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Before yesterdayJunferno

Wacky History of Computer Scrabble

✇Junferno
By: Junferno
11 July 2025 at 03:40

💾

Yes, it is possible.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Junferno
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Junferno
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/junferno
Discord: https://discord.gg/junferno https://discord.gg/WEykWbjkR2
Wishlist my game "Sleep Herd" on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3045180/SLEEP_HERD

Footnotes:
- Scrabble was preceded by Butts' other game, Lexiko, which did not have a board. Scrabble was previously called "Criss-Cross Words" and "It" before that. The game was renamed to "Scrabble" by entrepreneur James Brunot, who also rearranged the premium squares on the board and simplified the rules to sell the game.
- Monty Plays Scrabble had a sequel "Master Monty" (US Release 1987) with a larger lexicon and a more "difficult" tier (five tiers instead of four).
- Official English Scrabble currently uses one of two dictionaries: the NASPA Word List with 196,601 words and the Collins Scrabble Words with 280,887 as of 2024. The official dictionary used in the US at the time of Monty was the OSPD1, though I could not find how many words it contained.
- Turcan's Computer Scrabble was published by Leisure Genius. The edition for the ZX Spectrum was developed by Psion, with the fake words bug quickly patched in a second version.
- A trie is a distinct data structure from a "tree". Computer scientists sometimes pronounce trie as "try" to make this distinction. It was originally defined mathematically by Alex Thue in 1912 and in the context of computer science by René de la Briandais in 1959.
- The idea of storing potential letters on the board was shared by Peter Weinberger of AT&T Bell Laboratories, who had made his own Scrabble move-generator (94,000 words, 1 to 2 minutes a turn), in private communication with Appel and Jacobson.
- Maven ended up using the dawg due to its smaller size and therefore quicker download speed, whereas Quackle uses the GADDAG for its faster move generation. Either is considered acceptable by the general community due to word generation not being a bottleneck in modern Scrabble bots.
- The Monte Carlo Method was originally suggested by Stanislaw Ulam to John von Neumann for the simulation of neutron diffusion in nuclear fission after the invention of the first electronic computer: The ENIAC, another US government wartime project.
- One significant difference between Maven and Quackle is Quackle's use of "superleaves": a pre-computed database of values for every single possible combination of 1-6 remaining rack tiles.
- The deterministic search in the Quackle endgame is the B* search which is a type of "best-first search", though modern algorithms may opt for exhaustive searching, such as a program by the company Ortograf (according to Del Solar, 2022) and Macondo (Del Solar, 2023).
- AlphaGo is bot by Google DeepMind that plays the boardgame Go, defeating reigning Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016. DeepMind also made DeepNash, which is a bot that plays Stratego, a boardgame involving imperfect information, a broad possibility space, and strategies involving bluffs. DeepNash uses the game theory concept of achieving Nash equilibrium rather than something like Monte Carlo, and reached a top-three ranking on the Stratego platform Gravon.
- Macondo is a new Scrabble bot currently still in beta that also uses Monte Carlo Methods but aims to be better than Quackle, started in 2017 by César Del Solar, who also founded the online Scrabble community Woogles.
- Elise is a Scrabble bot released in 2013 with a more sophisticated move evaluation similar to that of chess engines. Compared to the Quackle 0.97 Champion Player, it was measured to win just over 60% of games in 10-20% less time per move (Street, 2013). Thank you Alex Dings for this detail.

Watch the full ending, coming soon on Patreon as a member: https://www.patreon.com/Junferno
See the code for the ending, open-source on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui/Scrapple

Licensed Music:
Bad Apple!! (English Cover)【JubyPhonic】@JubyPhonic
Bad Apple!! French ~Orchestral Vers. 2 | Little-chip (TikTok remake) @Littlechip
Bad Apple/Touhou Cover en Español - Undertale Version Kira0loka @kira0loka

Further Reading:
"Breaking The Game" by Kenji Matsumoto: http://www.breakingthegame.net/
César Del Solar on Medium: https://medium.com/@14domino/scrabble-is-nowhere-close-to-a-solved-game-6628ec9f5ab0
ELBBARCS.COM by Francis Desjardins (Ortograf Inc.): https://www.elbbarcs.com/

References: https://junferno.com/references/#list-6

Junferno is not endorsed by nor associated with any artists or creators featured.

Thank you Red Slendy for providing stylised English CC!

Music tracklist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsTVaNk5lQHlq4hB124qTGlsrhyiAfqfR

Gobot

✇Junferno
By: Junferno
18 October 2023 at 01:30

💾

Guy who is not a game developer talks about game development and Godot (pronounced like Van Gogh).

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Junferno
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/junferno
Join the Discord: http://discord.junferno.com/
Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/junferno
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Junferno
Check out my other stuff on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui

Footnotes:
- The definition of "game engine" can be ambiguous. I consider game engines to be any software framework that provides some core functionality/functionalities to multiple games.
- Godot is licensed under the MIT License, which is an open source license, permitting unrestricted use, modification, and distribution. Contributing to Godot requires approval though, as is standard.
- Godot joined the Software Freedom Conservancy in 2015, an organisation that provides support to non-profits. In 2022, Godot left the SFC to establish its own Godot Foundation.
- Unlike GameObjects in Unity, Nodes do not require a transform (which is a component that assigns a position, rotation, and scale). Under Nodes there is Node2D, Node3D, and Control (UI element). But a node on its own can also store game logic. Nodes do not have components, but a component workflow can be implemented in Godot using nodes.
- Other than GDScript, Godot 4 also has C# support in a separate build, and experimental C/C++ support (or even Rust) using the GDExtension system.
- Godot 4 was a complete engine rewrite. Along with Blender Support, Godot 4 introduces a Vulkan backend.

References: https://junferno.com/references/#list-5

Contribute to Godot: https://github.com/godotengine/godot
Donate to Godot Foundation: https://godotengine.org/donate/

Desmos Blender Suzanne: https://www.desmos.com/3d/4cd0d0ee9c

Photos and videos courtesy of Juan Linietsky, Godot, Wikimedia Commons
Gameplay footage courtesy of GOG, Oh Back in My Day, Nintendo of America, World of Longplays, Chubzdoomer
3D models modified from:
Model rips uploaded by SanekOgon, Walujski
CC Attribution models via Sketchfab: Blender Logo by shahrukh7587, godot logo by soundsbeard
Junferno is not endorsed by nor associated with any individuals, products, organisations, companies, artists, or creators featured.
Sound effects: Neon Genesis Evangelion

Thank you Red Slendy for providing stylised English CC!

Music tracklist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsTVaNk5lQHlq4hB124qTGlsrhyiAfqfR

A Formal Notion of Computability

✇Junferno
By: Junferno
29 June 2023 at 23:30

💾

Another episode of Junferno directly monetising his undergraduate education.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Junferno
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Junferno
Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/junferno
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/junferno
Discord: https://discord.gg/junferno https://discord.gg/WEykWbjkR2

Footnotes:
- The origin of the Entscheidungsproblem was from Leibniz, who considered it after developing a mechanical calculating machine in the 17th century. Hilbert posed the problem with Wilhelm Ackermann in continution of his program of problems, which were problems he considered to be the most significant mathematical problems of the 20th century (which includes the Riemann hypothesis).
- General recursive functions (or mu-recursive functions) would later be the basis of recursion theory, founded by Rózsa Péter from Gödel's work.
- Church's lambda calculus would later influence the notation of the functional programming language Lisp, though Lisp was not originally derived from lambda calculus.
- Turing-complete means "able to simulate any Turing machine". Turing-complete machines existed before Turing, but were not used to their potential, such as Charles Babbage's analytical engine in 1837, which was designed for arithmetic calculation. Ada Lovelace was the first to recognise that Babbage's engine may be used for more complicated logical operations. Her note (1842–43) on using the engine to compute a sequence of Bernoulli numbers is often cited as the first computer program.
- Turing did not name his machines "Turing Machines" in his original paper, but rather Logical Computing Machines (LCMs). Rather than proving logical statements, they "computed numbers", as in they generated numbers digit-by-digit. Numbers that could be generated by LCM were "computable numbers". Turing's negative proof of the Entscheidungsproblem was not in regards to the Halting Problem, but rather in regards to computing whether a machine will ever output the digit 0. This was equivalent to computing problems however, as logical statements can be encoded with numbers (see Gödel numbering).
- Post's approach to computability was very much in the perspective of the human mind, as opposed to Gödel's rational approach. Post developed an equivalent model to Turing's machines independent to Turing just a few months after Turing's paper, which used a two-way infinite "symbol space". Hence, the video states that Post both "agrees and disagrees" with the Turing Machine, as (from what I can tell) Post's independent approach is equivalent mathematically but not so much philosophically.
- A common misconception is that Turing claimed that no machine could compute something that a Turing Machine can not. Turing never explicitly stated this, as he only proposed a definition of "effective computability", but it is a topic still debated on today. While there are theories for quantum "hypercomputation", quantum computing as we know it (Deutsch 1985 presented at 13:34) has the same computing power as Turing Machines, just faster. Deutsch, however, does claim that his Church-Turing-Deutsch principle encompasses every physical process.
- The Church-Turing thesis continues to be accepted as all alternative models of computability developed (Post, Schönfinkel, Curry, Markov) just end up being equivalent to Turing computability.
- Turing spent his later years conceptualising the design for the stored program computer alongside John von Neumann, who created the von Neumann architecture.
- David Hilbert's speech, "Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country", was in light of the exclusion of German mathematicians post-World War I. It is likely that he did not end up delivering it due to poor health. Nonetheless, Hilbert remained supportive of Jewish students and colleagues. A quote by Hilbert in 1934 to the Nazi Minister of Education in reference to the removal of Jews from academia was that "There is no mathematics in Göttingen anymore."
- In 1939, Kurt Gödel fled Nazi-occupied Austria to Princeton University, where he befriended German-born Jewish physicist Albert Einstein.
- In 1952, despite cracking messages crucial to British victory against fascism, Alan Turing was prosecuted for "homosexual acts" by the British government. He passed away in 1954.

References: https://www.junferno.com/references/#list-4

Photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Sega
3D models via Sketchfab courtesy of cameronac
Licensed music Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed) J-POP Karaoke - きただにひろし - ウィーアー!(アニメ『ONE PIECE』OP)
Gameplay footage courtesy of Cibley, Mayor Mori, Tiger
Junferno is not endorsed by nor associated with any artists or creators featured

Thank you Red Slendy for providing stylised English CC!

Music tracklist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsTVaNk5lQHlq4hB124qTGlsrhyiAfqfR

Why You Can Draw a Cat on Your Computer

✇Junferno
By: Junferno
1 April 2023 at 15:00

💾

Retro cats & funny tech.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Junferno
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Junferno
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/junferno
Discord: https://discord.gg/junferno https://discord.gg/WEykWbjkR2

Footnotes:
- In coloured image, a CRT may have multiple beams of RGB with different intensities to create a spectrum of colours. CRTs were later superceded by LCD, plasma, and OLED displays which are significantly cheaper and less bulky as they do not require a vacuum tube.
- Ivan Sutherland also created The Sword of Damocles in 1968 with the help of a few of his students. This was a head-mounted display and tracking system, considered one of the first augmented reality systems.
- One of the most important features of Sutherland's Sketchpad was that it could draw perfect lines and circle arcs from a draw path. This was via geometric constraints (e.g. the radius of the circle arc or the angle of the line), set by a combination of the light pen and push button inputs. Sketchpad also supported zooming and clipping.
- During the development of the Lisa and Macintosh, how a screen should look had not yet been standardised. The Lisa has a 720 × 364 screen with rectangular pixels. Atkinson advocated for square pixels, which did not end up making it to the Lisa but did make it to the Macintosh.
- While most raster systems at the time used 1 for white and 0 for black (much like a light switch on/off), the Macintosh did the opposite, to reflect the black-on-white design of the GUI (you set a pixel to 1 to write a black dot on a white page).
- Bresenham's line algorithm was named after Jack Bresenham, who developed the algorithm in 1962 at IBM for the Calcomp plotter, a sort of printer-like device that directly draws on a roll of paper using a pen (often just a ball-point pen) that strictly moves horizontally and vertically.
- A MacDraw file is called a PICT file, or a Picture, which is a sequence of QuickDraw calls. The buffer which stores the copy-and-paste image is also a Picture, even if copied from MacPaint. This is to allow for copy-and-paste to be shared across MacDraw, MacPaint, MacWrite, and any other applications that support it.
- While MacPaint was still called SketchPad (before MacSketch), it was also called LisaSketch.
- Because of the limited memory, MacPaint was programmed to fit in only 5,822 lines of Pascal with an additional 3,583 lines of assembly. QuickDraw fits in a total of 17,101 lines across 36 assembly files. The "Objects" referred to in the video are instances of Pascal Records.
- MacPaint also has rectangular selection, which selects both black and white pixels into a Rect which then gets passed to maskBits. This can be flipped and rotated by 90 degrees.
- While making MacPaint, Atkinson also attempted to build an early OCR tool that allowed for text to be edited after already being rasterised. This was eventually abandoned.
- MacPaint 2.0 and MacDraw II were released by Claris, a subsidary of Apple. MacDraw became MacDraw Pro and finally ClarisDraw in 1992.
- A major competitor to Adobe Illustrator was Aldus FreeHand, which had its own file format but could also make encapsulated PostScript files. Adobe acquired FreeHand in 2005, 10 years after being barred from acquiring FreeHand while acquiring Aldus in 1994. FreeHand was discontinued in 2006. Aldus also created SuperPaint, one of the first applications to combine vector and raster drawing by taking inspiration from both MacDraw and MacPaint. Today, professional drawing softwares combine vector and raster drawing (such as with vector/raster layers).
- Other application-level proprietary 2D graphics libraries also exist, such as Windows GDI/GDI+ and Core Graphics for macOS long after the original QuickDraw. Today, many of them have either been deprecated or very likely use 3D graphics libraries under the hood for many functionalities (such as OpenGL, DirectX, or Metal). Regardless, any optimisation from directly drawing as a 2D raster as opposed to drawing an abstract space is negligible. Photoshop allows for drawing with CPU or with DirectX/Metal/OpenGL, which is faster and with more features.
- Susan Kare later went on to design for Microsoft, IBM, Sony Pictures, Facebook, Pinterest, and Niantic Labs. Some of her other notable work includes the card deck in Windows 3.0 Solitaire.

References: https://www.junferno.com/references/#list-3

Photos courtesy of Folklore, Computer History Museum, Apple Inc., Wikimedia Commons, basalgangster
3D Models via Sketchfab courtesy of sev, Jakob Henerey, Paper Bandit
3D Models via Free3d courtesy of mahmed195, ingham18
Junferno is not endorsed by nor associated with any artists or creators featured. Artwork/video credits in video. EDIT: Unknown artist at 20:03 is Nek0Galleta.
Special thanks to the McGill Library, Internet Archive, Macintosh Repository, and my fellow editors on Wikipedia

Music tracklist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsTVaNk5lQHlq4hB124qTGlsrhyiAfqfR

Intro to Competitive Programming

✇Junferno
By: Junferno
19 September 2022 at 18:05

💾

Most interesting video ever created. I don't know what I mispronounced but I definitely mispronounced something. Also Junferno's face is not in this video as much due to him falling into a state of anguish mid-recording (he was busy).

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Junferno
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Junferno
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/junferno
Secondary Discord invite if vanity invite expires: https://discord.gg/WEykWbjkR2
Check out my other stuff on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui

Corrections:
- [Visual error at 6:02] "Ultrecht" should be Utrecht
- [Visual error at 10:32] Shortest path from A to C should be ADC, yielding a distance of 1+7=8, making the total distance from A to C to E: 8+12=20

Footnotes:
- Other prominent online judges similar to Codeforces/DMOJ include AtCoder, Leetcode (mostly technical interview-type questions), Codechef, and TopCoder. CSES is an online judge focused on a single problemset. Advent of Code is a Christmas-themed daily programming challenge run annually in December in which only the output of the test cases has to be submitted as opposed to the solution code. Google Foobar is a "secret" Google programming challenge meant to be a recruiting technique targeted towards Google Search users who use keywords related to coding.
- The technical term for a "network of nodes" is a "graph". Algorithms dealing with such graphs are categorised as graph theory algorithms. Nodes are connected by "edges" which may or may not have "weights". A directed graph is a graph in which the edges only go one way. An acyclic graph is a graph which contains no cycles.
- A queue is different from a list in that it is not indexable, but rather just serves the element at the top when polled. A priority queue serves the element with the highest priority (usually implemented with heap). It does not actually "sort itself" but the elements will come out "sorted". The queue is sometimes referred to as "a list" in this video. This is meant to mean a "sequence of elements" and not the "list" data structure that exists in some languages.
- The preferred language for most competitive programming is C++, though other languages are also used. Java, for example, is often used alongside a rewrite of the input reader class, as the built-in Scanner is too slow.

References: "For the absence of a bibliography I offer neither explanation nor apology." -- Edsger W. Dijkstra

Photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, GeeksForGeeks, DMOJ
DMOJ: https://dmoj.ca/
Codeforces: https://codeforces.com/
Single Source Shortest Path: https://dmoj.ca/problem/sssp
VM7WC '15 #4 Gold - Chain Rule: https://dmoj.ca/problem/vmss7wc15c4p3

Music tracklist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsTVaNk5lQHlq4hB124qTGlsrhyiAfqfR

Community Captions:
Portuguese (Brazil) - Guilherme BR

The "VTuber" and its (Technical) Future

✇Junferno
By: Junferno
6 August 2022 at 19:30

💾

Serial Experiments Junferno.

EDIT (March 2023): The ending of this video includes some predictions on the future on VTubing, including the possibility and implications of a truly "AI" VTuber. As of December 2022, this prediction came true with the debut of Neuro-sama just one month after the release of ChatGPT, which lead to mass debate about AI and the possibility of AGI, a heavily philosophical question. Given such hindsight, this video does not provide nearly enough nuance to this now-widespread and controversial topic so please forgive the oversimplification.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Junferno
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Junferno
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/junferno
Secondary Discord invite if vanity invite expires: https://discord.gg/WEykWbjkR2
Check out my other stuff on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui

Corrections:
- [Visual error at 25:09] "Nvidea" should be Nvidia

Footnotes (cut for time):
- Woody Bledsoe later on went on to make contributions in early A.I. pattern recognition. An unknown amount of the research in the Facial Recognition Project is missing, and the research group the report was submitted to (King-Hurley Research group) was found to be a front for the CIA. The CIA stated that it could neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of the report in 2014.
- Modern marker-based mocap systems can also use LEDs rather than reflective or retroreflective material, which can be more easily detected.
- CodeMiko's mocap hardware involves a combination of an Xsens suit, a pair of Manus VR gloves, and a MOCAP Design facial tracking helmet (which is just a helmet attached to an iPhone X). The suit and gloves use various accelerometer and gyroscope sensors attached to the body to detect motion.
- Infrared light has a wavelength longer than visible light and is commonly used for night vision and surveillance, as it is radiated naturally by humans.
- PrimeSense, the company that designed the Xbox Kinect, was acquired by Apple in 2013 to design the TrueDepth camera. Thus, it can be assumed that TrueDepth's IR technology works similarly to the Kinect.
- The stereo mesh solver from OpenCV can create a 3D surface mesh using an array of cameras at different angles to a face, similar to the Pixel's uDepth.
- Another regression model is logistic regression, which puts the hypothesis through a sigmoid function to bound it between 0 and 1 and compares it to a threshold, thus predicting classification (0 or 1 rather than a range of numbers). The sigmoid function is a common activation function for neural networks.
- The cost function is sometimes referred to as the "loss function". These terms are *generally* interchangeable.
- The first ConvNet model used for computer vision was by Yann LeCun et al. in 1989. LeCun was one of the first to use backpropagation and was able to recognise hand-written numbers. This model would later be called the LeNet.
- Facial recognition (classification) models can also use statistical approaches such as PCA or LDA for dimension reduction.
- Tensorflow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence developed by the Google Brain team. Pre-trained models are available for use and further training via the Tensorflow Model Zoo.
- There are three basic machine learning paradigms: unsupervised learning, supervised learning, and reinforcement learning. Facial landmark detection uses supervised learning, in which it trains off of labelled training data.
- Landmarks are usually mapped to a 3D model by the bones of the model (which the renderer uses as a guide to move the rest of the model). The movement does not have to be exact to the captured landmarks. For example, an avatar could have a different degree of skin elasticity.
- Both Hololive and Nijisanji began for their respective mobile AR apps: The hololive app for iOS and Android and the Nijisanji app for iOS.
- Hololive has several other branches besides Hololive English. International branches include Hololive Indonesia and Hololive China (though Hololive China was shut down following political controversy). Holostars is the male-only branch.
- OpenSeeFace's models are trained from scratch using MobileNet V3 architecture as a backbone. MNV3 is a ConvNet designed for mobile phone CPUs. The final landmark determination step also doesn't use normal linear regression, but a heatmap based approach with offset vectors, where UNet upscaling layers follow after the MNV3 feature extraction. Thank you Emiliana_vt for this detail.
- Kizuna AI went on indefinite hiatus in February 2022 following a last livestream titled "hello, world 2022".

References (password: kizuna): https://controlc.com/7323a3b2

Photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Fandom
Kizuna AI: https://www.youtube.com/c/AIChannel
CodeMiko: https://www.twitch.tv/codemiko

Music tracklist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsTVaNk5lQHlq4hB124qTGlsrhyiAfqfR

Bad Apple Channel Reveals Analytics

✇Junferno
By: Junferno
20 May 2022 at 04:00

💾

Special occasion lower-effort Junferno. You probably already know what it's going to be.

See it on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui/bad-apple

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Junferno
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kevinjycui
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/junferno
Secondary Discord invite if vanity invite expires: https://discord.gg/WEykWbjkR2
Check out my other stuff on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui

Bad Apple!! 15th Anniversary UTAU Cover
Junferno UTAU Voicebank (Junfune CV): https://www.mediafire.com/file/22pdpgotm8849ls/Junfune_%25E3%2582%25B8%25E3%2583%25A5%25E3%2583%25B3%25E3%2583%2595%25E9%259F%25B3v1.0.zip/file
Kasane Teto UTAU Voicebank
UST by Tanjiro Taidana: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOv0dX8-2WKj21xEKYmpr2A

Music tracklist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsTVaNk5lQHlq4hB124qTGlsrhyiAfqfR

Community Captions
Czech - adamira7390
Greek - geg
Portuguese (Brazil) - GuilhermeBR

Machine That ______ When You ______

✇Junferno
By: Junferno
21 April 2022 at 21:22

💾

Video about Arduino. Now all I need is crack.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Junferno
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Junferno
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/junferno
Secondary Discord invite if vanity invite expires: https://discord.gg/WEykWbjkR2
Check out my other stuff on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui

Footnotes:
- In general, engineering terminology is not always very absolute (e.g. the definition of "computer", "super computer", "microcontroller", "embedded controller", etc.) and is very context-dependent. Terminology used throughout this video may follow or contradict other sources, but the overall idea is the same.
- Among other popular Arduino boards are the Arduino Nano and Arduino Mega. Arduino Uno is the most introductory.
- The predecessor to the Arduino Uno is the Arduino Duemilanove (or Arduino Due), which is also based on the ATmega328P. The full name was difficult to pronounce for non-Italian users, so the succeeding board had a simpler name: Uno.
- Arduino Uno is currently on its third revision: the Uno Rev 3.
- Also included on the Arduino Uno is a crystal oscillator for timing, a reset button, an ICSP pin as an alternative to the USB port and bootloader, LEDs to indicate signals being transmitted, and an AREF to set a reference point for analog input.
- The USB port for Arduino is USB Type-B. A USB-B to USB-A male-to-male cable is required to connect to PC.
- Arduino also provides a command-line alternative to its IDE: The Arduino CLI.
- A stepper motor divides its rotation into many small steps, and the motor can be commanded to enter the position of any of these steps, whereas a servo motor rotates by some magnitude relative to its current position.
- The stepper motor used is a Nema 17 Stepper Motor using an A4988 driver.
- In order for external software within the computer to communicate with the Arduino's microcontroller after the sketch has already been burnt and loaded, the Arduino remains connected to the computer via the serial USB port and the external software (i.e. the Python program communicating with Twitter API) feeds binary data that can be interpreted in the Arduino sketch using the UART. There are of course other ways to do this, including microcontrollers with native USB or wireless approaches if given a Bluetooth module.

References: https://pastebin.com/fPJcmqP9

Photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Arduino, Atmel Corporation.
Parody not associative.

Music tracklist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsTVaNk5lQHlq4hB124qTGlsrhyiAfqfR

Community Captions
Arabic - mind-controlled-by-psy-corp aka aaaa 15 yo.
Greek - geg
Portuguese (Brazil) - Guilherme BR

To Become Vocaloid

✇Junferno
By: Junferno
29 January 2022 at 17:30

💾

Video about Hatsune Miku and also a few other things.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Junferno
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/junferno
Secondary Discord invite if vanity invite expires: https://discord.gg/WEykWbjkR2
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Junferno
Check out my other stuff on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui

Corrections: https://junferno.com/corrections/#list-1

Footnotes:
- The Kempelen Speaking Machine is another voice synthesizer created by Wolfgang von Kempelen a few years after Kratzenstein, which uses similar elements but is better documented
- Timbre and tone have many different definitions in music/math/psychology but we're using the purely mathematical definition according to H. Kenmochi in "VOCALOID – Commercial singing synthesizer based on sample concatenation"
- The newest versions (V5) of Crypton Future Media's vocaloids such as Hatsune Miku are released on Crypton's own software, Piapro Studio
- Jinriki voicebanks are Utauloids that use samples from popular media (e.g. Bernie Sanders, SpongeBob) without permission from the voice provider. These voicebanks may be used for personal covers but distribution is illegal
- Other types of voicebanks for UTAU include VCCV
- Voicebanks would often record the same sounds in many different pitches to prevent having to shift the pitch of a sound too much
- Synthesizer V Studio or SynthV Studio is a singing synthesis software released in 2020 using a hybrid AI/sample concatenation synthesis engine that has been gaining popularity in recent years

References: https://pastebin.com/kn1srxAM

Photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Fandom
Tanjiro Taidana: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOv0dX8-2WKj21xEKYmpr2A

Junferno UTAU Voicebank (Junfune CV): https://www.mediafire.com/file/22pdpgotm8849ls/Junfune_%25E3%2582%25B8%25E3%2583%25A5%25E3%2583%25B3%25E3%2583%2595%25E9%259F%25B3v1.0.zip/file

Music tracklist:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsTVaNk5lQHlq4hB124qTGlsrhyiAfqfR

Unity Gaem Engin

✇Junferno
By: Junferno
15 November 2021 at 23:00

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Fun challenge for the commenters: Not mentioning the fact that I've been gone for 3 months.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Junferno
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/junferno
Secondary Discord invite if vanity invite expires: https://discord.gg/WEykWbjkR2
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Junferno
Check out my other stuff on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui

Footnotes:
- The definition of "game engine" can be a bit obscure. I consider game engines to be any framework that provides some core functionality/functionalities to multiple games
- The game engines made after Doom and Quake were called the id Tech game engines developed by id Software
- Ren'Py is a game engine for visual novel games
- Models without bones require both a Mesh Filter and a Mesh Renderer component. Models with bones only need a Skinned Mesh Renderer component (this goes into some more advanced 3D modelling stuff)
- Mixamo is a website that sells 3D character animations (as well as a few free ones)
- Unity also has has the ability to make 2D games. This is similar to its 3D engine, but just without one of the D's
- Alternative modern general-purpose game engines to Unity include Unreal Engine and Godot

Sources: https://pastebin.com/Cy0dHmyg

Photos courtesy of Unity Documentation, Wikimedia Commons
Gameplay footage courtesy of hirudov2d, World of Longplays, Exposed.Files, Chubzdoomer, Throneful, TheDkmariolink, Nintendo Players, AcornNuggetz, THE LEADER, ColFox, GameSpot Trailers, D. H. Kim, App Unwrapper

"Komm, süsser Tod" 8-Bit by Recon CookieMons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPCX8xpOrFw

Music tracklist:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsTVaNk5lQHlq4hB124qTGlsrhyiAfqfR

Community Captions
Portuguese (Brazil) - Guilherme BR

The Title of this Video was Typed with Donkey Kong Bongos

✇Junferno
By: Junferno
29 August 2021 at 00:45

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This video is dedicated to all the commenters who thought it would be hilarious to ask for a full-length video on the Donkey Kong Bongos. Enjoy the direct consequences of your actions.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Junferno
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/junferno
Secondary Discord invite if vanity invite expires: https://discord.gg/WEykWbjkR2
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Junferno
See it on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui/DKBongoToKey
Check out my other stuff on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui

Footnotes:
- The official default controller of the PlayStation 5 is called the DualSense controller, as opposed to controllers for the previous PlayStations which were named "DualShock". The DualShock 2 and 3 have pressure-sensitive buttons, which are analog input.
- On Linux, an example of a game development API is SDL
- The DK Bongos were also made for Donkey Kong Barrel Blast for the GameCube but that was cancelled after the game was released on the Wii instead
- The Nintendo controller standard of having the B button to the left of the A button has been around since the NES controller
- There are no adapters for GameCube controllers to Wii, but the Wii Classic supports native GameCube controller support for up to 4 controllers
- An alternative third-party adapter for the GameCube controller to Wii U/Switch/PC to the ClouDream adapter is the Mayflash adapter
- GameCube controller adapters have two USB cables, though the grey cable is only for force feedback (i.e. rumble support, which is unused for the Donkey Kong Bongo)

Sources (for research on things I didn't know about beforehand): https://pastebin.com/UEyLXsxQ

Photos courtesy of Microsoft Docs, Google Patents, Wikimedia Commons, MARU-CHANG.COM
Gameplay footage courtesy of CrackedRabbitGaming, Flippy, Little Z, wizzgamer, SergiuHellDragoonHQ, John GodGames, Carls493, chaoreturnsforgood76, SadisticPenguinOfAND, Fry, Mekkah Dee, N64guide, jun cleofas, Xpertgamingtech, IGN, SonicPigeon, Jake Sharratt Martínez, World of Longplays, cdjblue, GXZ95, Throneful, quill18, ThisIsBetaGaming, ZephyrMantis
Massive http://m4sv.com/
Nick Robinson https://www.youtube.com/user/babylonian
jam1garner https://twitter.com/jam1garner

Music tracklist:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsTVaNk5lQHlq4hB124qTGlsrhyiAfqfR

Bad Apple!! played with pure CSS in high quality

✇Junferno
By: Junferno
7 July 2021 at 23:19

💾

Uploading the full Bad Apple!! PV in about 139MB of pure CSS and HTML (without any JavaScript) as promised in the previous video. Animation quality slightly reduced to compress CSS file from 165MB and play all the way through on Chromium. Note we are referring to CSS as in Cascading Style Sheets and not Character Select Screen or Counter-Strike: Source. Uses Python PIL, BeautifulSoup, cssutils, OpenCV to generate HTML/CSS files.

As described in "The Art of Pure CSS" (preamble): https://youtu.be/wUQbchYY80U

Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/WEykWbjkR2
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Junferno
Check out my other stuff on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui

The Art of Pure CSS

✇Junferno
By: Junferno
3 July 2021 at 23:45

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The highly anticipated sequel to Sun Tzu's "The Art of War". I promise I'll buy a proper microphone soon...

See the CSS art itself: https://kevinjycui.github.io/css-video
See it on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui/css-video

Bad Apple!!: https://youtu.be/MQbjW2VfaHs

Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/WEykWbjkR2
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Junferno
Check out my other stuff on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui

Chickenbread's rendition: https://youtu.be/Ym8-25wuVts

Music tracklist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsTVaNk5lQHlq4hB124qTGlsrhyiAfqfR

Community Captions:
Portuguese (Brazil) - Guilherme BR

The Challenge of Making a Keyboard for Every Language

✇Junferno
By: Junferno
12 June 2021 at 13:00

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qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm. I apologise in advance for any mispronounced words. I unfortunately do not speak most languages.

Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/WEykWbjkR2
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Junferno
Check out my other stuff on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui

Corrections:
- Modern Polish typists use the programmer's keyboard as opposed to the standard one. A better example of a keyboard that uses separate keys for special characters is the Swedish keyboard[1].
- In the French AZERTY, the grave-accented a (à) has its own key (though the US International layout uses a dead key). A better example of a letter using a dead key on the AZERTY layout would be the circumflex-accented a (â) which is typed by pressing the '^' key followed by the 'a' key.
- On the Korean 3-set keyboard, the initial consonants are on the right and the final consonants are on the left.
- The Romaji for 今日は is usually "kyouha" in modern Japanese, meaning "today". "Konnichiwa" (or "konnichiha") is written with the Hiragana characters こんにちは.
- JIS stands for Japanese Industrial Standard, not Japanese International Standard.

Footnotes:
- Japanese writing contains a mixture of Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji
- The Chinese Pinyin layout uses the English US keyboard, with tonal markings ignored and 'ü' substituted with either 'v' or 'u'
- All keyboard layouts fall under ANSI, ISO, or JIS which determines how many keys they have and general positioning (eg. English US is ANSI, English UK is ISO, Japanese Industrial Standard is JIS)

Sources (for research on things I didn't know about beforehand): https://pastebin.com/fkWbS7Ej

Photos courtesy Canon Semiconductor Equipment, Wikimedia Commons, IBM, Google Patents, Windows Keyboard Layouts,
John J. G. Savard http://www.quadibloc.com/
Miguel Farah http://www.farah.cl/

Music tracklist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsTVaNk5lQHlq4hB124qTGlsrhyiAfqfR

How 3D Games are Played on 2D Screens

✇Junferno
By: Junferno
26 May 2021 at 21:00

💾

Rambling about graphics

See it on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui/Discord3D-Renderer

Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/WEykWbjkR2
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Junferno
Check out my other stuff on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui

Special thanks to 16-Bit-Dog for helping me fact-check this video. He's a great friend and a much more experienced low-level graphics programmer than I am. Check him out on GitHub: https://github.com/16-Bit-Dog

Sources:
LearnOpenGL: https://learnopengl.com/Introduction
OpenGL Documentation: http://docs.gl/
Vulkan Tutorial: https://vulkan-tutorial.com/Introduction
DirectX Documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/directx
Discord Developer Portal: https://discord.com/developers/docs/intro
Unity YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Unity3D

Gameplay footage courtesy of BossBattleChannel, Frederick Vandoren, TRIKO, brunnodrk, DatBoiEle, AFGuidesHD, ScereBro PSNU, Awesome Gamerland, Game Informer, RehinRealm, Seraph22x, packattack04082

Music tracklist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsTVaNk5lQHlq4hB124qTGlsrhyiAfqfR

Community Captions
Korean - BearJere
Portuguese (Brazil) - Guilherme BR

Bad Apple!! but rendered with Minecraft Creeper Explosions

✇Junferno
By: Junferno
10 May 2021 at 22:07

💾

Nothing special about this one. It's a bit of a stretch to say inter frame compression, but basically the creeper explosions represent the change in black to white pixels between frames. Video speed adjusted. Uses Java, Maven, Spigot API, Python PIL.

Watch the preamble: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhv0IyPcFA0

Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/WEykWbjkR2​
Check out my other stuff on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui

I have Twitter too but if you follow me there you get to see me tweet like twice a year
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