Wednesday, August 23, 2023

wOne

I remember enjoying this game.

Use the arrow keys to control the wheel, with your task being a simple one: collect barrels (or coins) and stars by rolling through a myriad of levels full of ramps and platforms.

https://jayisgames.com/review/wone-and-two.php

The original website, "Sean Cooper Games", is available on the Wayback Machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/20121026161721/https://www.games.seantcooper.com/

Thursday, August 17, 2023

Using Chaos to Guide a Spacecraft to the moon

Typically, chaotic dynamics exhibit highly irregular behavior and the sensitive dependence on initial conditions prevents long-term prediction of the state of the system. However, the inherent exponential sensitivity of chaotic time evolutions to perturbations can be exploited to direct trajectories to some desired final state by the use of a carefully chosen sequence of small perturbations to some control parameters. These perturbations can be so small that they do not significantly change the system dynamics, but enable the intrinsic system dynamics to drive the trajectory to the desired final state. This process has been called targeting.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576500001259


In his book, Belbruno tells the story of how he used chaos theory to get the world’s first spaceship (a Japanese spaceship named Hiten, which means “A Buddhist Angel that Dances in Heaven”) to the moon without using fuel.

http://treeoflifereview.com/spotlight_belbruno.php

https://www.edbelbruno.com/

Cookie Clicker

Some useful JavaScript snippets to hack Cookie Clicker if you want to explore the game without sitting through the whole game experience.

https://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/test/

I. Get just under Infinty cookies.
Note: having Infinity cookies will bug the game.

Game.Earn(9e+302);

II. Buy 1000 of everything.
Note: all prices start to approach Infinity with counts nearing the upper 4000s.

Game.storeBulkButton(4);

for (let i = 0; i <= 14; i++)
for (let j = 0; j < 10; j++)
document.querySelector(`#product${i}`).click();

III. Buy all available upgrades:

document.querySelectorAll('#upgrades .upgrade.enabled').forEach(node => node.click());

Tuesday, August 15, 2023

Download from Wayback Machine

You can use the following tool to download an archived website from the Wayback Machine:
https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader

I found it here:
https://superuser.com/questions/828907/how-to-download-a-website-from-the-archive-org-wayback-machine/957298#957298

It's a Ruby script. If you happen to have a SSH shell that has Ruby, but doesn't let you install packages globally, you can do this:

gem install --user-install wayback_machine_downloader

And the script will be here:

~/.local/share/gem/ruby/2.7.0/gems/wayback_machine_downloader-2.3.1/bin/wayback_machine_downloader

Saturday, August 12, 2023

Acer Aspire One D255

I recently attempted to revive my old Acer Aspire One D255.
I fitted it with an affordable SSD, upgraded the RAM from 1 to 2 GB, and set out to get it up and running.

I. Operating system

  • Lubuntu 23.04 installation failed twice, each time with a different error.
  • Windows 10 gets installed, and would really be ideal due to ongoing support, but it is far too slow on this machine (even on the LTSC version the Start menu takes a few seconds to show up).
  • Windows 7 64 bit got installed, but I couldn't find a video driver.
  • Windows 7 32 bit works fine; I went with the Home Basic edition.
Note: the CPU (Intel Atom N455) is 64bit, but the system is designed to run a 32bit OS.

II. Drivers

The Acer website no longer lists the product, and the old product page link has been deleted.
The Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy.
https://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/drivers/2987;-;AOD255

However, their "global-download.acer.com" server still hosts all the driver files.
An anonymous benefactor links to them on a dedicated blog:
http://getacerdriver.blogspot.com/2015/04/acer-aspire-one-d255d255e-drivers.html

III. Software

Finding working software for Windows 7 is surprisingly challenging.

Google Chrome 109.0.5414.120 is the last version that runs on Windows 7.
I went for a PortableApps.com package which I got from SourceForge.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/portableapps/files/Google%20Chrome%20Portable/GoogleChromePortable_109.0.5414.120_online.paf.exe/download

IV. Troubleshooting

Immediately after installing Windows 7, I was hit with the Windows Update Error 80072EFE.
Luckily, there was an easy fix available on the Microsoft Support Community, namely downloading and installing Windows Update Client for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2: March 2016. Windows Update worked after this, and I was offered to install hundreds of update packages.