Weeknotes 2021 W50

I finally booked an appointment to get my booster shot coming week.

Coming week also is my first week of holidays (I’ve got two weeks in total), which I plan on spending by doing primarily not much at all. There’s some work needed on closecontact, which will be my priority otherwise.

In the area where I live, a new pedestrian bridge, the Golda-Meir-Steg got opened last week. I checked it out for the first time this week, and it’s wild how suddenly, two separate areas feel much closer together with just a simple footbridge.

Also, I learned that Steg means footbridge in German.

I’ve put my experiments with Swift/SwiftUI on hold for now. The process has been too frustrating for a side project, for a handful of reasons. There is a lot to learn about AppKit, and the documentation is sparse. SwiftUI is not documented well and only offers basic functionality. Learning a new language (Swift) is taxing, even though fun — I like Swift a lot, turns out. Lastly, learning a new IDE (Xcode) and all its bells and whistles turns out to be a ton of work.

I was planning on using SwiftUI/AppKit for building a budgeting tool, but I’ve decided to redirect those effort into actually building something, with Ruby, as a command-line tool. Because I am so familiar with Ruby, I can prototype my idea far quicker than with any other setup.

Creating this product as a command-line app means that I can build it entirely around List of external textual DSLs. I find this particular interesting, because text files are as reliable as you can get.

For budgeting, I’m currently using YNAB, but the idea of not having my budgeting information available locally bugs me. It means that an internet outage, or a YNAB outage, prevents me from consulting my budget. The idea of putting significant amounts of my financial information in the hands of a third party is also making me uncomfortable.

My goal is to have a reliable, text-based, local-first app that I can use to manage my budget. This will no doubt be quite the effort, but what’s making this a lot simpler is not having a UI, and building it in a language I am very familiar with.

I learned about uses.tech today, and now I think I might add a /uses page to the site — similar to the /now that I already have. That might overlap with a colophon, which I have been meaning to add.

I discovered Scroll this week, whose markup language Scrolldown has some similarities to D★Mark.

Games: A bunch of my friends picked up Skyrim (Special Edition) and I’ve also been playing it for a bit. After some technical difficulties, I’m back in the world of Tamriel.

I’m taking it quite relaxed, talking to all the NPCs, reading the books, paying attention to what people are doing, and it’s a lot of fun. There’s a lot of subtleties that I missed previously.

I’m also playing Detroit: Become Human. It’s intense, and one of the most emotionally taxing games I’ve played in a decade.

TV: Lots of good shows on at the moment!

I watched the first few episodes of The Expanse season 6. I’ll wait with writing anything opinionated about the season until the season is already well underway.

I’m also excitedly watching the second season of The Witcher.

Star Trek: Discovery is not available in my region, and so I’m not watching it. It really sucks that it is unavailable, so I might see whether I can work around it not being available in Germany.

Don’t expect detailed reviews about these TV shows. I’m watching them for entertainment, not for the purpose of reviewing them.