Lewin Kelly Heliodex

Heliodex project update – July 2025

Another project update! I never know what to write in the first paragraph of these things. Here's what I've worked on over the last month.

Mercury

The documentation site on the docs branch has been updated with articles on installation of certain tools and further integration guides.

I've been experimenting with different ways to start up and manage Mercury's external services, mainly the Database and Economy service. This has usually been done with Docker, which is great when it works though often has issues on machines with poor support for virtualisation. Starting each process independently is difficult to manage. I tried using my own tool for this, which worked surprisingly well, but would shut down if its parent terminal was closed. Recently I tried Nomad, which

💻 How to Activate Windows XP Professional – Step-by-Step Guide

This guide explains how to activate Windows XP Pro using a valid product key, either online or by phone.

🔹 What You’ll Need:

A genuine Windows XP Pro product key sources like licencekeep.com
Internet or phone (depending on activation method)

Heliodex project update – June 2025

Hey all, welcome to another project update. I've been inside drinking plenty of water and writing plenty of code recovering from the unbearable Scottish summer heat of over 15°C.

Mercury

At the moment, I'm working on 2 branches in the Mercury Core repository: assets and docs. The assets branch contains some updates to the Economy service, allowing it to handle asset transactions for limited and unlimited assets. It also reduces the complexity of currency by making stipends constant and removing fees, which may destabilise the economy somewhat, but we'll find that out in the future. The docs branch contains a basic documentation site for Mercury Core and related services, which is still a work in progress. As outlined in [#389](https://github.com/tp-link-extender/MercuryCore/issues

Why I Deleted My Steam Account After 20 Years

Some may know me from over a decade worth of modding broken, under-performing or otherwise inconvenient aspects of PC ports. Dedicated users of Special K also know that I have spent as much time battling problems caused by Steam as I have defects in the games themselves.

My experience with PC gaming goes back a further two decades, to the days of shareware, dialing into a BBS to get game patches / user generated content and tedious DRM fetch-quests involving physical game manuals. I was irritated when Half-Life 2 shipped on PC and required a dedicated piece of software to satisfy DRM and patch the game, but at the time these were minor inconveniences. Valve tried to quell concerns of software preservation with the first of a long series of lies wherein they claimed to have a contingency plan for the DRM scheme reaching end-of-life.

Steam's DRM scheme has reached end-of-life multiple times without the promised parachute.

In 2002, the cl

Heliodex project update – May 2025

Hello all, here's another monthly project update. The summer holidays have started, so I'm away at the moment, but I've still had lots of time to code some cool things.

Mercury

The jokes, hoaxes, and memes have all turned out to be true. There will be a Mercury 3.

Mercury 3 will be hosted on the domain xtcy.dev. We have a working DLL hook for the 2013 client & studio (same as previous Mercuries) and a Windows Server VPS for running Mercury Core, RCCService, and related services.

Qubic Monero Hashpower Share

UPDATE 14 AUGUST 2025: Plots of blocks mined by solo miners and unknown pools are available at moneroconsensus.info.

UPDATE 31 JULY 2025: Qubic has changed the view key of its mining wallet. This Gist can no longer use the previous methodology to estimate Qubic's hashpower share. I am working on a realtime web app to display Qubic-related information.

Qubic claims to be mining a large number of Monero blocks. This note plots apparent Qubic mining data.

Heliodex project update – April 2025

Welcome, again, to another monthly update. This one's right in the middle of my exam season! How convenient.

Mercury Core

Mercury Core is back to life now, after a few months of inactivity. The codebase has been given some much needed TLC & dedusting and I'm working on improving many of its parts – at the moment the 'communication' branch contains a rewrite of the forum, status updates, and asset comments into a single system, as well as improvements for likes/dislikes.

The database schema has also been significantly improved, the auth system has been rewritten without the need for Lucia v3 (thank you lucia!), all components have been migrated to use Svelte 5 syntax and features, fixes have been applied to the economy service, and many miscellaneous formatting and styling fixes have been made, as usual.

Heliodex project update – March 2025

Happy holidays! The year is Marching on, so I hope everyone is doing well; here's some updates on the projects I've been working on.

Coputer

Coputer now features a number of 'program types' for programs to accept and return certain values. Current program types are as follows:

Test programs, which take no arguments and return nothing, for the purposes of debugging Litecode
Web programs, which take a few web request parameters and return a web response

go-ternary

Yes, I know—yet another attempt at bringing a ternary-like experience to Go. But hey, Go doesn’t have one, and I wasn’t around when the last million were written.

Why?

Because Go doesn't have a ternary operator, and according to the official FAQ, it likely never will. The reasoning? To prevent developers from writing "impenetrably complex expressions." But let's be real—poor coding practices exist in all forms. Instead of outright banning a useful construct, wouldn’t compiler warnings for overly complicated ternary expressions have been a more reasonable approach?

Since that's not happening, here’s go-ternary—because sometimes, a one-liner is just nicer than an if-else.

	public class MakeWeirdMips : MonoBehaviour
	{
	[MenuItem("Pema/MakeWeirdMips")]
	public static void MakeWeirdMipsAsset()
	{
	Texture2D tex = new Texture2D(1024, 1024, GraphicsFormat.R32G32B32A32_SFloat, TextureCreationFlags.MipChain);
	FillMip(tex, Color.magenta, 0); // 1024
	FillMip(tex, Color.green, 1); // 512
	FillMip(tex, Color.blue, 2); // 256
	FillMip(tex, Color.red, 3); // 128