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Hello! My channel has been silent for a long time, and you may be wondering why.

Earlier this year, I posted a video series in which I talked about my life. I also mentioned my educational background. So, things are changing.

I decided to take a break from my programming career of 25 years, and I am currently studying at the University of Helsinki. I am studying in a Bachelor's Programme for Teachers of Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry and Master's Programme. The nominal length of the study program is 3+2 years, but I am trying to get it done somewhat faster. Which means that my calendar is filled to the brim.

I have also taken extracurricular topics — namely, Computer Science — although so far I have chosen to complete several of these CS courses directly with exams.
This all of course means that my weekly schedule contains very little free time. This is not an exaggeration. Almost every evening and night is spent doing exercises/homework, or listening to lectures that I did not have time to attend during the day because of conflicts of scheduling. Unfortunately, it also means that I have an even harder time finding time to make YouTube videos than I did before.
I haven’t abandoned this channel! I still have ongoing video projects and plans, but they are progressing very, very slowly. And I still do read literally every comment that you post on my videos — both old and new — and reply if applicable, and delete spam. There is also the Discord server at  https://discord.gg/aG4ztC4  , where I chat pretty much every day at some point.

The studying is divided into four periods each year. This first period is very busy for me, like I wrote above. So far I do have the energy for it — I am not falling behind — and I find the studying quite exciting, and a refreshing change compared to what I used to do for work. However, the periods thing means that four times in a year, I get to choose which direction to throttle the workload; how busy to make my calendar. It is plausible that I will take it easier in the next period. But it remains my plan to shrink that total nominal duration by at least one year.

Now, speaking of these Computer Science courses. As I have mentioned earlier, I am pretty much self-taught when it comes to programming, database design, Linux administration, and other CS topics. Many people have asked me where to learn all that stuff.
One of the reasons I took CS as a side subject, even though it is not part of my curriculum, was to assess the level of CS education in a university in Finland.
So far, I have to say, I am very pleasantly surprised. The range of depth, from utter basics (such as basic components of a computer, or introduction to binary numbers) to sophisticated details (like DevOps with Docker, lambda calculus, GraphQL, and ethics of AI), is extreme. Whether you know nothing or you are an expert, you will find something new to learn. The level of teaching is very high quality. The exercises offer practical examples and make you think and analyze these topics from a wide variety of angles.

I do not know what the level of CS education is in universities of other countries besides Finland, or even in other universities of Finland besides Helsinki, but so far my impression is that, well, I am impressed. If this is an opportunity for you and you are interested in it, I suggest you take it.

Without enrolling, here’s a particularly challenging list of algorithmic problems, if you want to try your hand at it (for free; the introduction is in Finnish, but the tasks are all in English. Warning: These are not beginner’s challenges. They are extremely difficult.):  https://cses.fi/alon/list/  See also the course page at:  https://studies.helsinki.fi/courses/c ... (you may need to use a translator to read it). 

On YouTube censorship. Once in a while, I get a notification of someone posting a comment on my video, but when I go to check, there’s nothing there. That’s not me deleting your comment. That’s YouTube deleting your comment, and there is nothing I can do about that.

Even I get the same treatment: Sometimes, when I try to reply to a comment someone posts, the reply appears to go through successfully, and is still there even when I reload the page, but in about 20 seconds, if I reload the page again, the reply disappears without a trace. It’s nowhere. (It is _not_ in the “Held for review” tab.)

This is infuriating. While I considered the possibility that it is a cache coherency problem at YouTube, the fact that it appears to happen more with comments about controversial topics than with comments about other things, makes me suspect there is again some rogue politically-correctness AI loose at YouTube, and it is being tested _on us._ My recommendation: If you post a comment or a reply on my videos, first write it in a separate editor such as notepad/pluma and then copypaste it to the comment box. After posting, reload the page ~minute later, and if the comment is still there, you’re good. Otherwise you may need to edit your comment, rephrase something, try this, try that, ipso facto, abracadabra, until the magic box decides to finally accept your text.

Again, there is nothing I can do about that. But I thought it might be useful for you to know. 

Hello! I am not dead or retired or anything! It is summer time, and the rendering series took much toll on me, working on it for almost 10 hours each day for several months, so I am resting and regaining my energy. Or so I would do in an ideal world, but of course, I have been focusing on other projects that I have been neglecting for a long time, such as my Simon’s Quest Retranslation project at  https://bisqwit.iki.fi/cv2fin/  . Which, incidentally, has sparked topics for new videos in the future.

Unfortunately, there may be still a few weeks before I get a new video out (as usual, I have like a dozen I am working on, inching each of them closer towards completion like a turtle race). In the mean time, I have done a few spontaneous livestreams on Twitch in the recent weeks, primarily to deal with tech support scammers that have recently discovered Finland, and while waiting for the calls, chatting about various topics with people who are watching it live. I uploaded some videos about it on my extra channel:  https://youtube.com/c/ExtraBisqwit  Check it out if you haven’t done so already! I am not going to move towards that direction, but long-time subscribers know that I make very varied content. 

In my texture mapping tutorial I showed how affine mapping behaves “wonky” when the shape differs from an equilateral. I am sure at least _some_ of you thought it’s because I made the shape from triangles. So what happens if we render quads instead? I changed the rasterizer to render any convex polygons instead of just triangles, without the tesselation step, and disabled the perspective correction. Here is the result! 

Status update time!

The next video on my channel, at least the one that I am currently working most actively*, will be a programming+tutorial video, and it is a return to a topic I have been working on since 2015: 3D graphics.

I am planning to make a video series about this. We will begin gently with polygons and perspective corrected texture mapping — with 100% software rendering using only standard libraries (+ SDL2 for 2D graphics).

Already in 2016, I finished making a proof-of-concept for this video series, and you can actually see a teaser for it in my Chip8 video, but it has been on hiatus for a long time. This is because I was waiting for an inspiration to strike on how to make it presentable. Two weeks ago I finally got the inspiration that I so desperately was waiting. So now I am hard at work.

The code footage for this new video has been finished. It weighs about 19 minutes total, although the actual timing will still be adjusted depending on narration. Next steps: Script and camera footage. Then, narration and video editing.

Yes, this time I created a 80% of the video’s footage before writing a script for it. This tends to be generally what happens with my programming videos. I have a rough outline of the flow of the video only in my head, which I am now refining into notes that will form the basis for narration.

I _want_ to publish this video in the next 7 days, but I don’t think it will be ready so soon. My estimate is at least two weeks, given that I have a day job and other responsibilities and I am only working on this on my spare time. Regardless, the biggest part is already done.

*) I reserve the possibility of pushing a quick “b-studio” project ahead this video in the schedule, if the situation warrants it. 

Alright, I just finished writing the script for my next video (and all footage has been recorded). Unfortunately my nose is very congested at the moment, with some kind of common cold going on※, so I can’t do any voice recording.
Unfortunately, the timing of my narration completely determines the timing for the video clips, and thus video editing cannot begin until narration is done — so the progress will be paused until the situation regarding my nose eases — which may be a day or it may be a month from now. Thank you for your patience.

※) Frankly I don’t care what is the proper medical term for that. All I know my nose is dripping like mad and I can’t breathe through it. I have this going pretty much non-stop throughout the years, but sometimes it’s like only level 2 (meaning it doesn’t drip, it’s just congested for no reason) and sometimes it’s up to eleven. Right now it’s at like 7. My throat and voice are fine. It’s just that speaking while your nose is blocked gives your voice a particular quality that I personally hate listening to (and it makes it very difficult to pronounce nasal consonants like m or n), and I don’t want to subject you to that experience. Thank you for understanding. 

I am working on a video on a topic that people keep bringing up from time to time. A brief commentary on TempleOS and on its late author. Just need to think up footage for a more discussion-heavy segment (analytics show that views go down if I just put the dirt-falling animation on it), and it should be ready for upload soonish.