If you add the third optional argument of "enter" when running the sha256.rb script you can use your keyboard to step through. I haven't set this up for the individual animations though.
ruby sha256.rb sizzzzlerz enter
I didn't do anything special for the terminal animation. I just work out the current state of the hash function at each step, clear the terminal, and print the entire state back to the screen. I know it looks like I'm directly manipulating each individual bit in your terminal, but really I'm just redrawing your screen.
I'd like to do something more practical in future, but for this I just did what I needed to do to get an animation working. Still, every bit you are seeing is correct.
I wanted to understand how SHA-256 works, so I made a terminal animation that shows the bitwise operations at each step. I wrote a text guide in the README.md to explain what's going on. I think my technical terminology is okay.
I'm new to hash functions though, so I don't yet know why SHA-256 has been designed in the way it has (e.g. why exact numbers were chosen in the bitwise rotations).
As far as I understand, the Sigma functions promote diffusion of bits to help prevent collisions, and Choice/Majority/Addition help to make it a one-way function, but I'm not entirely sure. I'd be interested in learning more about the design if anyone has experience in this field.
A friend of mine stretched her ears and went to Dr. Evil to have them sown up. He did a great job, and it cost £200. This is not available on the NHS and probably would have cost thousands (for someone with less experience in the same procedure).
I've been using Neo4j to store the bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin transactions have a graph structure, and so by storing the entire blockchain in a graph database you can easily query for connections between different bitcoin addresses.
My experience with Neo4j has been a good one. The database is currently around 1TB and runs continuously without a problem. It's fast enough to use it as a public blockchain explorer, whilst simultaneously keeping up with importing all the latest transactions and blocks on the network.
It took some time to get the hang of the Cypher query language to get it to do what I want, but the browser it comes with is handy for learning via trial and error. I found the people on the Neo4j slack channel to be incredibly helpful with my questions.
You wouldn't be allowed to do this unfortunately.