The most momentous thing of this week is probably that I bought a subscription for Pika and started this very blog. I’ll post-date an introdoctury note rather soon, but first here’s my first review of the week.
At work, you noticed once again that ill-used Scrum/Agile degrades into the PO and other project management entities using it to gain progress reports, whereas team communication suffered. And once that’s ingrained into the team, people live with that, look for workarounds instead of just talking things out. I’ve got mixed feelings about the whole process in general, but for once “No True Scotsman” does apply.
One the private side, I discovered too late that there’s a #CheapPcChallenge on the fediverse that ends in October. I would’ve liked to assemble some parts on ebay and build some special-purpose semi-retro-computer, including using it for a specific purpose, but won’t make it in time. But it did mean that I now ordered a few spare parts for projects after that deadline.
Also watched way too many YouTube videos about weird cults.
Health #
On a recent trip to the US, we did so much sight-seeing that there rarely was a day where we didn’t spend hours walking, so my ancient Fitbit watch rarely went below 20k steps a day.
This went down rapidly after that. Home-office, bad weather, and still no decent motivation to visit the gym I’m paying for. So my goal is actually setting up some routine to get that going again. Last time that really worked, I listened to a lot of the back catalogue of one of my favorite podcasts, Ken & Robin Talk About Stuff. I’m planning on going full retro, and restarting that. I don’t have the tiny iPod Shuffle that I used for this back then, so either I’m going boring phone + bluetooth, or get my iPod Classic working again.
Gaming #
No computer gaming this week. I did get to run two of my own RPG campaigns this week, after a long holiday hiatus. One in the real world, where I succumbed to a “roadside diversion” to encompass the whole game session again. This was less an issue when we gamed 8h sessions, but with 3-4h workday ones, I’ve got to work on my gaming style.
The other on was our long-running virtual Pathfinder 1E game. There’s been some interesting world-building, but it also means that we get a bunch of “end boss” fights now, which take way too long with the system. I do wonder whether we’ll continue that after the final showdown.
Oh, and the one campaign where I don’t GM will restart soon again, after a long GM burnout pause. Looking forward to that.
Side projects #
This category will hopefully expand a lot, I noticed that I’ve got too many notes about starting side projects, but not a lot going on. Things I’m looking at:
Programming & Computing:
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Getting more into Rust with some bookmark management tool (CGI or sync web)
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Tetris clone for a HTMX presentation I want to do (not written in HTMX, but serving as some kind of hook for the talk); Need to pick a minimal JS framework for this.
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Set up Haiku on actual hardware and see if I can stand writing native GUIs with C++ again (been burned here by MFC ages ago).
Writing:
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My other blog is starving, because I had high plans for it, writing more meaningful things about programming and programming history. Writing more here should help there. Plans: Getting syntax highlighting into the homebrew blog engine.
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My own “The Dark Eye” heartbreaker RPG. I researched rule system and picked a variant of Basic RolePlaying for this, which should prevent me from tinkering too much on that front.
Links #
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“Minminuteman”’s YouTube Channel – Debunking of bad archeology. With all the cults and bad politics, the whole “ancient aliens” weirdness is almost wholesome. And you do get to learn a bit about the actual archeology from the host.
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Building a Single Page App With HTMX – HTMX is supposed to be a way for backend developers to get better interactivity, so abusing this by having a service worker thread “backend” in Javascript is a weird hack in the best sense of that word.
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The Brutalist Programmer’s Manifesto – Classic case of “Haha, only serious”. Lead me to read up a bit more about actual brutalism, which everybody seems to define in a different way. But apparently this has been a problem from the start.
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Phlex – A Ruby template engine that actually uses Ruby. I still think the HTML-focused template engines everyone uses right now are badwrong. That was supposed to be an easy way for the old setup where a “web designer” produces a finished HTML page and then programmers spruce that up. Which almost nobody does anyway. XML should be produced, not written.
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Why Tcl – I like
turtlesTcl, and at least one other person on this world does so, too. Also, bisque Tk is best Tk. -
Creative Writing using Notepad++ – Syntax highlighting applied to writing prose. I like that this is a home-brewed solution adaptor for the author’s needs, not generic WordStar/org-mode/markdown comments & highlights. Also that it’s in Notepad++, which is one of the laste humble editors that try to stay editors.