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I went for a walk through fields and woods this January. It was cold. Almost as cold as it gets these winters around here. And it was white. Far whiter than it usually gets around here these winters. It wasn't snowing. But there were icicles on cars and roof edges, fences and branches were covered in ice and everything except the main street was white. The air was misty and where the view allowed to see into distant trees or villages, a fine fog created harmonious images in any direction.

I was less than 100 m away from my house when I thought "I should have brought a camera." for the first time that day. During the following hours I noticed many details with interesting looks due to the snow and ice cover or surrounding. I had many ideas for photos that I wanted to take. I never before realised how many photogenic things winter weather creates. But to be fair: I also usually don't get to see that landscape for days. And then I usually don't take an hours long calm walk through it.

After a while I really regretted not bringing, or going back for, a camera. My phone's camera is dirty and damaged, has a delicate auto focus problem and creates disenchanting pictures most of the time that lack contrast. When I came back home the sun came out and started to delete the white scene so that I could not take the pictures tomorrow that I wanted to take today. And that was the end of winter 2024.

I used my last battery percentage point to take these pictures after the sun came out and most of the fog had gone.

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WAMP 2023 - Close-Up Shots Of Things Lying Around And Stuff But Not People

I brought a camera to WAMP last year. The resulting pictures are very underwhelming. But because I was there and my brain has experiences and memories connected to them, I deem them worthy of being here. These are close-up shots of things lying around and stuff but not people. There is a separate entry with macro shots of things lying around and stuff but not people.

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WAMP 2023 - Macro Shots Of Things Lying Around And Stuff But Not People

I brought a camera to WAMP last year. The resulting pictures are very underwhelming. But because I was there and my brain has experiences and memories connected to them, I deem them worthy of being here. These are macro shots of things lying around and stuff but not people. There is a separate entry with close-up shots of things lying around and stuff but not people.

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Distinguishing Line Separation in Texts

When reading an article or a book I often accidently read a line several times because I slip at the moment where my eyes run back to the beginning of a line. I thought maybe there could be a solution to this. My need for a solution for this problem may be unique. Probably almost everybody knows from expereince what I mean by slipping into the wrong line on a line break. But it sometimes really prevents fluid reading for me. So I thought of a few ways of formatting or presenting a text in a way that prevents this slipping.

The basic idea is to separate every other line visually so that it is intuitively obvious which line comes next when jumping to the beginning of the next line after a line break. An interlacing pattern that does not disturb the reading but just slightly guides the reader into automatically falling into the correct line after a line break. This may be an alternating pattern, marking every second line, or a more elaborate one that repeats overy three or more lines. In theory any such method should be possible to implement in a e-book reader. Maybe that would get me to switch from paper books to a tablet-like device.

One already commonly used mothod to achieve the same is alternating white and gray backgrounds. For some reason this is only commonly used with tables. Any colour combination could be used.

Another idea is to mark the line beginnings and endings in the free space left and right of the text. I like the idea of different shapes, e.g. a filled circle, a cross and a square outline; three symbolds that aren't easily confused on first sight.

The following I like best, visually, but it interferes with existing common formatting. The end of every second line becomes bolder at the end; the beginning of every other line starts out bold and becomes less so towards the middle of the lin, creating alternating lines of bold at the beginning and bold at the end. This way when you reach a line break on a thick line, you should continue on the next thick line after the line break. You may keep any typos that you may find in the following example.

One of my favourite NES games is Crackout, a Konami game (disgtributes by Palcom) that I used to play and be bad at as a child. It's a relatively simple Breakout style game (relatively simple compared to what crazy creativity got hold of game programmers since then when reinventing video game classics). Sometimes you have to destroy non-blick objects, like glass boxes or monsters. Often there are creatures that produce a variety of bonus objects that can help not at all or very very much when you collect them (depending on the situation you're in and what bonus it randomly produced).

One thing that I like a lot about it is that it has an interesting way built in to save games. There's no RAM on the cartridge. Nintendo games didn't usually do that in the early 1990s. Of course no flash storage, either. Rather it generated a string of characters every time you lose your last ball. This generated "Password" contains the level you were in as well as any other relevant statuses. When you start a new game you can choose to start from the beginning or to enter a password. Either way you always start with 6 balls. This means as long as you write down the password after a Game Over, or not turn off the console, you can always continue by starting again at the last level you were at.

I'm still bad at this game. But it still is fun. The levels get pretty challenging early on, which makes the priciple that you can only fall back to the beginning of the current level a welcome design choice. And because of the password system I can continue my recent appempt at advancing to higher levels than I've reached as a child on any console and cartridge I like, including emulated ones.

Edit: As I learned today, this method of letting the player continue at the beginning of the level at which the game ended, is actually pretty common for games from that area. Bomberman 2, for example, is even a game that I played a lot myself in my childhood, but didn't remember the codes about.

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