Weeknotes 2024W52
The final week of the year! This week was a lot of Christmas activities. AM’s family and friends were all in town and we bounced around from group to group to see everyone.
For Christmas, I got a Camp Snap camera that I’ve been wanting since reading Jedda’s review of it. It is really fun to play around with! It has one button that takes the picture, one slider to turn the flash on or off, an LCD screen that shows how many pictures you’ve taken, and that’s it. The shutter speed is pretty slow (between 1/32 and 1/16 seconds) so it doesn’t handle motion well at all. Lots of pictures I took were blurry. I also learned that it is easy to get your finger/knuckles in the right-hand corner of the picture. Most of the pictures from this week feature that. Overall, I’m really happy with it. I can throw it in my pocket, hand it to anyone and they can use it, and take more pictures while still staying relatively in the moment.
I got a copy of Exploding Kittens for Christmas after I enjoyed it so much. It’s an expanded version for playing with up to ten players and it has some cool new cards. I really like how easy it is to teach but still has some strategy and suspense to it.
As part of wrapping up the year, I started filling out my YearCompass. I did one last year and really enjoyed it. It’s a booklet that guides you through reviewing the last year while preparing/roadmapping the next one. I’ll probably make a censored version as a blog post sometime.
For media, I finished reading A Wizard of Earthsea and posted my notes. I really enjoyed it and if you like an easy fantasy book with great world-building and prose, give it a read. Since it’s a series, I started reading the next one, The Tombs of Atuan.
I also started reading Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. I’ve been building websites for a while now and designing the damn thing is always the hardest part. Looking for the basics online never gave any actual concrete advice. Basically, I just want to know enough about design to make attractive websites and visual materials but I don’t really care about Gestalt principles and the ratio of length to width for a button.
In movies, I watched The Polar Express. The last time I watched it was when they wheeled in the TV on the cart in kindergarten. It was still pretty magical. I also watched Alice, Darling. I don’t know why I’m so attracted to stories of trauma and healing but I love them (e.g. The Women by Kristin Hannah, Baby Reindeer, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hosseini, etc.)
Links
- Mastodon Annual Report 2023 by Mastodon. A bit late but I like that non-profits have to disclose where their money comes from and where it goes. Yay for transparency!
- Meeting the demands of tomorrow’s Internet by isabela at Tor. Tor’s reflections on 2024 and projects for 2025.
- Ruby 3.4 Documentation: A Step Towards Better Ruby Documentation by Stan Lo. I love well-designed documentation. I think it really makes a project stand out when they’ve put a lot of thought into it.
- Hacking physics from the back of a napkin by David Wakeham. Napkin math is so interesting to me. Starting from first principles, you can calculate things that seem impossible with just a little bit of high school math.
- Numbers are leaves by Christos. If you represent integers as sets, visualize them as trees, then spread it out, they turn into leaves!
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