Still alive

Hi there.

I haven't posted on Gemini for a while. Not for lack of interest, I've definitely been reading a lot of content on Gemini, I just haven't really been dedicating the time to putting words on uhhh... The screen.

The DIY PDA project is slowly crawling forward. I've 3D printed about 6 iterations worth of shell designs and I've soldered all the components together but I haven't actually gotten around to putting the two parts together yet. On the software side I started working on a calendar application and designing the associated file formats around that. The current question mark hanging over the project is around how I'm going to handle keeping time. I'm actually considering an approach which I thought was novel where we don't keep time with an RTC. Instead at boot we pull a Pokemon and ask what the current date is. This would mean that the battery life should be pretty insane because we can totally power off the device when it's not in use.

I've been doing a bit of game development lately. Nothing really concrete that I want to show off at the moment. I'm re-working a prototype I built on the Godot Engine to be a multiplayer 2D STALKER type shooter game with an integrated level editor. I've always enjoyed developing the systems in games almost more than the gameplay and I've got to say, the level editor is SO much fun to work on! So far I can paint tilemaps with a few different brush sizes and also place entities in game with JSON strings on them to allow customisation. It's great fun.

Reading wise I went on a bit of a Star Wars tear across the Christmas break and binged through the new High Republic books. They're good Space Wizardy fun if you're in to that! I also picked up Busy Doing Nothing by Rekka and Devine Lu Linvega which chronicles their trip across the Pacific Ocean from Japan to Vancouver in a 33ft sail boat. I would also recommend that!

I launched my personal wiki/digital garden space recently too. I mainly use it as a space to whack recipes and notes on things I'm interested in. I built it in Python and it ingests the Markdown files generated by the wonderful nb tool.

Busy Doing Nothing

Wiki

nb