Current Projects: Open Dilators; Math Set for EmojiRunner
So, it’s been about 9 months since the last time I updated this. Time to ramble about stuff.
Folklore
First of all, as in any decent scientific article, let’s do a thorough overview of the litterature – AKA what the hell have I been doing?
Starting the school year with a magnificent months-long mental episode, I was barely human until 2026 entered the ring. During this long and cold black hole, playing games with my wife helped a lot (including but not limited to: Tears of the Kingdom, Chrono Trigger, Myst, Made in Abyss, Journey, Vampire Survivors, Chants of Sennar…). As the tides turned, I got prescribed methylphenidate, which helps quite a lot with doing any kind of stuff every day.
In the past few months, I managed to read the third and final act of The Book of Dust trilogy, i.e. The Rose Field. While slightly more focused than the second entry, it feels like a weird political statement gesturing vaguely at fascism and capitalism, utterly failing to provide a tight narrative along the way. I managed to enjoy it to a degree, but if lands far behind His Dark Materials.
Recently, I also played through Unbeatable and liked what I got, a janky FLCL-esque adventure (it even got a few tears out of me). I’m now deep down a Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth shaped rabbit hole, but it shouln’t last much longer.
Anyway, I also did some #productive stuff, like finally getting rid of all Ubuntu slop from my computers, switching to a Arch with KDE everywhere.
Open Dilators
At some point in time last year, I got a second-hand 3D printer. A friend heard about it, and they sent me the .stl model of a dilator for their SRS post-op. I found no information about this online so I got curious, followed the trail, found the gal who made the 3D model and contacted her.
A few rounds of back-and-forth work later, here is the product of our joint work, the Open Dilators website. It contains not only a complete series of 3D models for increasingly large dilators, but also a comparison with the sizes of “““real””” brands, and some instructions to (as) safely (as reasonnably possible) print & use these beasts.
Writing Unicode Maths with EmojiRunner
I’m a big LaTeX user, but sometimes you just need to type some basic-ass unicode math on Discord or in an e-mail, and the keyboard shortcuts always suck (which means I can’t be assed to remeber them).
It’s at one of those times that I suddenly realised I already use on the daily a tool serving a similar purpose. EmojiRunner, as the name might suggest, allows one to search for emojis in Krunner by typing their name. It offers a (presently buggy and incomplete) feature to add your own custom emojis, which are then stored in ~/.local/share/emojirunner/customemojis.json. Notably, those custom emojis can (just like the ones provided by EmojiRunner) be grouped together in collections, with specific tags attached, along the lines of:
{
"Greek Letters": [
{
"description": "The lowercase sigma greek letter",
"emoji": "σ",
"name": "sigma (lowercase)"
},
{
"description": "The uppercase sigma greek letter",
"emoji": "Σ",
"name": "sigma (uppercase)",
"tags": ["Sum"]
}
]
}
Following my own internal vibes and logic, I thus made a small collection of custom “““emojis””” for EmojiRunner, including most of the unicode symbols I am likely to use, I thus handmade my own .json file, whith the matching LaTeX command tagged when relevant.
Conclusion
Let’s forget about this blog until I suddenly feel like I need to post again, probably in 2027, who knows, who cares. 😎
🐊 seeya later alligator 🐊