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The park near my house has lots of chestnuts and my kids have been collecting them like crazy (it’s actually their favorite post-school activity). We accumulated quite a hoard. I thought it would be fun to make a launcher so we had something to do with our new chestnut collection. I wanted to go with a very simple crossbow-style design (like the famous D2 item) using latex tubing and a leather pouch for holding the chestnuts. This is what I came up with. It launches chestnuts about 220 feet, and it’s simple enough to build in an afternoon. The frame is a 42 inch 2x2 and a spare IKEA bed slat for the crossbeam, glued and screwed together. A 3/8 inch eye bolt goes through each end of the crossbeam, and the latex tubing is tied to those and to the pouch from a leather shepherd’s sling. Tying the tubing was the fiddliest part. It has to be stretched while you wrap it with butcher’s twine, so I clamped a couple of scrap blocks to my workbench to hold it. I like this design because the tubing can be wrapped around the eye bolts to easily add more tension and power. The Trigger My favorite part of the design was that I decided to use an archery release like this one for the trigger. It provides a safe and reliable way to hold the tubing back, and it’s made to let go cleanly. I 3D printed a little housing that mounts the release securely to the back of the stock, and the release clips onto a loop of archery D-loop cord on the back of the pouch. Then I added a dowel for a rear grip and an old handle I had previously removed from my shop vac. How Well Does It Work? We tried it at the park and it works surprisingly well. Aimed at about 35 to 40 degrees, it sends our chestnuts (on the small side, about 10 to 15 grams) about 220 feet. Thanks to the archery release, we haven’t had a single misfire. I got curious and did some rough math. To go that far with air drag, the chestnuts are leaving at somewhere around 85 to 100 mph, which works out to about the same energy as a paintball. So safety glasses are important and you never point it at anyone. You can find the 3D print on Printables and a full build guide on Instructables. Make sure to always use it with adult supervision :)
Using modern AI coding tools feels like jumping into the cockpit of a BattleMech. My co-worker used this analogy recently and I love it. It perfectly sums up the feeling of vibe coding for me. I can move faster, jump higher and it feels like a there is a whole new world of possibilities available to me. This is true for me as someone who no longer writes code every day, but many experienced software engineers don’t feel this way and I get it. They’ve been running around on foot and learned to be very effective without it. Jumping into the cockpit of something entirely new is jarring. The BattleMech can feel clunky, burdensome and they basically have to relearn all their instincts around movement and orientation (it can also sometimes shoot itself in the foot!). On top of this, many non-technical folks have also jumped into the BattleMech. They are running off in all these strange directions because they don’t know what to use it for. They are copying things, building things that suck and filling social media feeds with their creations. Many software engineers feel the same way as artists did a few years ago because pretty much anyone can create software now. The good news is that domain knowledge and software development instincts are still essential. The BattleMech can be incredible if you know exactly where you want it to go, but it’s also happy to lead you straight off a cliff.
Progress Quest is generally considered the original idle game. It came out in 2002 as a parody of EverQuest and the emerging MMORPG boom. “Playing” it consists of creating a character, clicking “Sold!”, and then watching progress bars fill forever. There’s no interaction, no real gameplay, just waiting. At first glance, it feels like a gimmick — a joke game built to poke fun at the MMO trend. But what’s surprising is that its creator, Eric Fredricksen, built a whole RPG simulation underneath the progress bars. There are 270+ monsters, procedurally named equipment, multiple storylines, intentionally weighted stats, real loot tables, and a surprisingly complex progression system. On top of that, there’s even an authentication system for competitive multiplayer leaderboards that are somehow still around today. I love Progress Quest because of its absurdity, but also because it’s such a good example of something being far better than it needed to be. The amount of effort and attention to detail in this game makes me smile. Exponential Progression At the heart of Progress Quest is a single formula that controls level progression. The time it takes to complete level N is: (20 + 1.15^N) * 60 seconds. That means early levels take minutes (a few hours to get to level 10), while later ones take years (many years to get to level 100). There is also additional time outside of leveling for the player to go to market, buy/sell things, and head back to the “killing fields”. There are still thousands of players active across the remaining multiplayer realms, and pretty much everyone above level 95 has had the game running for over a decade. That doesn’t even count single-player characters. Races and Classes The race and class systems are hilariously absurd, but they don’t affect gameplay at all. The player races are: Half Orc, Half Man, Half Halfling, Double Hobbit, Hob-Hobbit, Low Elf, Dung Elf, Talking Pony, Gyrognome, Lesser Dwarf, Crested Dwarf, Eel Man, Panda Man, Trans-Kobold, Enchanted Motorcycle, Will o’ the Wisp, Battle-Finch, Double Wookiee, Skraeling, Demicanadian, and Land Squid. And the classes are: Ur-Paladin, Voodoo Princess, Robot Monk, Mu-Fu Monk, Mage Illusioner, Shiv-Knight, Inner Mason, Fighter/Organist, Puma Burgular, Runeloremaster, Hunter Strangler, Battle-Felon, Tickle-Mimic, Slow Poisoner, Bastard Lunatic, Jungle Clown, Birdrider, and Vermineer. Hilarious Monster Types There are over 270 hand-crafted monsters, and every one of them has a thematic loot drop. The Giant series imagines what giants would be if they were made of basically anything: Humidity Giant (drops “drops”) Beef Giant (drops “steak”) Rice Giant (drops “grain”) Porcelain Giant (drops “fixture”) Mini Giant (drops “pompadour”) The Golem series follows the same logic: Beer Golem (drops “foam”) Oxygen Golem (drops “platelet”) Cardboard Golem (drops “recycling”) The Scout hierarchy is great: Cub Scout (drops “neckerchief”) Girl Scout (drops “cookie”) Boy Scout (drops “merit badge”) Eagle Scout (drops “merit badge”) The Elemental series is an entirely new take on Elementals: Bacon Elemental (drops “bit”) Cheese Elemental (drops “curd”) Hair Elemental (drops “follicle”) Porn Elemental (drops “lube”) When the game picks a monster to fight, it level-matches against your character and then applies modifier prefixes based on the gap. That adds more flavor to the monster names. Procedural Equipment When you get new gear, the game doesn’t just pull from a list. It runs a little algorithm: Pick a base item matched to your level from a list like Stick → Shiv → Longsword → Halberd Calculate the quality gap between the item’s base level and your level “Spend” that gap across up to two modifier adjectives, each with a point value Whatever is left becomes a numeric +N prefix So a level 40 character might find a +13 Custom Holy Mithril Mail — a level 19 Mithril Mail base, with Custom (+3) and Holy (+5), leaving +13 unspent. The modifier tables are split into good and bad. If the gap is negative — meaning the item is actually better than you — the game pulls from the bad list instead: Rusty, Dull, Bent, Plastic, Nerf (-7), Rubber (-6). There’s also a whole list of spells with names like “Holy Batpole,” “Grognor’s Big Day Off”, and “Roger’s Grand Illusion” that will make their way into your spellbook and increase in level with roman numerals. The Main Game Loop Surprisingly, the game has a real game loop. It works like this: Kill monster task — The game generates a monster with a duration based on your level. When the timer finishes: Loot is added to your inventory, either a specific drop or generic loot XP is gained, which can trigger a level-up Quest and plot bars advance Check encumbrance — After a kill, if encumberance is at or above your limit, you go to market instead of fighting: The game will say “heading to market to sell loot” Then the game sells items one at a time, removing the top item in inventory and adding gold Items with “of” in the name sell for much more This continues until only gold remains Buy or head out — After selling, or if you weren’t encumbered in the first place: If the player’s gold is high enough to buy better gear, the game says “Negotiating purchase of better equipment” and the game upgrades a random equipment slot Otherwise the game will say “Heading to the killing fields” Next kill — After heading out, the game generates another monster and the cycle repeats Stat Progression When you gain a stat point, the game uses a weighted system biased toward your highest stat. Half the time, the gain is completely random. The other half uses quadratic weighting, where each stat’s chance is proportional to its value squared. That creates a snowball effect where your best stat keeps getting better, which feels authentic to how RPG builds tend to work. The only real strategy to playing Progress Quest is trying to roll high STR at character creation. Having higher STR gives you higher max encumberance which affects how often you need to go to market. The thing is, the market trips are such a small fraction of actual game time that this only about a 5% difference in how fast your character will level up. In Conclusion This is probably more than anyone wanted to know about Progress Quest. It’s an absurd, charming little game, and I hope it somehow keeps living forever. If you want to play the “multiplayer” Windows version, you can download it here. I also wanted to play on my Mac, so I vibe-coded an Swift version that runs on modern Mac hardware. See you on the killing fields!
I made a retro-inspired dock to charge my Playdate out of a Raspberry Pi case. The case is a miniature version of the Super Famicom and I love how it makes the Playdate look like a little game cartridge when it’s charging. Making one yourself is pretty straight-forward, you’ll just need the following components: Retroflag SUPERPi case A compact right-angle USB-C cable, like this one The 3D printed insert I designed First, print the two halves that make up the 3D printed insert and attach them with super glue. Make sure to align the cutouts on each side and then clamp the two pieces in place while the glue dries. Then take the Retroflag case apart and unscrew the main board. You’ll have to cut some wires and remove the front-facing USB ports. Make sure to leave the rear-facing USB-C port in place as we’ll reuse this to power the Playdate. Then, using a Dremel, cut a rough 86 by 21 mm rectangular hole in the top of the case. It doesn’t have to be clean as it will get covered up by the 3D printed insert. You will also need to remove some of the internal support structure inside the case using pliers or flush cutters to make space for the insert and wires. After it has dried, insert the 3D printed piece through the hole and hot glue the right-angle USB-C cable into place. Lastly, splice the USB-C cable to the red and black wires coming off the rear-facing USB port on the case. The red (or pink) USB-C cable wire should be spliced to the red wire on the USBC-C port. The two black wires should also be spliced together. That’s it! At some point I’d like to make it into a functional USB hub and add an internal LED.
A few years ago, I built a Wi-Fi-controlled Nerf turret, but I never got around to creating a proper build guide for it. When I finally sat down to write one, I realized just how many things I would do differently. That realization quickly snowballed into a full redesign—and the result is a vastly improved version of the SwarmTurret. This new version is not only more powerful and precise, but it’s also easier build. Here are some of the major upgrades: Simplified Assembly: I reused the shell of an existing plastic blaster, which significantly cuts down on 3D printing and makes putting it together much easier. Improved Stability: A new belt-driven Y-axis adds smoother motion and includes an adjustable tension system. Enhanced Accuracy: The camera has been repositioned for better aiming precision. Direct X-Axis Drive: I replaced the original gear system with direct motor control for more responsive movement. Performance Boost: Upgraded from Raspberry Pi 4 to Pi 5 for faster web app performance. Integrated Power Supply: Now features a built-in power supply with an on/off switch—no more fumbling with cables. Web App Enhancements: The control interface is more intuitive and responsive. I’ve published the complete build guide, along with the updated code and 3D printable parts.
More in programming
In the corner of the rear Floodgap lab sits a pile of classic game consoles. It used to look like this: Sega Dreamcast all the consoles here only came with NTSC RF output and date from the pre-flat panel TV era. That includes multiple Atari consoles (including the inevitable VCS, here a Darth Vader 2600), several Pong machines — including two Commodore units — with various chipsets, an Intellivision (as the rebadged Tandyvision One, my first) and a Bally Astrocade with lots of upgrades. It seems wrong to use them with a flat panel, and CRTs lag less. Plus, games with a light gun (here the Dreamcast and one of the Pong consoles) often rely on the CRT's rapidly scanning beam to know where they're pointed. So what do you do when the CRT TV goes bad? I should note that this isn't all the old school gaming fun in the house. In the commons next to the pinball machines are an Xbox 360 Slim and a PlayStation 2, and in the home theatre connected to the 3D projector is a PlayStation 3 since it has some stereoscopic titles. These might appear in future articles. But most of the rest are here. I bought this Panasonic Omnivision PV-M2035 from a friend at church in 1999 for $100 [about $200 in 2026 dollars]. He had no use for it, and the top of the plastic shell had been heat-warped by sitting in his car too long, but it worked, still had the remote, and was a suitably cheap TV for my unsuitably cheap studio apartment. I used it for local news and Friends with a set of rabbit ears, VHS movies, and speakers for playing music by connecting a CD player to the single rear input. When I moved to a less cheap 1-bedroom, it came along, and its flat top was flat enough to become a shelf for a DVD player. I got the Dreamcast from Fry's in 2001 after Sega discontinued it and managed to share the composite input between them. That apartment was my crashpad for about a decade before moving to the current orbiting HQ, whereupon I bought a passive-3D flat panel TV and moved the Omnivision to its current location in the back of the house. It shared the RF input between the Inty, and later the Atari 2600, and later still the Astrocade and various Pongs. At any one time there were at least four consoles always connected to it via switches and switchboxes, and I wired up an accessory port for more. plastic was broken and on these TVs that's pretty much the load-bearing part. When it arrived at the mailbox and I unpacked it, I could see the lower half had sandwiched right through the VCR slot, with visible PCB fragments and broken buttons; aside from the tube itself (ironically), the thing was a total loss. The seller nevertheless made good on the refund, to their credit, and I got to schlep it to the recycler. Overall, however, it had occurred to me that there were very few TVs sufficiently contemporary with the M2035 out there, which might be a hint about their general longevity. So, if I was going to be forced to buy a different Panasonic, then it might as well be a more recent one, and it should be one of the "triple play" units (i.e., TV, VCR, DVD) so that I could at least get rid of the external DVD player. Mission: Impossible '88 and '89 DVD sets, where the "in stereo" animation was even burned into the video stream.) not recording and thus impossible to watch many DVDs, for which the Sima CopyMaster was the cheapest solution: it simply blots out that portion of the vertical blank along with the pulses, which also has the side effect of sometimes stripping closed captioning (in the vertical blank as well), though DVDs with proper subtitles are of course unaffected. Later Sima devices could regenerate portions of the vertical blank for better quality, and Macrovision actually sued them over their products in 2005, but later settled. The mixer on the right was purchased literal decades ago at Radio Shack (more specifically a "Video Enhancer Stereo Audio Mixer") that I think we used for a Halloween display exactly once and then forgot about. Here it was used first as a cutoff switch, and second as a way to match the audio volume from the DVD player with the audio volume from the Dreamcast, which was also directly connected to the second rear Y-cable. This TV is mono, so the stereo channels from the audio mixer and the DC get merged using their own Y-connectors (also Radio Shack) before going into the Y-cable to the single line audio input. The video function isn't used here at all; it was just a audio mixer on the shelf I wasn't otherwise using. The DVD player is under the mixer and the CopyMaster, a cheapie Sony special that will only eject discs if it's in the mood or summarily threatened with violence. You already met this system when we adjusted the laser pickup and refurbished its rechargeable battery. you met the Tandyvision One (otherwise identical to the Mattel Intellivision Master Component, and manufactured by them as an OEM) when we installed a composite video modification and a front power-cutoff reset. I later upgraded it with an original Mattel Intellivoice speech synthesizer (Tandy never rebadged these) and a CuttleCart. But you haven't met the Bally on the bottom, officially introduced in 1978 as a game console and simple home computer, sold under various names such as the Bally Professional Arcade seen on early units, later the Bally Computer System badging here, and now collectively referred to under its final incarnation as the Astrocade. These machines were based around a 1.789MHz Z80 (half NTSC colourburst) combined with the same graphics hardware Dave Nutting Associates used for Midway's arcade games Gorf and Wizard of Wor, among others. Unfortunately, much of its theoretical graphics power went unrealized because it only has half the video memory of the arcade units (i.e., 4K) — and that's all the memory it has, so it has to interleave bits in the video memory to store BASIC programs, meaning only game ROMs can take full advantage. Still, that was enough to be solid competition for the likes of the Atari VCS and Fairchild Channel F, and it holds its own well against the slightly later Intellivision. does have is a doozy: the cooling vents are on the underside. These machines are very prone to overheating and can be easily damaged by it, which is why I use two foam struts to keep it off the carpet. The yellow label is for Astrovision, a separate enterprise that had been attempting to develop their own console. The (then) Bally Professional Arcade was selling poorly, though part of this was due to a tardy launch and Bally's weak retail presence, and Bally decided to sell off the consumer products division in 1979. Astrovision, unable to get their unit to market quickly, bought it in 1981 along with a limited license to the Bally name and reintroduced it at Winter CES 1982. Astrovision units are otherwise the same except for the badging and are the most common Astrocades today, though the company became another victim of the 1983 video game crash and went bankrupt shortly afterwards. Simultaneously, an Astrocade derivative merged with Bally's unfinished ZGRASS-100 expansion chassis was reworked into the Datamax UV-1 graphics generator, sold in small numbers until around 1982. the wall warts and power strips, and do a little spot vacuuming with the Roomba. out in spring. Gremlin's Blockade; and a simple calculator and screen paint toy ("Scribbling"). The display is a bit noisier than the Inty/Tandyvision, probably because of the difference in shielding, but still quite good. Videostak Video Game Center, which allegedly could accomodate a VCS, Intellivision or ColecoVision. The front decal is somewhat worn and the woodgrain veneer doesn't match the Vader VCS nearly as well, but it's still a fun-looking setup. Intellivision System Changer which has Atari 2600 hardware in an expansion box for the Intellivision II (useable on the original Inty with modification). It might be fun to explore the reputed irregularities between what is believed to be a VTI clone TIA in the System Changer and the slightly earlier Coleco Expansion Module 1 (and the related Coleco Gemini), and see how they differ in practice. Now for the Pong machines. These attach to the "accessory port" on the input switcher. The current Pong menagerie are mostly MOS 7600-based, MOS' own Pong-on-a-chip: two from Commodore themselves but PAL only using the MOS 7601 (the TV Game 2000K and TV Game 3000H), plus two MOS 7600 (NTSC) systems, a Coleco Telstar Gemini, not to be confused with the Coleco Gemini or Coleco Telstar, and an Allied Leisure Name of the Game II, possibly the earliest use of the chip in NTSC regions. We'll play the Name of the Game II and Telstar Gemini below. These will be consoles for another day, but I also have a boxed Atari Video Pinball, an "honorary" Pong machine though it plays several other games, and a boxed Atari Ultra Pong Doubles, which we had before we got the Tandyvision, but I don't ever recall it working fully and it later failed to power up and got thrown away, so this is a replacement. My least favourite of the Pongs here (I really only picked it up because it was cheap) is a 1977 Magnavox Odyssey 3000. The 3000 is basically an upmarket Odyssey 2000 with proper handheld controllers, but otherwise the same me-too AY-3-8500 Pong-on-a-chip generating the same black-and-white display. Allied Leisure Name of the Game II is a two-player Pong based on the MOS 7600-001. This chip notionally contains three field games (a tennis game, a "goal" game usually billed as either soccer or hockey, and a racquetball game) and a skeet shooter, but the racquetball game can be put into a single player mode by setting it to "four" players and the NotG2's switch triggers this mode in place of the skeet shooter. It was noisy on the other TV and it's noisy here, possibly because it has its own internal RF switchbox, but it plays fine. Coleco Telstar Gemini, an MOS 7600-004 system. This has two "pinball" variants (with flippers and moveable Pong paddles, so it's still a Pong of sorts) and two shooting gallery variants involving shooting a deformed bear sprite. The light gun connector is the same as the Coleco Telstar, so I borrowed the gun from that. sing along with The Offspring. But the output looks crisp through the rear jacks, the sound is proper stereo, and we now have front inputs I can use for something else without rigging a whole bunch of Y-adapters again. Plus, if the Telstar Gemini's gun works, it's all but guaranteed the Dreamcast's does. am likely to play some Video Pinball, and in its box that's easy to move, so that can go on top of the 2600 and the NotG and Telstar Gemini can sit next to it. The old TV is out in the garage and as I have time I'll extract its circuit boards and go over them more thoroughly, since I had a lot of good times with that television and it would be nice to fix. If I do, I'll write it up here, since it's an actual old VCR. Meanwhile, I have some possible projects in mind for the Tandyvision and Astrocade, and maybe some mods to go in the VCS, and you can read about those in future articles too. In the end, with the new TV all set up, the 1980s can live again in my rear office. Or, as my wife likes to point out, they never actually died there either.
An introduction to ZKeys: a new service that stores encryption keys off-site and automatically locks access to them if the client machines go offline for a long period of time.
Google told K-12 schools they could turn off AI, but only if they gave up search too. That isn’t integration. It’s holding education for ransom.
Once a year at my church, I usually give one sermon. I was asked to tie the theme to a young adult retreat we had taken to the Sunshine Coast. My first experience giving a sermon was many years ago at my old home church in El Monte, California. It was a Vietnamese-American church, but…
Practical tools for design engineers to explore possible futures through speculative design
