Weeknotes for 2024W24
WWDC, Family, Blender, and Japanese
WWDC, Family, Blender, and Japanese
343 words
174 words
248 words
An open source font I rediscovered recently.
I recently added a “uses” page to my site. If you’ve ever been interested in the tools I use, take a look. If there are things not on that list that you’d be curious to see, let me know. :)
227 words
153 words
I started building a chess engine in Rust. Here it is.
Resolving, yet again, to blog more and social media less.
I came across this handy list of things to blog about when you don’t know what to blog about. As someone who often doesn’t know what to blog about, it’s nice to have a list of ideas for what to blog about.
I thought this book was a lesbian romance – and it is – but it’s so much more too. It’s the story of two women and the difficult pasts they emerge out of. I really enjoyed how LaCour wove together their processing of that trauma with growing into young women, making questionable choices, finding themselves, and ultimately each other. It’s heavy at times, but also beautiful. I really enjoyed it. Thank you, Tess, for the gift. ❤️
Get it at Folio in San Francisco, or on Bookshop.org.
I’ve been playing a lot of chess lately. Tess and I have been watching Slow Horses on Apple TV+, and there was a recent episode in which a chess game between two characters is a key plot beat. That got me thinking about playing again.
I learned chess as a kid. My dad taught me. I played in chess clubs in elementary and middle school. I was really into it for a while!
I have a Chess.com account now: erynrwells. I’m also on lichess.org: I’m erynrwells there too. Send me a friend request or challenge? :)
I really enjoyed looking through the images on Docubyte’s Guide to Computing. It depicts machines from the early days of modern computing – think IBM mainframes, PDP-1’s, and lots of midcentury modern design – in a way I found really intriguing.
I finally got around to replacing the Twitter icon in the site’s header with a link to my Mastodon page. It was surprisingly tricky because of how I styled and layed out those icons. I was able to clean up the SVGs a little bit too.
These days I have way too many social media accounts. I’m mostly on Mastodon and Instagram.
A kind reader pointed out to me that my Atom feed was incorrect. There were two
problems. First, I was specifying an incorrect URL in the feed’s <link rel="self">
– it was pointing to a nonexistant feed.xml file. Second, I was
omitting a <link>
tag from the entries entirely.
Thunderbird didn’t like this. With no <link>
for an entry, it would show the
feed’s <link>
in it’s UI. And that link left users at a 404 page.
I pushed a fix this morning. You might have to refresh or resubscribe to pick up the changes.
Someone shared my Netscape Meteors post on the Orange Website, causing it to be moderately viral for a few days. Here’s an update on the web traffic my server received.
I went on a hunt to find the "Meteors" loading animation from Netscape back in the 90s, and wrote up my adventure.
Tess, EJ, and I took a weekend trip down the coast over Memorial Day weekend this year to stay in a beachside condo in Pajaro Dunes, just west of Watsonville. We enjoyed hanging out on the beach, playing music and games, building Kiwi Crates, and just generally being together. I took a couple photos too. :)
At the beginning of April, Tess and I took a trip to Japan for two weeks. She had a work meeting to attend in Tōkyō, and we were lucky to be able to extend the trip to take some vacation before her meeting.
This was my first trip to Japan. I had been wanting to travel there since I was a kid playing Pokémon Red on my OG Game Boy. To say I was excited is a bit of an understatement.
You can read all about our trip on my travel log page. Tess also wrote about it on her website.
A brief book report.
I checked out Dave Grohl’s new memoir from the San Francisco Public Library as an audiobook after a friend recommended it to me. Broadly, it’s a series of anecdotes from his life, many of which include famous celebrities and musicians.
Dave seems like a really genuine person. Throughout the book he expresses his gratitude for the people who’ve supported him along the way. He’s been through many challenging experiences too, and reflects on them with a positive attitude. I enjoyed his humor and humility, and the pearls of wisdom he’d earned from those experiences.
While browsing r/nethack
, I came across a post from someone sharing a collection of AI-generated
images that illustrate the story arc of a game of Nethack. Between the images and the prose they added around
it, I thought they did a fantastic job of capturing the mood of the game.
A summary of my best-to-date game of Nethack.
In the wake of Elon Musk taking control of Twitter, a lot of folks have decided it’s not as welcoming a place as it once was. In my circles, there’s been a huge movement of people to Mastodon and cohost mainly. I have accounts on all of those places, though I haven’t quite figured out where I’ll land yet. If you’re interested in following me anywhere else on the internet, I made a handy list.
Tess and I were both sick this week and had a hankering for soup. We ended up eating soup for lunch every day. (What can I say, we like soup.) All of these places are excellent.
A quick note about the upcoming lunar eclipse in the morning of 2022-11-08.
I’ve found Hugo’s API for collections to be difficult to understand. Here’s my attempt to summarize it’s quirks.
A writeup of a small JavaScript waveform visualizer I made with P5.js.
Some roguelikes I’ve enjoyed recently.
In which I get hooked on that one roguelike (God help me)
In which I learn about how to profile my ZSH init files.
In which I submit a video of me playing a small Eurorack system to CMSS
In which I travel to the Pacific Northwest with some high school friends, and have a lot of warm fuzzy feelings about it.
A quick staycation getaway to San Francisco's Japantown with Tess.
A timelapse video of me building an Oskitone Scout set to music produced using the Scout itself.
A writeup of how I set up a Raspberry Pi to boot over TFTP to facilitate an operating system development project.