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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
