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Recently on builtwith.coffee:

  • Deacon King Kong

    [Jun 23, 2021]

  • Weeknotes for the week ending June 20, 2021

    [Jun 21, 2021]
    • It’s finished: Full photo of the patio in our backyard at night. Close up photo of the patio in our backyard at night.

    Well, “finished”. We still need ~1.5 yards of top soil to make a flower bed, and the light “poles” are a “temporary” solution of zip-tying 2x2s to the chain link fence. As with every time we do a yard project I overestimated how much pea gravel we‘d need, so I‘m trying to figure out a place for what‘s left in the driveway before ordering more stuff to... have dumped on the driveway.

    • Woke up this morning and when my daughter came down she said “Happy Father’s day” followed by “... do you like salad?”. Me: “uh, sure?”

    My Dad loves to eat... "salad"

    She came up with the same answer for her Mom on Mother’s Day. We eat a side salad with dinner a lot in this household, but I don’t think either of us have ever been like “oh yum yum salad my favorite”.

    • The above was made during the last week of Kindergarten. Now comes Summer camp. Summer camp days run longer than school days (yay) but means driving there for dropoff and pickup instead of walking (boo).
    • That’s it, I think? After finishing up the patio I spent most of my free time just hanging out on it. We did have mojitos with garden mint last night (on the patio, of course).

    Album a day

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  • Weeknotes for the week ending June 13, 2021

    [Jun 14, 2021]
    • Watching more TV than usual around here. Went through the entire first season of Sweet Tooth, and now I have to go back and read the comics. I remember the end of the world events being more vague in the comics, they’ve added detail to the TV series but I’m not sure the details make logical sense. Still, I adored the comics, and the first season does a pretty delightful job of bringing it to life (Bobby is…much cuter). Also watched Bo Burnham: Inside, also good. If you want to be convinced to watch it, just watch Welcome to the Internet here:
    • Read Nothing To See Here. It’s about raising kids who spontaneously combust, which, if you’re a parent, you can immediately recognize is really just all kids. The book included this article at the end, which resonated with me: I Was Worried My Anxiety Would Prevent Me From Being a Good Father. My Sons Changed That
    • Finished Ori and the Will of the Wisps. Great game, one of the few games out there where your character’s movements make you feel super powerful (Spiderman on the PS4 is another one that comes to mind). I wish the Switch Pro controller had a headphone jack because Ori has beautiful music but I had it on low volume since I was playing after the kid was asleep.
    • More yard work. This was the end of last weekend: My backyard with some of it dug out. This is where we are after this weekend: My backyard with a cobblestone border and paver stones It’s so close! And by close I mean many tons of pea gravel away from close!

    Album a day

    I took a break for vacation last week, and apparently forgot to update the last week of May… but now I’m back. The full list remains here.

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  • Nothing to See Here

    [Jun 9, 2021]

  • Weeknotes for the week ending June 6, 2021

    [Jun 6, 2021]
    • Our vacation didn’t quite go as planned, we ended up back and home after the long weekend, but still took the week off. Instead of going to one beach we went to a different, closer beach. Lessons were learned, let’s leave it at that.
    • Speaking of the beach, my daughter is now at the age where other kids just show up and they start making plans / coming up with games on the fly, so while we were at the beach a gang of children started building a pit of “eww-goo”, their name for sand + water, and then one of the children went to get more water but noticed a dead (what appeared to be an) eel on the way, and felt the need to pick it up and drape it over their arms and parade it around the beach.
    • Finished The 7 1/2 Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle. Recommended if you’re a fan of Dark or Knives Out or Inception (or maybe even Shutter Island). There was one part of the plot I didn’t think was explored enough but it’s a definite page turner.
    • Read One Man’s Amazing Journey to the Center of the Bowling Ball. I miss bowling.
    • As a New Englander my instinct when taking a break from one type of work is to do a different type of work, so I finally started doing something about our backyard situation. It started as:

    ... and now it looks like:

    and all of the materials have been sourced, cobblestones (from here) for edging and pea gravel (from here) for the inside. We debated pea gravel or something else since we moved here, but then our neighbors did pea gravel and it looked really nice so we went for it.

    • Sourcing yard material is always wild. If anyone wants to make a claim about video games being fantasy they should point at Minecraft. This is like a 20 cube patio in Minecraft and literally 5+ tons of rocks IRL.
    • Ideally the patio phase of the project will be done by the end of next weekend, but the weather this week is peak high temps for this area and more grass pollen than my face can handle. Really hoping a cold front moves in mid week and... all the grass dies?
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  • The 7 1/2 Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle

    [Jun 2, 2021]

  • Weeknotes for the week ending May 30, 2021

    [May 30, 2021]
    • It’s my birthday. And we’re on vacation. And it’s like 50 degrees and raining. I still put May as the second best weather in New England (the end of September / beginning of October being the best) but it’s still New England weather.
    • But we’re renting a house and who doesn’t love digging through the random mugs at the rental house for the best one (I didn’t pick this, but I appreciate the choice). A coffee mug that says "I Dig Gardening"
    • We released a new feature at work yesterday, you can now talk to a veterinarian on the weekends. After a year of doing work on an application that had nearly zero users I appreciate working on something that I can see people using.
    • I finished Can’t Even. I’m a millennial who usually can Can Even--maybe because I’m now an elder/geriatric/ancient millennial, but the book raises a lot of good points, like the switch from pensions to 401ks producing an endlessly growing economic engine that splits society into essentially people who are in debt and people who make money off of money. I have mixed feelings about unions and the death of said unions. My first job out of college I was a contractor working alongside union members and a lot of the stories of "the good old days" were just... white guys taking advantage of the fact that they were white guys. I’m not sure it was that different than in tech today, where white guys hire other white guys for good paying jobs. I still think the book does a good job of hitting the "Greatest Hits" of what’s wrong with our generation.

    Album a Day

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  • Can't Even

    [May 26, 2021]

  • ⎋ The Linear Oppression of Note-taking Apps @ maggieappleton.com

    [May 25, 2021]

    Notion, Roam, Evernote, OneNote, Bear, Obsidian. They are all centred around writing text documents that flow from left-to-right, then top-to-bottom; the way all text works in English. Even if they support other languages, you'd still write Arabic or Hebrew or Urdu linearly, just right-to-left.

    You might say this is what defines a note; it is a chunk of written text, presented as a small piece of digital paper. It's pretending to be a real piece of paper, but without many of the features that make real paper useful. Like the ability make marks on it that are not simply words in a straight line.

    Found on Ben Tsai’s Twitter, who posts about a lot of interesting non-linear note ideas. Some worth exploring:

    1. kinopio.club (and you can leave a note on my public board).
    2. mmm.page (in alpha).
    3. https://nototo.app (in closed alpha).

    And sort of similar (but as Maggie notes, much more expensive) options in Goodnotes and Notability for the iPad.

    Check it out

  • Weeknotes for the week ending May 23, 2021

    [May 23, 2021]
    • Finished Think Again. If you want the TL;DR version, watch this:
    • Kiddo turned 6. I feel like she turned 5 a few months ago? What happened to this last year. That said, my parents came up to visit this weekend because, unlike last year, they can. Big hit among the presents across all of the age ranges was Ribbon Ninja.
    • My father was up before anyone else this morning. In fact he was up early enough to discover that the bird feeder in the backyard isn’t getting cleaned out by squirrels, but by a raccoon. Later a hawk started eating from it. I think fencing in our backyard inadvertently turned it into a low-key nature preserve.
    • I might not be good at video games any more. I picked up Returnal on release day, I just beat the first boss this week, and proceeded to get absolutely destroyed in the second level. I just don’t think I can. I also picked up Cadence of Hyrule and also could not, so I finally settled on Ori and the Will of the Wisps which is beautiful and seems beat-able. Ori and the Blind Forest is one of my favorite games of all time and so far it looks like WotW matches it. Also picked up New Pokémon Snap but that was for the aformentioned now six year old.

    Album a Day

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