August 2022 is no more. August is typicallly an even slower month than July with most colleagues still on leave. Besides the yearly re-examinations, there's ample time to catch up on the latest literature. Another major part of August---besides the traditional SIGSCE paper deadline---was reserved for editing and re-writing parts of my upcoming creativity book: it's now officially greenlit for the Manning Early Access Program! I'm quite chuffed and eager to share more details. Very soon!

It's been a few months since I've got my hands dirty with some serious code. It's perhaps time to start thinking about bootstrapping another hobby project. In true "Scratch Your Own Itch" style, I've been reading more IndieWeb-related API implementations but they don't do much for me anymore. The more I see people add to their personal website tech stack, the more I think I should start removing stuff.

Previous month in review: July 2022.

Books I've read

In last month's review, I said:

I'm contemplating on quitting GoodReads.

This month, I wrote GoodReads is as good as gone. I enjoyed writing more in my journal lately because of it. I'll try out using The Story Graph links here. The Open Library is very slow, ugly, and its database is messy. There's also Oku but it doesn't seem to support something basic as book browsing without logging in?

• The Crown Conspiracy (The Riyria Revelations #1) by Michael J. Sullivan. A fast-paced adventure where the roguish do-gooders are everything but heroes. 4/5---not a brain burner, great pace, great cast.

I also started reading Daniel J. Levitin's Successful Aging, a thick codex on neuroscience and aging, but progress is slow.

Games I've played

After last month's Dexter Stardust, Kristien was really eager to hunt down more point & click adventure games, both new ones on the Nintendo Switch as replay existing classics.

• Agent A by Yack & Co. Crazy to think that this was originally "just" a mobile game. If you like escape rooms, you'll love these puzzles.
• Spy Fox in Dry Cereal by Humongous Entertainment. Despite the fact that the Switch port is horrendous, the jokes in there are designed to amuse both children and parents who happen to play along.
• Day of the Tentacle by LucasArts. The 1993 classic that is still every bit as good as it was back in 1993. If you never played this, you're not a gamer. This was our fourth playthrough---I think.

I bought Cursed to Golf at its release date, I've had my eye on it for a while. So far, to be honest, it's disappointing. I'll have a review out somewhere in September. After DoTT, in anticipation of the upcoming Monkey Island release, Kristien & I are replaying the first two editions as well.

I'm still on the fence about the the new Turtle's Cowabunga Collection. I heard it's really good but already have all Game Boy versions, and Shredder's Revenge makes Turtles in Time kind of obsolete. I don't care about online functionality.

Selected (blog) posts

• You should take more screenshots by alexwlchan, via Luke Harris. Damn right you should! I really enjoyed doing that for my old websites but still don't do this often enough.
• Sharding Yourself by swyx, via Jim Nielsen. An interesting approach to increasing the number of writing outlets instead of staying in "I have nothing to say" mode.
• Peter Rukavina mentioned a "leave what you can" Little Free Pantry. I've never seen a pantry like that in our area but we're (slowly) getting used to Little Free Libraries.
• Twenty Years of Blogging by Roy Tang. Twenty Years!
• Subscribification by Doc Searls via Rubenerd. Ads, ads, ads. It's getting disgusting.
• Sarah Solos, a BGG solo blog by Sarah Chapman that I enjoyed scrolling through.
• Performance productivity and building a culture that matters by Ben Werdmuller.
• Hyundai’s AES key was lifted from an example by Ruben Schade. Flipping through the linked article, as a programmer, I felt embarrassed.
• Work ethics by Jeremy Keith. More work hours indeed equate to less quality, but managers still don't get it.
• Ars Technica: US government to make all research it funds open access on publication. Fi-na-lly. Our university mandates the open access publication of pre-printed editions.
• Business Insider: Amazon's Empire of Surveillance. Yet another reason to dump GoodReads.
• The Wiper Blade Adventure by Luke Harris. A random story about random wiper blades that made me laugh.

Other random links

• Gum, for writing "glamorous shell scripts", leveraging Go's Bubbles and Lip Gloss frameworks.
• Quickchart.io, an API-based chart generator that looks easier to use than my default go-to JS framework, amCharts.
• And then there's ChartJS, perhaps also worth a closer look.
• https://boardgameprices.co.uk/. Does what it says on the tin.
• RingsDB, a deckbuilder for the Lord of the Rings living card game.
• Bun, a very fast JavaScript runtime drop-in replacement for Node/Deno that just works.
• VSCodium, open source binaries of VS Code that are telemetry-free.