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Curiosities

This page collects some miscellaneous interests, skills, and side-quests I’m passively exploring or curious about. It's not meant as a checklist or a claim of expertise.

This includes ongoing hobby projects, long-term goals, and "cool uncle tricks" / "party tricks" that are fun (and occasionally useful) to carry around in your head.

Long-term

Personal benchmarks rather than competitive goals.

  • Chess (Lichess)
    • Classical: 2000 ✓
    • Rapid: 2000 ✓
    • Blitz: 2000 (~1850)
    • Bullet: 2000 (~1800)
    • Chess960: 2000 (~1600)
  • Go: slowly working toward 1-dan on the standard 19×19 board
  • Getting fluent in Japanese (ongoing study using spaced repetition)

Shelved

  • Cubing
    • 3x3: personal best of 20 seconds (current PB: 26 sec): I went through a fairly serious cubing phase, learning all PLLs and ~70% of OLLs. Other interests eventually took over, but I still keep the 4-look last layer algorithms memorized—after all, it would be too embarrassing to forget how to solve a Rubik’s Cube now. I can also solve the Mirror Cube.
    • NxN: I've tinkered with most NxN cubes (2x2 to 7x7). Not very fast but the idea is simple: you "reduce" these cubes into a 3x3 and use the same algorithms.
    • blindfolded: I’ve looked into how it works, but getting decent at it would take real practice.
    • other twisty puzzles: Probably a rabbit hole for another time.
  • Unix ricing: It was fun and incredibly educational, but these days I prioritize stability. I still value great tools; I just want them to be 'boring' and predictable.

Other things of interest

  • CTFs
  • PC building
  • animation
  • video editing
  • photography
  • self-hosting
  • puzzle solving
  • languages
    • European: French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish
    • Asian: Korean, Mandarin
    • classical/ancient: Greek, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit
    • constructed: Klingon, Toki Pona
  • geography
  • mental math, mathemagics
    • calculating the day of the week from any date (Doomsday rule) ✓
  • memory techniques and random trivia
    • mnemonic systems
      • major system ✓
      • Morse code
    • PAO ✓
    • periodic table of elements using PAO ✓
    • PAO for playing cards
    • mind palace
    • digits of pi, e
    • US presidents
    • British monarchs
  • creative and physical skills
    • wrapping a present
    • knots
    • music
      • instruments: guitar, harmonica, flute
      • theory
      • electronic music
    • card tricks
    • drawing / painting
    • origami, paper planes
    • penmanship, calligraphy, cursive
    • knitting
      • sewing a button
      • sewing a hole
      • knitting a hat/scarf
    • lock picking
    • gaming
      • GeoGuessr
    • playing pool / snooker, trick shots
    • cooking, properly chopping vegetables
    • ambidexterity (improving fine motor control and handwriting)
    • pottery
    • making / throwing a boomerang
    • whistling
    • backflip
    • bushcraft and survival skills
    • celestial navigation
    • identifying birds by call
    • woodworking and DIY
    • slingshotting
    • unicycling
    • swimming
    • ice skating, roller skating, skateboarding: kick flip
    • kick scootering, BMX biking, tailwhip
    • adventure sports: sky diving, skiing, cliff diving, paragliding, climbing, parkour
    • dancing: moonwalk, shuffle dance, breakdancing

Some delightfully useless skills

  • binary counting on fingers to 1023 (3b1b video) ✓
  • calculating logarithms by hand (#1, #2)
  • learning Pigpen cipher
  • ripping an apple in half with bare hands
  • juggling, yo-yoing
  • how to be a table (requires 4 people)
  • stacking dice with a glass
  • rolling a coin across knuckles
  • pen spinning
  • spinning a book/football on your finger
  • making shadow puppets
  • drawing a near perfect circle with a marker/chalk
  • drawing dotted lines on a chalkboard
  • breaking glass with your voice

Misc tricks