x$ because we’re rotating around the $x$ axis

Around the $y$  axis

$z\text{'}=z\times cos\theta -x\times sin\theta$ and $x\text{'}=z\times sin\theta +x\times cos\theta$ . $y\text{'}=y$ because we’re rotating around the $y$ axis

Around the $z$  axis

$x\text{'}=x\times cos\theta -y\times sin\theta$ and $y\text{'}=x\times sin\theta +y\times cos\theta$ . $z\text{'}=z$ because we’re rotating around the $z$ axis

Projection

Conclusion

Edits from the 10/11/2025