In more "pointless things to do with PHP", I've been toying around with Assembly for GameBoy (https://gbdev.io/gb-asm-tutorial/part1/assembly.html) ... and testing out compiling PHP code into a gb file.
RGBDS has most of the constants that are needed. And as long as any variables are unsigned int and less than 255... we're golden.
`$x = 123` is basically `ld a, 123 / ld [$c000] a`
I'm able to bruteforce the compiler, being very careful with the PHP. I may write this up.
The last few weeks I've been learning about GameBoy game roms and compression algorithms. And I saw the DuckTales game was only 64k, and thought "that's smaller than my company's Contact page"... "can I run it in PHP?"
The short answer is no, but you can pull out images and sprites:
https://www.terrymatula.com/random/2026/decompiling-ducktales-for-game-boy-with-php/
Just a random thought, related to nothing: If multiple people keep trying to harm you, maybe the problem is YOU.
We bought a used Hyundai Kona EV, after having a Leaf EV for many years. Easily goes 200 miles on a charge, and with planning, much further if you find 1 hr fast chargers on your route. No subscriptions, and I think our monthly electric bill has MAYBE gone up $10ish on average.
Still have a gas minivan, but rarely gets used these days. The only downside is the $200 a year we have to pay Texas, to offset gas tax.
I think this is pretty good, and probably apt for the past 20 years. "Leave politics at home and be where the people are" is the only disagreement I have, because choosing to engage on a site that profits a literal racist IS a political choice.
Also, weird to see so much Laravel hate. I'm confident in the opinion that Laravel Herd is one of the greatest things I've encountered in my PHP career... and at least half of personal project use it WITHOUT Laravel.
Rush tickets acquired. San Antonio, Sept 23.
Wife asked if I wanted to take our teenager, and I laughed and said "No, I want to actually enjoy myself".
13 years ago, I wrote a book for #laravel v4. In the past quarter, 2 people bought physical copies and 4 bought the e-book.
Thanks for the $5 in royalties, but damn...
I think the first PHP conference I went to was in 2010, if I remember it was a small weekend thing sponsored by SpiceWorks(? Are they still around?). Since then, I've been to many more and even done sessions at a few.
In all that time, I never did a post-conference game night. Maybe before I retire I'll actually go to one.
It got me thinking in terms of dev, with this recent npm attack.
Hero: We've got a security vulnerability... I need to revoke the GitHub tokens.
Partner: Maybe we should wait for SecOps. They'll be here in like 2 minutes.
Hero: Don't you see?!? There's no time!!!
rm -rf . gets run. *Manager: You did your best Hero. You can't blame yourself. You're the best dev we got.
I know generative AI is evil. But...
Taking crappy songs I wrote/recorded with friends while in high school, and making "marching band" versions is really funny.
"I left a party at 9:30 on a Saturday. Not tired. Not sick. I wanted to get back to my agents."
My favorite moment in a start-up's life is when they have to stop doing "firstname@company" email addresses, and move to "first initial last name@company" emails.
It was pretty good.
It's probably been 10 years since I was actually interested in an Apple keynote. I guess they still do cool things, but it's so incremental at this point. Watching people live-post things like "The clock got a new font face!! Yes!".
If that's your thing, cool. But that seems to be all there is these days.
Is there a term for "AI psychosis" where you Googled things and got AI summaries that you used, and had images that were super low resolution and Adobe Firefly upscaled them... And then you get the "Was AI used?" question, and have internal struggles because you KNOW what the question is REALLY asking, but while you technically should answer "yes", it's way more nuanced than that?
Why does a photonic being need an oxygen suit? Or a suit at all? The doctor isn't "wearing" anything, just projecting appropriate attire. Voyager went through all this.
Ha! Just yesterday was musing about how I hadn't seen any Anthropic traffic. At least their UA is easily blockable.
When I started learning Godot a couple years ago, I created a fairly simple "idle clicker" to learn about Timers and UI nodes and such. That led to a JavaScript prototype last year using clipart from over 20 years ago (https://matula.itch.io/idle-hands). THAT led to me using the assets and theme on the Godot game (edit: got rid of separate page). And now I just completed all info on Steam to have it released there! It's basic, but fulfills my goal of publishing a Steam game this year.
I was playing around with various physics options in Godot, and decided to create a car jumping thing where you can tweak the various settings. I thought I might turn it into a full-on game where you have certain targets to achieve, and can buy new parts for the car to change the physics.
But I got bored and was just enjoying changing the sliders to make the car do weird stuff. So I just posted that: https://matula.itch.io/wheels-up
Better place to live: Buffalo or Rochester, NY?
I'm fascinated by houses with basements. They don't really do those in Texas.
Current project: Turning my Mac Mini into a local seedbox... you know, for downloading open source Linux distros and public domain movies. Mostly done, but trying to figure out an easy way to trigger downloads from my phone or other computers.
little thing I was curious about: https://matula.github.io/furry.html
Steam requires SO MANY images, and I'm not exactly sure what they're all for. They should have a graphic that shows where in the system each one goes, instead of a description full of jargon.
And while Steam Achievements don't say they require images, and you can have it checked off the list WITHOUT images, they absolutely require each achievement to have an image (2 actually).
OpenClaw looks pretty cool, and 99% of the people who are tempted to use it, shouldn't. It WILL screw you in some way.
You don't give an unknown entity full control of your computer, and expect good things.
Sure, there are ways to isolate it, but that takes work. And if "vibe coding" is your motivation, you probably aren't interested in putting in the work.
Also, so far in my tests, everything people are celebrating, can be done better by other means. 🤷
Happy "Take Five day" for all who celebrate.
I remember getting into Bitcoin pretty early on, and reading the whitepaper, and even spinning up a co-op miner on my home computer and letting it run over night (wallet is long gone sadly).
I thought it was a cool tech, and the og advocates were hardcore libertarian or anarchists. The goal was financial transactions outside of the govt/Fed/Corporate capitalist system. Mostly drugs, sure... But I remember some neat stores on TOR. And you BOUGHT things with BTC...
Germany was robbed of that goal. Not a foul..
I enjoy some good PHP discourse that's not just "PHP is dead! No it's not!".
I've been doing PHP stuff over 20 years, and hope it's able to attract new people to it. I remember installing WAMP, following a Webmonkey tutorial, and getting a dynamic site working fairly quickly... And it was exciting. While working during the day with a compiled language, PHP provided that quick fix I enjoyed in the off hours.
My Houston Music Archive project is done in pure PHP, and it's still enjoyable.
Learning Blender 3D. I'm basically an expert at this point.
The ACL 2026 line up looks good. Glad to see Soda Pop Jetpacks were able to reunite.
Sometimes I wish I had, like, a PhD in Sociology or something, and could spend my days researching for some bs topic that came to mind.
Today, it would be about Rush, objectivism, and the "fork in the road" that nerdy, teenage, white boys hit when they come of age.
I came to the conclusion, "you know, Rand is right. If everyone thought and behaved exactly as she did, things might be fine. However, I live in the real world". Many people don't get to that point.
Kind of wild to see all the Mastodon/Fediverse instances that immediately ping my site after posting a link or even replying to a post with a link.
And then right after that, all the "exploit" pings.
I liked the new Star Trek: SA episode. I don't care about some of the YA-ish stuff, but I accept it's not targeted to me, and it's only like 10% of the episode.
If I weren't a robot, I legit could've gotten emotional at the end.
Are there any people writing about "AI" is a measured, reasonable way? Like, a lot people agree with the shitty aspects, but it exists and probably won't be going anywhere. How do we traverse that path in a sane way?
Joined "GameDev.tv Game Jam 2026" #gdtvjam ... and I've got an ok idea I think I could actually get done in a week. Going to try something in 3D.
I learned about the GridMap node (in a GameDev video actually) and want to incorporate that. Maybe even a Path node?!?