Deciphering Nostr and it's private keys

I’ve heard of https://nostr.com for about a year, but not until recently have I experimenting with it. This post consists of my rough notes as I progressed to sending a nostr message. If you are interested in a bare minimum way to post events to nostr, read on. Generate a new private key $ openssl ecparam -name secp256k1 -genkey -out ec-priv.pem The output here as the file extension notes is PEM:

Lord of the Rings Card Game Tracker

Lately, I’ve been playing a bit of The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game by Fantasy Flight . The game is seriously fun and quite strategic. Like most strategy games, there is a lot of token and phase tracking, something I thought could be easier with a simple web application! Introducing LotR TCG Tracker !

Using Magic the Gathering Art for D&D Ideas

Recently I’ve spent a bit time reading some of Dragon+ Magazine articles, one particularly grabbed my attention. Using Magic Cards as D&D Items presents a very interesting way to craft items, using Magic the Gathering cards, one can gain inspiration for their next +1 Dagger, or even an Elven Stronghold. I think the reason I so quickly latched on to this idea was because Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons are two of my favorite games, plus I really dig the Ixala art work, I mean who hasn’t fantasized about riding a dinosaur to work.

Python Pandas and D&D Monsters

As you may be aware the Dungeon Brawl application I’ve been working on defines monsters in YaML format (check out the data/monsters directory) . I thought it would be interesting to load this data in to Pandas and do a bit of data analysis. Loading Data While in the Dungeon Brawl repository I started up an ipython shell, then import a couple libraries: In [1]: import yaml In [2]: import glob In [3]: import pandas Next I need to find each of my monster’s YaML documents, these files reside in the data directory.

Dungeon Brawl

In order to re-familiarize myself with MongoDB I decided to write a little web application utilizing it as a backend datastore. Dungeon Brawl is a Python Flask app that runs inside Docker with the help of docker-compose. Using this application a Dungeon Master can easily track all things combat for their Dungeons and Dragons group. Grab the source code from Github , or check out a demo .

Magic the Gathering Card Recognition

This weekend I took a bit of time to read up on OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision Library) , I wanted to capture images of Magic the Gathering cards, then identify them using a Python library called ImageHash . Below is a demonstration of what I was able to accomplish in about 2 days of research and hacking: I’ll try and break down the steps and image manipulation functions I used to achieve this.

Remote Controlled Car using Raspberry Pi and Webcam

Setup First thing I tackled was setting up the L293D H-Bridge on the Bread Board. I found myself referencing the following Diagram a couple times. Step one is connecting your chip down the center of your board: From here I connected the 3 power pins to my board’s power rail using a few Jumpers : A few more Jumpers connect each side of the chip to ground: Finally I use a couple Wires to connect both sides of my power and ground rails:

Python says, Simon's hipster brother

Many of you may remember playing with a Simon Electronic Memory Game when you were younger, you know something that looks like this: At it’s core the game is rather simple, the device lights up random colors, and you need to repeat the pattern. Of course it gets harder the longer you play. I thought it would be fun to build a Simon game using Raspberry Pi and a few electronic components:

Arduino values to Python over Serial

I’ve done a little bit of reading on the ReadAnalogVoltage of Arduino’s home page, and they give a straight forward way to read voltage from an analog pin. I wanted to take this one step further and send the value over serial, then read it in Python using pySerial . My setup is very straight forward, I have a Arduino UNO , a bread board, and a battery pack holding 4x AA batteries: To start out I want to merely print the voltage value in Arduino Studio to the serial console, my code looks something like this: