Welcome to Arcana Labs
The best puzzles are those not intended to be solved. – Unknown
Providing Security Utilities, Tooling, and other Amusements, Arcana Labs is a small, independant technology exploration and development concern operating out of Atlantic Canada. Our past work has focused on security and disaster recovery, with present work focusing on monitoring tooling and developing puzzles and challenges intended for entrants into the “hackish” fields. Our ultimate goal is to improve our own overall understanding of computing to as deep a level of understanding as practical. We’ve organized our projects into a few categories: hardware, software, and a blog.
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Latest News
Dispelling Illusions: An Update on Arcana Labs
2024-05-06 00:00:00 -0500
Over the last few years, I’ve been blessed to have the support of many friends, family, and individuals in the maker and electronics communities who were interested in my projects, in order to help keep the Labs afloat. A key part of that blessing has come through scheduled donations through various “support” platforms I’ve used in the past. However, I feel that something has changed which I need to be honest and up-front about, and which means I will no longer offer Patreon as an avenue to provide the lab material support. I want to be clear, this isn’t about not appreciating your support - this is about appearances and ethics.
New Project Leak: A Game for Scribes
2024-04-22 00:00:00 -0500
In a previous post, I was pretty clear that new projects and new subject areas were coming to Arcana Labs. While part of that is going to be a bit of an overhaul to the site to support it and make it more portfolio than business, I do have one small announcement I wanted to make before I dig into that heavy lift.
Scope Creep: The Broadening of Arcana Labs
2024-04-07 00:00:00 -0500
This post is a long time in coming, but march was a bit of a trip. Things are changing and moving around in my personal and professional life, and that means the Lab’s nature is changing to. Welcome to reality, everyone - the only constant is change.
PETI Roadmap From Now to Firmware 1.0
2024-02-27 05:00:00 -0600
It’s not just you - for the last several months I’ve been talking about pretty much exclusively the 0.4.0 firmware update for PETI, and with such a close eye on that (admittedly large) prize, it can be hard to see where the rest of the project is going. That’s why, for this week’s blog post, I want to take a step back, and look at the current roadmap for updates that should lead us more or less all the way up to the 1.0 firmware update - the “release” version.
Automating PETI Font Changes
2024-02-06 05:00:00 -0600
Just last time, I talked about how I’ve been working on making some changes to how fonts are handled in PETI; specifically, switching to a more standard font “source” format that would allow more choice on the developer end, insofar as what tools would be usable for editing the fotns. We chiefly did this by creating a FontX2-format exporter for the older fontedit editor, since fontx2 is a relatively simple bitmap font format used by lots of other embedded devlopers, and usable for quite a few different font editors. The simplicity of the format gave me a pretty clear idea for how to get the fonts included directly into PETI’s source code, which itself gave me some ideas for working toward one of the loftier end-goals of the project.