DEV Community: dayu2333-jinyul

I Built a Live El Niño Tracker From NOAA's Raw Data — the Part Nobody Tells You

dayu2333-jinyul — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 14:01:40 +0000

I Built a Live El Niño Tracker From NOAA's Raw Data — the Part Nobody Tells You

A couple weeks back NOAA declared 2026 an El Niño year and said there's a 63% chance it turns into a Super El Niño this winter. I wanted to see the current number for myself — the ONI, the index everyone cites — and quickly found out there isn't a clean live dashboard for it. The data is sitting in a bare ASCII file on NOAA's server.

So I built one. It's at https://elninoguide.com/ — the tracker page there is what this post is about.

The number everyone quotes is the Oceanic Niño Index, or ONI. Here's the part that trips people up: it's not a point-in-time reading. It's a three-month running mean of sea surface temperature anomalies in the Niño 3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific. That means the "latest" value always lags — the August reading isn't real until mid-September, because the June-July-August window has to close first.

NOAA publishes it in a plain text file at cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/data/indices/oni.ascii.txt. The format is one line per year, then twelve columns for the overlapping three-month seasons (JFM, FMA, MAM, and so on). You grab the most recent populated column and that's your headline number. Right now it's +1.39°C for MJJ (May-June-July), comfortably above the +0.5°C threshold that defines an El Niño.

The build itself is deliberately boring: static HTML, a couple of Chart.js canvases for the five-year ONI trend and the Super El Niño comparison, and no backend. I pull the numbers by hand each month when NOAA updates the file. That's it. No cron job, no scraper — just me checking the ascii file and updating one value.

The charts I actually care about:

the five-year ONI line, so you can see how fast 2026 has climbed (it went from −0.21°C in JFM to +1.39°C in MJJ — one of the sharpest La Niña-to-El Niño flips on record)
a table of the four Niño regions (1+2, 3, 3.4, 4), because "El Niño" isn't one number, it's a gradient across the Pacific
a Super El Niño comparison, because the 63% forecast only makes sense against 1997-98 and 2015-16

If you're into weather data or just want to see what a hand-rolled tracker looks like, it's all at https://elninoguide.com/. The full guide part of the site covers what a Super El Niño actually means for different regions, which is where most of the interesting reading is.

5 Arms of God Mistakes That Wiped My First 20 Runs

dayu2333-jinyul — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 05:37:27 +0000

Arms of God looks like a simple bullet heaven. It isn't. My first 20 runs ended in wipes before I stopped making these five mistakes:

Merging weapons too early. Level 1 + level 1 merge wastes most of the potential. Wait for both to hit level 5.
Ignoring element match. Mixing fire and ice gives a generic +10%. Matching gives +25% and unlocks tier-2 effects.
Spreading Cathedral upgrades evenly. The biggest resource trap in the game. Rush damage to 5, then health to 3, then speed to 3.
Picking blessings by rarity. A rare Executioner outperforms several legendaries on the Assassin. Math beats color.
Selling instead of disenchanting. Disenchanting gives crafting materials and a shot at weapon essence. Selling just gives gold you'll have too much of anyway.

The full list of 15 mistakes, with the fix for each one, is here: Arms of God beginner mistakes

Most of these come down to the same lesson: Arms of God rewards patience and punishes impulse spending.

I Lost 40 Hours in Arms of God Because Nobody Explained the Merge System

dayu2333-jinyul — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 05:36:56 +0000

The Arms of God tutorial tells you that merging weapons transfers stats. What it doesn't tell you is that merging a level 1 weapon is a trap.

I lost my first save to this. Merged everything early, ended up with a roster of under-leveled weapons at the Act 3 boss, and got flattened.

What actually matters with merges:

Level before you merge. Level 1 + level 1 gives roughly 60% of the stats of a level 5 + level 5 merge. Wait until both are 5+.
Element match. Fire + fire = +25% fire damage and unlocks the tier-2 fire effect. Fire + ice = generic +10%. Always match.
Rarity scales the transfer. Legendary donor is roughly 75% stat transfer. Common is about 60%. The gap widens with each merge.

The single biggest thing: get AoE or spread onto a rapid-fire weapon by level 15. If you haven't by the mid-boss, you're in trouble.

I mapped every merge combination and the synergy logic behind them here: Arms of God weapon merge combinations

The merge system is the real game. The weapons are just the pieces.

The Arms of God Economy Is Backwards — Here's What to Actually Buy First

dayu2333-jinyul — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 05:36:24 +0000

I hit a wall in Arms of God at Act 4. Not a skill wall — an economy wall. I was carrying 210,000 Gold I couldn't spend, zero Blood Crystals, and a main weapon stuck at +9 because I'd dumped Iron Shards into three swords I replaced an hour later.

The fix wasn't grinding. It was buying in the right order from the start.

The five currencies, and which two are traps:

Gold — common early, useless late. You'll have 200k you can't spend by Act 4. Spend it like it's free.
Iron Shards — the real bottleneck. Needed for weapon upgrades 11-15 and the Cathedral. Bottlenecked by drop rates, not farmable.
Divine Essence — rare throughout. Every wrong spend costs you a respec.
Blood Crystals — extremely rare. Limited supply, gone forever if wasted.
Soul Fragments — boss drops only. Don't spend on non-meta upgrades.

The rule: spend Gold like it's free, hoard Divine Essence and Blood Crystals like they're going out of style.

I wrote up the full act-by-act purchase order, including the Shrine discount timing most people miss: what to buy first in Arms of God

Took me about 50 hours to figure this out the hard way. Hope it saves you the Act 4 wall.

I built a reaction time test to see if I actually improved at FPS games

dayu2333-jinyul — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 12:31:23 +0000

I play a lot of FPS games, and at some point I got curious whether my reflexes were actually getting better or if I was just imagining it. So I went looking for a reaction time test.

The problem: every online test I found was buried in ads, wanted me to install something, or gave wildly different results each run. I'd test at 210ms, refresh, then get 340ms on the same day. Useless for tracking improvement.

So I built a clean one at checkreaction.com. It does the classic "wait for green, click" test, tracks your average over multiple tries, and gives you a percentile so you know if 230ms is decent or not (spoiler: it is — average is around 250ms, and pro gamers sit around 150-180ms).

If you want to know whether you're actually getting faster or just experiencing placebo, check it out at checkreaction.com.

I built a live El Niño tracker because NOAA's data was scattered across 10 tabs

dayu2333-jinyul — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 05:54:12 +0000

I got interested in El Niño earlier this year when the 2026 event started making headlines. Everyone's got an opinion on what a strong El Niño means for weather, but actually looking at the data turned out to be way more annoying than it should be.

The ONI (Oceanic Niño Index) number — the one thing that actually tells you whether we're in El Niño, La Niña, or neutral — lives in a NOAA PDF. The sea surface temperature anomalies are in a different chart. The regional forecasts are buried on another page. I'd have ten tabs open just to answer the question "so what's the current status?"

So I built a single page that pulls it all together: a live El Niño tracker at elninoguide.com. It shows the current ONI value, the status, and what that means region by region. I also added seasonal forecasts and practical prep guides, because "the ocean is warmer than usual" doesn't tell you whether to worry about your garden, your water bill, or your winter heating.

The thing I learned while building it: most people don't actually need a climate science deep-dive. They need a straight answer to "is this El Niño going to affect where I live, and how?" That's what I tried to build — the raw ONI data up front, then the practical stuff below it.

If you're trying to make sense of the 2026 El Niño, or just want one clean place to check the ONI instead of hunting through NOAA's site, the tracker is at elninoguide.com.

I catalogued the Borderlands 4 legendary drops so I could stop checking my phone

dayu2333-jinyul — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:20:40 +0000

Borderlands 4's legendary system is great until you're on hour three of farming the same boss and you can't remember if the gun you're chasing even drops from them.

That was me last week. I kept alt-tabbing between a spreadsheet, two wikis, and a Reddit thread from six months ago. Eventually I got mad enough to consolidate everything into one place: BL4 Wiki.

What I actually put together

Legendary weapons database — what drops, where, and the actual stats instead of vague "this gun slaps"
Boss loot tables — so you know if you're farming the right fight before wasting an evening
Vault Hunter builds — Amara, FL4K, Moze, Zane, with skill point allocation that isn't a 40-minute video

Why it's better than a Fandom page

No auto-play videos, no "create an account to view the table" popup, no six paragraphs of lore before the stat you came for. Just the numbers, organized the way a player would look for them.

If you're deep in the BL4 grind and want to stop guessing, check it out: bl4wiki.com

What's the legendary you've farmed the longest? I'm convinced the Hellwalker in BL3 never actually dropped for anyone and it's all a collective hallucination.

ARK 2 keeps getting delayed, so I built the taming database I wish existed

dayu2333-jinyul — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:20:19 +0000

ARK 2 was announced in 2020 and it's still not out. At some point I got tired of refreshing the store page and just started playing ARK 1 again — and immediately remembered why I kept quitting: the taming info scattered across ten different forums is a mess.

Half the answers are outdated, half are for a modded server, and the rest contradict each other. So I did the thing every frustrated player does and started my own notes. Those notes turned into ARK Wiki.

What's actually on it

Dinosaur taming database — time, food, and narcotic counts for the ones people actually ask about, not just the popular few
Crafting recipes — the full list, searchable, without the autoplay-video nonsense
ARK 2 section — what's been confirmed from trailers and dev streams so far (base building, the new creature roster)

The part that matters

It loads fast and doesn't blast you with ads. I know that's a low bar, but for a survival game wiki it's apparently rare. Everything is organized by what you'd actually type into a search bar, not by whatever taxonomy the first editor made up.

If you're still playing ARK 1 or just want to keep tabs on ARK 2 news in one place, give it a look: ark2wiki.net

Real question though — what dino did you waste the most time taming before realizing it wasn't worth it? Mine was a Carno that died to a pack of raptors ten minutes later.

Roblox Rivals Weapon Stats That the Game Never Shows You

dayu2333-jinyul — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:47:56 +0000

Roblox Rivals has 45+ weapons across guns, melees, utilities, and special items. The game shows weapon names and vague categories. It doesn't show damage values, doesn't explain fire rate mechanics, and doesn't tell you that the SMG you unlocked at Level 3 is outclassed by the Assault Rifle you could have unlocked at Level 5.

After testing every weapon across multiple patches, I cataloged the actual numbers. Here's what matters.

The beginner unlock path

Skip the SMG at Level 3. It seems like a cheap early upgrade, but the Assault Rifle at Level 5 beats it in every scenario outside point-blank range. Your optimal path:

Pistol (default) — serviceable. Use it to learn maps and movement.
Assault Rifle (Level 5) — your first real upgrade. Works on every map.
Katana (Level 6) — optional but worth it. 45 damage, fast swing, completely silent.
Shotgun (Level 8) — dominates close-range maps. One-blast kills at point blank.
Sniper (Level 12) — one-shot potential at any range. Highest skill ceiling.

By Level 12 you have a dominant weapon for every range bracket. Everything after that is optimization.

Stats the game doesn't show

Damage falloff — Shotguns deal 80 damage point-blank but tickle past 15 meters when only 2-3 pellets connect. The Sniper has no falloff at all — 100 damage body shot at any distance, 200 on headshots.

Fire rate types matter more than the number — Auto weapons (hold trigger) are forgiving. Semi-auto weapons (click per shot) reward accuracy. Bolt-action (cycle between shots) punishes misses hard. The Plasma Gun uses a charge mechanic — hold to charge, release to fire — that takes practice but deals 40 damage through walls.

Utility timing — Flashbangs blind for 3 seconds. Smoke Grenades block line of sight for 8 seconds. Medkits restore 50 HP. High-level players always carry a utility in their second slot. Skipping utilities is the most common beginner mistake.

The complete reference

I built robloxrivalsweapons.com to track every weapon:

All 45+ weapons with damage, fire rate, and unlock level in a searchable table
Weapon type breakdowns: how guns, melees, utilities, and special weapons differ
Tier list showing S through C tier rankings
Leveling guide to reach weapon unlocks faster (1v1 duels give best XP/hour)
FAQ covering unlock questions, event weapon availability, and meta picks

No ads, no signup. Check the Roblox Rivals all weapons list before you waste an unlock on a weapon you'll never use.

Midnight Chasers Car Guide — Why Buying the Most Expensive Car Is a Trap

dayu2333-jinyul — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:46:25 +0000

Midnight Chasers on Roblox has 20 cars ranging from the free Starter Coupe to the $1.2M Hurricane GTR. New players almost universally do the same thing: grind for the most expensive car, buy it, then wonder why they're losing to a $380K Drift King on Parking Garage.

The game doesn't explain track types or how stats interact with different circuits. It shows you five numbers — top speed, acceleration, handling, nitro, price — and lets you figure out the rest by losing races.

Three track types, three different cars

Midnight Chasers has three distinct track categories, and the optimal car is different for each:

Highway circuits (Coastal Highway, Desert Run) — long straights with gentle sweepers. Top speed dominates. The Hurricane GTR (97 speed) and Apex GT (95 speed) are untouchable here.

City circuits (Downtown Alley, Industrial District) — frequent 90-degree turns, short straights between intersections. Acceleration and handling matter more than top speed. The Eclipse RX (88/87/85) and Wraith Turbo (89/91/77) consistently beat the Hurricane GTR on these tracks.

Drift events and tight technical tracks (Parking Garage, Mountain Pass) — handling is everything. The Drift King has 98 handling and will gap any Speed Demon by 10+ seconds on a 25-corner circuit. The Razor Edge (80/85/92) and Storm Chaser (83/80/90) also excel here.

The earning priority that saves you 800K

Starter Coupe → Flash Z ($180K, Level 5-ish) → Eclipse RX ($620K, Level 25) → Apex GT ($850K, Level 35).

This path gives you a competitive car at every price tier and covers all track types by the time you hit Level 35. Skip the Bolt R ($500K) — it's a side-grade from the Flash Z with slightly better top speed but worse acceleration. Skip the Inferno S ($550K) — the Eclipse RX outclasses it for only $70K more.

A complete car database

I built midnightchaserscars.com to catalog every car with full stats. It includes:

All 20 cars with top speed, acceleration, handling, nitro, price, and unlock methods in a sortable table
Car category breakdowns: Speed Demons, All-Rounders, Technical Specialists
Best car picks for every playstyle (best overall, best for beginners, best value, best drift car)
Money earning guide with race payouts by track tier and daily challenge optimization
6-question FAQ covering the most common questions from new players

Free, no ads, updated within 24 hours of new car drops. Check the Midnight Chasers all cars list before your next purchase.

I Cataloged Every DTI Theme Outfit That Actually Wins — Here's What 200+ Rounds Taught Me

dayu2333-jinyul — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:44:54 +0000

Dress to Impress just hit 2 billion visits on Roblox. Every round, 8-12 players get a theme and 5 minutes to throw together an outfit. Then everyone votes. Most players average 3 stars and have no idea why.

After playing 200+ rounds and tracking what actually wins — not what looks expensive, not what VIP players wear — a clear pattern emerged.

The biggest misconception: VIP items win

They don't. A VIP dress with clashing accessories loses to a well-coordinated non-VIP outfit every single round. The voting system rewards coherence over flash — does your outfit match the theme exactly, and do the pieces work together visually.

Some of the highest win-rate combos use zero VIP items:

Layered Goth (black corset top, long skirt, choker, dark lipstick) — 5 stars on Dark Academia, Gothic, and Emo themes
Streetwear (oversized hoodie, bike shorts, high socks, sneakers) — 5 stars on Casual, Sporty, and Urban themes
Y2K (grey cargo pants, fitted crop top, chunky sneakers, butterfly clips) — 5 stars on Y2K and 2000s themes

All entirely free-to-play.

Y2K is the most misunderstood theme

Y2K shows up in roughly 20% of rounds and trips up more players than any other theme. People default to pink and rhinestones, but actual Y2K is low-rise bottoms, baby tees, chunky sneakers, and butterfly clips. Think Britney Spears circa 2001, not Barbie.

The non-VIP cargo pants in grey paired with a fitted crop top and the free chunky sneakers is a consistent 5-star combo that costs zero Robux.

Why I built a reference site

The DTI wiki has item names but no outfit combinations. YouTube videos show individual looks but aren't searchable by theme. So I cataloged everything at dtioutfits.com.

The site includes:

Outfit ideas for every theme — Y2K, VIP, non-VIP, seasonal, school, fantasy
Screenshots of each outfit so you can see what it actually looks like
Item names listed so you can find them in-game fast
VIP/non-VIP labels so free players know which outfits they can build
Updated for every new DTI update and seasonal event

No ads inside the content area, no signup, completely free.

What actually wins

After tracking 200+ rounds, the single biggest factor in winning is layering items that belong to the same visual family. A monochrome outfit with 4-5 layered pieces beats a rainbow outfit with 10 mismatched items. The game's voting UI shows your avatar for about 3 seconds — coherence registers instantly, clutter doesn't.

If you're stuck on a specific theme or just want to stop guessing, check dtioutfits.com before your next round.

test published

dayu2333-jinyul — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:44:05 +0000

hello world