Game of the Year

“Thanks” to the Coronavirus for keeping me in my house, I made it through four of these. Of them, The Last of Us Part II had the best story, Hades is the best video game, in that it is fun and has great mechanics, and art, and sound. Ghost of Tsushima was a fun open world game, but wouldn’t make a Playstation 4 top ten for me. Final Fantasy VII remake likely would make a top ten list, but I’d hesitate to recommend it to people who hadn’t played the original.

Markdown is going on tonight

Let him who hath understanding reckon the markdown of the bear

Cross posting from a next.js blog to micro.blog

I like the idea of micro.blog, and I’ve lazily cross-posted my blog to the site via RSS for a while, but the feed always ended up in the format of [post title] - [link to post], which doesn’t capture the spirt of microblogging.

I reworked the RSS feed in general when updating this site to next.js, but I thought I'd take a stab at getting micro.blog crossposting working too.

Since I couldn’t find much in their documentation on what parameters were used to construct the micro.blog feed from an RSS feed, I found users who were cross posting, looked at their feeds, and then tested out a couple posts to see how they showed up on the timeline.

Notes:

1. It's much easier to use a JSON feed. This is perhaps not surprising since Manton Reece drafted the spec and created micro.blog.
2. Microblogging is strongly against using titles for posts.

I ended up taking the same loop my index page uses (gets every single markdown post, but then returns the latest ten) and running it through this function:

import siteConfig from "../data/config.json";
var md = require("markdown-it")();

const makeJsonFeed = (posts) => {
 const feed = {
   feed_url: siteConfig.jsonURL,
   title: siteConfig.description,
   home_page_url: siteConfig.siteUrl,
   author: {
     url: siteConfig.siteUrl,
     name: siteConfig.author,
   },
 };
 const items = posts.map((post) => {
   return {
     author: {
       url: siteConfig.siteUrl,
       name: siteConfig.author,
     },
     id: `${siteConfig.siteURL}${post.slug}`,
     url: `${siteConfig.siteURL}${post.slug}`,
     date_published: post.frontmatter.date,
     content_html: md.render(post.markdownBody),
   };
 });
 feed.items = items;

 return JSON.stringify(feed);
};

export default makeJsonFeed;

And on the index route, I use it like this:

const jsonFeedObj = makeJsonFeed(postsToUse);
fs.writeFileSync("./public/rss/feed.json", jsonFeedObj);

While I do have titles on most of my posts, they are optional, and I chose to leave them off the JSON feed. If they are added, micro.blog goes back to the [post title] - [link to post] I was trying to get away from!

You can see the result at my micro.blog timeline or in the JSON feed.

Trying two things: updating my old Macbook Pro to Big Sur.

And testing titleless posts for micro.blog RSS integration. Big Sur definitely didn’t work, let’s not go 0 for 2.

Spirographs

We were cleaning out toys this weekend and found a gear drawing set for making spirographs. A family member bought it for my daughter to take on a flight when she was younger, but she was too young to enjoy it at the time. We had more fun with it this week, and finally got around to using these Zebra pens I had.

But, the programmer in me said, “hey, sometimes the gear skips, what if we did it in code”, and made this.

The colors are random, have fun reloading / changing the variables.

Obligatory Simpsons gif:

SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY

Attempts at recording the RC car in slow motion. They’d be better if my kid didn’t get such a kick out of running off with the tripod.

When the all wheel drive kicks in.

I’m gonna send it.

I just like the sound on this one.

Pumpkin Leftovers

Day One (two, three, seven-hundred and thirty...)

I've gone back and forth on where to journal things for a while, but I've been using the MacOS/iOS/iPadOS/WatchOS app Day One for two years now. And I know it's been two years, because Day One has a feature where it shows you what happened “on this day” in previous years, and yesterday was the first day it had an entry from two years ago. And no, the entry wasn't “the end of 2020 is going to be terrible!”, it was about a job interview, which became theme in 2019.

I'm not going to say Day One is the perfect app, and I generally don't like apps with recurring fees, but it does a few things really well:

• You can see your posts on a map. If you usually write on your phone, or take pictures on your phone, it will infer the coordinates from that. You can then search for posts by location, or just zoom around all the places you've been.

• You can record sound from your Apple Watch. Sometimes if I'm just out in the woods/by the beach/listening to my kid sing a made up song, I'll turn it on.
• The aforementioned “on this day”, which has been wild in 2020, looking back at times when we did exotic things like “travel” and “see family members”.
• You can split the journals up by theme, but also view them all in aggregate, so I have one that’s just for food, one for rides/hikes.
• You can turn on end to end encryption on everything.

It has some silly features, like prompts. Some are interesting, others are like this:

I’ve never considered printing it, a service they offer. I back it up, you can export the whole thing to HTML. Should I print it? Maybe. I’ll make a note today and see how I feel in two years.

Adventure Princesses

CDs were better than this

Me: “Hey Siri, play Disney Radio”

Siri: “Now playing Radio Disney, presented by iHeartRadio”

🎵 weird tween pop starts playing 🎵

Me: “Hey Siri, play Disney songs…”

Siri: “Now playing Disney Radio”

🎵 mix of Disney soundtracks with extreme bias towards Mulan starts playing 🎵