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Pixel art OCs

Mon, 18 May 2026 22:53:34 +0300

Been recently spending free time drawing silly little pixel arts of original characters. Here they are, in rough chronological order.

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.