Ben Cottrell Articles

Using floating point division, modulus (finding the remainder), and floor rounding, it is possible to convert any number from base 10, into base n. Beyond base 10, we need to assign other symbols to the digit, or include delimiters, in order to convert back into base 10. For example, hexadecimal …

Foreword It's remarkable how much technology stays fundamentally the same, and the Windows operating system is a testament to that. Their market dominance has actually had a positive impact, in terms of providing a consistent platform to target, especially through DirectX as well. In fact, DirectX may have supplanted Windows …

Unlike a lot of common content management systems, like Wordpress, the system which generates my website does not have a built-in search feature. I use Pelican, a static site generator written in Python, installed through the Pip package manager. I wanted a challenge, so I decided to build my own …

I've been quite busy: upgrading my web server OS, deploying a wiki, and refreshing the design of this website. Following a trend of trying new things, I have decided to try out Ko-Fi so that it can serve as a source of revenue, if I decide to become more of …

I'm not a keen proponent for the Treaty Principles bill, which has just passed it's first reading in parliament. From the outset, it's not clear to me what the ultimate intentions are for this bill. I will preface this article by stating that I'm not a lawyer, and I am …

I'm fond of the former era of online gaming with Adobe Flash. I'm particularly curious about the format used during that time period, called Shockwave Flash, which was used to make interactive movies. I've drafted a specification for a format inspired by SWF here: https://docs.google.com/document/d …

In these days, user privacy is still too often overlooked, as this is something we trade for the wealth of social media. On here, I've decided to respect user privacy by choosing a commenting system which runs locally, and does not require PII information to function. I've chosen Isso, which …

I want to say that the GNU/Linux desktop experience has improved tremendously, with thanks to some architectural changes with display rendering. Wayland is a good replacement for XOrg, as it deals with a lot of the redundant pathways and legacy cruft preventing more responsive rendering. One of the remaining …

Journey from NixOS NixOS was great for trying out new software, being able to revert to previous system wide configurations in the form of generations, as well as isolating dependant packages and identifying them with the derivation as a hash. Unfortunately, I had to rely on other experts to provide …

Trying out NixOS has been an interesting experience, and breaks away from traditional GNU/Linux distributions that I am normally accustomed to. There's a great emphasis on a configurable system environment, with the ability to roll-back changes, and to mitigate dependency issues. I've also been able to properly use the …