Sam Trenholme’s blog
Grab bag
August 10, 2026
I discuss ideas for a universal cross-platform filesystem, and how
the manosphere/
RedPill movement is a profit making industry.
A universal file system
What is the best filesystem to use for an external hard drive? For a
while, I have been using FAT32 for fairly small filesystems which
anything can mount (FAT32 can support a filesystem up to two terabytes in size;
I use FAT32 for my car stereo which
doesn’t support exFAT), and NTFS for anything bigger.
FAT32 doesn’t support journalling and has a four gigabyte filesize
limitation. exFAT has issues with patents
(but, yes, Microsoft gave open source software
a free license to use exFAT) and doesn’t have journalling. NTFS has
only readonly support on MacOS unless one buys a third party program.
Probably the best universal read-write filesystem which all
mainstream operating systems support (including some BSDs) is UDF, the
filesystem DVDs used. It’s a read-write filesystem, it’s a
log-structured filesystem which means the entire filesystem is a
journal, it’s supported for both reading and writing in Windows, Linux,
and MacOS, among other operating systems, and filesystems can be up to
16 terabytes in size.
There is some hacking to make a UDF drive cross-platfom, but there is
a utility
which
handles the corner cases and documents all of the UDF compatibility
wrinkles.
The manosphere greed machine
Wired has an article
about the manosphere movement, i.e. the kinds of guys who
believe the lie
that 80% of the women
sleep with only 20% of the men. It argues that this movement is fueled
by greedy men who spread lies online to hook men in to the movement and
sell them things.
Getting men to believe 80% of the women only sleep with 20% of men is
a great way to make money: Convince men they can become part of that
imaginary 20% if they buy your $20 dating guide which supposedly
teaches you to become a “real man” (whatever that is) who attracts all
the girls.
ObHack7 release
July 25, 2026
I have made what will probably be my only release of ObHack7 today.
This is a random map generator (procedural generator) for Doom, Doom2,
and Heretic that runs in Windows. It can be downloaded by clicking (or
tapping on)
this link,
and
source code
is also available.
OhHack
ObHack
is a fork of
Oblige 2 which I mainly worked on back when I didn’t have Internet at
home and wanted to be able to play unlimited Freedoom and Heretic
levels.
There was interest in me doing a version of ObHack for later versions
of Oblige, something I never did until a couple of years ago, when I
started using Oblige 7 to generate Heretic levels.
ObHack7 2026-07-25
Compared to Oblige 7, ObHack7 has the following changes
-
Town theme enabled (this looks like maps in E1 with classic Heretic).
-
New theme: Egypt (which ObHack had), which makes very sandy “desert”
levels.
-
“Episodic” levels start out smaller and get much bigger.
-
“Small”/“Medium”/“Large”/“Extreme” levels are now smaller.
-
Heretic: More tomes, more mega-armor.
-
We now make Episode 6 levels for Heretic (see discussion below).
-
Heretic: Level starts usually have backpack, often mega-armor.
-
Heretic: The only liquid we have is water.
-
CONFIG.TXT updated.
-
Added note that, because of a bug in Oblige7, levels using a date for
the seed should have the seed be in MMDDYYN000 format, where MM is
month, DD is day, YY is year (2000-2099), and N is a number from 1 to
9; the final three digits of the seed should be 0. Example seed:
0725261000 (or 725261000) for a seed with today’s date.
Playing Heretic in 2026
Now that Heretic + Hexen
has been released, finally giving the E6 levels
official names, here are my thoughts on playing Heretic here in 2026:
-
Heretic + Hexen opted to have a mid-1990s pixelated look for the
game. There is a reason why Quake added support for hardware
acceleration to get rid of that ugly pixelated look, and why people
quickly in the late 1990s added graphic cards to their computers to
have things look much more smooth.
-
The best way to play Heretic here in the 2020s, in my opinion, is
with the final release of Dengine,
which is Heretic with modern graphics, and uses Quake-like “mouse look”
and WASD gameplay, the way a modern FPS (first person shooter) game
should be played.
-
I also like to play using the mid-first-2000s-decade 1.8.6 release of
Dengine, which also supports mouse look, hardware acceleration, is tiny
(only 2.2 megs in size), and runs great even on an ancient N455 Netbook
from 2010. I have a mirror
of this old version of Dengine.
Episode 6
Heretic’s “Shadow of the Serpent Riders” release included three
secret levels in Episode 6; these maps were for deathmatch play. E6M3,
“American’s Legacy”,
doesn’t have an exit.
Oblige 7 handled episode 6 by ignoring it. ObHack7 handles Episode 6
by having E6M3 have an exit; ObHack generates not only E6M1-E6M3, but
also E6M4, E6M5, and so on, even generating E6M9.
The way Heretic + Hexen handles E6M3 having an exit is by having a
“You’re not supposed to get here, but hurray, you won the secret
levels” message after exiting E6M3, then ending the game. E6M4 and so
on are not accessible.
Dengine (Doomsday) 1.8.6 had a bug: It would take one to E6M4 once
one exited E6M3, and so on until E6M8. Switching the exit in E6M8
causes the exit to “click”, but otherwise nothing happens. Exiting E6M9
puts one in level E6M0. While it’s not possible to load a game saved in
E6M0, exiting E6M0 puts one in E6M1 again.
ObHack2 in fact generated an E6M0 level so one could exit the secret
E6 level and continue playing maps. ObHack 7 doesn’t generate E6M0; not
only isn’t there a way of getting to E6M9 without using the Doomsday
console, but exiting E6M9 will, since there isn’t E6M0, crash Doomsday
1.8.6.
This is a non-issue for source ports with UMAPINFO
support, but ObHack7 is made for Doomsday 1.8.6, which came
out well over a decade before UMAPINFO existed, and doesn’t generate
UMAPINFO lumps.
Obsidian
I mention Obsidian, another fork of Oblige 7. Obsidian is available
here:
https://github.com/GTD-Carthage/Obsidian-Content
My impression is that Obsidian has a lot of features Oblige 7 doesn’t
have, but the code is a lot more buggy and unstable than Oblige 7 and
ObHack are.
Download
ObHack7 can be downloaded by clicking (or tapping on) this link,
and source code
is also available.
Note that both files are compressed using 7-zip. Windows 11 comes
with built-in 7-zip support; users of Windows 10 or earlier can use 7-zip
to extract the files.
More Marshall Memories
July 24, 2026
In today’s blog, I go over some more memories of Marshall, who was a
father figure to me at a very key point in my life. I wrote about him
previously in
a blog from last year.
Marshall and God
When I worked for Marshall, he would read to me from the Bible.
Marshall was from the deep south; the Bible belt. The state he was
from hasn’t given their electoral votes to a Democrat since 1976. He
came from a world and a set of values that are very conservative
Christian.
I was, at the time, an atheist. I wasn’t just any old kind of
atheist; I was an intolerant atheist who got annoyed by people reading
and talking about the Bible in front of me.
Marshall started wanting to read the Bible to me during our breaks
from work in the office. I would object most loudly “I don’t want you
reading that book to me!” Marshall was insistent, and since he was the,
you know, president of the company, he got his way.
So he would sometimes read me some passage from the Bible. This would
invariably lead to me complaining that God was just a myth. We would
have long arguments about this.
I finally capitulated and told Marshall I was willing to agree that
there is a God. This wasn’t good enough for him. He told me I had to
have a Christian faith. When I asked him why, he told me because I was
born and raised Christian, so that is the only faith I could have.
Marshall and myself had various spiritual debates. These debates
would often get heated; I had a lot of intolerance in my atheism, and
Marshall was, at this point, so frustrated with his life he was looking
for any reason to get in to an argument.
One of the our productive debates was when I told him about a dream I
had many years before, where I met someone named Peter who guided me to
a magical place. He was impressed with the dream; when I mentioned the
person who led me in the darkness was named Peter, he told me Peter was
one of the important apostles in the New Testament, and that maybe it
was that Peter who I saw in the dream.
My final conversation
with Marshall
Decades after moving on from Marshall, I talked to him one last time.
He told me he didn’t even want to remember that part of his life, and
with good reason: He lost his car, his house, and the girlfriend he had
at the time ended up divorcing him.
I told him it was a pleasant memory for me and that being with him at
that time in his life was key to my spiritual growth and becoming an
adult.
We said “I love you” to each other before ending the call. That was
the last time I ever talked to Marshall; I didn’t find out he died
until a couple years after he passed away.
Remembering Marshall today
When I take a daily walk around sunset, something about the light in
the air reminds me of my time with Marshall. It is a very pleasant and
peaceful feeling today; being with Marshall planted the seed for having
a relationship with God that I have to this day. I became a man because
Marshall mentored me at a very key moment in my life. This is something
I am glad I experienced.
Grab bag
July 19, 2026
Some quick thoughts.
Writing code in 2026
A blog titled Why write code in 2026
has come out. I am glad I retired from
writing code just before human programmers were replaced with AIs; I
get to concentrate on interacting with people instead of machines today
and have a lot more deep meaningful friendships than I had when I was
making a lot of money writing code for countless companies, most of
whom are failed
and forgotten
today.
I still write code the old-fashioned way, by hand, here in 2026, but,
I do use AI to answer programming questions which I used to have to dig
through Stack Overflow arguments to find the answer to.
Daylight savings time
There is a bill running through congress right now
to make daylight savings time be
year-round; people in the US would no longer have the annoyance of
“spring forward” and “fall back”.
Mexico used to follow daylight savings time, having their clocks
change time when they did in the United States, but stopped observing
DST in 2022. So now central Mexico is, depending on the time of year,
in Mountain Daylight Time (during the summer) or Central Standard Time
(during the winter); should this bill pass the senate, then central
Mexico will always be in Mountain Daylight Time, which means its hour
will not shift relative to the US depending on the time of year.
People’s economic future
Well over one generation ago, I worked at a gas station (today’s blog
picture is a picture of me from this era). It was a lot of work, and I
had to work graveyard two nights a week (making doing anything during
the day, such as going to college, impossible), but I kept doing it
because I knew once I saved up enough for a car, I would be able to get
out of the trap and start a career path. And, indeed, that is exactly what happened.
In today’s generation, that does not appear to be viable anymore.
Back when I was working
at the gas station, the exit path was clear: Since I was very talented
with computers and the then emerging Internet, I just needed to start
working in Silicon Valley. And that’s exactly what I did.
AI has greatly reduced the number of jobs in tech, so the exit path I
had so many years ago is no longer viable. Indeed, I know people under
crippling student loan debt who just cannot make enough money
to chip away at their debt or even own a car, much less start a family.
Re-watching Terminator 2
July 11, 2026
I re-watched Terminator 2 today.
Rewatching Terminator 2
I saw “Terminator 2” when it first came out, and just re-watched it
in light of the fact that AI is now real. In the movie, they were about
25 years more optimistic about AI becoming real than what happened in
the real world; AI was viable in 1997 in the movie, but in real life it
didn’t become viable until 2023 or 2024, when people starting using
ChatGPT as a free therapist.
Also, AI was developed by the military in the movie,1
but while the military has helped fund AI development, it has been
created by and funded in the private sector.
Yes, this movie describes one risk of AI: It may decide to kill us.
Whether or not that is a real risk is still up in the air, but what
has happened is that AI is causing massive economic damage,
completely destroying the tech industry and highly paid computer
programmers.
I remember being a kid working at a gas station, slowly saving up
enough money to buy a car, and being on the internet for hours every
night, learning computers and technology to get out of the trap of only
being able to work in a gas station. Finally, I saved up enough to buy
an old car, had a friend of a friend who worked for a place that was
hiring, and got my foot in the door by working as tech support for the
then nascent internet industry in Silicon Valley. From there, I slowly
became a highly paid software developer.
With AI taking over everything, people these days no longer have that
opportunity. AI is eating away at the middle class, and today’s
generation of talented artists, musicians, and computer programmers are
having their jobs being taken away from them by AI agents, forcing them
to stay in low paying service positions.
Picture credits
The picture for this blog is a waxwork of the Terminator at
Madame Tussauds, London. The picture was taken by Daniel Jurena
from Prague, Czech Republic. The picture has been
altered (resized and cropped), and is CC-BY-SA 2.0
licensed.
Footnote
1: The details are more complicated, but in the interest in having no spoilers, this is a reasonable description of how Skynet was created.
Grab bag
July 9, 2026
Some thoughts I have had these last few days.
The Motte
I have decided to no longer contribute to The Motte. Like DailyKos
and a lot of other online spaces, it has become a place where people
think it’s OK to be rude to other people and not have basic respect and
dignity.
Its problem is this: The Motte suffers from the “Nazi Bar”
problem that Twitter (X) also suffers from. Since The
Motte is an online space that allows racists
and other bigots to post “reasonable” arguments, the place
has become dominated by right wing shills.
People not having basic kindness and decency in anonymous forums has
been a long standing issue in the technical community; Slashdot, while
not being racist, had had issues with kindness two decades ago and they
are prevalent to this day.
Fortunately, I have a network of friends who do have kindness, love,
and decency.
The Motte’s server code
While The Motte doesn’t link to this anywhere on their website, The Motte’s server code is available online as open source software.
The code is, as is typical for 2026, a lot of AI-generated slop, but
the code is out there and other people are free to make their own
version of “The Motte” for Reddit-style discussions.
GitHub is having
issues deploying pages
It’s well known in the hacker community that GitHub has reliability issues.
The issue I am dealing with is this:
GitHub pages. While the servers that serve the static pages are rock
solid reliable, the GitHub actions which convert Git code in to a
static web page is very unreliable.
GitHub pages are OK for pages which aren’t updated very frequently,
such as the MaraDNS home page
or my blog archive,
but they are not OK for pages which update
frequently, such as my current blog.
That in mind, I will self-host my current blog, and use GitHub for
the archive.
djbdns no longer compiles
With the post-C23 changes to the C specification, djbdns 1.05 (its
final release) no longer even compiles. Considering that, two
decades ago, djbdns advocates were well known online for being
obnoxious loud mouthed people, it’s telling that not one of them is
actively maintaining djbdns here in the 2020s.
I, on the other hand, am actively maintaining djbdns. My own fork of
a fork of djbdns, ndjbdns,
does compile, but one needs to type in this incantation to compile it:
export CC="c99 -D_DEFAULT_SOURCE"
./configure
make
The cc command these days, by default, tries to compile
C23, which is a distinctly different language than the C which
djbdns (and, yes, my own MaraDNS when I was starting
it) was written in. The above command, for now, instructs GCC/LLVM to
compile the program as if it’s using the current-for-2001 (i.e. the
year the final version of djbdns came out, as well as the initial
version of MaraDNS) revision of the C specification.
MaraDNS: Compiles as C23 code
I have updated MaraDNS to be C23 compatible code so it will still be
able to compile should C compilers ever stop supporting the C99
specification, even though I don’t think losing C99 will be an issue:
As I type this, not only do both gcc and clang
support the C99 specification, they also support the C90 spec that is
now some 36 years old.
The MaraDNS authoritative server, the Deadwood recursive server, as
well as the Lua/Lunacy-scripted coLunacyDNS servers all compile without
warning using a C23 compiler.
Lunacy standalone still emits warnings (but does compile)
when compiled as a C23 program, so my next project is to have Lunacy
compile without warning in a modern C23 compiler.
Lunacy 2026-07-05 released
July 5, 2026
I have released Lunacy 2026-07-05 today, and have done some updates
to MaraDNS.
Lunacy 2026-07-05
Lunacy is a scripting language I use in MaraDNS (both to process DNS
queries with the coLunacyDNS server and to generate the documents); it
is a security hardened fork of Lua 5.1.
The last time I bumped the version number was in late 2022 with the
2022-12-06 release of Lunacy. The 2026-07-05 release is by and large
unchanged; the only changes are:
-
It is now possible to set the compiler with CC when
using the Makefile and Makefile.editline
makefiles.
-
There are now no warnings when compiling with clang 20; there is only
one warning when compiling with GCC 16.
-
There is now a makefile to compile Lunacy using TCC 0.9.25 in Windows
-
The reference manual has added a note about not exposing the output
of pairs to untrusted parties, and includes a sorted
sPairs function, as well as noting popen2 arguments
should only come from trusted sources.
-
Since 2022, I have written a book about how to use Lunacy as a
scripting language like Ruby/Perl/Python. This book, and its source, is
now part of the Lunacy tarball.
The code is available on the Lunacy webpage.
Post 3.5.0038 MaraDNS updates
I have also updated MaraDNS so she generates no warnings when
compiled with:
Since MaraDNS here in 2026 compiles with no warnings, even when
-Wall is set, and since MarsDNS uses the -std=c99
flag when compiling programs, should MaraDNS not compile in the future,
it is almost certainly a bug in the compiler toolchain and not a bug in
MaraDNS.
The code is available on GitHub
as well as other repos.
