Casey Primozic’s Notes

Misc. notes, code, and other content I want to post publicly that don’t warrant a full blog post

By Casey Primozic

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Building a Realistic Raindrop-Covered Window Pane Material in Three.JS

Casey Primozic
Screenshot of a rain-covered window rendered with Three.JS. There appears to be many water drops covering the back surface which refract the light from the background. The background is blurry and gray with indistinct high-rise buildings visible in the distance and a gray concrete platform just outside the window. The corner of a table and a table leg are visible in the bottom left corner.
Recently, I’ve been working on a rainy scene in Three.JS. One of the most important parts of this scene is a greenhouse with big glass windows. I decided to take a stab at making some realistic raindrop-covered window panes for them using Three.JS’s built-in transmission shader. The result turned out pretty well if I do say so myself, so I thought I’d write up my process for building it from start to finish.
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Fixing Anker USB Hub Not Connecting to M1 Mac

I have an Anker USB hub that I use with my work laptop - an M1 Mac Pro. I use it to plug in two USB-A peripherals (mouse and keyboard) as well as to plug in a HDMI monitor. The hub itself connects to my laptop via USB-C. In addition to the hub, I also have a second HDMI monitor, a USB-C internet adapter, wired headphones, and my charging cable connected to the laptop.
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Investigating Fidget Spinner Bot

While watching some logs for my webserver recently, I’ve noticed a significant amount of requests coming from a bot I didn’t recognize with the user agent of fidget-spinner-bot. It seems to be pretty aggressively crawling my personal network of sites that I maintain, following links and downloading page contents. Some requests are also coming from user agents including my-tiny-bot, thesis-research-bot, test-bot which seems to be the same or related. I usually recognize most of the user agents of bots making significant amounts of requests to my server, so these stood out to me.
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Exporting Minecraft Objects to Three.JS

Recently, I’ve been working on some interactive sketches/games in Three.JS. For one of the levels I was building, I had the idea of importing something I built from one of my old MineCraft survival worlds in to use as part of it. I figured that there was a pretty good chance of some software existing to export MineCraft levels to some 3D model format for 3D rendering or other purposes, and that indeed is the case.
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Google Cloud Platform Gems

I was reading a Hacker News thread for an article comparing GCP to some alternatives like AWS. I’ve been a GCP user for a good while now, and it’s definitely my go-to public cloud. We also use it at my dayjob at Osmos. Reading the article and comments got me thinking about some of my favorite GCP features. GCP has a few excellent gems which are better than pretty much any competing cloud offering:
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