august

halext labs

justin scawful • 31 August 2019

one last blog post before august is over. i recently purchased the domain halext.org after i noticed it was available. with a little help from flashwave debugging some troubles with the server and my dumbass pointing the dns to the wrong ip, i got the site running. i'm working on a new modernized version of the homepage right now that will be compatible with all browsers as well as mobile. i used to own the domain for a few years, but lost it in 2017 when i was tight on money and just couldn't prioritize renewing the domain. rogueamp swept it up and just held onto it for awhile so nobody could touch it. i'm happy to have it back in my possession.

the domain was originally owned by a user by the name of thexdarksider who was a croatian hacker from the website malwareup. he was among the first few people who inspired me to get into computers and programming. he used the website as just a personal landing page and hosted some fellow users content as well as his own small blog. at some point he stopped using the internet and rumor around the friend group is he became a monk and moved to the mountains, giving up the internet. there's some old chat logs of him returning to the chat room for a bit to talk with people but not much came of it from what i remember.

sophomore year

justin scawful • 22 August 2019

i've had two days of school so far and it has gone pretty well. i've been assigned a lot of homework in pre-calc/trig but that was to be expected. c programming was also pretty easy first day. just going over the syllabus and then copying a short program over to get the muscle memory. since i've been working in c for awhile now i'll be okay for the first 6-8 weeks. once the midterm hits we'll get into pointers but i've been working on them so much in my spare time that if i keep it up it'll be nothing to me. it makes sense in my head now after reading a ton of different explanations but now i have to be able to use it effectively.

i have been meditating more consistently as well. i've managed to complete 20 minute sessions a few times now and have kept it up daily for 18 days as of today. i'm proud of myself, even if some days are just five minutes it's still helping me deal with stress a lot.

high energy

justin scawful • 13 August 2019

i've felt a lot of motivation lately to get things done. i have been working on practicing my C programming really consistently and i've been working on the Zelda hack a lot. there's been a ton of work done on it that I will probably make an update for on the oracle article but it's definitely because of the rom hacking community on discord that i've been more motivated lately.

work has been going pretty well for me I'm managing to stay active and get a lot done when it comes to putting away stock which makes me feel good exercising and lifting heavy objects for hours at a time.

i managed to get into the pre-calc/trig class I wanted. originally it was full so i signed up for the web version but like two days later a spot opened up and I switched my schedule around a bit to make room for it and now in less than a week I'll be in that class at 9am learning more math. in the end i wont get a ton of time to break from the math but that's okay, I'm enjoying the time while I have it.

mathematics

justin scawful • 5 August 2019

i've finally done it. after immense procrastination and like two and a half months of studying i've finally tested into pre-calc/trigonometry. today i got a 66 on the geometry placement exam, that i needed at least a 60 on and last thursday i got a 58 when i needed a 54 on the algebra placement exam. it took a lot of relearning concepts from high school and consistent studying to make it though. i didn't play a lot of video games over the last two weeks and i definitely haven't worked on zeniea at all. i feel really good about it considering how poor of an attitude about math i've had over the last 6 years since algebra 1 where i didn't pay much attention and barely tried. now i've found a way to like math again and i'm happy about it.