If you want to learn IBM i with a modern IDE, you can actually use VS Code with https://github.com/halcyon-tech/vscode-ibmi.

I also made a subpar guide to getting started on IBM i with RPGLE at https://barrettotte.github.io/IBMi-Book. Its a really fun language/environment and I recommend anyone take a try at coding something trivial.

I explored this a bit last year in a project for converting small snippets of RPG, COBOL, and FORTRAN to a punch card like format in https://github.com/barrettotte/punchit

https://www.masswerk.at/keypunch/ is a good tool for getting the basics of the punch card encoding scheme.

There's also a handful of people over at Hackaday that have made hardware for reading punch cards. Example: https://hackaday.com/2015/01/17/arduino-reads-punch-cards/

Oh man I always wanted to build some insane things with redstone, but never got around to diving in. I have a little 4-bit architecture I'm working on so one day I can implement it in Minecraft and/or Satisfactory.

I hope to see your creation sometime, that sounds awesome

Apparently it is possible to create QR codes on Factorio's minimap as well. I wonder if it could be automated using the in-game construction bots.

[Example](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/gqfi33/you_can_ma...)

This is the kind of stuff I love to see; an absolute mad man

I think you mean an absolute mad scientist ;)