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playdate

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    What I have done in the third week of 2023 (teaser: podcasts, playdate, no movies)

    Streak, this is the third time this year I’ve managed to write down what I’ve done during the week.

    If you’re interested in what it was like before, you can read about the first and second week.

    • I have been very busy at work this week. So there was less to discover. I did a lot of walking with the dog (~ 50 km from Monday to Saturday so far), so at least I had enough time to listen to podcasts:
    • For these posts, I was looking for a way to log the podcast episodes I was listening to, but couldn’t find a way to look them up in Overcast. So I wrote a Shortcuts script that logs the currently playing episode to a Drafts document after 30 seconds.
    • 🥘 Speaking of the Shortcuts app. I love Mela and in my family we use Pon for shopping lists. Unfortunately, there is no way to export shopping lists directly from Mela to Pon. And it is not possible to import the corresponding Reminders list into Pon. So I put together a little shortcut that somehow does the job.
    • ❤️ I was playing around with my omg/now page.
    • 💻 I bought Photos Workbench. I think I will mainly use it to compare and select pictures. I really miss a corresponding function in the Photos app. I have looked a lot for alternatives and had even subscribed to Lightroom in the meantime. But that’s a complete overkill and I don’t want to have any more software from that company. That’s why I’m happy that an app has now been released that will hopefully take care of that.
    • 🕹️ Played Pick Pack Pup (2022) and the first ten levels of Gravity Express. The former is fine but I did not fell in love so far. The latter ist very similar to Rocket Bytes but Gravity Express has checkpoints, tasks, fuel, etc. I seems not that hardcore as the other. I really like what I’ve seen so far.
    • 🗼Stumbled across Lantern.
    • Bought Homecoming for Mastodon. I think this can easily be done via Shortcuts too but anyways …
    • 📺 No TV, now movies this week 😢
    • 🧊Gave the IceCubeApp beta another try. Unlike many others, I’m not warming up to the app. It has too many little bugs that make it hard for me to use it regularly. But of course, the whole App Store approval saga was funny - or rather the opposite.
    • 🎙️MacWhisper: It’s absolutely impressive what’s now possible.
    • 💬 Too much Mastodon but I really like it there. And Gruber even replied to me. He disagreed and I didn’t want to argue, but whatever!
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    🚀 Ah, cool, Gravity Express for playdate has been released! https://ninovanhooff.itch.io/gravity-express #playdate

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    What I have done in the second week of 2023 (teaser: playdate, macOS apps, podcasts, movie)

    After all, this is the second time this year that I’ve managed to write down a bit what has been keeping me busy during the week. 🥳

    • 😔 So, this was my first week at work and thus, unfortunately, again far too little time for things I really enjoy. (I’ll have to think about my work situation in great detail at some point).
    • 🕹 Playdate: After the two pre-installed games on my playdate, the first two new games included in Episode 1 arrived for me on Monday: Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure and Boogie Loops. Unfortunately, I’m completely musically untalented, so I haven’t looked at Boogie Loops yet, but I despair of Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure. As a now completely inexperienced player, I fail grandiosely at this game. For me it is extremely difficult. I just got to level 20 and I was told that there must be 50 levels. Another game on the list of games I will never play through. Bloom meanders along. I find it a bit of a pity that in the dialogues there are really only the same statements available, each worded a little differently. I don’t feel that you can really influence the story. I’m not 100% sure if I would buy the game again. I had a quick look at EYELAND. However, it doesn’t support savegames and so far I haven’t felt like trying to tackle it in one go.
    • 🎧 Podcasts: Despite the ones I regularly listen to (ATP, The Talk Show, Automators, Connected, Techmeme Ride Home) and due to my recent interest in micro.blog and omg.lol, I stumbled upon Hemispheric Views by Andrew Canion, Jason Burk, and Martin Feld as well as Core Intuition by Manton Reece and Daniel Jalkut.
    • 📔 I’ve written a follow up post to my short list of non-work related macOS apps I really like: Even more macOS apps I enjoy using 😎
    • 🍿 I’ve watched Avatar: The Way of Water in the cinema with my family. Bombastic, sure, but - as expected - completely irrelevant and above all predictable plot. Still, I didn’t regret going to the cinema again.
    • 📺 Together with my wife I finished watching the third season of For All Mankind. I think I liked it better than the second and I’m looking forward to the fourth.
    • 🤓 Because of omg.lol , I tried to understand IRC. It’s been a long time since I was on it. It felt like back in the Amiga days. I’ve installed irssi via Homebrew, was able to connect, but failed with its operation. I’ll have to look at it again some other time. Even though I am not a fan of, I understand very well why Discord etc. have become famous 🤦‍♂️
    • 🍩 I’ve 3Dprinted some small things, primarily for household or work purposes, such as an iPad Stand, to use it as a second monitor at work and a tea bag drainer. And of course things for my AnkerMake M5 itself, like Spare Parts Box and Accessory Bins. (I was already afraid that this is another hobby that is only concerned with itself. In other words, you do things with it that you only do because you now have this thing that does things … You understand me.)
    • 🤯 For me, I still haven’t been able to conclusively determine on which platform I want to follow whom and where I want to post something and how. The interoperability of the fedivers (micro.blog <-> mastodon together with RSS etc.) is ingenious, but it also leads to a lot of friction and redundancy at least for me. I definitely need to get better at this. In all the experimenting I’ve been doing over the last few days, I’ve often had the problem of finding the exact URL of an RSS feed. To achive this via Reeder or similar was too cumbersome for me and the times when the browser I use simply displayed the feeds prominently are also long gone. I have therefore created an iOS/macOS shortcuts. I’m not good at it, but it does the job I hope.
    • 👨‍💻 Oh, I almost forgot. The battery on my private Intel MacBook Pro was dead. I had it replaced. It cost me € 229 - not exactly cheap. But the whole thing, including sending it in (to the Czech Republic, repair and return) took less than three days 👏. However, I got a new top case with a new keyboard etc., which probably wasn’t a bad idea for that model. Since it had already been in use for several years, I decided to completely rebuild it. I would have preferred to save myself the experience. So many little macOS (iCloud) bugs in the process really annoyed me and the new system settings are hell.

    🙋‍♂️

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    What I have done in the first week of 2023 (teaser: mastodon, omg.lol, playdate, ankermake)

    I was motivated by muhh’s blog entry to write down what was on my mind in the first week of January. I’m not sure yet if this will become something more regular, but I wanted to start putting something online more often anyway - more on that below.

    I’ve had the last two weeks off. The weather was bad, I had a cold 🤧 and therefore a lot of cycling wasn’t an option either (at least that’s what I told myself). So, I used the time to hang out at the computer a little more than usally. There was a lot of exciting things to discover there. Somehow Elon started this with the downfall of twitter, which he initiated. I had only been there reading for years anyway, and then after the takeover I decided to download my data, delete the clients on my end devices and no longer use the account.

    As an alternative, I was of course interested in Mastodon and clicked an account on the standard instance mastodon.social. Thanks to tools like movetodon and fedifinder my timeline has also filled up pretty quickly, and I actually “met” pretty quickly some real people with whom you could exchange ideas in a friendly manner. All in all a very positive experience.

    One great thing about the fediverse is the extreme dynamics of the tools and clients that are currently being built around it. It feels like back in the early days of Twitter where, for example, a single programmer, Loren Brichter, with Tweetie could turn the whole twitter landscape upside down. (BTW he only has an inactive account on Mastodon 😢)

    I tried countless clients over a few days. Among others (unsorted)

    The official app is okay, but IMHO not great; toot! I liked the range of functions very much, but you also have to cope with the strange design somehow. Because I follow some accounts that post a lot, and since the timeline on Mastodon is not orchestrated by any algorithms, posts from other people are in danger of being lost. Thats why a good list function is very important to me personally. There, Mammoth also makes a very good impression, but in the end I was lucky and was able to test Ivory via Testflight. The app by Paul Haddad and Mark Jardine has an button design that is a bit too playful for my taste, but otherwise it is extremely stable and really great at everything it does. The recently added list features are awesome, as they allow certain accounts to be hidden from the home view. So, atm I stick to Ivory and am looking forward to even better builds.

    Then, sometime last week, I came across a post from @otaviocc@social.lol on omg.lol. And then, coincidentally, I signed up for the service with thousands of other people (who must have read a post on Hacker News and not otaviocc’s post 😎). On omg.lol you ultimately get a “funny” address on the web that contains a wide variety of small services. A single page website (to use as a business card), a statuslog, an omg.lol-email address (forwarder), different DNS services, pastebin, PURL service, a weblog (beta), etc. And while I was at it anyways, I also have my Mastodon account moved from mastodon.social to social.lol. Luckily that went really smoothly. It was a lot of fun getting involved, configuring everything and thinking about what it’s even good for 🤦‍♂️.

    In the meantime, I continued to work with the AnkerMake M5, which also arrived after a very long wait at the beginning of December. All in all I’m very happy with the 3D printer, but still don’t really know what got into me back in early 2022 when I backed it on Kickstarter. But that is definitely going too far at this point and maybe I’ll go into more detail elsewhere.

    Well, micro.blog is kind of a universe in itself too. In addition to choosing a theme, there is of course the client question. I got some for iOS (the official app, Gluon for Micro.blog and MacOS (MarsEdit 5, which I use via Setapp) looked at various editors (iA Writer, Drafts and Runestone. In addition, there are useful tools as Mimi Uploader (iOS) to upload images and Epilogue for Micro.blog to track books, but I’m just starting out here, there are just too many apps and I have to see which ones “click” for me.

    There are of course all sorts of little helpers for publishing interesting links and posts on Mastodon or blog entries. Among others Linky and Re: Toot by Simon B. Støvring (who, by the way, is also responsible for Runestone) I would like to mention at this point.

    As if all that wasn’t enough, at the beginning of last week, after a 1.5 year wait, I received my long-awaited playdate game console. (In the meantime I had actually already forgotten that I had even ordered it and I was all the happier that it suddenly arrived.) It’s a lot of fun to deal with the little yellow box and I wanted to jot down some impressions I got. I rented a domain with Wordpress installed last year already and tried a few things with micro.blog but didn’t really publish anything on either platform. This year I wanted to change that and thus started with a post about the playdate.

    All in all, it was an exciting time in terms of IT. Now all of a sudden I somehow have three blogs and will soon have to concentrate on one of them and see when everyday work starts again tomorrow, whether I still have the time and, above all, the desire to continue writing down my thoughts, or these escapades were again one of my “manic” excursions into something new and I would lose interest again the day after tomorrow - which would be a pity.

    So, maybe cu next week 🙋‍♂️

    PS: initally, I wanted to talk a little bit about the music and podcasts I’ve listened to, too but this post is already way too long.

    1. Update 22.01.2023: It seems like he is not actively developing it right now. ↩︎

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    playdate

    Picture of Playdate console by Panic

    I’ve been a happy owner of a playdate game console for a week now. I ordered it in July 2021 and finally received it a mere 1.5 years later. Since then I’ve really enjoyed the console. Every animation, every sound somehow expresses the joy and dedication that Cable Sasser and his team at Panic evidently put into the development of this – while rather expensive piece of hardware.

    I really like the first two games of Series 1 so far and they couldn’t be more different. Whitewater Wipeout is quite a challenging game of skill in the spirit of California Games, which I played with friends for hours on the C64 and immediately brought back fond memories. The game makes very good use of the crank. At first I was happy about 200 points, meanwhile it’s a few thousand and my sons, who grew up with graphically bombastic touchscreen games on iPad and Co. or complex titles on the PS4, also liked it straight away and now fill the high score. However, how you can achieve several million points in this game will probably always remain a mystery to me.

    Screenshot of Whitewater Wipeout Highscore on playdate

    Casual Birder is „a snap-‚em-all adventure set in beautiful seaside Bird Town“ and also entertaining. However, I haven’t really progressed very far here.

    I’m definitely looking forward to the next 20 games that are included in the purchase price, which also puts it into perspective, and I’m excited for the upcoming store (aka catalog).

    Meanwhile, you can load your own games and applications onto the device via USB or a website (called sideload). A probably almost complete overview of all projects can be found on the playdate community wiki. The games are often offered on itch.io and usually cost somewhere between $1 and $10.

    So far I’ve been into Bloom, „a real-time narrative-driven social sim about starting up a flower shop“ and Rocket Bytes, „a 1-bit precision rocket flying reverse platformer“. The former is just plain nice, the latter hard as hell. Other games I would like to check out are EYELAND, Daily Driver (Tech Demo) and A Balanced Brew. And if you have a dollar left over, you can also buy A Joke Thats Worth $0.99 for a smile.

    As if that weren’t enough, Panic has an app called Mirror that allows games to be streamed and recorded directly to a monitor. Accessibility has also been considered. And then of course there’s the development environment, once in professional and as if that wasn’t enough, also a comprehensive web editor, with which you can develop really professional games in the browser.

    It was also a good thing that I have been the happy owner of an AnkerMake M5 since December 2022, so I was able to get a suitable Magnetic Cover, because unfortunately I didn’t have the official ordered and now the shipping would be more expensive than the case itself ;-(

    3d printed magnetic cover for playdate

    I’m excited to see how the little yellow part will continue, I’m looking forward to regular game updates for the next eleven weeks and at the same time I’ll be listening to the official podcast. Long story short: for me personally a really compelling overall package.