The first Twitch office (back when it was Justin.TV) was so cold I wrote a "heater" command for my macbook. It just spun the cpu in a tight loop, and was very effective!
Operations once wrote me an email about how to cleanly exploit a xss vulnerability in the application they're using so they can implement their feature without editing the code base.
Which reminds of the Yule Log TV program[1] for those who lived in the NY metro area < 1990. Although it seems farcical now, it was envisioned as a way for low-income residents without a fireplace to have a "fire" during the Christmas holiday.
That name - the Yule Log - seems familiar, and brings up some vague but soothing memories for me. I believe it was an early Internet (i.e. circa 2000, "Web 1.0") web page that displayed the same kind of fireplace-log setup. Gave me some serene, hypnotic peace in the midst of the excitement of programming in Borland Turbo-C!
Unfortunately, I'm having a little problem "regulating the heat": C-+ is supposed to make the fire bigger, C-- smaller. When I run this in a tty, neither of the two does anything. When I run it under X, C-+ moves the fire down and C-- moves it up. Is it just me or is that a bug? (Running elementaryOS Freya.)
Thanks, it is the intended behavior. It has been useful for me a few times when the fire didn't align properly. There is no function for making the fire bigger and smaller yet.
Well, de facto it can make the fire bigger or smaller. If the bottom of the fire is below the lower screen edge, only a small part is visible. Move the fire up -> more becomes visible -> the fire becomes "bigger" ;-)
At least is does in a graphical environment. Like I said, it doesn't work in terminal.
I think we can do even better, though. Only two colours? Only using solid blocks? We should be able to get beautifully smooth 256x256 (dithered) colour!
Just what I needed to complete my auto heating laptop. This animation will compliment the buzzing laptop fan with heat, so I enjoy some warmth this winter.
In seriousness though, why not? He probably had a good time writing it, learned a thing or two, and now has something fun to show off. "Why" doesn't need an answer if it's fun. Besides, the odds are that "hey, look at how this code makes a fireplace" will get someone interested in coding who was bored by "hey, look how this code lets me manage a large database of packages."
I have been thinking about switching and currently use evil-mode but in default emacs, so I can switch to vim bindings if I want to but when I open a new buffer it's in emacs mode, however to me modal editing can be less productive
I mean, vim's modal language is more expressive, and you can get things done faster, but if I am coding I want most of my brain power to be on the algorithm I write, and I find that sometimes coming up with cool vim motions to do what I need to do instead of up-up-up-delete-up-up-up-delete etc. pulls me out of the zone a little bit because I have to engage my brain more.
For pure fun editing yes, I agree that modal editing is cool, and it is quite nice to be able to do complex text changes without really ever using the cursor keys, but when I am deeply concentrating I don't know, I don't care if I take two seconds longer to do something because I use the cursor keys because in the end those two seconds are seconds I use to think about the problem at hand anyways, which is not "how do I get to that spot and do that text change as quickly as possible"
Not sure, maybe if I give it more time it will become more automatic, but after a few weeks of mostly vim/evil-mode editing I still reach for emacs when doing "serious work"
To play with it for 30 seconds and then forget about it. Or to show it to friends at work. Or for any number of silly reasons. Personally, I'm interested in the code - I don't know how to do that in Emacs, and I wish I would.
To see how it's done? I've actually been considering writing a package for emacs that requires a certain amount of animation, and this package would probably provide some useful hints. (Though I'm going to start by reading the animation guide linked to from the README, I think.)
