💾 Archived View for gemini.panda-roux.dev › log › entry › 35 captured on 2023-04-19 at 22:39:33. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Posted on Sunday September 26, 2021
Hi geminiverse, it's been a minute.
Work has been ramping up in intensity over the last couple of months. I've been handed the reigns of a significant project that's been sapping most all of of my mental energy. The work is challenging and I'm learning all the time, so I'm enjoying it; but one consequence of this is that I've been all over the place in terms of personal projects. I feel like things are getting away from me.
I thought it might help me to list out each of the side projects I'm currently working on, in order to articulate them and "take stock" so to speak. I'll try and write a bit of information about each item after I list them all out.
A couple of months ago I found an old Palm Pilot device made by US Robotics at a local junk shop. After playing around with it for a week it was relegated to a junk drawer to gather dust. Last week though, the thought occurred to me that it would be a fun project to try and learn how to write applications for it.
I struggled for an evening to get a build environment and emulator set up for the PalmOS SDK, but I was eventually able to get everything set up and built my first "hello world" app.
I'd like to try and build a (necessarily offline) gemlog reader for PalmOS. I got comfortable with building basic user interfaces and managing the main event loop, but I stopped short of fully grasping the database/resource file APIs. They're somewhat complex and I'm holding off for a weekend when I have a good chunk of free time to take another stab at that.
I've been slowly fleshing-out a 2D game engine over a couple of years. It's got integrated Lua scripting, Codepage 437 text rendering, noise functions, and I recently added spritesheet capabilities. Over the last couple of months I've gotten it to a place where I'm comfortable with the progress I've made, and I've been fiddling with the idea of building a game with it. So far I've got a basic state stack set up, along with a sprite editor, asset pipeline, color pallets and sprite viewer implemented via the Lua API.
Progress is slow in terms of actually building something playable, however, because I only really enjoy building the systems and don't have a lot of ideas for creating playable games.
I've gotten about halfway through this; learning to use libcurl and ncurses was interesting. I am able to request pages and display them on the screen. My plan is to follow that up with handling various response codes and adding page scrolling. I haven't touched this one since July I think.
I made significant progress on this recently but I'm hitting snags with libmicrohttpd IIRC and haven't taken a look at it in two weeks or so.
Update: Someone already made this, so I'm going to use it instead of making my own
https://hub.docker.com/r/mailserver2/mailserver
I recently purchased an Espro french press and have been using it to make cold brew. I'm still trying to dial-in the right grind size and steeping duration, but honeslt I'm not too picky just as long as I get a sufficient volume and it doesn't taste like complete ass. Each batch takes a full cup of beans, which feels like a lot even when I'm ordering 5lbs at a time.
Haven't thought about this for a few months, not sure if/when I'll get around to it.
Once the weather decides to cool down I'm planning on getting out and shooting in the local riparian nature preserve more often. As it stands though, we're almost to the end of September and still in the nineties. It's getting old.
- panda-roux -
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