my problems with CP2077 (and lots of RPGs)

September 28, 2024  ๐ŸŽฒ โš”๏ธ

When Cyberpunk 2077 was announced, I was really excited. The teaser for it looked exactly like the Cyberpunk 2020 RPG that Iโ€™d like so much when I was a kid. When it came out, I tried it and it was a mess. Later, I heard they worked out lots of the problems, and I went back and Iโ€™ve been playing it. It still looks just about perfect, and gets lots of things right. It feels like a really good adaptation of Cyberpunk 2020. There are a lot of bugs and interface issues, still, but I donโ€™t want to write about those, because itโ€™s boring.

tweaking my 1Password library to bug me less

August 18, 2024  ๐Ÿช ๐Ÿง‘๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป ๐Ÿ”

A few months ago, I wrote about a new 1Password library for Perl, which I was using to stop putting sensitive information into my environment. I was pretty happy with this! It meant I could put a pointer to my credentials in my configuration, instead of the credentials themselves.

I still like printing code listings

July 12, 2024  ๐Ÿง‘๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป

I used to program on paper, then type it in later. Not all the time, but sometimes. Sometimes Iโ€™d write pseudocode. Sometimes I wrote just the code I would type in later. Sometimes just flow charts and subroutine signatures. These days, I only really do the last version, because I always have a computer nearby now. Iโ€™m not stuck in a boring lecture, for example, with only a legal pad.

trying to cope with Slack's BlockKit

June 30, 2024  ๐Ÿช ๐Ÿง‘๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป

The other day, a concatenation of circumstances led me to thinking about the lousy state of sending formatted text to Slack. We have a bot called Synergy at work, and the bot posts lots of content. Mostly itโ€™s plain text, but sometimes we have it send text with bold or links. This is for a couple reasons. Our bot supports channels other than Slack (like SMS and Discord and the console), so we canโ€™t express everything in Slack-oriented terms. But even doing so would be hard, because of the APIs involved.

listening to your friends' jams with last.fm

June 15, 2024  ๐Ÿช ๐Ÿง‘๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป

Quite a while ago, I wrote some Spotify code that would find places when my Discover Weekly playlist would intersect with those of my friends and coworkers. This was fun. Every once in a while, I talked about other things that might be fun, along those lines. I tend not to do too much with those ideas, because the Spotify API is often missing exactly the method I want, and I can work around it, but it becomes too much of a pain. Also, Iโ€™m a little lazy when the project will need other people to be interested, unless Iโ€™m sure they will be. Who wants to launch a flop to their friends?

workflower, for my dzil testing workflows

June 2, 2024  ๐Ÿช ๐Ÿง‘๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป

Starting ages ago, once in a while somebody would show up and offer me a commit that would add some automated testing system to my open source repositories. I liked the idea, but it always felt like a free puppy. I didnโ€™t know how it worked, I didnโ€™t know how the YAML file (always YAML!) was put together, and I didnโ€™t know what I was supposed to do when something went wrong.