4DCu.be
a blog about programming, gaming, technology, ...
Hnefatafl, Viking Chess for Game Boy
On The Royal Game of Ur, getting two Game Boys to talk to each other using the link cable proved to be quite difficult. I got $50 worth of tokens and burned them all on this feature. Getting semi-decent music was a hurdle too, and I’m still not quite happy...
Creating Cheats for my Own Game Boy Game
While the computer games I played in my childhood often came with cheat codes baked into the game that allowed you to pass parts where you got stuck, for handhelds like the Game Boy specialized hardware was needed. One of my most prized possessions from my childhood was such a...
Claude Design to revamp two projects
Design has always been my bottleneck. I usually have a fairly clear idea of what I want, but turning that into a consistent interface is where I get stuck. For the last redesign of my resume site, back in 2024, I ended up hiring a designer through Fiverr to get...
Revisiting a 20-Year-Old NDS Project with AI
Almost twenty years ago, during my PhD in bioinformatics, I needed to brush up on C++. Our lab was doing comparative genomics, studying how genomes evolve at the structural level, particularly the effects of whole genome duplications in plant genomes. One of the key tools we used, i-ADHoRe 2.0, had...
The Royal Game Boy of Ur
Years ago, a documentary on “The Royal Game of Ur”, one of the oldest known board games, nearly 5,000 years old, instantly piqued my interest. When I later heard Dr. Irving Finkel discuss it on a podcast, the fascination came flooding back. But this time, I had an idea: build...
Python to Rust: Porting My Genetic Art Algorithm
One of the first posts on this blog showed how to implement a genetic algorithm in Python. Revisiting that project, I realized it is an ideal candidate to port to Rust: it is computationally heavy, and touches on performance, parallelism, and data structures. In short, a good excuse to finally...
Using my Kindle PW3 as a Dashboard for Home Assistant
An old Kindle, once jailbroken and running KUAL, can be repurposed as a dashboard for just about anything. I’ve actually done this before - though right now, I don’t really need those stats anymore. It would be nice, however, to show some real-time data from my Home Assistant setup on...