Homepage on Unknown Group 13

A Sudden Return

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Well, that was longer than I hoped. I had to take some leave because my life got very busy. I was still active elsewhere, but this website was certainly neglected in the meantime. Don’t want to get whining like I did in past posts, but as usual, things aren’t looking fantastic. The AI craze has erradicated any hope of good work in an already oversaturated field, it made the prospect of self-employment refurbishing hardware economically infeasible due to the horrifically inflated prices of RAM and storage, and generally the cost of living as risen considerably in such a short amount of time. I’m frankly lucky to still have a home for the time being and not roaming the streets.

About Me

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m just a amateur programmer learning my craft from north east United States. I started with an interest in computers and eventually programming at a young age, began by fiddling with Batch scripts (typical story) and touched on JavaScript (don’t want to think about it anymore), but my first steps in a “true” programming language was with BASIC dialects, notably Microsoft QuickBasic on MS-DOS 6.22, as I also developed an interest in virtual machines. I eventually migrated away from Windows to Linux due to increasing dissatisfaction with the former and even through the transition and operation of the latter wasn’t entirely sunshine and rainbows, I do not regret it in the slightest.

Current Projects

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This page is being reworked!

I have a few projects I’ve worked on or am working on, here’s a few. Be sure to report any bugs or security issues in the appropriate place.

I don’t get to work on them that often due to university.

Most features will have a little progress bar underneath describing an estimation of how “finished” it is.

(Mostly) Finished Projects

PathChecksum

Small and simply Java program to recursively calculate and check checksums.
Still want to work out some minor issues and some other features.
Thinking about restructuring into a proper Java project and maybe a “silent” mode, to suppress printing, so it can be used in scripts or perhaps as a library.

FileSplitter

Another small Java program for splitting big files into many smaller ones. Uses SHA-256 for integrity checks on chunks and the file as a whole.
Currently buggy.

HBM’s Nuclear Tech Mod

A developmental fork of NTM for features I thought were interesting or useful. Takes up a lot of my time and effort. Most of these features are incomplete either because of feature creep and losing interest or no longer believing the feature is useful or maybe Bob just did it himself.

Tough Times

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t been updating these like I wanted, I feel silly about the whole thing. It just seems like everything is getting worse. Maybe part of it is my fault for not taking action when I could’ve, instead I’ve just been procrastinating about it all. What am I supposed to do though? Turn off my emotions? Give up on university when I’m so close to finishing? Everything has been blurring together, if it weren’t for the seasonal change, I couldn’t tell that it was April and not November of last year. Can I even get a job after university? Is anyone hiring? Should I just drop my standards and get stuck in some minimum wage, dead-end job just so I don’t starve or go homeless? Alright, enough feeling sorry for myself and ranting to the void.

Hardware Luck

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking back about how I seem to have the worst luck when it comes to hardware. Just some strange happenings with stuff I get or try to work with.

Problematic PC

It all started with my main PC build, I was excited to finally get a workstation computer that I could do all my tasks on, from light gaming to heavy coding projects. I’ve been stuck with an old laptop for a while and I was desperate to upgrade. After the CPU finally arrived, I happily slotted it in, and tried to boot it up. Fans turned on, some LED status lights, but the graphics card was silent. Since the CPU didn’t have integrated graphics, the discrete card was a requirement. I worried that the card was dead, it got warm, so it was receiving power, but maybe the PSU was faulty and not delivering enough power. Maybe it was the CPU, maybe the motherboard.

Work for Nothing

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A feeling that I’ve been having for a while about a several things I’m involved in. The feeling you get where you put a lot of time, effort, and money into something for naught. Try to set something up, only for nobody to use it because they can’t understand how to change over to it from what already exists. Am I making any sense? Probably not. I just feel like I’m doing a lot of work for nothing, they don’t actually need me to be around, they can do fine on their own. If anything, it seems like sometimes my presence is undesirable, I just overcomplicate things with the way I do things. Facebook this, Gmail that, we need X amount of smart TVs, etc. etc., yet you want to do all your accounting and paperwork on actual paper? Then why am I here?

Fumo Zone and Moving Forward

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Probably a bit out of left field compared to my last post, but I wanted to talk about it anyway. Just yesterday my order of bootleg fumos arrived early to my delight. Maybe not the wisest financial decision, but they just look so funny. They’re not as squishy as I’ve imagined, but that’s probably just the different type of stuffing they used. I got two Yuuka fumos (don’t ask), so I can tell the slight differences in the crafting defects, so I guess you can say each bootleg fumbo is personalized in some way.

Contact Me

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Jabber/XMPP (preferred): uffr_7894@macaw.me
Matrix: @uffr_7894:matrix.u-group13.org (primary) and @uffr_87:matrix.org (backup)
Email: uffr_private_26989(at)u-group13(dot)org (forwarded email for privacy)
NOTICE: I recently setup a self-hosted mail server and certain mail providers don’t support it. Outlook and iMail (or providers using their servers) are currently known to block inbound emails from my server, though I am in some process to remedy this. Providers like Gmail and Yahoo (or providers using their servers) are known to allow it.
NOTICE: The mail server is configured to be rather strict, outbound mail will fail if the server doesn’t support modern TLS and incoming mail tends to hard fail if the sending server has a misconfiguration.
Discord: @uffr (DMs are blocked)
IRC:
Libera & U-Group 13: UFFR or UFFR_87

The Long Road of Life

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As it seems with any time I think things are going to get better, things get so much worse. It’s been a pretty rough year, worst of my life so far, but I’m still here and I’m not planning to go anywhere soon. I kind of wanted to start a blog here at some point, mostly to just jot down some of my thoughts, since nobody is going to be reading these, just never got around to doing it. I suppose starting on the anniversary day of my website is something of a special occasion.

MamizouBot Privacy Policy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Collection of Information

You may opt out at any time at your convenience to prevent future messages or queries from being made.
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Opting out will also prevent you from properly using the bot.
All messages you send, not just ones in channels explicitly watched by the bot, can be seen by the bot.
Messages that you send that are relayed either to the IRC or to Discord, are stored permanently.
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Other user fields, like “real name” and account name may also be queried at any time with a /whois command on the Discord end.
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Messages received and relayed are not stored permanently.
Discord or by anyone that happened to be in the IRC channel at the time, subject to the client they use, may collect and permanently store messages sent.
IRC channels may also setup message history to log a certain number of messages for a certain amount of time, but may be seen by anyone joining within that time and if your message is within that buffer.
While you may opt out at any time, this does not include messages already sent to and collected by Discord or IRC users.
We make no attempt to restrict what others do with their own logged messages collected by their IRC client. Even if we did, there is nothing we can reasonably do. What you send is at your own risk and you are free to opt out at any point.
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Commitments

Any information collected and not used by services is kept secure to the best of our abilities.
Your information will never be sold to third parties.
Information not specifically used by services is not permanently stored or used in any way outside of logging.

Services and Links

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Other Pages

~~IRC Relay Discord Bot Privacy Policy~~ Not currently running

Other Services

[203:e679:4a58:d7df:4b77:2918:663:7a29]:443, the Yggdrasil version of this site. There’s also a link in the footer linking the current page.
NTM Wiki
- ~~Yggdrasil at [200:8b55:6f2e:dad8:aeee:9641:2993:8955]:443~~ Not recommended because buggy due to self-referencing cleartext links.
Gensokyo Chronicle (in-development), Yggdrasil
- Yggdrasil: [203:e679:4a58:d7df:4b77:2918:663:7a29]:8443
~~IRC Server (TLS/SSL enforced)~~ Not currently running
- IRC also works through Yggdrasil if you use port 6697, but you’ll have to ignore the certificate error because it’ll still want a *.u-group13.org domain.
~~Newsgroup Server (TLS/SSL)~~ Not currently running
- For those who don’t know what that is, it’s basically a precursor to a forum board or Reddit. Some are still active and are, in a sense, federated, but this one is private because of the backend and because I don’t want to bother with all of that.
(More to come)

Miscellaneous

CA Certificate Chains

Note: Most people won’t need these. They’re for special applications. For instance, the Yggdrasil versions of sites use certificates signed by this private CA.

Titanium Whitehorse

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

One of my more ambitious projects was to develop my own computer system for Minecraft. After about a year or so of back and forth planning, developing, and undoing everything I’ve spent months on, I’ve finally gotten close to something of value and most importantly: it works. After all this time, tangible progress has been made and I’ve done most of the current work in about a week, everything from the months upon months of work on the previous iterations not included, no longer relevant. The decision to branch into a custom architecture instead of some kind of scripting language was partly due to my interest in the low-level side of programming and my belief that it would be simpler to implement, since you could have each game tick of the host TileEntity be a clock cycle for the CPU within. Though I suppose you could increase the clock speed from a pitiful 20 Hz by increasing the amount of clock cycles executed per game tick either by loop or explicitly inserting them, I don’t know how much higher I’d want to go, at least in Minecraft, but especially modded Minecraft, where people may be running hundreds of other bloated and unoptimized mods and/or just simply have multiple in-game computers running simultaneously.