I started playing Caves of Qud this week. I'll probably be doing a lot of that. It is very engrossing.
I signed up for postcrossing.com, so I am creating some fun postcards to send people. I drew five random recipients that are all over the place. The five cards I'm sending are going to travel something like 24,000 miles in total. That's pretty cool. Snail mail is fun.
I'm starting to job search a little bit as well. Not very happy at my current position and I don't see things improving there. Looking to join a product company of some kind.
So far I am having a good time. I need to wait until the recipients have confirmed delivery and logged the cards inside the system before I can pull more addresses to mail cards to. I think that is fine; there's no rush and I wouldn't want it to turn into work anyway.
I started publishing a log of postcards here just as a fun goof.
Going bouldering outdoors for the first time and taking grad pics for my friends!
Also always thinking about what to do when my lease ends this July. I've lived in Oregon my whole life, but with the remote job I've got I could move anywhere (with a reasonable cost of living). Been thinking about Chicago?
It's a long weekend in the US, so I'll be driving out to Central Washington and spending the weekend flipping rocks looking for snakes with my family. Washington isn't an excellent state for herpetology, but if we're lucky, we might find a couple. Most likely are gopher snakes and northern Pacific rattlesnakes, but there is a very slim chance we might find a rubber boa, or possibly a sharp-tailed snake.
I just hope the lingering pain from my ankle fracture doesn't get in the way too much.
Probably melting in the heat here in London. When it's cooler I'll go out for a big walk, maybe towards Hampstead.
I'm going to keep working on my experimental web browser. To make a standards-compliant browser is (sadly imo) a huge undertaking, so I want to see if it's possible to extract the rough structure and content of pages and display them in a reasonable way, a bit like reader mode. Or like a text-based browser, but with graphics. I'm having great fun with it so far.
Ooh, sounds similar to an idea I had for making a browser that ran a "sensible subset" of HTML, probably something that is similar to what gets output by pandoc or sphinx.
Long weekend in the UK for most. Heading to a friend's for a couple of nights, BBQ and Pizzas.
Sunday taking the family to banger races, the headline race is Cars & Caravans which could be interesting. Never been before, watched Alex Brundle take on banger racing a few weeks ago and figured it looked like a good afternoon out.
Well this is completely unfair! I know enough British English to think you're talking about sausages racing (which is a real thing and can be dangerous) but instead you've gone and given the name to what God Intended to be called "demolition derby". We really are separated by a common language. Guess I will spend the weekend watching more RobWords, which isn't the worst thing.
This weekend I’m tuning HanGrid, a small browser-based incremental game about Chinese character components.
You buy radicals/components, place them on a 5x5 grid, and the game checks whether adjacent parts can form valid Chinese characters.
The design problem is making completed characters feel like the main engine, rather than letting players just fill the board with high-value components.
The instructions say to drag from the store to the board, but dragging did nothing. By accident discovered I had to tap the shop item, then tap the board.
Thanks a lot for the feedback. Both points are very helpful.
On touch devices, dragging usually scrolls the page by default, so the actual interaction should be “select a component, then place it on the board.” I need to update the instructions to make that clear.
The scrolling issue was my mistake. I forgot to enable scrollbars for the embedded itch.io frame. That should be fixed now.
Thanks again for testing it and reporting the first-minute issues.
After returning home and playing it for a few rounds, I think the current shop design -- the same selection of radicals in each slot, slots never cycle over without a purchase, and purchases make the price go up -- makes the game go pretty slowly. An unlucky run in the beginning can quickly cause the price to be >$1200 per radical with an income of ~$20 (over a minute per piece), and if nothing in the shop matches what you've got on the board then you still have to pick one (and watch the price go up again).
The "meta" seems to be to place and discard radicals (conserving central board space) until something you can make a 3-part character (yellow) out of shows up, then you place it + 2 partners in the center and surround its empty slots with blues. Each of those will get their base values incrementing automatically, so you quickly go from a lack of funds to plentiful funds just by sitting and watching the yellow improve its neighbors. In one round I got a 4-part (dark yellow? gold?), which provided enough income to quickly get three more 4-parts, at which point the game is essentially over.
The inability to move an already-placed piece is pretty frustrating. If I put some down to refresh the shop selection then maybe a potential 3-part comes along, but its partners aren't in the right position to link. I can put it down near one or the other, but that's pure hope of the second partner showing up again.
Other minor nitpicks:
Some of the parts look too similar ( 囗 and 口 are both boxes).
I don't understand why 人 and 亻 are separate -- 亻 is labelled "ren" rather than "rén", is the 部首 form distinguished from the 漢字 form in Chinese?
If an existing 3-part has one of its radicals show up in the shop then I can delete it and re-add it for a second yellow box, which feels too easy to be intentional.
I agree with most of this. The current shop is too punishing: if the shop does not offer anything useful, the player still has to buy something, the price increases, and the run can slow down badly. I’m going to change the shop so it can refresh/cycle without always requiring a purchase, and probably add some kind of “offer at least one usable component” rule.
The move issue also makes sense. Right now placement is too final, which makes early unlucky placements feel bad. I’ll likely add a move/swap option or some cheaper way to reposition pieces.
The yellow/4-part snowball is also not intended to end the game that quickly. That sounds like the upgrade/income curve is too explosive once a strong structure appears.
For the smaller points:
囗 and 口 are actually different components: 口 is the “mouth” component, while 囗 is the larger enclosure component used around characters like 国 / 围. But visually, especially in a small tile, they look very similar. I need to make that clearer with better labels, tooltips, or different sizing/styling for enclosure components.
人 and 亻 are separated because one is the standalone character form and one is the component/radical form, but I should explain that better. The pinyin display also needs cleanup.
Deleting and re-adding a radical to duplicate the same 3-part upgrade is probably an exploit. I need to track discovered/completed character structures more carefully.
Thanks again. This gives me a much clearer direction for the next balance pass.
I have started reading the malazan series and it is very good, so more of that.
I have a FOMO about getting value out of copilot's per-request billing before it's yanked at the end of the month, but in my free time I don't use LLM agents, even though I'm slopping it up at work so hard, also I don't know what I might use them for.
Perhaps I'll write a blog post. I've been very offline for ~8 months due to life things happening, and now that things are slowing down again I have bandwith free to update/engage again.
I told myself I would allow 6 months at this new job before deciding that indeed it's not for me. However, it feels "stable" for now post-rampup and there is room to use emacs as my world (via WSL). Tradeoff is it's underpaid and mostly in office. What I'm saying is I'll browse around and see what's out there, I miss being paid to write clojure
^lighter note, I'll play a bunch of OSRS with the wife and and stretch and spoil our cats, and it's a long weekend here!! yay
I'd be interested to hear how this goes! Are you migrating the existing cluster, or redeploying? I like the idea of having my k3s cluster be single-stack-ipv6, but I don't really have the time/energy to redeploy the whole thing.
I've been saying it for a couple of weeks now, but - completing Factorio (My last test-attempt at a victory ship got ~30% of the way there, setting off with my fuel stockpile only at 10%, so I'm hopeful that "just" waiting a little longer to stockpile fuel beforehand will see me through)
And sleep, catching up on sleep, more sleep, my God. I'm in the dubiously-positive situation of my day job work being compelling enough that I've fallen into working long days because I want to see things get shipped.
But also I'm oncall for work so we'll see if that gets interrupted.
Watching our goddaughter graduate high school. Not sure where the heck time has gone, was there hours after she was born to becoming an adult now. I love her so much and can’t believe the day is finally here!
I am preparing our boat to go on a canal and town based vacation. That’s supplies, fuel, some small electric work and some oil level checks. May the weather gods smile favorably on the next two weeks!
Getting Factor 0.101 packages working in Nixpkgs. Currently 0.101 is the default for factor-lang but this is out of sync with factorPackages which is 0.100. Seems a bit a tweaking is required to get the buildFactorApplication function running again. I think it might be working—let’s just hope I can get a review in the next 6 months.
studying pre-calc (just finished learning exponents / radicals, now moving into solving equations, word problems, linear and quadratic equations)
working on my resume and trying to find interesting jobs to apply to. i have more or less been told that i will not get promoted so i am going to look for remote roles
doing some interview prep (leetcode, figuring out how to brand myself)
cycling
spending time with family on monday
i had a good week this week and i'm pretty energized. gonna get drunk and play mtg with my partner tonight :)
I have a raspberry pi with an e-paper display hat which I'm hoping to repurpose* as a desktop TOTP code generator.
I wrote up a little Rust app (to learn Rust) to do it and it's great at generating the bitmaps for the display.
Only problem is I don't know where I've misplaced the pi. So I'm going to be looking for that this weekend!
I hoped to use this as a project to finally start blogging, but I can't really do much show and tell without a device!
*current purpose is to display a live map and timetable of the San Juan Islands ferry system but I no longer live there and moved the pi into a closet shoebox somewhere.
I want to continue working on my SOUP-like, but while writing the software renderer for it, I realized my linear algebra skills have dulled quite heavily since I went to university, so I might also carve out some time to brush them up (most likely with 3Blue1Brown's Essence of linear algebra). No more plans other than that, just chilling after a busy week at $WORK.
matt-y | a day ago
I started playing Caves of Qud this week. I'll probably be doing a lot of that. It is very engrossing.
I signed up for postcrossing.com, so I am creating some fun postcards to send people. I drew five random recipients that are all over the place. The five cards I'm sending are going to travel something like 24,000 miles in total. That's pretty cool. Snail mail is fun.
I'm starting to job search a little bit as well. Not very happy at my current position and I don't see things improving there. Looking to join a product company of some kind.
icefox | a day ago
Live and drink! And don't feel shy about playing on Roleplay mode if you get sick of dying to babboons throwing rocks for the 37 million'th time.
matt-y | a day ago
Live and drink!!!!
kaimac | a day ago
postcrossing.com looks like fun! (<- fixed your link btw)
matt-y | 21 hours ago
Thank you!
So far I am having a good time. I need to wait until the recipients have confirmed delivery and logged the cards inside the system before I can pull more addresses to mail cards to. I think that is fine; there's no rush and I wouldn't want it to turn into work anyway.
I started publishing a log of postcards here just as a fun goof.
yawp | a day ago
Going bouldering outdoors for the first time and taking grad pics for my friends!
Also always thinking about what to do when my lease ends this July. I've lived in Oregon my whole life, but with the remote job I've got I could move anywhere (with a reasonable cost of living). Been thinking about Chicago?
regulator | 22 hours ago
Outdoor climbing is such a blast. Have fun and stay safe!
TeddyDD | a day ago
I have to finally finish Disco Elysium since next game by za/um is already released :D
munificent | 23 hours ago
It's a long weekend in the US, so I'll be driving out to Central Washington and spending the weekend flipping rocks looking for snakes with my family. Washington isn't an excellent state for herpetology, but if we're lucky, we might find a couple. Most likely are gopher snakes and northern Pacific rattlesnakes, but there is a very slim chance we might find a rubber boa, or possibly a sharp-tailed snake.
I just hope the lingering pain from my ankle fracture doesn't get in the way too much.
jak2k | a day ago
I hope I'll finish my website rewrite and migrate some of my hundreds of bookmarks to it.
Maybe I'll also add a proper CLI to libfuckit and refactor it a bit. And I I manage to do a lot, I might even start working on an IndieAuth provider.
kaimac | a day ago
Probably melting in the heat here in London. When it's cooler I'll go out for a big walk, maybe towards Hampstead.
I'm going to keep working on my experimental web browser. To make a standards-compliant browser is (sadly imo) a huge undertaking, so I want to see if it's possible to extract the rough structure and content of pages and display them in a reasonable way, a bit like reader mode. Or like a text-based browser, but with graphics. I'm having great fun with it so far.
icefox | a day ago
Ooh, sounds similar to an idea I had for making a browser that ran a "sensible subset" of HTML, probably something that is similar to what gets output by pandoc or sphinx.
jak2k | 7 hours ago
This is a super cool project! I'm also playing with the idea of a document web. Unfortunately haven't started programming yet…
I'd recommend taking a look at rel=* links for semantic navigation (e.g. "next page") and at microformats.
icefox | a day ago
Playing Subnautica 2, messing with rendering in sdl3, and hopefully getting travel and stuff sorted out for the rest of the year.
sinclairtarget | 16 hours ago
How are you liking it so far? Subnautica (the original) is one of my all-time favs
icefox | 15 hours ago
Its fucking great.
[OP] caius | a day ago
Long weekend in the UK for most. Heading to a friend's for a couple of nights, BBQ and Pizzas.
Sunday taking the family to banger races, the headline race is Cars & Caravans which could be interesting. Never been before, watched Alex Brundle take on banger racing a few weeks ago and figured it looked like a good afternoon out.
tclancy | a day ago
Well this is completely unfair! I know enough British English to think you're talking about sausages racing (which is a real thing and can be dangerous) but instead you've gone and given the name to what God Intended to be called "demolition derby". We really are separated by a common language. Guess I will spend the weekend watching more RobWords, which isn't the worst thing.
yiyu | a day ago
This weekend I’m tuning HanGrid, a small browser-based incremental game about Chinese character components.
You buy radicals/components, place them on a 5x5 grid, and the game checks whether adjacent parts can form valid Chinese characters.
The design problem is making completed characters feel like the main engine, rather than letting players just fill the board with high-value components.
Prototype: https://chunq.itch.io/hangrid
I’d be interested in feedback on whether the first minute makes sense without knowing Chinese.
jmillikin | a day ago
First minute feedback:
yiyu | a day ago
Thanks a lot for the feedback. Both points are very helpful.
On touch devices, dragging usually scrolls the page by default, so the actual interaction should be “select a component, then place it on the board.” I need to update the instructions to make that clear.
The scrolling issue was my mistake. I forgot to enable scrollbars for the embedded itch.io frame. That should be fixed now.
Thanks again for testing it and reporting the first-minute issues.
jmillikin | a day ago
After returning home and playing it for a few rounds, I think the current shop design -- the same selection of radicals in each slot, slots never cycle over without a purchase, and purchases make the price go up -- makes the game go pretty slowly. An unlucky run in the beginning can quickly cause the price to be >$1200 per radical with an income of ~$20 (over a minute per piece), and if nothing in the shop matches what you've got on the board then you still have to pick one (and watch the price go up again).
The "meta" seems to be to place and discard radicals (conserving central board space) until something you can make a 3-part character (yellow) out of shows up, then you place it + 2 partners in the center and surround its empty slots with blues. Each of those will get their base values incrementing automatically, so you quickly go from a lack of funds to plentiful funds just by sitting and watching the yellow improve its neighbors. In one round I got a 4-part (dark yellow? gold?), which provided enough income to quickly get three more 4-parts, at which point the game is essentially over.
The inability to move an already-placed piece is pretty frustrating. If I put some down to refresh the shop selection then maybe a potential 3-part comes along, but its partners aren't in the right position to link. I can put it down near one or the other, but that's pure hope of the second partner showing up again.
Other minor nitpicks:
yiyu | a day ago
Thanks, this is extremely useful feedback.
I agree with most of this. The current shop is too punishing: if the shop does not offer anything useful, the player still has to buy something, the price increases, and the run can slow down badly. I’m going to change the shop so it can refresh/cycle without always requiring a purchase, and probably add some kind of “offer at least one usable component” rule.
The move issue also makes sense. Right now placement is too final, which makes early unlucky placements feel bad. I’ll likely add a move/swap option or some cheaper way to reposition pieces.
The yellow/4-part snowball is also not intended to end the game that quickly. That sounds like the upgrade/income curve is too explosive once a strong structure appears.
For the smaller points:
Thanks again. This gives me a much clearer direction for the next balance pass.
neeasade | a day ago
I have started reading the malazan series and it is very good, so more of that.
I have a FOMO about getting value out of copilot's per-request billing before it's yanked at the end of the month, but in my free time I don't use LLM agents, even though I'm slopping it up at work so hard, also I don't know what I might use them for.
Perhaps I'll write a blog post. I've been very offline for ~8 months due to life things happening, and now that things are slowing down again I have bandwith free to update/engage again.
I told myself I would allow 6 months at this new job before deciding that indeed it's not for me. However, it feels "stable" for now post-rampup and there is room to use emacs as my world (via WSL). Tradeoff is it's underpaid and mostly in office. What I'm saying is I'll browse around and see what's out there, I miss being paid to write clojure
^lighter note, I'll play a bunch of OSRS with the wife and and stretch and spoil our cats, and it's a long weekend here!! yay
janiczek | a day ago
Prototyping game mechanics for my postapo PBBG (~ browser text MMORPG) written in Elm.
samcat116 | a day ago
Moving my homelab K3s cluster to be IPv6 only and using Cillium, as well as deploying a NAT64/DNS64 server for all the stuff that still requires that
jdpage | 13 hours ago
I'd be interested to hear how this goes! Are you migrating the existing cluster, or redeploying? I like the idea of having my k3s cluster be single-stack-ipv6, but I don't really have the time/energy to redeploy the whole thing.
scubbo | a day ago
I've been saying it for a couple of weeks now, but - completing Factorio (My last test-attempt at a victory ship got ~30% of the way there, setting off with my fuel stockpile only at 10%, so I'm hopeful that "just" waiting a little longer to stockpile fuel beforehand will see me through)
And sleep, catching up on sleep, more sleep, my God. I'm in the dubiously-positive situation of my day job work being compelling enough that I've fallen into working long days because I want to see things get shipped.
But also I'm oncall for work so we'll see if that gets interrupted.
mvg | 20 hours ago
Going on a three day bikepacking vacation. Minimizing screen time, maximizing time outdoors.
addison | 20 hours ago
Getting the first massage in my life. It's been a tough few months and my partner suggested it, gonna expand my relax-horizon this weekend.
digilink | 18 hours ago
Watching our goddaughter graduate high school. Not sure where the heck time has gone, was there hours after she was born to becoming an adult now. I love her so much and can’t believe the day is finally here!
nehal3m | 11 hours ago
I am preparing our boat to go on a canal and town based vacation. That’s supplies, fuel, some small electric work and some oil level checks. May the weather gods smile favorably on the next two weeks!
toastal | 6 hours ago
Getting Factor 0.101 packages working in Nixpkgs. Currently 0.101 is the default for
factor-langbut this is out of sync withfactorPackageswhich is 0.100. Seems a bit a tweaking is required to get thebuildFactorApplicationfunction running again. I think it might be working—let’s just hope I can get a review in the next 6 months.paulocuambe | a day ago
Studying zfs source code and trying to implement code to read the uberblock.
mvg | a day ago
regulator | 22 hours ago
i had a good week this week and i'm pretty energized. gonna get drunk and play mtg with my partner tonight :)
phroa | 20 hours ago
I have a raspberry pi with an e-paper display hat which I'm hoping to repurpose* as a desktop TOTP code generator.
I wrote up a little Rust app (to learn Rust) to do it and it's great at generating the bitmaps for the display.
Only problem is I don't know where I've misplaced the pi. So I'm going to be looking for that this weekend!
I hoped to use this as a project to finally start blogging, but I can't really do much show and tell without a device!
*current purpose is to display a live map and timetable of the San Juan Islands ferry system but I no longer live there and moved the pi into a closet shoebox somewhere.
liberty | 18 hours ago
Probably write more physics simulations in Scheme. I've been trying to get more to run om the Web woth Hoot.
https://codeberg.org/liberty/physics
dhruvp | a day ago
Finally shipped the Voiden CLI Runner : https://github.com/VoidenHQ/voiden/tree/beta/packages/voiden-runner.
Now refactoring the code.
pralkarz | a day ago
I want to continue working on my SOUP-like, but while writing the software renderer for it, I realized my linear algebra skills have dulled quite heavily since I went to university, so I might also carve out some time to brush them up (most likely with 3Blue1Brown's Essence of linear algebra). No more plans other than that, just chilling after a busy week at $WORK.