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Frames Per Stratum

If I understand the problem correctly, this is the solution:

I solved it with Z3. Took less than a second of computer time, and about an hour of my time -- mostly spent trying to remember how the heck to use Z3 and then a little time debugging my initial program.

What I'd do is set up a simple website that uses a little JavaScript to rewrite the date and time into the page and periodically refresh an image under/next to it. Size the image to fit the remaining free space of however you set up the iPad, and then you can stick anything you want there (pictures/reminder text/whatever) with your favorite image editor. Upload a new image to the server when you want to change the note. The idea with an image is that it's just really easy to do and keeps the amount of effort to redo layout to a minimum -- just drag stuff around in your image editor and you'll know it'll all fit as expected as long as you don't change the resolution (instead of needing to muck around with CSS and maybe breaking something if you can't see the device to check that it displays correctly).

There's a couple issues to watch out for -- e.g. what happens if the internet connection/server goes down, screen burn-in, keeping the browser from being closed/switched to another page, keeping it powered, etc. that might or might not matter depending on your particular circumstances. If you need to fix all that for your circumstances, it might be more trouble than just buying something purpose built... but getting a first pass DIY version working is trivial if you're comfortable hosting a website.

Edit: If some sample code that you can use as a starting point would be helpful, let me know.

My guess is that if browsers as we know them weren't invented, HyperCard would've become the first browser eventually. No idea where things would progress from there or if it'd have been better or worse than the current clusterfuck. Maybe we'd all be talking about our "web stacks" instead of websites, and have various punny tools like "pile" and "chimney" and "staplr". Perhaps PowerPoint would've turned into a browser to compete with it.

If browsers were invented but JavaScript specifically was not, we'd probably all be programming sites in some VB variant like VBScript (although it might be called something different).

I had somewhat limited time this past week, but wanted to keep working through my backlog of unfinished shows, so I pulled up the short (6 episode) series Looking Up At The Half-Moon and watched that. I think I dropped this after episode 2 the first time I tried it, but finished it this time.

The show is a hospital drama + romance, which seems unusual for anime. I don't think I've watched any other anime set almost entirely in a hospital before -- scenes, yes, but not the whole show. I'm not generally into medical drama so I haven't really gone looking though; this is one I went into blind originally.

Guess which novel shows up again! Yup, it's Night on the Galactic Railroad. I feel like I'm seeing this book everywhere now, and this show quotes from it directly; one of the characters has pretty much memorized it. Something I noticed from the quotes is that one of the characters (in the novel) is named Campanella -- which should ring bells for anyone who's played the Trails series... No idea if there's actually a connection there, but I thought it was interesting.

The show strained my suspension of disbelief with how a number of characters acted, but did some things I found interesting as well. The doctor's characterization did not go in quite the direction I expected, and there were a number of other surprises throughout. Episode 5 in particularly really went somewhere I wasn't expecting. I kind of feel like I should write more about that... but it would all be spoilers.

You can't really, as others have pointed out, but I like Philip K Dick's definition of reality: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away."

Between kbin's issues around the holidays and some of my own issues this month I haven't been very active lately, but I'm still here.

I finally managed to finish watching Penguindrum! That show was weird. I really don't have the words to properly express just how weird it was. Did you know that Penguindrum and Utena share a director? I didn't realize that going into it, but after finishing Penguindrum I felt like giving Utena another try -- and realized that fact after looking up some details about it. It was very much an "ohhhh..." kind of moment. I'm not deeply familiar with the details of the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attack, Night on the Galactic Railroad, etc. that were sources of inspiration for the show; so, a lot of it probably went over my head. I still have a few screenshots left that I never got around to posting -- here's a suitably weird one.

Since the last time I commented on here, I've also gone back and cataloged all the anime I have. I looked up the starting air date for every show and movie, and then sorted them oldest to newest. That was a bit more involved than I expected it to be and I wasn't sure how I should handle some entries (e.g. Index/Railgun, Fate/<whatever>, FMA, ...) where there's multiple works that are related in a complex fashion. For movies there were often multiple dates associated with a work so I went with public release dates (in Japan) even if they were shown a few months earlier at a film festival or whatever.

The oldest anime movie I've watched is The Castle of Cagliostro from 1979 (which is older than I thought it was), and the oldest series I've watched through (if you count it) is The Mysterious Cities of Gold from 1982. (The oldest series I have is the first season of Lupin III from 1971, but I've only watched a few episodes and the pilot.) It turns out that the year with the most entries I've got in my collection is 2013 with 2012 as a close second; I did a lot of DVD collecting around 2015-ish when I had terrible internet at home, so I suppose that makes sense.

I also realized recently after seeing a post about a nihonga featuring a tiger and a dragon and wondering if it was referenced in ToraDora (didn't see it in the first episode) that Taiga's English voice actor (Cassandra Lee Morris) is the same person who voiced Fie in Trails of Cold Steel, Morgana in Persona 5, Ritsu in K-On, etc. That was a bit trippy.

Still got any fun renders from back then?

POV-Ray, perhaps? You give it a scene description text file and it will render a raytraced image of the scene for you. You'd need to find or write an appropriate scene description though for what you want to randomize.

Hopefully both dishes come out great!

I've never tried to make a stew out of duck before, but if someone asked me to wing it anyway, I'd probably try to use it in a gumbo: Dark roux, Cajun Trinity (celery + onion + bell pepper), jalapeno, garlic, stock, fresh thyme, bay leaf, lots of fresh ground black pepper, spoonful of hot sauce (e.g. Crystal or Tabasco if I can't get that), plus your meat -- served over white rice. For chicken (e.g. chicken thighs), I'd sear it first but I'm not sure on the best treatment for gamey fowl. Personally I might try to blanch it first to try to reduce the gameyness (based on recommendations I've seen about cooking certain kinds of stewed pork -- like pork belly in Chinese dishes), but you'd do better to get advice from someone who's actually cooked with gamey ingredients more than I have if you can.

Adapting a coq au vin recipe might be another idea to try if gumbo doesn't appeal, but again, I've never tried that with duck either.

Thanks for introducing me to this. I hadn't seen it before. FYI, there's a higher resolution version on the Japanese Wikipedia:

• Tiger portion
• Dragon portion