It might be easier to just fire up Wireshark and look for relevant traffic when you trigger the action.
I write code and play games and stuff. My old username from reddit and HN was already taken and I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to be called so I just picked some random characters like this:
>>> import random
>>> ''.join([random.choice("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789") for x in range(5)])
'e0qdk'
My avatar is a quick doodle made in KolourPaint. I might replace it later. Maybe.
日本語が少し分かるけど、下手です。
Alt: e0qdk@reddthat.com
It might be easier to just fire up Wireshark and look for relevant traffic when you trigger the action.
I don’t know if there are any existing implementations that work well enough yet for it to actually be relaxing, but it might be possible to set up a hands-free IF experience by hooking up speech-to-text and text-to-speech tools to the game.
What I’d do is set up a simple website that uses a little JavaScript to rewrite the date and time into the page and periodically refresh an image under/next to it. Size the image to fit the remaining free space of however you set up the iPad, and then you can stick anything you want there (pictures/reminder text/whatever) with your favorite image editor. Upload a new image to the server when you want to change the note. The idea with an image is that it’s just really easy to do and keeps the amount of effort to redo layout to a minimum – just drag stuff around in your image editor and you’ll know it’ll all fit as expected as long as you don’t change the resolution (instead of needing to muck around with CSS and maybe breaking something if you can’t see the device to check that it displays correctly).
There’s a couple issues to watch out for – e.g. what happens if the internet connection/server goes down, screen burn-in, keeping the browser from being closed/switched to another page, keeping it powered, etc. that might or might not matter depending on your particular circumstances. If you need to fix all that for your circumstances, it might be more trouble than just buying something purpose built… but getting a first pass DIY version working is trivial if you’re comfortable hosting a website.
Edit: If some sample code that you can use as a starting point would be helpful, let me know.
Any ways to get around the download failing
I did this incredibly stupid procedure with Firefox yesterday as a workaround for a failing Google Takeout download:
[1] You can actually replace the new .part file with anything that has the same size in bytes as the old file – I replaced it with a file full of zeros and manually merged the end onto the original .part file with a tiny custom python script since I had already moved the incomplete file to other media before realizing I could try this. (In my case, the incomplete file would still have been useful even with the last ~1MB cut off.)
There are probably better options in most cases – like Thunderbird for mailbox as other people suggested, or rclone for getting stuff from Drive – but if you need to get Takeout to work and the download keeps failing this may be another option to try.
Pokemon (1st gen and 2nd gen – plus some of the spin-off stuff from that era to a lesser extent) captivated me in a way no other games have before or since. Honestly, I hope nothing ever grabs me that hard again; it’s kind of scary how obsessed I was in retrospect.
A number of N64 games also made a big impact on me. Majora’s Mask was probably my second favorite game (after Pokemon) for many years. (OoT made an impression too, but I played MM first.) I loved the music in Diddy Kong Racing. I got 120 stars in Mario 64, and when I tried it again as an adult, I really appreciated how short and to the point levels could be (not that I played that way as a kid) – also the camera in that game sucked. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness kind of disturbed me a bit as a kid, but it’s probably the first game I encountered a sort of “New Game Plus” in, which was neat. (People have since told me that’s the “black sheep” of the series and that it’s really weird that that’s the only one I’ve played significantly.)
Duke Nukem 3D was the first game I modded, I think (very simple graphical stuff). Definitely wasn’t age appropriate but I played the heck of it anyway. Didn’t really get much into other shooters other than playing through the main game of Perfect Dark on N64 and playing split-screen Golden Eye with friends.
I also played a lot of Sim\ games – particularly SimCity 2000, SimEarth, and SimTower. Also had a bunch of others like SimFarm and even some of the more obscure ones like SimSafari. Streets of SimCity and SimCopter being able to load SC2K maps was really neat though. Played a fair amount of other city builders and simulation games like Caesar III and Roller Coaster Tycoon too. My parents probably hoped I’d become some sort of business manager. :p
I had a lot of creative tools back then as well which I treated as not-that-different from video games. Various Kid Pix programs (one of which had a bunch of odd video clips integrated – including a short documentary about jackalopes of all things), Kid’s Studio, Digital Chisel, some version of HyperCard, etc. Game Maker – which I found around the year 2000 back when it was still on www.cs.uu.nl – ultimately led me to being a professional programmer.
Not OP, but I made a version of red-braised pork belly roughly following this recipe a while back with results I enjoyed. I had to make a few adaptations to the ingredients to substitute in things that were easier for me to get – e.g. sherry instead of shaoxing wine, and just used ~1/4 cup of my regular soy sauce since I couldn’t get both light and dark soy sauce – but it was still tasty.
I’ve used Wireshark when I want to inspect the traffic going through my computer. I’ve found it particularly handy for debugging my own networking code. I’ve also used netstat to see active connections and programs listening for traffic when I don’t care about the packet contents specifically.
With that said, can I possibly only allow traffic to and fro from the proxy through my firewall?
Yes. That is what I suggested. If you configure the firewall to only allow traffic to/from the specific IP and port combination of your proxy, other traffic will be blocked.
I should be able to (in theory) inspect traffic too, although I don’t know how far that will take me.
You can do content filtering via a proxy like that, yes. A similar sort of configuration is used on school computers to do things like block adult content, with varying degrees of success. Some ad-blocking techniques work on similar principles.
If I understood your question correctly, you’d run the proxy application (which might be Squid or Apache or some other program) either on the host computer outside the VM or elsewhere on your network. (I’m not well versed on all the ins and outs of setting Firefox up to communicate through a proxy; I just know it can be done.) The proxy would listen for incoming traffic on a specific port you configure. You then tell Firefox (in its network settings) to communicate with the specific IP and port of the proxy instead of talking to web servers directly.
To prevent other programs from communicating, you’d firewall off the VM with iptables (or maybe ufw or something else depending on what you use on your system). You’d set it to drop all traffic going to/from the VM’s network except packets going to or coming from the specific IP/port combinations you want to allow.
This isn’t a bulletproof way to block other apps from talking to the internet – anything that knows about the proxy (or which can hijack/manipulate a program like Firefox that you’ve told about the proxy) could communicate with web servers via the proxy, but depending on your specific concerns it may be good enough.
You could try configuring Firefox to access the internet through a proxy and then block the VM off from everything except the proxy and your network mount with a firewall (outside the VM).
A nocturnal carnivorous marsupial native to Australia and New Guinea, 300 g (11 oz) to 7 kg (15 lb) depending on species – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoll
That’s a new word to me too.
Thanks for copying the list out; I’m not visiting YouTube either at the moment. I think I probably saw this video a while ago though – at least, that particular set of games looks very familiar…
I’ve played some of them and have some things to say about them:
Have you tried Resonance? It’s a mystery adventure game set in modern times where you play as four different characters whose stories interconnect. It’s been a while since I played it (a decade or so?) but I remember that it had an interesting game mechanic that let you use memories like items in various interactions, as well as a number of puzzles that I rather liked the design of.