I finally sorted out a dark version of my blog.
It’s not adjustable with the system theme yet, but I liked it so much that I’ve left it on as the default.
Thanks to Toby on CodePen for sharing the Christmas lights!
I managed to migrate a few older photos into my blog archive. Barring one rogue post, 2020 is now complete. I will try to finish 2019 in the next couple of weeks.
Blogging is back, again
Joel Gascoigne on the resurgence of blogging. Did it ever leave?
It feels like blogging and personal websites are back. And tinkering and sharing experiments, too.
I suspect this never actually went away, but I think in the absence of a social network based on open standards, it became less interconnected.
It’s wonderful to have a broader gathering place again.
Like Joel says, I am glad to see blogs and personal websites gaining more exposure again and, more importantly, that we’re gathering in places to share our blogs as well. We’re reconnecting with other bloggers once again. We have more places to meet, not just the one.
These days, BlueSky, Micro.blog, and Mastodon are my regular hangout places. They are open meeting places in that they either employ open standards or create open standards to improve social media decentralisation. They have chronological timelines, don’t do ads, and all support RSS feeds.
I’m more than happy to share on these platforms, and I hope that others will continue to as well.
Trying out TickTick
For the last weeks, I’ve been back to using bullet journaling. It works well, especially for my day job, for which I use a separate notebook. For everything else outside of work, though, it’s been working okay, but I feel I still need something digital-based for long-running projects.
Keeping a long list of tasks in a notebook is fine if you have one or two long-running projects, but I have a couple of web applications to keep track of and a growing project that now requires multiple lists.
I’ve tried almost every known task manager, and none of them has worked. Every task manager is different, so they usually don’t work out for me for various reasons. One task manager I haven’t tried though is TickTick.
First impressions are good. Tasks can be put into lists and even folders. They can also be tagged so that they can be filtered. A couple of extras I didn’t expect to see are the baked-in Pomodoro timer, an excellent addition to a task manager, and the ability to track habits.
It’s still early days, but it’s clear to me now that I need a digital task manager to keep track of these long-running projects. We’ll see how TickTick works out in the long term.
Tonight, the Lang household is celebrating Thanksgiving with the usual twist: a little turkey, roast vegetables, and Yorkshire puddings. We’ve settled down for the night with the NFL on.
Finally, I did it—deleted my Twitter account. It started out as such a fun and exciting place on the web, and it hasn’t been like that for me for a few years now. I’m glad I pulled the plug on it.
Considering cancelling my NYT subscription
My NYT subscription ended its introductory offer of £6 and is now £12 per month. I’m finding it hard to justify the cost now. I rarely read much of the news from the NYT these days, and I have also deleted their games app from my phone.
I enjoy the sports coverage on The Athletic and read some articles from there every day. The Wirecutter is also a good read, but to continue these subscriptions individually is almost as much as the full NYT subscription itself.
I might wait and see if a Black Friday offer can bring the subscription back down. If not, then I think it’s time to cancel the whole subscription. I’ll find coverage of the NFL elsewhere; that won’t be a problem. And there have to be good alternatives to the Wirecutter as well out there; I just need to find them.
This will be a must-see for the family. I can’t tell you how often I’ve watched the original animated movies with the boys.
I have mixed feelings about this morning’s snowfall. On the upside, the garden will be immensely picturesque under snow. On the downside, the golf course will likely be closed all weekend, which scraps the plans the wee yin and I had for tomorrow.
Walking the path with TypeScript
This week, I spent most of my free time adding an NPC character to my ThreeJS game and have them walk towards me each time I move my own character.
I’m using the A* algorithm. Each time I move my own character, the NPC finds the shortest path to my character using this algorithm and then moves one step to my character.
As I’m already using a two-dimensional array to represent the game’s board, using the algorithm on this array helped me get it working. What I wasn’t prepared for was the amount of code needed to implement the algorithm and move the NPC across the board. Still, I managed to learn a thing or two more about TypeScript.
What’s next for my game? I’m not sure yet. There are so many things that I could be doing, such as adding attributes for my characters, both PC and NPC characters, and adding more elements for the map, like ancient ruins. My youngest is also designing skins for the playing character and the NPC, so they’re more than just coloured rectangles on the board.
Projects like EmojiRain make me glad we have developer-friendly social media platforms again.
I had more fun with ThreeJS tonight. I increased the size of the board and added some trees and boulders to it. I am now at a point where I will focus more on building a representation of the board as an object to start moving my character around the board.
I continued to make some progress with ThreeJS and TypeScript tonight. I managed to draw a tiled board, move it around the screen with the mouse and be able to change my field of view with a slider.
Joan Westenberg suggests giving yourself 5-year timeframes. I love this. It gives you enough time to work on something, even tear it down, and start again.
Why 5 years? Because it’s the perfect amount of time to marinate in the quiet dread of potential failure, without fully descending into the loud panic of inevitable failure. Five years is enough time to tenderize the soul. You could go from a nobody to a legend, or from a nobody to a nobody with five years of extremely detailed regrets. Either way, you’re richer for the experience.
Molly White’s blogroll page is a treasure trove of RSS feeds if you’re looking to escape from the algorithm-based timelines of the big social media companies.
A couple of web development projects for the winter
Now that the golf season is down to me and the boys only getting out at the weekend, I can start spending more time on a few side projects. There are so many things I would like to learn, but I figure just limiting myself to a couple won’t take up too much of my time.
So, from now to March, I’ll spend a few hours each week on the following.
- Learning more about Rails 8 and Kamal — Dailymuse and Writeabout will each get a bump to Rails 8. Only Writeabout, though, will get the Kamal) treatment to begin with. When I have gained enough knowledge about Kamal, I’ll also look to deploy Dailymuse with Kamal.
- Learn TypeScript and ThreeJS — A work colleague showed me a hobby project he is working on using ThreeJS. It’s the perfect excuse to learn TypeScript and build something for the web that isn’t just another web application.