Took us a while to build this from scratch. She has some good ideas for building a action RPG game like Dragon Quest and I decided to give this a shot and she has been playing and testing the games. So far she's loving it. Hope you all enjoy.
It's a native Mac game and you can get it for FREE here:
https://code.intellios.ai/cedricsquest/
Took us a while to build this from scratch. She has some good ideas for building a action RPG game like Dragon Quest and I decided to give this a shot and she has been playing and testing the games. So far she's loving it. Hope you all enjoy.
cwMarkdown is a focused, read-only Markdown viewer for macOS. It deliberately has no editor: the entire surface area is given to presentation, so a document looks as good as the writing in it. The goal is the reading experience of Typora — clean measure, comfortable line height, a native system font — in a small, fast, native app.
Under the hood it’s a SwiftUI app that renders Markdown in a WKWebView, which gives pixel-level control over typography while keeping the window chrome, toolbar, and outline fully native. Parsing is done with marked, code is highlighted with highlight.js, and math is typeset with KaTeX — everything bundled, so the viewer works with no network access at all.
cwMarkdown is a focused, read-only Markdown viewer for macOS. It deliberately has no editor: the entire surface area is given to presentation, so a document looks as good as the writing in it. The goal is the reading experience of Typora — clean measure, comfortable line height, a native system font — in a small, fast, native app.
Under the hood it’s a SwiftUI app that renders Markdown in a WKWebView, which gives pixel-level control over typography while keeping the window chrome, toolbar, and outline fully native. Parsing is done with marked, code is highlighted with highlight.js, and math is typeset with KaTeX — everything bundled, so the viewer works with no network access at all.
I trained a modified U-Net that translates Bayer-CFA photos into Foveon X3 sensor images — the look from the Sigma DP2 Merrill (stacked 3-layer photodiode sensor, captures full RGB at every pixel, no demosaic interpolation).
The novelty is a 1D pixel-stack injection layer concatenated at the bottleneck between encoder and decoder, encoding the B·G·R photodiode column structure that a Foveon sensor captures and a Bayer sensor can't.
Training is end-to-end on matched scene pairs — Bayer camera and a DP2 Merrill tripod-mounted side by side, same scene, homography-aligned and tiled into 256×256 crops — with L1 + VGG perceptual + a small TV smoothness penalty, AdamW + cosine schedule, mixed precision on a single 24 GB GPU.
The empirical finding I didn't expect was how location-sensitive the injection is: at the bottleneck it works; injected earlier the encoder learns to ignore it, injected later the decoder has already committed to a demosaic-style chroma reconstruction. Keeping the prior 1D (not 2D) also mattered — it forced the network to learn inter-channel coupling instead of memorizing per-region lookups.
Architecture diagram, training methodology, and a Mac app you can run on your own photos: https://code.intellios.ai/photo.
I have been doing research on generating Foveon X3 image from Bayer image using deep learning for a while and here is my latest research result.
I will forever mourn the general demise of server browsers. Too many games require you to use matchmaking systems, which means it's very hard to build up a small community in-game anymore. You either have to rely on forming small parties with people you've stumbled upon one by one, or you have to seek out people from some much larger area like Reddit or Discord. It takes a lot of the serendipity out of the experience. Without a small community it becomes much harder to ensure you're not playing with people who make the game less fun by whatever metric you care about.
I used to be an admin on a group of about 18 or so connected Counter-Strike 1.6 servers called T3Houston*. We ran modified versions of various Warcraft 3 mods which added persistent XP/leveling, as well as integration with an external item store and player database the owner maintained. Most of those servers were filled to the brim during peak US gaming times, and our forum was quite active.
There aren't many games these days where you could do something like that. I discovered the community because one day I was just looking for a server with open slots for me to join. I was fairly skeptical of whatever a Warcraft mod would be like, but ended up enjoying it so I added it to my favorites. Eventually I got to know the regulars and joined the forum. Notably, the place felt far less toxic than the average server I'd join back then. I can completely believe this is just me looking at the past through rose tinted glasses, but it feels like the general toxicity has gotten worse at the same time as we've lost a lot of tools to manage it.
* If anyone else here remembers the name T3Houston: hi! I'm Stealth Penguin
I enjoy ASCII games (Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is surprisingly easy to get into in ASCII mode), but the obtuse UI of Dwarf Fortress was a little too much effort to learn. I hope the Adams brothers get some well-earned financial stability with this incredible endeavour. They are some old-school software craftsmen, devoted to the art of excellent game design for the sake of it, money be damned.
I've already gone through 3 weeks worth of Handmade Hero episodes but stopped because of my busy schedule. During that short time I was able to appreciate the value of having full control over your code.
I've built a career using game engines other people have made. Sometimes it bothers me that I do not know what's going on behind the hood because of all the layers of abstraction. It's nice to be able to make something quickly, but the programmer in me feels sad that I'd have to trust things to just work without me knowing how.
Handmade Hero showed me how things work behind the scenes and it inspired me to be more aware of the internals of what I'm using as much as possible. Now I make it into a point to delve into documentations and source codes and am now also playing around with low level languages (Like C and Rust) during my free time. Overall these have helped me a lot and I look forward to improving myself more.
So kudos and thanks to Casey for this series. It has helped me strive to become a better programmer.
Heads up first: I'm going to mention a website I built.
I'm not sneaking that in — read the rest only if you take APs next
week and want one more option.
For the rest of you: AP week starts Monday May 5. If you have a friend
in AP classes, the best thing you can do for them this week is leave
them alone for two hours after dinner. That's it. No app needed.
For people in the boat with me — taking AP exams next week and
running out of new MCQs to practice — these are the three things
that worked for me this week, in order:
problems. The ones you missed. The retention bump is bigger than
doing fresh material — there's research on this called "spaced
retrieval." It feels less productive but it isn't.
Snapchat but my recall the next morning is way worse than after
short blocks.
stuffed animal, whoever. If you can't explain why the answer is
the answer in 30 seconds, you don't actually know it yet.
The site I built (ap-quiz.com) is a flashcard quiz — multiple choice
with explanations and a leaderboard. 17 AP subjects. AP Calc AB is
free; other subjects let you do 3 questions free, then it's a
subscription, so you can check if it's useful before paying anything.
It's not a substitute for FRQ practice — that's the gap. For FRQ go
to College Board's released free-response questions, they're free
on collegeboard.org and they're literally the same authors as the
real exam.
Good luck next week. We're almost done.
Just to let you know I found this tool (https://ap-quiz.com) very useful for AP prep. It's a mobile website which gives AP question quiz. I can do it on the road when waiting for bus or my food in restaurant.
I'm working on a side project, ap-quiz.com, has officially launched. It is a mobile-focused high school AP exam practice app that brings together a massive AP question bank. When you're waiting for the bus or waiting for your food at a restaurant, you can easily open the site and practice questions anytime.
The platform uses a game-style system with different levels, scores, and trophies, allowing users to compete with each other to see who can achieve higher scores. For questions answered incorrectly, AI provides targeted analysis so users not only learn the correct answer, but also understand why they got the question wrong.
Currently, the website is not completely free. It costs $4.99 per month (currently discounted), which helps us purchase more question banks and add more AP exam categories.
Everyone is welcome to try it out.