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Dan Freeman

@dfreeman.io

320 followers 100 following 120 posts

👨‍💻 Software | 👾 Games | 📚 Books | 🏳️‍🌈 General gay nerdery

Edinburgh 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 • he/him

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Dan Freeman

@dfreeman.io

Today I thought of sodaconstructor for the first time in probably almost two decades. It was a little 2D mass-and-spring sim that let you build Strandbeest-style walkers and other little automata.

Looks like it's gone the way of the dodo now, but wow I really have the itch to play with that again.

September 22, 2025 at 4:12 PM

Dan Freeman

@dfreeman.io

Me: *waits on hold for an hour and 45 minutes*

Royal Mail customer service: hang on jerk, it’s 6:30; we’re closed *click*

A screenshot of an active call on my phone, with the timer at 01:43:47. It’s currently 6:31pm.

September 15, 2025 at 5:34 PM

Dan Freeman

@dfreeman.io

Parcel from @proud-geek.co.uk arrived with some June reading for me today!

Happy Pride, friends 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

A copy of “I Want That Twink Obliterated!” alongside a couple bookmarks and a card for the Proud Geek bookstore, all sitting atop just-opened cardboard packaging.

June 4, 2025 at 5:13 PM

Dan Freeman

@dfreeman.io

Me, circa 2008: “Sure you can pull some neat tricks with it, but does the pigeonhole principle actually matter for real world day-to-day things?”

Edinburgh, this morning:

Two holes in a stone wall, each featuring a pigeon sitting near the front. A third pigeon is peeking out from the back of one of the holes.

May 2, 2025 at 10:57 AM

Dan Freeman

@dfreeman.io

The code underlying this is a gnarly hackathon-grade mess, and it would take a huge amount of work to actually turn it into anything resembling real support.

However!

As the weekend wraps up I feel pretty good having gotten some @unison-lang.org code, abilities and all, running in the browser!

A screenshot with Unison code on the left and the Safari devtools open on the right. The Unison code includes a demo function that handles and uses the `Ask` ability, and then bundles that function up into a WebAssembly module to serve.

The devtools window has loaded the resulting page, and shows the results of calling the demo function from the browser console.

Full text of the code and console follows. Code:

demo.incrementOnAsk : Nat -> Nat
demo.incrementOnAsk start =
go n body =
handle body()
with cases
{ result } -> result
{ ask -> resume } ->
Debug.trace "providing n:" n
go (n + 1) do resume n

go start do
ask + ask + ask

demo.run : '{IO, Exception} URI
demo.run = do
module = warp do
expose "incrementOnAsk" [VNat] (Some VNat) demo.incrementOnAsk

run.local.serve do
files =
Map.fromList
[ ("/demo.wasm", WasmModule.toBytes true module)
, ("/loader.js", Text.toUtf8 jsLoader)
]
service = serveFiles files do
HttpResponse.ok (Body (Text.toUtf8 defaultPageHTML))
ServiceName.assign (named "wasm") service

Console session:

> demo.exports.incrementOnAsk(1n)
trace: providing n:
1n
trace: providing n:
2n
trace: providing n:
3n
< 6

March 30, 2025 at 10:07 PM

Dan Freeman

@dfreeman.io

Pre-blocking and post-playtime shots of the blanket I crocheted for my nephew’s first Christmas this year.

Seems like it was a hit! 🎄

A blue crocheted blanket spread atop a bed, slightly wonky in the border in particular

The same blanket, rumpled underneath a 6-month-old playing a toy piano

December 28, 2024 at 11:05 PM

Dan Freeman

@dfreeman.io

D y i n g

A screenshot of the "Recording" timer from a Zoom meeting, currently clocking in at 4 hours, 40 minutes, and 21 seconds.

December 10, 2024 at 6:50 PM

Dan Freeman

@dfreeman.io

Got hit with some Disney music during my morning scroll, and I'd never realised what an absolute pick-me Aladdin is 🫥

What's played as his thoughtful, introspective reprise of One Jump Ahead amounts to "why can't everyone see I'm not like those OTHER poors; I'm actually a real person!"