Home on /dev/urandom's dev site

Jen viropluv' (song translation)

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 17:26:13 +0000

This is a translation of the song “It’s Raining Men” by “The Weather Girls” into Esperanto. It is slightly inspired by Avlönskt’s multilingual translation of the same song.

Esperanto	Literal English	Original English
Pliiĝas humido,	Humidity increases,	Humidity’s rising,
Depremiĝas aer',	Air loses pressure,	Barometer’s getting low,
Sciigas ĉiu font',	Every source informs,	According to all sources
Strangega pri afer':	About a very strange thing:	The street’s the place to go
Duonen post la deka	Half (an hour) after ten	‘Cause tonight for the first time
Unufoje en histori’	For the first time in history	Just about half-past ten
Aperos viroj en ĉielo	Men will appear in the sky	For the first time in history
Kaj falos sur ter’ de ĝi!	And fall onto earth from it!	It’s gonna start raining men!
…	…	…
Jen viropluv'!	Here’s the man-rain!	It’s raining men!
Laŭdu dion¹! jen viropluv'!	Hail god! Here’s the man-rain!	Hallelujah! It’s raining men!
Diluv'!	A flood!	Amen!
Ho, nun mi volas ekiri al la ekster'	Oh, now I want to start² going outside	I’m gonna go out to run and let myself get
Kaj malsekiĝi en ĉiu er’³!	And get myself wet in every part³!	Absolutely soaking wet!
…	…	…
Jen viropluv'!	Here’s the man-rain!	It’s raining men!
Laŭdu dion! jen viropluv'!	Hail god! Here’s the man-rain!	Hallelujah! It’s raining men!
Ĉia tipo eĉ!	Every type, even!	Every specimen!
Ĉia grando kaj kolor',	Every size and color,	Tall, blonde, dark and lean,
Kompleksio kaj humor'!	Complexion and mood!	Rough and tough and strong and mean!
…	…	…
Klare, la naturo	Clearly, the nature	God bless Mother Nature,
Ankaŭ estas fraŭlin',	Is also a single woman,	She’s a single woman too
Ŝi iris ĉielen	She went into heaven	She took off to heaven
Kaj plenumis la devon sian,	And fulfilled her obligation	And she did what she had to do
Subaĉetis anĝelojn	(She) bribed angels	She bought every angel
Por ke estas la kondiĉ',	So that there is the condition,	And rearranged the sky
En kiu por ĉiu ino	In which for every woman	So that each and every woman
Troveblas perfekta iĉ'!	Can be found a perfect man	Could find her perfect guy
…	…	…
Sentas mi, ke proksimiĝas ŝtorm',	I feel that a storm is coming close,	I feel stormy weather moving in
Proksimas komenc’ (proksimas komenc’)…	Beginning is close (beginning is close)…	About to begin (About to begin)
Freneziĝas volo en spirit’…	Desire in spirit is becoming crazy…	Hear the thunder, don’t you lose your head
Ŝiri tegaĵon kaj resti en lit'!	To tear the roof and stay in bed!	Rip off the roof and stay in bed!
…	…	…

Esperanto also has a literal loanword “haleluja”, but in my translations, I prefer to form sentences using the more basic Esperanto words whenever possible, rather than use loans directly. ↩︎

Midnightly Thoughts (a short story)

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:40:57 +0300

It was supposed to be a simple operation, one that she’s done thousands of times. Assume the identity of a mortal, become this writer guy’s biggest supporter, seduce him, give him an unforgettable night, only to watch him disappear without a trace in a burst of flames shortly after. There was nothing to go wrong, and yet there he was, peacefully asleep, his body and soul completely intact. It was at that moment that “Artemis” began to think that maybe that “fall of gods” might have been real.

On generative AI and intellectual labor

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 19:21:50 +0300

Lots of people these days are talking about how generative AI technology is leading workers to lose skills, bosses to trust chatbots more than their employees, folks at risk to make absurd decisions, etc.

As these models are very capable of providing wrong, yet correct-seeming, answers, this causes people to accept low-quality results and pass them through, as if there’s nothing wrong with them, especially when contrasted with asking questions from other people, who are much more likely to refuse or question one’s request or take way more time to accomplish it properly.

Pixel art OCs: Gabby

Thu, 28 May 2026 21:25:07 +0300

Pixel art OCs: Fred

Thu, 28 May 2026 21:25:04 +0300

Ellie, Fred and Gabby are a set of three characters I drew in the last week or so. Mostly made to experiment with drawing different things, they don’t have much of an actual character (yet?).

Pixel art OCs: Ellie

Thu, 28 May 2026 21:25:01 +0300

Ellie, Fred and Gabby are a set of three characters I drew in the last week or so. Mostly made to experiment with drawing different things, they don’t have much of an actual character (yet?).

Thoughts: on liberalism

Tue, 26 May 2026 14:03:50 +0300

It’s become increasingly clear that in a lot of countries, the right has pretty much abandoned any ambition of still believing in “fairness” or “equality under the law” – perfectly willing to openly enrich themselves and their friends using government powers or declare entire groups of people as lower-class. There is a popular quote by musician Frank Wilhoit that goes:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Danielle, fixed scale

Thu, 21 May 2026 19:58:20 +0300

So yeah, I messed up the scale for one of the images of Claire, used that one as a guide, and as a result, the last image of Danielle ended up smaller than I intended. Here’s an “upscaled” fixed version, and I took the opportunity to also extend and improve the background.

Claire (<3 version, fixed)

Thu, 21 May 2026 19:58:15 +0300

Turns out, I accidentally messed up the scale when drawing this version of Claire, and made her a bit smaller. Even worse, I then used that scale as a guide for Danielle, and as a result, her image was also smaller than I intended.

Pixel art OCs: Danielle

Mon, 18 May 2026 17:35:38 +0000

For the next character, I went with a more unusual aesthetic instead of going for “conventionally attractive” designs. I also wanted to try drawing a plus-sized character for once, and experiment with more complicated backgrounds and poses that aren’t just front-facing once again. The end result is Danielle. I like to imagine that she doesn’t care at all about the opinions of the “general public” and dresses according to her own preferences, which her friends happen to love.

Pixel art OCs: Claire, part <3

Tue, 12 May 2026 20:09:17 +0000

One day, I also felt like drawing Claire in a more casual outfit doing a heart shape with her hands. Probably due to a simpler pose and outfit, it only took a single day.

Pixel art OCs: Ashley, part 2

Sat, 09 May 2026 20:02:57 +0000

Eventually I decided to rescale the 128x128 full-body characters to the same size as Claire and Konrad. In practice, this led to severe redrawing of their features. The girl in the tank top got the name Ashley.

Pixel art OCs: Hannah, part 2

Sat, 09 May 2026 20:02:57 +0000

Eventually I decided to rescale the 128x128 full-body characters to the same size as Claire and Konrad. In practice, this led to severe redrawing of their features. The girl with the jacket was named Hannah.

Pixel art OCs: Konrad

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 18:31:19 +0000

Pixel art OCs: Claire

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:57:18 +0000

Pixel art OCs: UFO 50 style face

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:18:55 +0000

This was a rather quick attempt to draw something in the style of UFO 50, a collection of 50 original games by Mossmouth, all made in a style reminiscent of 8-bit console games, sharing a single 32-color palette.

Pixel art OCs: Hannah (yet unnamed at that point)

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:16:59 +0000

This one ended up looking a bit goofy in my opinion. I spent most of my attention on the jacket, which was slightly inspired by one I saw on my way from work.

Pixel art OCs: Ashley (yet unnamed at that point)

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:17:25 +0000

This is the first full-body image. I was (and am) still struggling with maintaining proper proportions and posing, which is part of why most of these images once again use front-facing perspective. Unlike most of these images, which use the PICO-8 palette, this one was an experiment with the Anb16 palette.

Pixel art OCs: faces

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 20:37:22 +0000

Was browsing through the community page of a game on Steam, happened to see someone’s profile pic of an elf-like character from some MMORPG with purplish gray hair, and it gave me a tiny bit of inspiration to draw something similar. I did make little pixel art portraits before, but these were usually in a front-facing perspective.

Thoughts on differences between Western and Japanese home computer markets

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Okay, so last month (December of 2025), I saw a few screenshots of PC-98 games and went wondering: “in comparison, why do Western home computer games of the same era (the kind that you’d see on an Amiga or Atari ST) tend to be so ‘meh’-looking?”, in comparison to both console games of the same era and PC games that would come out shortly after games like DOOM would prove the PC was actually a viable mainstream gaming platform?".

on OS user interfaces

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of the time, our preferences for what an OS user interface should look like come down, ultimately, to either nostalgia or past experiences. Someone gets annoyed at a UI change and their instinctive reaction is to assume that whatever “the old way” was, was inherently better.

This especially applies to people who use Linux (or any of the BSDs, but for purposes of this page, I’ll refer to any of the “free desktops” as Linux), since it is rarely ever their first operating system – usually they started off with either Windows or macOS, and picked up habits and assumptions from that.

gxter, a GXT file utility

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have recently developed a small library and command-line utility in Rust that opens and creates GXT files from older Grand Theft Auto games. GXT files (description of format) are binary-based lists of localizable text strings that are used both by the game’s executable and all the game/mission scripts. Since the games are meant to be released in different languages, using a separate format for storing strings makes sense.

The program supports, and was tested on, files from GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas, and should also work with the “Stories” games, which are based on Vice City’s engine.

shogi move parser

Thu, 27 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve decided to write a little script using JS that reads a Japanese notation for a move in shogi and tries to convert it into English.

ascii table

Thu, 23 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A table describing the ASCII character set.

midnight commander subshell bug

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

After updating Alpine Linux on my VPS to version 3.14, I noticed that Midnight Commander (mc) crashed with a segmentation fault around 90% of the time, and at other times it ran, but refused to accept any input.

At first, I thought that it had to do with the OS update itself and something was wrong with the version of mc or some other package built in Alpine, so I tried building mc with ncurses instead of slang as it was before, but to no effect. To make matters worse, the bug disappeared when I tried to trace it in strace or valgrind.

rnd's doom page

Mon, 31 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Out of all PC games that have been around for decades, id Software’s DOOM is probably one with the largest longevity. People still make new levels for it, write new engines and modifications for it, and do speedruns for it under a variety of conditions, with new records still being broken every now and then. For almost every piece of hardware which can output graphics and run code, there have been attempts to port or clone DOOM, with “It runs Doom” becoming a popular internet meme.

linux framebuffer palette switching

Wed, 26 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Just like graphical terminals such as urxvt, the Linux framebuffer has an option to change the built-in palette. Distributions like Ubuntu use it to make the palette look nicer during bootup.

cuda debugging notes

Wed, 19 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

So, turns out, when you run a program that uses CUDA, either directly or indirectly (my program runs on CUDA, but uses OpenCL instead), there are issues preventing libasan from working. More specifically, if you run a program with libasan, the CUDA libraries will not work, and the OpenCL ones will not display an NVIDIA platform as available in the first place.

From my experience, seems like there are similar issues preventing Valgrind from working, either.

irssi tips and tricks

Tue, 20 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Recently found myself using irssi on a setup that’s slightly unusual, so I’m recording the information I found useful for posterity.

To switch windows, use Alt + number keys for windows 1-10, or Alt + top row (qwertyuiop) for windows 11-20.
Alt+Left / Ctrl+p and Alt+Right / Ctrl+n switches to the previous or next window respectively. It loops around from first to last or vice versa.
The script revolve is useful, since it compresses consecutive joins/leaves onto a single line. Useful for channels where there’s not a lot of activity.

my impressions from the streets of rage series

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As a kid, I didn’t have any 16-bit consoles, and at best, my experience with them was restricted to playing them for a short while when hanging out with my family’s old friends and their kids. Out of the games I got to experience that way, I played Sonic 1 and 2, Columns, Tom & Jerry: Frantic Antics and other games, but not any of the Streets of Rage games. Instead, the first time I discovered this games was when I discovered emulators.

vim hints

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

These are some of the useful settings and functions I use when working with vim.

cvlvl6 fanfic

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Trying to preserve an old page that I had a hard time finding online.

note on cpan

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Note to self: if your distro’s repositories don’t have a Perl package, it’s best to install them from CPAN instead. A tool called cpan minus (In Alpine, its packaged as perl-app-cpanminus) can do it easily, either installing packages into one’s home directory or globally.

riichi mahjong

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One of my big interests is things relating to riichi mahjong (リーチ麻雀): a variant of the Chinese tabletop game “mahjong” invented in Japan. It’s a rather complicated, but fun game where the players take turns picking and discarding tiles (which function similar to cards in a game like poker) in order to build a winning hand.

midnight commander tips

Wed, 17 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Assorted key combinations that are useful in MC.

freetype hinting settings

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I have a bunch of FreeType settings that I prefer on my systems, and these differ from the defaults on basically every Linux distro these days.

2026 update: This is a rather old post, made back when the monitors I used were pretty low-resolution, and saving every pixel of space seemed like a good idea. These days, high-DPI monitors are more common, and the old settings I preferred look absolutely terrible on these.

my pixel art

Thu, 04 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Here be pixel-art dragons.

Alpine Linux

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This page will host an assortment of tips and tricks collected while using Alpine Linux.

pixel art fonts

Sat, 28 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is the page where I’ll be hosting all the pixel art fonts which I drew.

trying to do assembly-level debugging in gdb

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

GDB seems to have been clearly made with source-level debugging in mind, the kind where the source code of the program is available. Sometimes this is not the case, or you just don’t want to bother looking for the source code. Here I’ll put a bunch of useful commands.

Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst on Wine

Sun, 02 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Occasionally I play the old multiplayer action-RPG “Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst”. On Windows, it works fine, but to make it work better on Linux (via Lutris), some extra steps may be needed.

about me

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

name: /dev/urandom (sometimes dev or rnd for short)

date of birth: june 1993

job: programmer

tech: i’m mostly a computing and retro software/gaming dork. i am kind of a linux/open-source fan, although i try not to be a jerk about it as some do. i occasionally code something in C or C++ (or a rare Bash/Perl script) in my personal time, and am currently figuring out Rust.

favorite movies: typically old comedies and silly action movies of the 80s and 90s, but I also like an occasional modern one.

assorted shell scripts

Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

shell scripts:

grab lines from dictionary, convert them into up-to-16-byte strings, do a binary dump

for x in `cat input_words.txt`; do echo $x | tr -d \\n | dd ibs=16 conv=sync 2>/dev/null | xxd; done

convert a .vgz directory to a .vgm one, along with updating all the playlists:

rename ".vgz" ".vgm.gz" *.vgz; gzip -d *.vgm.gz; sed -i "s/\.vgz/\.vgm/" *.m3u

(requires rename from util-linux and not from perl)

profiling utility hints

Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Some small hints for profiling utilities used on Linux systems.

riichi mahjong cheatsheet

Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

An ASCII table listing yaku and scoring rules for riichi mahjong.

shell parameter expansion

Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is a small cheat sheet to remind me of how parameter expansion works in unix shells.