The missing blog introduction post is going to be seriously post-dated, given that my draft goes into a totally wrong direction. But “soon”…
Work is, well, interesting. My project is running out sooner than I thought, so after an upcoming holiday, I’m looking for a new one. Or, well, my company is doing that (That’s were trading in more freelancer money for being permanently employed comes in handy). It’s definitely going to be another enterprise project, let’s see how well it’s managed…
Some random parts for my private “Cheap PC challenge” arrived (I’m too late for the official #CheapPCChallenge24). I’m aiming for a late 00s gaming PC I didn’t have back then, but staying on the cheap end of things. If you don’t want the top of the line CPUs, they’re going for surprisingly low money. I got a decent GPU, but mainboards stay surprisingly expensive. Let’s see what I can do with that E8400 and a Radeon HD 4850 card…
It does taste a bit like “retail therapy”, so to counter that I’m thinking about posting almost every non-embarassing thing I buy on this blog. Good filler, and maybe a small review.
Health #
Apart from scheduling a dentist’s appointment, not much happened there. I got my daily 10k steps in more often than not, but the gym is still eluding me. I did get an old iPod Classic armband. Not quite the right one, it’s a bit of an awkward fit.
Gaming #
I did try to install Master of Orion (the 3D remake) on my M1 Mac Mini machine, to play something between coding sessions, but I guess it’s a bit too old for that or the Intel emulation messed up. Wrong resolution for the display, but right resolution for the mouse events made quitting that hard, and all the while the part of the screen not covered by the ¾ game screen was flickering hard. And that even remained a bit after I quit the game, hope the backlight hasn’t been thrown out of whack permanently (it’s a cheap 2560 screen, but I kinda like it)
No tabletop RPG this week. One online session was planned, but two players didn’t turn up.
Side projects #
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Did a teeny bit of learning Rust, and might do two kinds of webapps as a test, the aforementioned linkhut/pinboard clone and a CV management tool (scratch where it itches, the Word templates passed around are one of thoe horrible messes where you change the alignment of something and everything is messed up, sirens in the distance)
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Had some ideas about a low-dependency syntax highlighting solution for my other blog: I’m basically expecting everything from Windows git-bash on the system, and vim is able to produce HTML output from a screen.
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A bit of reading for my “Pastoral BRP Project” RPG. Mainly about things that changed at the end of the middle ages, as I’m thinking about making that a common hook.
Links #
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Ponyhost LET Aggregator – someone posted this search engine for cheap servers. I’d be a bit worried that the company goes away suddenly or that I won’t get support because one person who sublets a server for cheap has to do everything on their own, but hey…
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Hyperkey for Mac – Wouldn’t you like a modifier key just for yourself? This is a relatively decent solution: Map one of your keys (like Caps Lock or the Menu key if you’re using a PC keyboard) to all the modifiers (Command-Alt-Control-Shift). This makes it easy to define shortcuts with the on board methods, while still not requiring contortions. I’ll probably post something about my complete setup and some favorite key combinations.
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Mirror Mode Mod for Skyrim – This came out of an online discussion on how to experience a game like the first time. You really can’t, but there were some interesting ideas. Using a VR version for example. Or this modification that manages to horizontally mirror the game. It’s a bit like writing or drawing with your non-dominant hand.
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Steve's Jujutsu Tutorial – Jujutsu is a new version control system that tries to take some lessons from years of git usage, but as with almost any modern VCS, it’s hard to get into. Steve Klabnik, who did a great job of explaining overly-complex Rust before, tries his hand at writing a tutorial. I think there’s some revision upcoming, but it’s already much better than the original documentation. (Note that I do find myself missing my old Subversion + Mantis Bugtracker setup a bit)
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Writing a mail extension for macOS with MailKit – I think most people agree with me that the state of email is horrible. It used to be somewhat simple, but then came HTML mail & Outlook. Modifying command line clients or the ones in Emacs is easy, but performance, ease of setup and displaying “rich” mails suffers. So this article where someone writes about their experience of writing an extension for the MacOs email client is appreciated. I remember using an extension way back that brought gmail-like shortcuts to the system. Maybe some itch is scratch-worthy enough to bring me back into Objective-C programming (or even learning Swift)
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Eliza in SNOBOL (PDF link) – The famous “psychoanalyst” chat written in an almost forgotten language. SNOBOL appeared in the 60s, and was decidedly un-Algol-like, a pragmatic programming language for string manipulation, using somewhat unique patterns. In this way, it’s a bit of a predecessor to awk (and arguably Perl). The SNOBOL 4 Book (PDF) is worth reading for an interesting historic perspective on language design that gets lost between all the Algols, BCPLs and Lisps.