“Get out more” goal for April failed. ❌
Oh! April just when by too quickly, and much of it was filled with family events that it left me socially tired. Fortunately it’s looking like May will be quieter so will try to get back on this horse.
I seemed to have developed some sort of condition where I hear American podcasters say Instagram, and it sounds like they’re saying “Insta-Graham.”
Near the start of the pandemic, I dropped my cutting board onto the tiled floor and it developed a split along the surface. This evening, five years later, that split finally separated apart. Not a bad run actually. And the board itself is still usable, it’s just a little smaller.
Since moving from Vim to VSCode back when I was learning Go, I lost my muscle memory for all those Vim keyboard commands I was using. Which is a shame, as I still use Vim to write Git commit messages. I probably don’t need to relearn them all again, but a useful subset would be nice.
🔨 XCancel
If you want to view a Twitter/X post or user without an account, this tool has proved to be quite useful. I’ve used it a few times and works flawlessly.
Oh wonderful. Now there’s an online sports betting/gambling site that shares the same first name as me. 🤮
And no, you don’t get a link to it.
Looks like a nice, polished, online Kanban board. Will file it away when I need something like this in the future.
Via: Mike Crittenden (the developer)
Oof! The cocktail of feelings one has when taking public transport: empathy for those stranded due to a major line disruption, mixed with relief that it’s not affecting your line.
A style of video I enjoy watching are vlogs by those that post other videos on YouTube. Because they put all their effort in their main topical videos, they can just be casual in these vlogs, with no pressure to be performative. It’s refreshing to watch.
I wonder if one of the desirable features of a foldable phone is its thickness when it’s folded up. Easier to find in a bag, easier to handle when using it in its closed form. I’m not sure it’s for me, but I can see it being a pro for others.
Gang-gang sighting in the park.
Devlog: Godot Game Update
A brief status update on that Godot game. I think we’re pretty close to a finished 4-1 level. The underground section has been built, and the level has been decorated. I’ve also added a couple of secrets, which needed a few new mechanics — like doorways, which are used to transport the player around the level — plus some refinement to existing ones. I am a little concerned about the amount of waiting involved near the end of the first half, where the player will need to make their way across a large gap by jumping on the slow cycling “layer 2” tile layer. I’ll see what feedback I get from play-testers about this.
I’ve also filled in the backdrop of all the levels to date. The grey default background colour has been replaced with a sky made of colour bands that came with the asset set I’m using. It’s basic, maybe too basic, but as long as it doesn’t clash with the interactive elements, and in the interest of “merely shipping something,” I think it’ll do for now.
Finally, I made some changes from feedback I got from play-testers. Movement can now be made using WASD, along with the inverted-T arrow keys. I’ve also bound jump to the Enter key for those that want to use WASD. I made some changes in how secrets are telegraphed with the goal of making them more consistent. This is always a bit of a balancing act, as I don’t want to make them too obvious: they’re secrets after all. I added a tiny bit of “slip” to the player’s movement, so they don’t stop dead whenever the key is released. I didn’t want to go too far here: adding too much inertia introduced the risk of the player just falling off a platform after landing from a jump, which I don’t think is a great experience. And I fixed a window resizing bug (Godot enables window resizing by default, for anyone else who needs to know this).
I think the next thing to do is to organise another version for play-testers, just to gauge what they think of level 4-1. Then it’s either on to level 4-2, or even introduce a new level between 1-1 and 1-2 to reduce the ramp up in difficulty between the two levels. Fortunately I’ve got some ideas on what I want to do for both of theses, so they’ll be easy starters. I’ve still got nothing for level 2-1, but I have a few ideas on what I want to do for 2-2, so maybe I’ll start that too.
If paying attention to birds is a sign of getting old, then I’ve been old all my life. 🪶
I’ve been finding great success in drafing up a post in my head about some missing feature, checking to make sure that feature is actually absent, finding out it actually exist, using it, and posting nothing. Call it motivated, not-looking-like-a-fool-on-the-internet approach to feature discovery.
🔗 You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown
A great post, and one that I agree with. The best designs of everyday things — light switches, road signs, etc. — are the ones that do their job without calling attention to themselves. And with the “out of sight, out of mind” operations of humans, I suspect it’s rare for people to wonder who were behind such successful designs. But that doesn’t make them any less successful.
Via: Birchtree
I’m pretty impressed by how full-feature GDScript is as a programming language. For example, I was wondering if GDScript supported lambdas, and sure enough, they do, along with full closures. These are pretty sophisticated language features.
You Probably Do Want To Know What You Had for Lunch That Other Day
There’s no getting around the fact that some posts you make are banal. You obviously thought your lunch was posting about at the time was worthy of sharing: after all, you took the effort to share it. Then a week goes buy and you wonder why you posted that. “Nobody cares about this,” you say to yourself. “This isn’t giving value to anyone.”
But I’d argue, as Doc did in Back to the Future, that you’re just not thinking forth-dimensionally enough. Sure it may seem pretty banal to you now, but what about 5 years in the future? How about 10? You could be persuing your old posts when you come across the one about your lunch, and be reminded of the food, the atmosphere, the weather, the joys of youth. It could be quite the bittersweet feeling.
Or you could feel nothing. And that’s fine too. The point is that you don’t know how banal a particular post is the moment you make it.
Worse still, you don’t know how banal anything will be 5 years from now, (as in right now, the moment you’re reading this sentence). The banality of anything is dynamic: it changes as a funcion of time. It could be completely irrelevant next week, then the best thing that’s happened to you a week later.
This is why I don’t understand the whole “post essays on my blogs and the smaller things on Twitter/Bluesky/Mastodon/whatever” dichotomy some writers have out there. Is what you write on those other sites less worthy than what you write on the site you own? Best be absolutely sure about that when you post it then, as you may come to regret making a point about posting banal tweets 17 years ago, only for that moratorium about banal tweets to be lost when you decided to move away from that micro-blogging site.
But whatever, you do you. I know for myself that I rather keep those supposedly banal thoughts on this site. And yeah, that’ll mean a lot of pretty pointless, uninteresting things get published here: welcome to life.
But with the pressure of time, they could turn into nice, shiny diamonds of days past. Or boring, dirty lumps of coal. Who knows? Only time will answer that.
Stripe support is a lot like democracy: it was better in the past, and on the whole it’s the worst one out there, aside from all the other payment gateways.
Today Melissa Lewis over on BlueSky pointed out that the font used in the infamous “You wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy campaign was actually designed by Just van Rossum, whose brother, Guido, created the Python programming language (https://bsky.app/profile/melissa.news/post/3ln7hx5rhcj2v)
She also pointed out that the font had been cloned and released illegally for free under the name “XBAND Rough”. Naturally, it would be hilarious if the anti-piracy campaign actually turned out to have used this pirated font, so I went sleuthing and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site with the font embedded (https://web.archive.org/web/20051223202935/http://www.piracyisacrime.com:80/press/pdfs/150605_8PP_brochure.pdf).
“You wouldn’t steal a corporate logo…”
I see why OpenAI is interested in buying Chrome if Google’s forced to divest it. I’d imagine it’s the same reason why Google built Chrome in the first place.
Perplexity buying TikTok? That I don’t understand. Smells a little like empire building.