January 2021
Image credit: European Union, Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery
Projects
Games Screenshot Manager: I’ve added a few new providers to get screenshots from, some file naming fixes for Windows and the option to download covers for games to create a nice gallery with them.
I still need to do some improvements on how options traverse through the CLI to providers to have a more robust system in place, and also to allow some unused options on current providers, for example allow overriding a provider’s default
input-path
or anything else, along with custom arguments that providers may need.I’ve uploaded my gallery of screenshots online. I’ve made that using the above and thumbsup along with some scripts to set it all together. I love the result.
Butterrobot has gone thorugh some small fixes as well. I’m already using the new version at work and everything seems to be working fine. I need to add some proper testing and review all the TODO coments I have laying around.
We got a brand new NAS at home and I’ve been digging through hard drives and computers to start organizing all my digital life in there. It’s a work in progress that will take a lot of time.
Home Assistant have a few improvements in terms of automations, lovelace dashboards and so on. Zigbee configuration has been a bit of a hassle since every motion and door sensor stopped being paired with my zigbee stick so I’m using a different integration to and so far everything seems to be working.
I’ve started learning Godot. I’ve always wanted to make and publish a game, and in the past (when I was very young) I made some small things using DIV Games Studio, Dark Basic and BlitzBasic but my career on game development ended abruptly, and there was that. Until today.
Even though I did some little game using Unity a few years back, Godot seems like a very powerful game development enviroment, it exports to several platforms, it’s easy to understand (though hard to master!) and it’s open source.
Not looking a career on game development but at least to cross out something I’ve wanted to learn for quite some time now.
I’m thinking the best way of handling “guides” for the blog (as I started with the one for Home Assistant). Sometimes I think a post is the better way because I can use as a note while I’m working on something, but lately I’ve been thinking on setting up a simple wiki that could store the same content but be constantly updated and I can use it as reference as well. I would have to find an easy way of storing the information and building it that is not overly complicated and allows me freedom to have it as a bunch of markdown files on a folder.
Books
The high lord (Trudi Canavan)
Finished the trilogy. I’m sad to say that this was average (at best) for me… the real story starts happening in the last book; pretty condensed for a trilogy while the first two only set ups the characters with nothing interesting happening and to make things worse the ending feels pretty rushed and boring.
I read it through the end though, so it had the necessary components to me to be engaged.
Started reading Masters of Doom
I couldn’t decide for any fantasy series to read now, so I’m going to read something different and see how it goes.
TVShows and Movies
Star Wars Marathon finishes!
Reached Season 5.
We’re debating if continuing with this or not. While I enjoy James Spader a lot on the show the main reason to watch it is the hook they have on us with the parent - daughter - spy mystery situation. It was nice at first but after five seasons we still don’t have clear answers for anything and when they give us a glimpse of one, on the next episode everyone seems to forget about it. It’s frustrating. And the relationship between the to main characters is annoying with their “Love, now hate, now maybe love?” behavior each episode…
Slow start for the Marvel’s Cinematic Universe on TV Shows. The first chapters are too much sitcom and very little “real world” related. I hope this unfolds better in later episodes and that the other series that are yet to come are better than this… I know that the last episode have more “Marvel” stuff, but it was one episode out of four released to date… let’s see how it goes on the fifth.
Games
The legend of Zelda: Age of Calamity
Finally rushed through the final parts of the main story. I liked the game but it got very repetitive and I grew bored of farming items or stuff to unlock improvements for the characters, so I just finsihed the 3 or 4 last story missions with my underlevel characters and called it a day.
Even at the end you got a lot of new stuff to unlock in the missions map, and that’s gonna stay there for the foreseable future.
I played a bit through it, the problem is that last time I played was on spring 2019… I forgot almost everything about the story so far (which I didn’t like very much at the time, and I wasn’t enjoying it now…) so I got almost through the end when I decided I should move into other things.
Got this as a Christmas present and I’m slowly going through it. There are some bugs here and there, but I wanted to play something Star Wars related and this seems the best thing at the moment. I love BD-1.
I discovered RetroAchievements thanks to RetroArch, and I’m amazed and how the community put this together for all of us. It works incredibly well (for the few I’ve tried so far) and you can even set up retroarch to make a screenshot automatically once you unlock an achievement, how amazing is that?
Articles
- [video] ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS The Final Fantasy VII Remake
- Rosenzweig – Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part I
- Steam’s login method is kinda interesting
- “Wireguard [sic]: great protocol, but skip the Mac app” blog post
- The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution and the VSCode gorilla
- The Embedded YouTube Player Told Me What You Were Watching (and more)
- That’s not how 2FA works
- Project Gemini
- [gemini] Every commit should be perfect
- Reflections on software performance
- Jumping on the bandwagon here: Newbies, listen to the established wisdom. I spent 7 years trying to make ambitious games to “break in” to the industry. I wish I spent 7 years making achievable games. The only time I tried to make something achievable, it paid off and I got a AAA gig.
- Andrea Scarpino - Sway and the Dock station
- NES Creator Reveals The “Shocking” Story Behind That Infamous Flap
- Firecracker: start a VM in less than a second
- Understanding the fork() system call in UNIX
- node.example.com Is An IP Address
- Use open platforms — or else