I’ve started doing intermittent fasting to help achieve my fitness goals. It’s only been a week so far but I’m liking how it’s making me be more intentional about my eating habits. My eating hours are from 11am to 7pm, so I basically get two full meals and some snacks. I thought the hard part would be waiting until 11am to eat, but it’s actually pretty easy (probably all the coffee helping there), then when I do eat breakfast I can put more thought into it than when I’m half awake....
Woah three blog posts in a week(ish) is unheard of
JS Naked Day🔗 happened this week, and as usual, I’m fashionably late. I decided to permanently remove a significant portion of the JavaScript from my site as it was affecting load times. There wasn’t a whole lot of JavaScript to begin with, which made this pretty easy to implement. What I did have was the following:
1. A script to randomly select from an array of quotes to display in the sidebar on each page load I just removed this as I just wasn’t finding it amusing anymore....
This didn't start out as a rant about Discord, but it sure ended that way.
fLaMEd’s post about instant messaging programs got me thinking about my own IM journey. I’m too young to really have experienced the peak AIM and MSN days, but I did use MSN/Windows Live Messenger in the late 00s to keep up with some online friends I had met through various forums. Eventually, I moved to Skype as that is what all my IRL friends were on at the time. I was also on Curse Voice for the brief time it existed, mostly for voice calls during League of Legends matches....
Algorithms suck, except when they don't
As a teenager, the music I listened to was music my dad shared with me, music my friends would play when we would hang out, or music from video games and movies I liked. I remember spending time on Pandora creating stations based off my favorites in hopes I could find something similar I liked. I would discover a few songs this way but otherwise didn’t have much luck. As a result, I find I just listen to the same stuff over and over again, but there is so much music out there, I want to find more!...
This past week I’ve been working on a big redesign of my site. I’m trying to recreate the vibe of MSN / Windows Live Messenger around 2008-2011. Today, I spent most of the day recreating the avatar frame from WL Messenger in CSS.
At first, I was trying really hard to recreate the kind of squircle🔗 shape from the login screen. It turns out this is quite difficult in CSS, and the only way I could possibly have done it is through creating an SVG path that I could use to clip the HTML element, but then I would lose access to the border and box-shadow properties....
Man, my one blog post per week goal sure fell apart quickly. To avoid going too long without a post, I figure I’ll give a quick update on what I’ve been working on. Over at the 32-Bit Cafe, we announced we are expanding into a Discourse forum🔗! I’ve been spending a lot of time setting it up and working alongside the rest of the mod team to get it ready before the February 15th launch....
Last weekend I was really getting the semi-annual itch to play Minecraft. When I loaded it up, I realized it would be a good idea to do a backup of my world, because I hadn’t done it in a while. I’ve poured a lot of hours into it with my partner and we would be devastated to lose it. So I wrote up a quick rsync command to send it over to my network storage (a strong term for an Raspberry Pi 4 with a USB hard disk attached)....
2023 was truly one of the years of all time. In this post, I will look back at some of the cool things I did in 2023 and set some goals to achieve in 2024.
...
This week, Riot Games announced they are bringing their Vanguard anti-cheat software to League of Legends🔗. Previously introduced with the release of Valorant, Vanguard is a pretty typical kernel-level anti-cheat software, which is to say, a security nightmare. It runs at the highest level of permissions possible on your system.
A lot of people seem concerned that, because Riot is owned by Tencent, Vanguard serves as a backdoor for the Chinese government....
I recently read fLaMEd’s post discussing the shortcomings of linking techniques frequently used on the smallweb, such as link pages, webrings, button walls, etc. Many websites on the smallweb employ these techniques in order to connect to other stops in the smallweb space. I don’t think they are inherently bad, of course, but the context matters a lot. I want to know why the webmaster has chosen to put these links on their website, even if the explanation is as brief as “these people are my friends and their websites are cool....