Nicolas F. R. A. PradoModify

2026-08-31 11:00:00

This month I attended HOPE - Hackers on Planet Earth. As always it was quite interesting and inspiring. I left full - overwhelmingly so - of excitement and ideas to do interesting things.

Some of the highlights for me were:

• A talk from a non-profit that helps North Koreans get rooted devices to be able to have access to foreign information (sometimes simply to watch South Korean soap operas). I was surprised both by the extent and the simplistic nature of the government's surveillance techniques.

• Joybubbles movie screening (more below)

• A talk on how a guy built a gadget to block ads from streaming services at the HDMI cable level

• At the Wikimedia NYC table in the hall, I had my fortune told by a thermal printer that printed the most recent Wikipedia edit at that moment. It read:

  Vietnam national football team
  - 8
  + 9
  

  I was impressed.

• At the ham radio village table, the guy tabling eagerly answered all my newbie questions on the topic. This led me to buy the RTL-SDR which was suggested as a good entry point. Excited to start playing with it!

• A talk about zines got me inspired to make and distribute zines at the library to bring more attention to topics I think are interesting and underrated. The idea that the zine can be a way to share knowledge in a local and physical way captivated me.

Photos

Some random photos I took throughout the month that I liked:

2026-08-05 11:00:00

This month, or rather last month as I'm a few days late, I spent back in my home town: São Paulo, Brazil.

Jam sessions with my brother

During my stay, me and my brother met a few times to play together. He played the drums, I played the piano. We just improvised, as we hadn't practiced any songs and I find improvising more fun anyway. We played in the basement of a family member, and it smelled as dystopian as it looked:

Recordings:

• Jam1.mp3
• Jam2.mp3
• Jam3.mp3
• Jam4.mp3

São Paulo themed shaders

I've recently started making shaders on my phone using the Shader Editor app, and during my visit to São Paulo I wanted to make something with the shape of the piso paulista that is ubiquitous throughout sidewalks in São Paulo. A big part of this apps' appeal to me is that you can access the phone's camera in real time, so you can mix photography and coding into a unique composition. As an added challenge I also made sure that all of the shader code could fit on the screen.

Below are the two compositions I made. For the first one I overlayed the shape (at the time I hadn't noticed it was mirrored) on a notepad where I'd drawn some doodles. For the second one I repeated the shape alternating between the colors from the brazillian flag while I captured São Paulo's main street, Avenida Paulista, with the camera.

2026-06-28 11:00:00

Last weekend me and my girlfriend went on a trip to Wildwood, NJ. As we walked around, we started noticing way too many cool neon signs. Intrigued, we did some research and made a wonderful discovery: Wildwood is "the Doo Wop capital of the USA".

Naturally we decided to walk back to the hotel that night taking pictures of as many neon signs as we could. My favorites:

2026-04-07 11:00:00

Every once in a while you play a game that is unlike any other, that transcends genres, that you can feel the author speaking through it to you, and that you can tell will stick around in your mind in some way or another probably forever. Hyperbeat is one of those games.

I love how the way to interact with anything in the hub is to just wait while a musical rest fills in, I love the 1 FPS walking animation, I love how philosophical the entire narrative and dialogues are, and how the different songs are used to emphasize feelings in the dialogue. And I LOVE the soundtrack.

The gameplay is hard, yes, and I missed many beats even in the tutorial. But you can clearly feel yourself improving as you play, and it's very rewarding.

This is how my character looked by the end of the game:

Thank you to Noclip2's Computer Worlds video for featuring this game, otherwise I might have never experienced it.

Now if you'll excuse I'm going out for a walk, because I feel excited and I can't sit still while listening to the Hyperbeat soundtrack.

2025-12-29 11:00:00

This year I bought more shirts than ever. Mostly because I decided to go to as many concerts as I possibly could.

With the year coming to a close, I thought this would be a good moment to look back at the shirts I collected throughout the year and see the story that they tell. So here it is, my 2025 retrospective through shirts:

From top left to bottom right:

• Row 1, Column 1: March. Went to a Three Days Grace and Disturbed concert. Three Days Grace was my favorite band as a teenager, and on the day of the concert I found out that Adam Gontier, the lead singer, who had left the band several years before, had just joined back. That show was a dream come true for my inner teenager.
• 1-2: March. I saw someone wearing this shirt in a picture of a local volunteering group I was part of and immediately asked where I could buy one. In fact I bought two extra to gift them to friends. It has been my most popular shirt by far, with many compliments received on different occasions and someone once even asked me if they could take a picture of it. If you also love it, check it out here: https://mtpfriends.bigcartel.com/product/what-s-more-punk-adult-t-shirt
• 1-3: April. Went to a social event in the neighborhood, and saw a local, and pretty good, band called Lolux.
• 1-4: May. Went to a Bloc Party concert at the Forest Hills Stadium. I came out of it feeling underwhelmed by the sound quality but it was fun nevertheless. Plus it made me discover Forest Hills, which I found a very quaint neighborhood that is hard to believe exists in New York City.
• 2-1: June. Wonderville is simply put my favorite place in NYC. As they put it, they're "Brooklyn’s home for independently made arcade games". The place looks very much cyberpunk-y, the games are all free to play, and they frequently have unique events, from livecoding to game jams to beyblade tournaments. This shirt was made to commemorate their 6 year anninversary, which I pre-ordered but ended up not making it to the party. I grabbed the shirt a few weeks later when I went there to show the place to a friend that was visiting NYC, something that has become a tradition for me (this is the third visiting friend I bring there).
• 2-2: June. Went to a Godspeed You! Black Emperor concert in Norwalk, CT. The 1-hour train ride to a small town definitely added to the vibe. The concert was really unique, featuring a stage that was almost completely dark with hand-crafted film projections showing behind, and a sound that would slowly build up from a lonely silence to an overwhelming array of layered distorted guitars and violins. Listen to Sleep to get a glimpse of it, but seeing it live was something else.
• 2-3: July. Went to a live Welcome to Night Vale show in Brooklyn. I used to listen to this podcast while in college, so it was quite nostalgic to hear it again, and seeing it live, with crowd interactions made it even more fun.
• 2-4: July. Went to see Creed at the Jones Beach Theater. Beautiful outdoor venue facing the sea, and it was awesome to hear them live. This was the first concert that I went with my mom and the fact that we took a train there and stayed at a hotel until the next day made it feel like a short vacation trip.
• 3-1: July. I love post-rock, and small concerts, so even though I had only listened to a single album from We Lost the Sea many years before, I couldn't pass on the opportunity to see them for just 25$. It was a blast, those cheap small concerts are the best.
• 3-2: August. In contrast, shortly after I payed 171$, the most expensive tickets of my life, to see Linkin Park at the Prudential Center in Newark. The view was good, but my seat was so far high that I felt detached from the concert. Also despite getting this shirt in the same size I always get them, this one is absolutely huge.
• 3-3: August. Went again to the Forest Hills Stadium, this time to see The Black Keys with a friend. It started raining heavily (ironically given the shirt text) shortly after they started playing, but luckily it stopped in time for the show to resume, despite being a bit shorter.
• 3-4: September. Went to see Breaking Benjamin and Three Days Grace (again!). Despite being my favorite band as a teen, seeing TDG this second time was much worse, and gave me the feeling it's not worth it to see a band twice. They played pretty much all the same songs, and this time they had a big screen behind showing clumsy visuals that were clearly AI-generated. Thankfully Breaking Benjamin was fantastic and made it worth it.
• 4-1: October. The night before heading out on a trip, I saw Anamanaguchi at the Brooklyn Steel. I only knew two of their songs, of which they only played one, but I really liked their new album that I first heard at their concert. They also played Hopes and Dreams from Undertale, to celebrate the creator's birthday, and that made this a unique and unforgettable experience.
• 4-2: October. I spent the largest part of October on a road trip throughout California with a friend as I mentioned in the "Song of the Month: Christopher Cross - Sailing" post. There were many natural wonders, but my favorite were the sequoias at Sequoia National Park. That's why I had to stop at the gift shop at the park and get a shirt (and pins!) as mementos of this wonderful place.
• 4-3: November. And to finish off the year, saw Of Monsters and Men at the Brooklyn Paramount with my girlfriend. The pit was pretty busy so it was hard to see at times, but the venue was really gorgeous and we had a good time. This shirt is a long sleeve, the first one I got in over ten years, and it's so pretty. I think it's my favorite shirt of the year.

2025-12-01 11:00:00

Slightly late for November, but better late than never!

As November rolled by, and the Christmas mood took over, I put on an old school Christmas songs playlist on YouTube.

Many of the songs I was hearing for the first time. A few of my favorites were Carol of the Bells, The First Noel and Darlene Love - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).

But my favorite of all has to be "Do You Hear What I Hear?", particularly the version sung by Andy Williams, so that's my pick for the month:

Andy Williams - Do You Hear What I Hear?