Hung Truong: The Blog!

Making a Trombone Champ Controller From a Trombone!

Note: this blog post is more or less adapted from a script I used to make my YouTube video on this subject. So if you want to watch the video, I’ve embedded it here! Or if you like reading more, then go ahead and read my post below! (I can’t stand the recent trend of making content that’s video-only so I refuse to not make a blog post out of this video!)

I just got this new game called “Trombone Champ” which is like Guitar Hero but with a trombone. It’s honestly one of the most refreshing new games I’ve seen, not only because it’s fun and has a good sense of humor, but also because it sort of reinvigorates the music game genre. I love that part of the game is subtly recognizing that you can’t really sound good on a trombone, which is hilarious. I did find that the control scheme could be improved, since you’re expected to play with a mouse (and optionally keyboard keys). So I set out to turn my soprano trombone into a real video game controller for Trombone Champ!

Stable Diffusion: Generating Images From Words

For the past few months or so, I’ve been noticing a lot of news stories about DALL·E 2, an AI image generator that uses GANs to create images from prompts. It was private for quite a while, and there were some similar, less powerful projects that were open. I played around with them a bit but I was waiting for a general release. I ended up getting into the DALL·E 2 beta a few weeks ago and last week I saw news that there was a new release of another project called Stable Diffusion, so I installed it on my MacBook. The results really blew me away!

I Created a Robot to Solve Wordle For Me

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days, you’ve heard of this game online called Wordle. It’s been growing like crazy and the New York Times even wrote a profile on the creator. If you know me, you know I like automating things, so it should be no surprise that I decided to automate playing the game. Here’s a blog post on how I did it.

Cloning Zwift on iOS Part 5: SwiftUI and Combine

I recently switched teams at Amazon to one that is using SwiftUI and Combine, so I finally have a good excuse to learn the two. I am somewhat familiar with Functional Reactive Programming from using RxSwift at Lyft, but I’ve only really dabbled a bit with SwiftUI.

I decided to spend some time last weekend (and this weekend) rewriting most of my Zwift clone app to use SwiftUI and Combine, and here’s some of the stuff I learned along the way.

Reverse Engineering Quibi: Protocol Buffers and HLS Streaming

I’ve had a lot of free time in the past few weeks so I decided to spend some of it working on side projects. I really enjoy reverse engineering apps, so I decided to take a look at Quibi.

Quibi (short for “Quick Bites”) is a video streaming app/service that has a bunch of shows that are short. The idea is that you can sit on a bus ride and consume an episode or two, depending on how long your commute is. One of the constraints of the platform is that you can only watch these videos on a phone or tablet with the app installed.

Since everyone is stuck indoors for a while this constraint is kinda stupid and most people would probably like to watch their videos on their big tv rather than huddle around a phone, which is what Emily and I had to do to watch that stupid viral show about the terrible wife with the golden arm.

Anyway, I had an idea to write a tvOS app that would work with Quibi, so you could watch your terrible shows on your tv. Here’s what I learned trying to reverse engineer the Quibi app.