Weeknotes 2022 W01
Second happy new year! Monday was, after all, the first day of the first week of the new year.
I’m back to work this week, which means the size of the weeknotes will probably go down as I spend most of my time at work instead.
I gave Night Shift a try on my Mac, which turned out to be a terrible idea, as my yellow-orange screen at 4:30 PM in Berlin winter made me nearly fall asleep at the keyboard.
Not much progress on my budget app prototype. I did integrate it with MoneyMoney, which I use to pull in transactions from all my bank accounts (via AppleScript) and compare with my beancount ledger to reconcile everything near-automatically.
Closecontact is on its way out, with most systems now shut down. It’s still possible for clubs to download their guest check-in logs for the time being.
Something I miss from my Shopify work environment: Shopify’s dev tooling has a handy control+T command-line shortcut, which opens the browser on the service you’re running on the terminal. I’ve gotten so used to it that I am missing it in adsf and nanoc live. Perhaps I’ll add it in.
Bread making continues to be fun and a good challenge! The loaf I made for Kat & Stephen turned out particularly well, and good-looking as well. This is one I made overnight, which might have had an impact on the consistency and dough strength. More experimentation needed.
I found that a homemade loaf of bread is a great gift, and a practical one to boot — at least for people who aren’t gluten-intolerant.
I wrote a summary of my Expenses for 2021.
I’m finally down to only one ISP again, which should make my internet expenses for 2022 less ridiculously high. I’ve had quite a bad experience with Vodafone (cable internet) but at least they gave me a nice year-long discount as an apology for period of time where I had daily internet outages.
Interesting read: Consider SQLite by Wesley Aptekar-Cassels.
The typical service-with-database-and-job-queue setup ends up requiring a lot of infrastructure for the sake of reliability and availability, but that gets expensive quickly. The infrastructure cost for closecontact is around €100/month, for reference.
For future projects, I’d like to play around with an alternative approach using SQLite and Sucker Punch. I don’t have much experience with this setup, and it‘ll require a change in the way I think about infrastructure and deployment, but it is intriguing.
In entertainment news, The Expanse season 6 continues to be excellent.
Against my better judgement, I finished Emily in Paris season 2. I enjoyed season 1 quite a bit — a much-needed dreamy break from reality. Season 2 feels just ridiculous, so much that my suspension of disbelief failed entirely.
I picked up Westworld and it’s fantastic. This show is intense, though! The fusion of science fiction and western is certainly unusual, but after a few episodes I think I’m warmed up to it. The opening title score is haunting me in my dreams already.
I put Red Dead Redemption II on hold because I can’t handle two western-style piece of entertainment at the same time. Silly brain of mine.
Matrix: Resurrections keeps playing around in my head. It’s deep, sincere yet humorous, and the more peel back the layers, the more layers I find. Renegade Cut’s video on The Matrix Resurrections (spoilers) is excellent.