March 2022 is no more. I'm starting to feel the same time anxiousness that Winnie Lim wrote about: it feels like yesterday writing "February 2022 is no more", while this month has three more days than the previous one! Looking back at the March blog posts, they were mostly about music: creating your own streaming server, choosing the right codec, an introduction to hip-hop. I recently extended my self-hosted Docker images with Gitea (and moved a few low-impact and private repositories off GitHub) and RSS-Bridge (to add a few Twitter/Instagram feeds of friends to my RSS reader). It's great how quickly one can set up virtually anything with Docker. I intend to find out how to encapsulate my wife's Wordpress + Moodle shenanigans into a self-contained Docker image.

This month felt rough. I am struggling to come up with interesting things to summarize here. I can't even remember what happened this month, except that most of it was filled with unpleasant events. A death in the family, COVID (and influenza) doing its thing after the Belgian government decided to not care anymore, Putin deciding to (try and) reclaim Ukraine, quite a tight academic teaching schedule and bread baking workshops in the weekends---it was perhaps all a bit too much.

Previous month in review: February 2022.

Books I've read

Almost nothing. I was just too tired. We were both very exhausted this month and decided to pass the evenings with a Flemish classic series Lili en Marleen from the mid nineties. I did start reading up on a philosophical approach to art history and aesthetics---De Moord Op De Kunst (The Murder Of Art) by Thomas Crombez. Although the material is very interesting, the writing style is a bit dry. My tired brain was unable to sustain much of the words. I'll have to re-read a few sections to better grasp its essence.

Games I've played

Just as embarrassing: almost none. After buying Puzzle Quest DS in February and playing half of the campaign of Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes, I stashed the Nintendo DS away for some reason. Re-reading these month review posts made me realize I should give them a second look. I also promised myself I'd get started on Dragon Quest VIII 3DS. That also never happened.

We did buy and finish TOEM this month, a beautifully crafted photo taking indie game. The pacing is just right, the mood is relaxing, and it's a lot of fun to discover and photograph fauna and flora. It took us 6.5 hours to complete (almost) everything. TOEM is truly a delight. It's from the Swedish devs "Something We Made"---the company name alone puts a smile on my face. We need more (AAA) wholesome feel-good games besides Animal Crossing!

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After re-reading my journals, I finally bought Okami HD for the Nintendo Switch and played about half an hour. Like I mentioned before, its style is simply put gorgeous.

Selected blog posts

• A collection of posts on Dockerizing (multiple) Wordpress instance(s) by T. Robertson
• After 2 years of work, I am now fully self-hosted (warning: Reddit)
• A Survival Guide to a PhD by Andrej Karpathy (which contains a lot of nonsense I'd like to counter in a future post)
• A look at search engines with their own indexes by Rohan Kumar
• "MP3 is dead" missed the real, much better story by Marco Arment
• Talent management at The French Laundry restaurant by Emmanuel Quartey
• Auto-rip Music CDs by Winny.tech

Too many people optimize sites specifically for Google without considering the long-term consequences of their actions. One of many examples is how Google’s JavaScript support rendered the practice of testing a website without JavaScript or images “obsolete”: almost no non-GBY engines on this list are JavaScript-aware.

Other random links

• A list of Official Nitter mirrors, the privacy-friendly Twitter front-end with built-in RSS feeds
• Run your own social network site for your friends by Darius Kazemi
• A Complete Guide To: Wu-Tang Clan, a Rate Your Music list by Vocab
• Ultratop Vlaanderen Jaaroverzichten 2002 albums, a Flemish top album history tracker