Week starting July 20th, 2020 (Week 30)
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I mentioned weeknotes before, but I thought it was worth expanding on.
There’s a trend lately of posting end-of-week wrap ups that contain the
little thoughts and notes that one might dump on Twitter, Facebook, or
Mastodon. Too small for a blog post, but in aggregate, something worth
reading. I have started to follow folks who post these things in an app
called Fraidycat. It’s an RSS aggregator intended for following personal
blogs. So far the experience has been positive, even though I’m
following a whopping two people, and looking to add more!
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Finished Halo 3 this week. Much shorter than the other Halo games, so I
was able to get it done well before the expected delivery of the next
Masterchief Collection instalment.
In other gaming news, my Thrustmaster joystick arrived. Haven't done too
much with it, but it's obvious that since joysticks have become more of
a niche product a lot more goes into their engineering.
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I've been running NoScript in Firefox. The web is *fast* when you're not
loading a bunch of random hostile scripts from adtech shops. I would
love an iOS browser that doesn't load external dependencies. No images,
no JS or CSS, just the HTML, rendered as cleanly as possible. If
something doesn't work for you, open the share sheet and send it to
Safari. That sounds like a project I could take on.
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Townscaper[0] is a beautiful game/toy. You paint lovely towns on islands
in the middle of the ocean. The interaction is really pleasant, from the
sounds to the interaction of new blocks with old ones. I wish I could
*touch* the blocks I'm working with.
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I’ve set myself another challenge. Not a big one, so I don’t feel like
I’m overloading myself. I discovered the Bike Citizens app, based on
Open Street Map. You can unlock free detailed maps if you cycle 100K in
30 days. The Cambridge map isn’t particularly detailed, but I thought
it’d be fun to get. I’ve managed 11K today, because I forgot to have the
app open for my other ride.
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I have a site I maintain called youreno.fun[1]. I just chuck all my meme-y
images on there. It used to be just an open directory with some
htaccess funkiness for better listings. Then it was a php script that
generated a listing. Then it was a script that generated a static html
page for the listings. Then I added pages for each individual image with
embed information.
Now I’m actually looking at adding tagging with an admin interface,
adding a database…all to get something that looks like a directory
listing.
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Went for a swim in the river Cam today for the first time this week! We
biked over after dinner for a dip. It was lovely and cold; just the
thing on a hot day. A dude on a road bike was angling to nick our
backpack (boy, would he have been disappointed), so if you do it, keep
an eye on your stuff.
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Last minute change of plans for the weekend. The region to which we were
going is listed as “an area of concern” regarding the novel coronavirus,
and I just found out many of the sites in the area as closed as the
council has been stiffing the charity that manages them. So that’s all
fun.
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[0]
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1291340/Townscaper/
[1]
http://youreno.fun
