Today, Skype is officially dead, and this makes me a bit sad. And I would like to dedicate this post to its memory.

I still remember the day I started to use it. I lived too far from my parents and relatives, who were living literally on the opposite side of the Earth. I had to use international calls and pay from $1 to $3 per minute, and as you can imagine, even a few and relatively short calls per month can easily cost $100 or more. There were special dial cards, but they were cumbersome to use, and some were pretty scammy.

I tried several solutions for internet calls, including one that was supplied with Windows, but the audio

I was asked to help with a Unreal project. That project has an issue with shadows from any tree. When the player is close to the shadow from that tree and moves around the shadow will change its shape. It becomes bigger or smaller depending on the direction you are looking.

Let me explain how trees are implemented. Each tree consists of a static mesh that represents branches and a static mesh that represents the canopy of the tree. Static mesh for the canopy has a material that replaces static mesh with many billboards that are leaves of the tree. It looks nice and easy to change because by changing the static mesh of the canopy you are changing the

I think every one of us can tell that AI is very dumb sometimes. Sometimes it outputs just utter nonsense or in simple terms - garbage. Sometimes it is smart and very helpful and sometimes it is as dumb as a chair.

For example, one day I asked AI about a book written by a specific author, but I didn’t remember the name of that book. Then AI said that the name of the book is “Wolf and Tractor”. It looks quite strange, especially if you take into account that the author died in the 18th century and there were no tractors in at that time.

And yes, I double-checked the internet because there was a chance that the word

I have a device that has an HDMI connector and can output to monitor and I have the image that I need to be displayed at the center of the screen as big as possible while keeping its aspect ratio. The device can output a picture that is 1920 by 1080 and the image has resolution 640 by 480.

Effectively we need to find a single ratio that we will multiply the width and height of that image and that image will fill the whole vertical or horizontal space. It must be a single ratio because we need to keep the aspect ratio of the image and not stretch or shrink it in a single dimension.

Firstly, we divide 1920

With the introduction of .NET Core Microsoft changed the format of the .csproj file. It is much smaller than the original format and I quite like it. Unfortunately, there are some regressions and this will be the subject of today’s post.

Imagine an application that has hundreds of assemblies. Now imagine that you want to recompile one of them, put a breakpoint somewhere, and start the main application. It is very simple in the .NET Framework class library. All you need is to go to project properties, go to the “Debug” tab, select “Start external program” and select the main application. Very easy and simple.

Now, let's compare it with the .NET Core class library. After

My first several iPhones were without any passwords. I had nothing interesting or valuable in them to warrant the extra hassle of entering a passcode every time I needed to use them. But with time I got some more sensitive stuff and with the iPhone 6 Plus, I started to use the fingerprint sensor to unlock it.

And to most degree, it works just fine. Sure sometimes it didn’t work when I had wet fingers or when I positioned my finger weirdly. But this happened quite rarely and in general, it was a positive experience. I meant that the trouble of having to do extra stuff was way less than having a secured phone.

But a lot of changed with

For the last several years a lot of YouTubers have been pushing a narrative that driving a car is bad for the environment, it creates traffic jams and pollution. And this is 100% correct. Then they finish with a narrative that everybody should use public transportation or bike and claim that this is the perfect future.

Let’s think about it. I live relatively close to work. It is only 11 miles from my work. 1 mile to the highway, 9 miles on the highway, and 1 mile after the highway. It takes me around 18 minutes to drive in the morning. Most of the driving is 2 miles before and after the highway because of many traffic lights. When I

Part 2 is here.

Somebody who read up to this moment can say to me that everything is looking not as bad as I stated. A lot of people use full self-driving and they are just fine. Well, this is not correct because they are not fine.

Previous iterations of full self-driving (FSD) we quite bad and even Tesla fans admitted it. But even in this case, some fans put their life at stake and there were many fatal cases that went public.

Practically it became more or less useful around the beginning of 2024. However, not many people have FSD because it is quite expensive. Mostly Tesla fans bought them but they don’t want to blame Tesla and

Part 1 is here.

Tesla is planning to use drivers to monitor full self-driving and effectively use them as QA and beta testers while they are developing technology and eventually switch to completely autonomous driving.

But this does not work because it almost works. Let me explain what I meant by that. I will start with this video why the author explained that in 2013 Google started testing its own autonomous vehicles and gave several of them to Google employees. They were told that they needed to always pay attention and to always keep their hands on the steering wheel at all times. Lastly, they told them that there are hidden cameras that will watch them all the