Not sure I buy the “dominos falling” theory, but interesting/sad that Firefox might be about to fall under the USWDS 2% threshold for browser support www.brycewray.com/posts/202…
As of yesterday, Doom is 30 years old
It’s interesting that Newsblur, Pinboard.in, and micro.blog all make bookmark archiving part of their premium offering. Maybe it’s an easy way to add value?
I was a happy Newsblur user for a number of years, but decided to give it a break for while, trying out non-cloud options like Rad Reader.
But, none of these ever really felt like a good fit, so back to Newsblur.
My favorite bit in the new Aesop Rock album might be where he spends a bar explaining the previous line (from ‘100 Feet Tall’, a story about running into Mr. T at Carnegie Deli in the 80’s):
From a television toughie to endearing it’s eerie
Started rubbing his belly, then a quip for the pups
“It takes a place like this to fill Mr. T up”
Get it? For those of you who don’t know the establishment
They’re famous in Manhattan for serving gigantic sandwiches
🎵
twenty thousand milliseconds
I’ve submitted twenty thousand milliseconds to the 20 Second Game Jam.
I’m not even necessarily sure it qualifies as a game. Maybe it’s more like a mutant skill challenge?
I wanted to do more with sound and graphics and juice and didn’t quite budget my time well enough to get there. Still, it’s nice to ship a thing.
Bonus complaint: mastodon polls don’t translate over, they just disappear– compare this to how that conversation appears on micro.blog.
A month on micro
About a month ago, I migrated my mastodon account over to this blog (via micro.blog’s built-in support for ActivityPub). How’s that going?
Mostly good. I like that I’ve got a full-fledged personal website here, that is fully customizable and could theoretically run anywhere. Behind the scenes, it’s just hugo.
I appreciate how micro.blog is trying to differentiate itself from traditional social media, creating a space that doesn’t reward popularity or sensationalism. There are no trending topics, follower counts, likes, or retweets to chase– just people writing and the things they write.
twenty thousand milliseconds
A submission to the 20 SECOND GAME JAM 2023, which tests your ability to differentiate between time intervals of less than 1 second. Made with Godot 4. Play on itch.io.
What are your favorite websites that aren’t around anymore?
I’m not sure we’ll watch Merry Little Batman, but it brings me some joy to see Jingle Bells, Batman Smells in an official DC production.
Decker
I’ve likened Godot to Hypercard before– they aren’t directly comparable, but my experience using Godot brought back a sense of possibility and fun that I felt when using Hypercard back in the 90’s.
I should probably be pretty excited to learn about Decker, which has modern touches, but also seems to lean pretty hard on nostalgia and Hypercard/Macpaint aesthetics. I’ll carve out some more time to kick it around some more, but honestly it leaves me a bit cold.
Currently reading: Petrograd by Philip Gelatt 📚
My excellent co-worker Adam created this online tuner for community radio stations: www.ldial.org (which is also excellent)
Troubleshooting before coffee
I spent at least 30 minutes trying to figure out why the score in my game wasn’t updating past the first point. It would go from 0 to 1, but then stayed at 1. I had a setter on the score variable, to update the score label shown to the user whenever the score changed.
It turned out, my setter wasn’t actually setting, so to score was always zero, and the incoming new score was always 1.
This is a good bundle of security books. I can vouch for Threats and Security Culture Playbook being worthwhile, and Software Transparency is on my to-read list.
Testing out Lillihub!
Currently reading: How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk by Douglas W. Hubbard 📚
Two chapters in, and I really appreciate learning about:
Currently reading: Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom 📚
I need to study this some more, but there are some good ideas in this cATO playbook, and the manifesto it links to: rise8-us.github.io/cato-play…
(hey, look, it’s an infosec post!)
Considering learning C#. I don’t even know who I am anymore.
Deadly Class
Finished reading: Deadly Class Vol 12: A Fond Farewell, Part Two by Rick Remender 📚
Some of the late-middle volumes were a bit of a drag for me, the characters and their exploits didn’t seem that interesting after leaving school. In this final arc (volume 11 and 12), I enjoyed seeing how these people turned out as adults, and the ending was pretty satisfying.
Long after I’m dead, there will still be articles using this picture I took in 2004 www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2…
Personal SEO
I’ve been spending some time trying to clean up search results for my name (yeah, kind of douchy, sorry), and one thing that’s been vexing me is my old Twitter name. I deleted my ‘rossk’ account a while back, but I guess 15 years of google juice means my name will forever be linked with twitter.com/rossk, even though someone else owns it now.
All of that is to say, I’ve created a new twitter account, which I hope becomes more prominent in search results for “Ross Karchner”, and which links back to this site.
Back to making
One week turned into three weeks, but I feel like I’ve worked that particular digital addiction out of my system (and diving in to Snap has actually helped crystalize an idea I’ve been thinking about, so it wasn’t entirely a waste). OK, back to making stuff.
My current idea for the 20 second game jam is really simple and pretty wonky: a trainer for being able to differentiate times shorter than a second (say, 500ms vs 700ms). Back in 2015 I went to some Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) training where this was mentioned as a useful skill for SRE’s. I didn’t entirely give up, but at that moment my dream of ever being an SRE seemed a little more remote.