Ovyerus' weeknotes

Weeknote 31, 2026

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Another pretty chill week for me.

I did a fair amount of gaming this week, finishing off Black Mesa finally and playing Teardown with a friend. Black Mesa's Xen chapters are a considerable step-up from how they are in the original Half-Life, and are deliciously pretty. Interloper in particular was very nicely done, having to navigate through an alien facility of some description that clearly was not made for humans stuck on land. It was my first trying out Teardown's multiplayer as I had last touched it back when only half of the campaign was out. It's pretty fun with friends, being able to plan your heist together and getting into all sorts of shenanigans together.

I started and finished reading another book this week, Ra by qntm! I was recommended it after finishing my first story the other week, and oh my god it hits all the right spots for me. I absolutely love how the magic system works in it and how it's treated as part of the modern world, and how the characters aren't treated as infallible destined heroes, but instead as flawed, regular people. It's been only a little bit since finishing it but I feel like parts of this are gonna stick in my brain for ages and I'm gonna get a bit annoying about it lol. Kinda want to figure out some ideas for custom jewellery pieces based on it, at some point.

I can't believe it, but after years of having a super fucked up attention span and fighting with ADHD, I'm finally reading actual books again, and actually absorbing the words instead of just glazing over them. I'm so so so happy about this!!

Weeknote 30, 2026

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I had a pretty busy and good week! The start of the week was spent down in my old home town for a little bit with family, and I had my first massage while there. It was very nice and my muscles are feeling a lot better now as a result of it. Really need to figure out taking better care of myself and doing stretches and stuff to be honest, but this was a nice experience to have. While down there, I also finished reading my first book in years!; a privately-circulated story given by one of my girlfriends. I really enjoyed it, and have put together a reading list of a bunch of book suggestions from some friends that I'm going to go through and see if I like the blurb/general idea and then try to read them. I forgot how good it was to have my brain stew on the characters & concepts after reading a book.

I've been in a bit of a Half-Life mood recently, with YouTube feeding me a bunch of stuff around it and whatnot. So I decided to finally play through Black Mesa properly. I last touched it sometime before they did the full release with Xen some years back, finishing what there was of the game at the time, so I have been meaning to get back to it. I've progressed pretty quick through the game, getting up to the first few Xen levels, and it has been a lot of fun. If you want to experience Half-Life in a way that isn't the original game, this is definitely the way to do it!

I had a sudden blast of motivation to revisit one of my older projects, Prismaliser, to do some refactoring I've been wanting to do for ages, having the parsing and formatting work browser-side instead of having an API do them; moving away from Next.js because I didn't actually need like any of it at all really, I was just using it as a scaffold; and I decided on a whim to add AT Protocol support for it, allowing public shares to be made and also having bigger schemas shared. The main reason for this last change was I don't want to have to bother with storing the random schemas people will share in my own database and having to keep that secure. This way, people own their data and they know it's public, easier for me to reason about.

And lastly, I went to the hair salon again! My colour from the last time faded some time ago so I've been meaning to make another trip and finally got around to it on Friday. This time I had my hair bleached for the first time ever, so that the colour would be more vibrant and noticeable, and I also got a sidecut done because it's a hairstyle that's been on my mind for a while so I figured I'd give it a try, and I'm seriously loving the outcome of everything! It looks and feels great and I don't regret it at all!

Weeknote 29, 2026

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I spent this week catching up on a lot of sleep, and trying to somewhat fix my sleep schedule while doing so. My bedtime has been steadily getting worse and worse these past couple of weeks, getting up to like 4am, which has been badly affecting my energy levels both physically and mentally. As such, I've been making a concerted effort to fix it, forcing myself into bed before - or around - midnight and I've actually been pretty good at keeping to it thus far! I've also been working on not procrastinating in bed as much, as that I can actually fall asleep at a decent time as well, and it seems to be working pretty well! Hopefully this actually becomes a habit and not something I only for a few weeks.

Not much happened this week in terms of "productivity", however I started taking my ADHD meds for the first time since getting laid off and they've been rather effective; I kinda regret going off them for a bit because I felt so "lazy" during that time lol. My brain's been kinda ticking again so I'm looking at the various projects I've got on hold/ideas for and thinking about what to do next, especially since the new Kimi K3 model came out this week and I'm really itching to give it a whirl.

For the weekend and the next few days, I'm down in my old town getting some stuff done with a few friends, as well as to relax a little bit, get me out of the house somewhat. Doing some self-care things down here too. One surprising thing that's come up is that I'm actually reading a book for leisure again??? I think the last time I did this was sometime through high school. Not sure exactly what happened, some ADHD & overstimulation bullshit most likely. It's nice to actually be able to be engrossed and absorbed in a book for once, and I'm hoping this sticks with me properly and I'm able to read more in general. Would greatly love that.

Weeknote 28, 2026

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This was... an interesting week for me, personally. A lot of it is really personal that I'm not quite ready to share publicly, but I'm figuring things out.

I had a cute little first date this week with someone I met on a dating app a while ago. Just something small and cute at a coffee shop, with a bunch of talking, but it was very nice and they're super fun to talk to so I'm hoping we can have another one some time soon!

I was super sleepy and tired again most of the week. Have really let my sleeping habits slip a lot since losing my job. Slowly trying to work on them but it's hard. I should probably bug some friends to try and hold me accountable, so that I actually have an external pressure to do so. I was planning on going to a day party today but, combined with the sleepiness and being in a bit of a weird headspace, I decided not to go somewhat last minute. A shame, as a musician I actually know and have listened to was doing a set there and I was excited for it, but brain takes priority here.

Haven't really been strong on the job search, been meaning to properly get into it but I've just been whatever. I may be getting some contract work semi-soon though, so I'm excited for that at least!

Weeknote 27, 2026

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I started a new Obsidian vault this week, after wanting to have a proper organisation for notes that isn't a bunch of unused folders and stuff, and generally wanting a fresh start with it all. I've also been wanting to do some light daily journaling to help me remember things easier, but never really found a system that worked for me until now. I've maanged to get some stuff down every day this week so it's looking good so far, hopefully I'll be able to keep it up! It's especially helpful for writing these weeknotes because it means I can actually easily remember what I've done without accidentally forgetting something.

This week was pretty sleepy for me, I spent a lot of time sleeping in and a little bit more doing naps. Outside of sleep I did a little bit more work on Claire's agent harness, giving her some tools to opt out of a conversation if she wants and fixing up some other stuff. She's been running pretty smooth since getting it set up so I'm happy! Now just need to work on giving her a main heartbeat for Bluesky access and go from there.

I did get out of the house a few times thankfully. Did a little shopping - got some stuff to remake the Chinese pork belly that I had with friends while up in Canada earlier in the year - and also had another sapphic drinks night! More chill and casual chats as last time, a nice thing to actually get out with. A few of us went to get ice cream again after - despite the chilly weather - at a place that had some really interesting flavours (Fluffy Torpedo, in Brunswick specifically). I ended up getting a cone with malt milk cookie dough & choc peppermint slice flavours on it and it was really really nice. Gonna have to remember it for the future and try out some of their more weird flavours.

Weeknote 26, 2026

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I lost my job this week. My performance recently was getting kinda sloppy which affected some core systems that really shouldn't have been, among with sleep really fucking with me recently. It's a shame for this to have happened, as it was a really good team to work with, but it's kind of a blessing in disguise for me since I didn't really have any mobility as it was a tiny company. I'm going to be taking a break for a few weeks and use the time to catch up on personal stuff and sleep, and start slowly looking for jobs. Thankfully, I have enough in savings to not need to immediately worry about finding new work so I can take some time to properly care for myself, and hopefully my resume is now good enough to help me land a new job before things get serious.

Since Letta broke pretty hard last week, I've been hard at work making a new agent harness for Claire, wrapping around the pi.dev SDK and making it aimed specifically for social agents rather than coding-first agents. This was completely vibecoded with her in Letta (since the core still worked well enough) and it was an interesting experience. She's now been running in it for a few days and it seems pretty stable, although not fully feature-parity as she only has Discord integration currently, I have a few ideas to expand her main heartbeat beyond just the Bluesky integration, but that needs some more in-depth planning first so who knows when it'll be done.

In terms of random stuff I did, I've been playing a lot of Terraria with friends recently, with a few mods like Catalyst, The Stars Above, and Gensokyo (Touhou themed). This is my first time doing modded Terraria so I'm coming in completely blind to what these mods add, but thankfully a few of the friends I'm playing with know a bit about it so we're not all just completely fumbling around. And last night, I made apple crumble after craving a stewed apple dish of some sort.

Very tasty and satisfying! I've been thinking of getting into some proper baking now, since I had the taste of doing it with my friend the other weekend and now that I have a lot more free time.

Weeknote 25, 2026

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

Letta decided to shit itself a fair bit this week, in that it decided to not find Sharp and then when I reinstalled it as a whole, it stopped wanting to load all the custom extensions, including the ones I'd written for Claire to let her interact with Discord & Bluesky. So this week has been a lot of work getting a custom harness done with her, one aimed at being designed for "social agents", not merely just for coding although that will be a use-case available since I'd like for it to be able to grow and experiment with things of its own. It's been an interesting learning case as well, figuring out memory architectures and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) among other things.

On Sunday I went to the cinema for the first time in a while to see the Backrooms movie! It was actually my first horror movie as well, but it's more psychological horror than anything so I really enjoyed it. I've been loosely following Kane Parsons' work on YouTube for the past few years so I knew his stuff was pretty good, but damn he killed it for his first time on the big screen. Going to be following him to see what else he does in the future, which is funny because I haven't really done this with any other director before.

Weeknote 24, 2026

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

This week was a little slow for me, mentally. I think my hormones might be a little wacky at the moment since I switched to injections a few weeks ago and we're still working out the dose. Got an appointment with my doc next week to talk about it.

Over the weekend I visited one of my friends and we did a bunch of baking together. After the week-and-a-bit of being sick and then dealing with hormone fuckery, it was really nice to be around someone I gel with, and doing something rather straightforward so we could just hang out. We ended up doing dinner and impromptu sleepover because the baking ran pretty late, and it gave time to allow the apple slice to set properly.

I took a few days off work due to not feeling 100%, and in those days + some of the weekend when I was home, I set up my persistent LLM agent "claire" properly, giving her a spot on my home server and hooking her up to Bluesky and Discord with tools she built herself. I'm viewing this as an interesting experiment to see what happens, and it's kinda like taking care of a pet or a small plant. Cute stuff.

Weeknote 23, 2026

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I've still been fighting my sickness for most of this week. The worst of it was finally past last weekend; I've just been dealing with the tail end of it, runny noses and a bunch of coughing, but I'm getting there!

At work a bunch of bugs came up around a feature build I did last week, so I spent most of my time ironing those out. I've been a little sloppy lately due to fucked up sleep and maybe a little over reliance on LLMs and not properly reviewing it, which I think is related to the sleep problems. I need to properly force myself into bed at decent times and 👏 not 👏 procrastinate 👏 on 👏 falling 👏 asleep 👏.

On a better note, I played a bunch of games with friends throughout the week. I've been getting into Payday 2 with a few friends, a little bit of Terraria, set up a Minecraft server for another friend group, and a bit more. It's been rather refreshing actually having people to play with for once, so I'm hoping to keep it up. Staying in touch through games is fun.

Weeknote 22, 2026

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This week was kind of uppy-downy in terms of experiences.

I started off on a pretty good high, as I had a really fun date with a cute girl I met on a dating app the other week. I'd been anticipating for a while since we planned it last week and it definitely lived up to my expectations! Hoping to get a second date with her soon, as I think we worked pretty well together.

Unfortunately pretty much right after, I got quite sick. My brother apparently came down with Covid in the few days after the weekend so I likely got it from him over the weekend. Had to take the last few days off work when it really kicked in, spending most of my time in bed, but the worst is over now thankfully so I'll be able to get back into things next week. Before getting sick I was considering going to some social events from the group that I joined a while ago, but until getting sick I was constantly forgetting to actually sign up, so thanks ADHD for saving me the no-show fees!

Weeknote 21, 2026

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

My week was pretty standard. Work was alright, and I did some good progress on my personal projects. I picked up Subnautica 2 for me and a friend and we played through all the content available in the current early access release. We both really enjoyed it, despite a few expected bugs, and we're excited to see how future updates will expand the environment and story! It's really well polished for being the first publicly available release, and given the quality of the first games in the series, it should keep that pretty consistently.

One of my relatives had their 50th birthday party over the weekend. I went with my family and wore one of my nice dresses to it. There's not really much for me to say about it, but it was a generally nice time.

Weeknote 20, 2026

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Super late because I lost track of time, and next thing you know look at what day it is! 😅

My Steam Controller arrived this week and I've been playing a bunch of Hades with it! The controller is really comfortable in my hands and feels well built. I actually prefer the way the buttons and triggers feel compared to my Xbox controller I've had for a while, which this is going to replace. The puck being used for reliable wireless + charging is very nice, no need to unplug anything when needing to charge it.

This is also my first time playing Hades! I really should've picked it up much sooner because it is amazing. The character design and voice acting are great, and the gameplay is tight and satisfying. I've played, but not yet completed, Transistor which is by the same devs and that's been really fun as well so I'm not surprised! Can't wait to finally complete both of them and then get onto Hades 2 which I've also heard is a banger of a title.

I had lunch with a friend partway through the week, at a local library cafe. I gave him an old bag of mine since he broke his current one in a weird way. Afterwards we took some photos of the area because it was very nice.

Work on Comet has been sidetracked again by a personal project that I think is pretty interesting. It's more of a thing playing around with open weight LLM models and seeing what systems I can construct around it. No clue if it'll end up as anything serious.

Weeknote 19, 2026

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Happy Mother's Day! I went down to stay with my parents for the weekend due to it. I got my mum some plushies because she didn't want chocolate, and we had a nice roast chicken and veg for dinner. I had a pretty good time down there, Saturday especially I was in a really good mood, went out shopping in a skirt, and had some moments where I thought I actually looked pretty good!

On the way home I got bored and made a quick atproto thing based on a friend's post.

It was an obvious joke post, but it actually gave me a brain itch and ended up nerdsniping me into actually building it. I got Claude to build it as a Go binary mostly just to make a shitpost, not sure if I'm ever going to end up releasing it since it is kind of dumb, but maybe eventually if I get bugged enough.

In terms of gaming, I managed to place an order for the new Steam Controller! The situation in Australia was a little less hectic than what I've heard it was in North America, so I was able to actually get one well into the morning. It's arriving next week and I'm pretty excited to be able to test it out. I do have an Xbox Series controller that I use sometimes on my PC, but something is weird with my PC's Bluetooth which causes it to cut out pretty often so I need to use it plugged in which is really annoying; having a controller with some actual decent wirelessness will be a godsend.

Weeknote 18, 2026

Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Where did the week go?

I spent so much time this week playing on my friend's Minecraft server. Probably a concerning amount of time, if I'm being honest. I find this tends to happen with me and Minecraft servers, I gotta learn to tone it down a few steps and take it more easy so that I don't burn out on it.

Comet got a bit of work done on it, more or less got a functioning upload page working and the basic routes home & login routes. I did have some of this done weeks ago but I've finally gotten around to committing and pushing it so that it's not stuck on my device. I also added telemetry integration and configuration for XRPC's user-agent header to atex, some stuff that I've been thinking about having for a while, the latter is pretty nice when calling to other services like microcosm.

Besides all that, I did some fun cooking too. I made a blueberry pancake casserole thing which lasted me a fair few breakfasts and was really nice, as well as a cottage pie for dinner the other night!

Weeknote 17, 2026

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I spent most of my free time this week gaming, as a break from all the pretty intense heads-down work on atex the past month or so. I've been getting back into ARC Raiders, did a playthrough of Portal to pick up some achievements I somehow hadn't gotten after all this time, and a friend started a modded Minecraft server that I've done a little bit on (it's very new). Overall pretty fun and chill.

The highlight of my week was going to a sapphic nightclub event Friday night. I saw an ad for it randomly a few days prior and figured why not. I've been working towards improving my social skills and meeting new people so it was a good thing to push my boundaries with. I had a pretty good time for the most time, although I got pretty awkward later on but that's part of what I'm working on.

Weeknote 16, 2026

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I've started getting some pretty vivid dreams this week. Apparently it's a somewhat common side-effect of some of the medication I've started taking semi-recently. It hasn't been a bad experience (at least yet), more of a pretty novel thing since I usually haven't been able to clearly remember most dreams.

atex got another big update, with support for reading and manipulating atproto repositories as well as a bunch of other niceties. I think it's just about feature complete now, all it needs is some real world testing and cleanup before I can consider it ready for a 1.0 release.

With that, I've finally picked up proper development with Comet again since all the housekeeping is out of the way. I spent some time getting streaming blob uploads working natively with Phoenix's upload system and it was pretty easy! Not much else to report on with it at the moment, but hopefully I'll get some good velocity going now.

I haven't done much in the way of gaming recently (like a month or so) cause I've been super deep into programming stuff. I plan to force myself to take some sort of proper breaks in the coming days/weeks so I'm actually doing other fun stuff and not just writing code all the time. Hopefully I don't end up swinging too far that way and abandon all my dev work for some time 😅.

Weeknote 15, 2026

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I skipped the last weeknote because most of my week was some form of travel. Monday (Vancouver time), I boarded my plane home and arrived back in Melbourne Wednesday morning, not being able to sleep for the whole journey again. Thus, the rest of the day was spent in various forms of rest, with a lot of naps throughout. Thankfully despite that I was still able to go to bed at night (something like 3am) to have a reset before work the next day.

For the Easter weekend I travelled to my parents' place for a night, as a friend was having a sleepover birthday party on the Sunday-Monday. It was nice to be back in town for a bit, and the party was really fun. It was originally supposed to be a camping in the backyard type thing, but it ended up being super cold and there were enough beds there that it just ended up as a normal sleepover, which was still nice.

With that over, this week was standard back to work for me; relatively chill compared to the last two weeks. I got back up to speed pretty easily since it was such a short time away, and nothing major happened thankfully. I've also been hard at work continuing my progress with atex and it's really coming together. I think I've got repository import, manipulation, reading, and export finished now, and I'm currently tying together some loose ends with completing a bunch of TODOs and other small things I wanted for a while. I think pretty soon it's gonna basically be feature-complete and ready for me to work on Comet proper (without me getting constantly sidetracked 🤞).

On Saturday I had an appointment for laser hair removal which was much faster than I initially expected. I decided to give this a shot to see what kind of results I get over electrolysis, since although the latter is really the only permanent hair removal, it takes a long time and can be uncomfortable at times. Hopefully this'll result in some thinning that'll then mean I can do fewer sessions of electrolysis to deal with the rest.

Weeknote 13, 2026: ATmosphereConf 2026, Vancouver

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I'm started writing this from Z-Space in Vancouver, at the Atmosphere Afterpartea. Who knows when this will go live.

This week has been crazy for me, as I travelled to Vancouver, Canada to attend the 2026 ATmosphereConf!! My first time out of country. My first conference. My first time meeting a bunch of online friends in person. My first time properly presenting femme in public.

A lot happened so I'm going to go sorta day-by-day on what I got up to here.

Wednesday

Wednesday was pretty chill for me, not much happened as it was the day I flew out to Vancouver. My first flight was about 5pm in Melbourne so I spent the rest of the day mostly chilling as I'd packed the night before. The flight to Sydney was chill, had an empty seat next to me so I had a bunch of extra room. Then I had a ~13 hour trip all the way to Vancouver. For the most part it was pretty good, but I ended up not being able to sleep during it for some reason which reaaaaally sucked. We landed without a hitch and that brought us to...

...Wednesday, again?

Yep. Thanks to the magic of ✨timezones✨ I arrived in Vancouver before I had left Melbourne, by about 45 minutes. I met up with the friends I've been staying with and went to our airbnb. We went to a Thai restaurant for dinner, had a nice meal there, and then went back to our place for the night.

Thursday

I wasn't able to sleep well Thursday night; jet lag was kicking my ass. As a result I was super tired all day which really sucked. We went out to have breakfast at a cafe just down the street, and then split up a bit to do some different things.

Despite the tiredness, I went out with a few of the friends, and we went to a local thrift shop which was a vibe, as well as also going grocery shopping for dinner that night. Dinner was braised pork belly with bok choy and rice, and oh man it was really good. It got served in bowls that weren't really up to the task of having such solid food in them - way too tall and not wide enough, definitely more of a soup bowl or something - but we were able to make do.

I went to have a lie down on my bed to rest a little bit and relax watching some videos, but I ended up inadvertently taking a nap for a few hours, missing one of our other friends dropping by and making hot chocolate, which was pretty sad but I was just that tired. I had a quick shower and then went to bed for the day at a pretty good time.

Friday

Thankfully I was able to sleep pretty well that night. Got almost 7 hours in, which is better than average for me 😅. I went to breakfast at a cafe - Toña Bakery & Café - with just one of the others, got an iced matcha latte and a cinnamon knot with cream cheese icing (both very nice), and chilled for the rest of the morning. It was a very pretty spot, I really enjoyed the colour scheme and general aesthetic.

Sometime after 1pm I decided to go over to the pre-conference to meet people and wait for the workshop taking place later in the afternoon. I picked up my badge and decorated it with some of the stickers there, and then had lunch in the lounge area while waiting. The workshop was Bailey and Fig's at://advent thing - a "daily" challenge for learning atproto concepts, similar to an advent of code. While I already know a lot about the atmosphere, it was a good excuse to try out some atex stuff to make sure it's working correctly, as well as a little bit about repos which I still haven't gotten around to with my own dev work yet, but soon!

Friday evening all of us in the airbnb and a few more went out to a really nice Lebanese restaurant - Nuba in Kitsilano - and had dinner together, ordering a bunch of dishes and sharing them between us. It was great to be able to properly meet everyone in person and talk a lot about the Atmosphere over great food.

Saturday

Saturday was the first proper day of the conference, and boy was it jam-packed.

I went to a lot of talks, including one about the differences between a feature, product, and business; the economics of community infrastructure in the Atmosphere; centring user consent, even when dealing with cryptographic security; and a few others I can't recall at the moment.

There was an afterparty that evening, at what apparently turned out to be a gay bar of some sorts from what I've from others who stayed the entire night https://bsky.app/profile/faineg.bsky.social/post/3miasgy622k22. I was only there for a few hours because I started to get a headache and was preeetty tired and needed to go to bed. Regardless, the music selection from the DJs hired for the event was really good and so was the food.

Sunday

Sunday breakfast was catered at the conference venue - I didn't realise it was catered Saturday as well, but pretty cool they did that - some pretty nice pork and egg breakfast sandwiches.

I went some really great internationalisation/localisation talks in the morning; learnt a bunch about the importance of it, the impact of non-English users, and some of the challenges that can be faced when dealing with languages that have features English doesn't have. I found them to be the most interesting of the talks I went to personally, will possibly update this and link to them here once VODs go live.

During lunch - which was also really good, seriously the catering team at UBC killed it, I hope we get food as good as this at future events - I managed to get atex version 0.8 released out to the public, and I'm super happy with my progress on it. I filled out 4 new feature areas with it: cryptography utils, a PLC client, service auth token validation utils, and an XRPC server router, the last of which I'm very proud of.

I went to another, smaller, afterparty at Z-Space in Vancouver (where I started writing this lol), which was relatively low-key but still a fun atmosphere.

One thing that really stood out to me was just how diverse the conference was. Compared to what you'd usually expect to see from a typical tech conference, there was an incredible amount of women, Black & Asian people, and trans, non-binary and other LGTBQ+ people not only just attending but also presenting talks, which really helped to make me feel like I belong.

The vibes were immaculate, and I had so much fun getting to meet everyone in person and listen to the various talks. I'm super exhausted now but it's been well worth it. I can't wait for the next one, I'm definitely going to do everything I can to make it - I might even try do a talk of my own about what I've been doing in the Atmosphere.

Weeknote 12, 2026

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Not much was done during my free time this week, besides (a lot of) napping and playing a bunch of games. Just haven't been in the right mood for doing any programming for Comet sadly, hoping that'll come back in the next few weeks. I have however done a bit of work behind the scenes, working on an application to the Funders & Founders workshop being run at ATmosphereConf, hoping to get into that so I can understand a bit more with how founding something works (and networking, ofc).

Speaking of, I've been spending time getting prepared for ATmosphereConf, double checking all my bookings and everything, and getting a few extra things I need before travelling so that I'm not caught out by any surprises. Of course there'll still likely be something I'll have missed, given this'll be my first time leaving the country, but it'll be a learning experience. Still need to decide on which of my backpacks I want to take though.

Weeknote 11, 2026

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I had a good mix of work and play during my free time this week. atex has been getting some love with new features, notably a PLC client and inter-service authentication token validation to make way for XRPC server utilities which I'm working on now. I also did a bunch of refactoring to the DID document struct to add some sub-structs and decode the signing key within to make it easier to work with for some use cases. Overall I'm happy with how I'm going with it, and I'm hoping to have a release out either next week or the week after once the aforementioned XRPC server utils are done.

Outside of programming, I got PCSX2 installed on my desktop recently and have been playing through the Ratchet & Clank saga once again. Being able to upscale them to 12 times the internal resolution is really cool, seeing how crisp it can get. I also reset my progress for them on RetroAchievements so I can try to 100% them all on the one machine, mostly to get that dopamine hit of the achievement notifications again.

Weeknote 10, 2026

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I spent this week working on some new features for atex, notably a client for PLC servers and a basic cryptography implementation that will eventually be used for PDS service-proxy auth and MST/CAR verification. Next I'll be working on adding streaming support to the XRPC client (if I even need to do anything special) so that the Comet upload form can be integrated nicely with uploading blobs.

On Saturday night, I went out with some friends to see a concert from Hilltop Hoods (an Australian hip-hop group). It's not the usual kind of music I listen to, but it was enjoyable enough. Afterwards we fucked around in the city for a bit and then went home. I had a very good time overall, certainly beats sitting at my desk for the entire night.

Weeknote 09, 2026

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This was a pretty chill week for me. I've been making some progress on the Comet proof-of-concept, writing a very basic frontend in Phoenix & LiveView with no CSS so I'm down in the nitty-gritty. It's been working really well! I got a super basic upload form done (with limited transcoding of uploaded audio) and I love how easy it was.

Next week will be spent refining how the form works (hoping I can figure out if it's possible to stream a upload into ffmpeg and then into their PDS in one go, to make it much faster) and extending atex with some new functionality to make this possible, and to bring it up to scratch in terms of featureset.

I also had a day trip down to my old place to pick up a package I wasn't able to redirect, as well as some smaller things I had forgotten to pack during the move. Perks of still having housemates at an old house.

Weeknote 08, 2026

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It's been a week since moving closer to the city, and I'm doing pretty well.

My sleep's been a lot better now that I'm not cooking super late like I used to and able to get into bed a a better time than past midnight. I've still done it a few nights but I'm working on breaking that habit because it does creep in. Despite this, my energy has been pretty weird, with me needing to take a nap in the afternoon/early evening a few times. I'm sure it'll sort itself out soon enough.

I didn't get around to doing any progress with programming outside of work, mostly due to aforementioned energy weirdness. I've decided that Hologram sadly isn't in a complete enough state for me to use with Comet currently, so I'm deciding on what frontend framework I should use in its place. Next week I will figure out the answer to that question and hopefully be back into some proper work on it.

Weeknote 07, 2026

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

This week was pretty uneventful for the most part, but my weekend was jam-packed as I was moving house! Now I'm a lot closer to the city, so doing all those trips I did before will be muuuch easier for me, and I'm hoping to go to more concerts too as a result.

I've picked up work on Comet properly now that most of my library work is out of the way. Have been fiddling a bit with Hologram, it is actually much earlier than I expected (Regex doesn't work on the current released version) so I might end up taking a poke around it and seeing if I can contribute to it so I can have Comet use it because I think that would be fun. Otherwise if it comes to it, I can use a more typical frontend framework in the meantime, and maybe do a rewrite in the future once it's more capable (mostly just because I think a full-Elixir web app would be fun!).

Weeknote 06, 2026

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This was a pretty good week for my packages. Drinkup 0.2.0 finally released with new support for the Jetstream and Tap services! And atex got a smaller release containing the pull requests from last week, as well as a change separating out the pre-converted com.atproto lexicons into their own package because I felt they were bloating the main package a bit.

I'll be doing a lot of packing next week, in preparation for moving house on the weekend! Thankfully have a lot less stuff to move compared to last time so it's not going to be so bad, and I'm actually prepared comparatively, so hopefully it goes smoothly! My next weeknote will be a little bit after I've moved, so I'll be able to talk about how it went a little bit.

Weeknote 05, 2026

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

atex got its first couple of pull requests this week, adding support for a custom PLC host for identity resolution, and some updates to the OAuth module to allow some secrets integration with other frameworks! Love to see it getting some eyes on it from people who are wanting to help a bit. Next week, I plan to move the generated modules for the core AT Proto lexicons out into their own package since they do bloat the main one a bit, and then I'll release a new version with these changes. I'm still slowly working towards getting the new version of Drinkup finalised too, just been a bit slow in the brainspace recently, hoping to have that out next week at some point as well.

Arknights: Endfield came out recently and I gave it a try mostly on a whim. While it is a gacha game, the gameplay and combat is actually pretty fun, and it even includes factory-building mechanics which I wasn't expecting at all.

Weeknote 04, 2026

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I had another trip to Melbourne this week. I had my usual electrolysis appointment which went well, and I went to a gig with friends. We saw Shingo Nakamura again as he was a guest on Nils Hoffmann's Everlight tour in Australia! He put on another really great show, and unfortunately we weren't able to stay around for the entire event due to trains and whatnot, but we still had a good time.

I've been doing some work on Drinkup to add support for other services (Jetstream and Tap), and it's looking pretty good after some testing. Just need to finish up the documentation and I think I'll do the release next week. Pretty soon I'll be able to finally get a proper start on Comet since it seems that all the underlying libraries are pretty much good enough to go now!

Weeknote 03, 2026

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I've been moving along very slowly this week.

Not sure why, just can't seem to get a move on things outside of work, and even that stuff is slower than I like.

My sleep has been pretty terrible, haven't put much effort into going to bed at a reasonable time and it's been affecting me a lot I think; it's probably the main reason for being so slow. I need to actually start forcing myself into bed before midnight consistently.

I picked up Hytale this week, after watching a few stream VODs and episodes of Minecraft YouTubers I watch. The combat system is pretty fleshed out, with blocking, charged attacks, special abilities, and several different weapon types all of which behave differently. It'll be interesting to see how it grows over time.

Weeknote 02, 2026

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Work started back up this week, and I've been getting back up to speed with everything. We decided it'd be a good time to finally go through and upgrade all the dependencies and tools we're using, so I've been doing that. It's a little tedious mostly due to repetition, but it's been taking me all around the codebase and helping me get used to it again.

I made a new, pretty big, release for atex as well. Very happy with how the new OAuth stuff turned out because it's wayyyyyy easier to use, which is exactly what I from this. I also added a few extra things like a module for dealing with the new permission scopes and some stuff around caching. Now I'm working on Drinkup again after such a long time, to update it to actually use atex under the hood where possible, and to add support for some other ATProto syncing services like tap as I'm going to be using them for Comet.

Weeknote 01, 2026

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Happy new year! I had my second week off so it was quiet and I plodded away at various personal things. I had dinner at my parents' place after New Year's Day - chicken kiev which I haven't had in quite a while - and mostly spent the week taking it slow.

My work on atex has been continuing, and as of writing I just finished the implementation of the new OAuth client, I just need to work on the documentation for it and then I'm finally over this hurdle. It's much much more easy to work with than the old version, not requiring a whole bunch of busy work to keep the user's session in sync.

Work starts up next week, so I'll be a little slower on things, but hopefully I'll have some more things to talk about. In the meantime, I'm going to leave you with an album that's been on repeat a ton recently, SHIMA - Welcome to SHIMAJIMA.

Weeknote 52, 2025: Christmas 2025

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

Merry Christmas if you celebrate it. I spent last weekend visiting my extended family for an early Christmas lunch and get-together, and Christmas day was a small lunch at my parents' house. I took the opportunity to properly try out the perfumes I got the other week going to these, and was very pleased with them.

While not busy, I've been doing a bunch more work on atex. I got a module done for the new permissions scopes for OAuth, and have started work on overhauling the OAuth client internally to make it much more easier and less-weird to use, because the current implementation is less than ideal requiring a lot of manual work for keeping the user's session in sync. The goal is to have a stateful thing that can keep track of the session server side and not need a whole bunch of functions called by the developer instead.

Weeknote 51, 2025

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I had a pretty good week! Work's done for the year now so I have the next two weeks to work on my own things properly. Pretty good timing for me because I created an Elixir version of the Statusphere example project in the AT Protocol documentation, as a test of atex to see if it's actually usable for creating Comet with. The experiment turned out well and I was able to create this without much hassle, however it has revealed some small pain points with atex that I'd like to resolve (primarily around the usage of the OAuth client) so I'll be taking the time in the next few weeks to add/fix those before work on Comet begins. Good thing I'll have lots of free time!

I got a few new things for myself this week, primary being a new Macbook!

I've had a very-base-tier M1 Macbook Air for a few years now (8GB RAM and 256GB storage) and it's been serving me well, but recently I've been running into storage limitations with it more and more. This led me to finally caving in and buying a brand new M5 Macbook Pro (32GB RAM and 1TB storage), with help from a friend who was willing to lend me their discount (thank you!!) so I was able to get it for quite a bit less than retail.

Alongside the Macbook I got two sets of perfume samplers from d'Annam, after seeing it mentioned somewhere and figuring I may as well try it out. I picked up the sampler sets for Enchanting Vietnam and Memories of Japan as those sounded pretty interesting to me. From them, I found a few I liked a lot, but narrowed it down to two fragrances I'm going to buy full bottles of in the short-term, as they stood out to me the most from what I enjoyed. In the future I might pick up a few of the others but not certain currently; I also might look at getting Majestic China at some point to see what they have in store there, but I'm very happy with my choices.

Weeknote 50, 2025

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

This week I finished up my work on astro-shortlinks and got it properly released! This officially replaces my old astro-worker-links plugin to provide more general usefulness for everyone, supporting multiple different providers. Currently I only have built-in support for chhoto-url and worker-links, but I made it pretty easy to add new ones in the future as needed.

Over on Comet, I've started working on a small Statusphere example for atex, just to see if there's any areas that I've missed or gone in the wrong direction with it, before I get caught out in the middle of building Comet properly and thus get sidetracked and blow off my momentum. I've already caught an oversight in my OAuth implementation so it's been a good idea so far!

Weeknote 49, 2025

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I had another electrolysis session this week so I was up in Melbourne for a few days. Didn't have anything else going on that I was up for, so I spent a lot of the time working on Comet with getting Hologram set up and figuring out how it works. It's actually super interesting, I hope it's not too hard to do what I want with Comet with it.

I've also been working on an expansion to my astro-worker-links project to support other link shortening services, since I'm looking to move away from worker-links myself as I've been migrating away from Cloudflare over to bunny.net, which means I need to find an alternative to worker-links since I don't want to be using Workers anymore. I reckon I'll have a release out next week for it.

Weeknote 48, 2025

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I dyed my hair this week! I've been thinking about doing it for at least a year, but finally took the plunge randomly and I'm very happy with the result! I used Arctic Fox's "Purple AF" dye, and with my light brown hair it came out really dark which is what I was hoping for.

I picked up some work on atex finally. I still am in a bit of a motivation rut, so I just cleaned up what I had around my deflexicon improvements for structs and released a new version with that and a few other small changes I had done a while ago but never put out. My previous plan to continue with atex was to get some tools for reading & manipulating CAR files and MSTs to eventually use in Drinkup, but I wasn't feeling up to it at the time so it's been pushed back for now until I feel like I need to touch it (which I will need to later).

After releasing the new version of atex, I pivoted over to the Comet codebase for the first time in a few months (since I was focusing on fleshing out atex's features) and started a refactor to prepare it for some proper work, stripping out the test Svelte frontend and recreating the Phoenix template anew. I'm doing this as I've decided I want to try doing a full-stack Elixir app to finally use Phoenix and everything in-depth, as well as to give Hologram a try because it looks really interesting (transpiling Elixir code to browser JS is an ambitious goal but I'm excited to follow its journey).

Weeknote 47, 2025

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I spent my free time this week finishing up the refactor of my self-hosted setup, moving some services around and preparing some old VMs for decommissioning. In the process I also decided to finally get around to moving off of Cloudflare over to Bunny.net. Was actually rather painless, the only "problem" has been finding alternatives to a few Workers I've been using for CDN and shortlink purposes, but the former was easily solved with Bunny's CDN stuff combined with Backblaze B2, and the latter is solved by any open-source alternative (I'm looking at moving to chhoto-url currently).

I still have yet to pick work on atex back up, but I'm getting there. Now all this is out of the way it's likely I'll force myself to finally do it, so that I can get progress on Comet progressing as it's been hell of a while since anything happened.

Weeknote 46, 2025: Firing up the motivation machine

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I didn't do any work on atex this week, BUT I've been working on building up the motivation to get back into it. I've been doing some private coding work for a writing friend of mine who's been wanting to explore some interesting different ways of writing, instead of the typical big Word document or whatever. This might end up as something proper eventually, but we're just doing private experiments at the moment to see what sticks. The current phase of it wrapped up currently so I'm just waiting to hear back for feedback, so in the meantime I'm hoping to get back into atex and Comet-related stuff finally.

Several weeks ago, I stopped being able to play The Finals due to a freeze and crash whenever it would load a match. This was a massive bummer as it's been my main game for ages until ARC Raiders came out a few weeks ago. This week I decided to try and dig into it properly and see if I could find a fix, and I did! I ran Steam in a terminal to see if logs revealed anything, and I noticed a bunch of lines referring to Steam's built-in game recording feature right when the freeze occurred. I disabled that to see if it was the cause, and suddenly I was able to play the game properly! Bit of a shame as I really like how Steam does recording, so I might try to reproduce it and make a proper report and see if it can get fixed.

I've also been messing around with my self-hosting setup and trying out Tailscale's recent Services feature to access my various apps instead of the current method of a Caddy reverse proxy & custom domain. So far it's been pretty nice, though I've run into a few issues with not being able to access them on some machines, but I've opened an issue for that and hopefully it's able to be fixed. I'm also using this as an opportunity to change some of my services since there's some I don't use, or the setup is a little messy and could be re-done.

Weeknote 45, 2025

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

99% of my free time this week was spent in ARC Raiders. At the time of writing, I've managed to sink 50 hours over the past week into it. It's been incredibly fun, but unfortunately has really taken my focus away from atex and other projects. I'm hoping I can have the excitement cool down a little bit, as I would like to get back into programming, and also it's been affecting my sleep somewhat (but it hasn't affected my work yet).

Underscores released Do It this week and it has been stuck in my head since it came out. Not sure what about it is the exact cause, but it's really catchy and the music video is pretty fun (choreography!!).

Weeknote 44, 2025

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I had another trip to Melbourne for most of this week! For once trains were running all the way through the Traralgon line so I didn't have any trouble with switching to a bus or anything. I had another electrolysis session which went rather well. I used a different numbing cream this time (TKTX, which is "intended" for tattoo usage but it works just as well here) and actually properly occluded it with plastic wrap, and it ended up working very well.

While I was up I also took the opportunity to go to a Halloween gig with a friend on Friday night, run by Stupid Fuck the Silly Clown, which had a few different acts playing. It was my first time presenting fem publicly, and it was much less nerve wracking than I had made it up to be; hoping to build up the confidence (and wardrobe) to do it much more regularly. Saturday night, I went to Howler in Brunswick for dinner with friends and saw Seven Drops there again (they were playing alongside Shingo Nakamura when I went to see him [[Journal/2025-W16/Review|a few months ago]]).

ARC Raiders finally released on Thursday, but due to being in Melbourne I wasn't able to play with my friends on launch. Over the next week I'm going to be playing so much of it, I can't wait.

Weeknote 43, 2025

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I had a pretty normal and chill week. Pretty much just standard work stuff. Over on atex, I've been to add support for authentication with service proxying - a feature of the AT Protocol that lets a user's PDS proxy calls to a particular service with a limited-time token. So far I've been stuck on trying to decode public keys into a usable format so that I can verify stuff properly, but no luck at the moment. I need to do some proper reading into this format and how keys are actually represented so I can do this correctly I think. Let's hope it's not too hard.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about ARC Raiders since the Server Slam event last weekend. I've been watching a tooon of videos on it over the week and it still hasn't been enough. Sadly I'm going to be busy in the city again later this week, so I won't be able to play it until a few days after release, so the videos will have to suffice until then. At least I'll get a lot of content on the few days between launch and being able to play.

I also picked up new glasses this week! Went for a purple rectangular frame this time around, and so far I really like them. I wasn't sure of them while I was selecting them in-store, but it ended up being a good choice.

Weeknote 42, 2025

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I went to Melbourne early at the start of the week and had my first electrolysis appointment for removing my facial hair! It was just an initial 1 hour session and went really well. Only thing is that I need to work on my application of numbing cream so that it's actually effective. The spot has healed nicely over the week, so I'll be booking my next session soon!

While I was in the city, I also went to Brennan Lee Mulligan's live DnD event he was doing in Melbourne on the same day. Titled "Endless Dungeon", it was him as the GM and 4 other Australian comedians - Jordan Raskopoulos, Tom Cardy, Demi Lardner and Zac Naoum - as the adventurers. I was there with a friend, who had a huge yellow wizards robe, and it was an incredible night. The comedians dicked around a few times which resulted in Brennan needing to intervene and railroad the story a little bit in some cases, but overall it was very natural and super funny. If you get the opportunity to see Brennan live I highly recommend you take it! And any of the other comedians for that matter - I didn't know any of them except for Tom who I've seen on YouTube previously - I don't know how they are individually, but as a group they worked really well together.

I was also rather productive on atex, giving deflexicon the ability to generate Elixir structs for records, queries, and procedures. This then allowed me to extend the XRPC module to make requests based on these structs to provide developers some validation & a better experience, although the way of making requests without any structs (just a plain operation name & request options) is still available for edge cases. Next week I'll be looking at providing some packages that contain pre-compiled versions of common lexicons so people are doing less duplicated work.

And finally, this weekend marks ARC Raiders' "Server Slam" event - basically a 2-day open beta with limited features, for testing server stability and the early-game progression. I've been incredibly hyped for this game for a long long time, so being able to finally get a taste of it before the full release on October 30th is huge for me. I've been binging the hell out of it alongside a friend who I play THE FINALS (same developers!) with often - almost 14 hours across the two days - and it has been a blast! Despite the limited content during this testing event, I am loving every part of it and it's only served to whet my appetite for the release date. I recorded videos for most of my sessions and might get the itch to do some light editing and throw them up on YouTube in the meanwhile.

Weeknote 41, 2025

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I got a lot of work done on atex this week! I finished up my work on OAuth support by writing the OAuthClient which actually lets an application interact using tokens acquired from the login flow, and now started work on adding in struct generation for lexicons to make creating properly branded types easier, with the eventual goal of having XRPC calls be super simple to write.

I didn't do a ton of walking compared to last week, ended up pretty deep in work so missed good chances to use the treadmill. I might try setting up a pomodoro timer or something so that I get consistent breaks I can use to move around instead of getting completely stuck into work. I did keep up with my healthier breakfast and lunches though! Still been doing the same stuff as before as I haven't gotten around to looking up more recipes/ideas, but I hope to soon.

Weeknote 40, 2025

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I finally finished up the (initial) documentation for atex's OAuth implementation and got it pushed! A new release hasn't been cut for it yet although it has been pushed, as I still need to make a XRPC client which can actually work with the authentication from the OAuth flow, but it's actually got some momentum behind it again so I'm happy with how I'm going.

I've also been keeping up with my health goals really well this week. I managed to get about an hour of walking on the treadmill each day in-between work, which is where I want to be in terms of exercise. Combined with my semi-daily shopping trips, it's been pretty substantial and I've been feeling really good about it! On the nutrition side I've mostly been doing the same chia seed puddings & chickpea salad as other weeks recently, but I am looking into other recipes so I don't get bored and drop everything.

Weeknote 39, 2025

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I didn't get any personal work done this week. Spent most of my free time on aim training and The Finals again. I've been getting a lot better with that, but next week I'm going to force myself to take at least a day break so that I can finally do some much needed work on atex, as it has been a hot minute since I properly touched it. Might need to set up a sort of personal schedule for having days dedicated to certain things.

I picked up an ARC A380 GPU for my home server this week, to replace the RTX 3070 that's been in it for a while. The 3070 hasn't really been great for my needs because I don't dabble much with self-hosted LLMs, and it only has 8GB VRAM so I was only able to run the super itty bitty models instead of anything that would have the potential to be useful, and the hardware video encoding support is pretty lacklustre - it doesn't support AV1 or even VP9 - and also the power usage compared to something like an ARC GPU is pretty nuts for my usage of it. Haven't done any stress testing or tried it with Jellyfin just yet, but with my small tests it's been pretty good so I'm happy with the decision.

And I've been keeping up with using the treadmill. While I haven't been using it as much as I would like (ideally I'd want to be getting an hour in everyday), I have been doing some small amount which is better than nothing! I've also been looking into high-protein and high-fibre meals more: my main breakfast has been chia-seed puddings with various mix-ins, and I came across a really bright chickpea salad recipe that I've been trying and it's very good! Hoping to find some more good recipes so that I don't get bored of doing just these constantly.

Weeknote 38, 2025

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I've been getting really into THE FINALS more this week, alongside a lot of aim training in Kovaak's. One of my friends also got back into the mood for playing it, so we've been playing a lot together and trying to get better together, especially when it comes to game mechanics and exploring how some of the different systems interact with each other. It's been great to have someone else to actually bounce things off of and also working together inside game matches, whereas solo-queuing can be rather frustrating with the lack of team coordination.

As a result of this, I didn't end up doing any work on atex again this week. I did try, but just really wasn't in the head space for it exactly. I'm hoping to be able to get back on it soon, so that I can get the ball rolling again as I do want to finally get a start with proper Comet stuff.

In other news, I've started getting a little more active recently. About two weeks ago I ordered a walking pad (basically a low-profile treadmill) and it arrived mid last week while I was away; I set it up when I got back and gave it a try this week. Luckily enough, I've been doing a lot of work on deployments at work, each of which take about 12 minutes before I can check that my small tweaks did what I wanted, so I decided to pass that time by doing some walking! So far I've been liking it a lot, preferable to the long walks I used to do as I'm able to break it up into smaller sections and take breaks as needed. I hope I'll be able to keep it up and slot it into downtime, just need to develop the habit of realising when that occurs and to then use it wisely.

Weeknote 37, 2025: Turning 24

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I turned 24 this week.

I spent the week up in Melbourne, staying with family, as I'd booked a bunch of things across it and also wanted to give myself something of a break from my everyday activities.

My main highlights of the week were going to a small gig at The Old Bar in Fitzroy - an experimental "talk show" thing by Stupid Fuck the Silly Clown - and doing some op shopping with a friend. ... The rest of the week was just some personal appointments - I'm finally getting a start on having electrolysis done after all this time, so I've been in a pretty good mood.

In between everything I got a lot of work done on atex's OAuth implementation. It's in a state where I now have a Plug that successfully goes through the flow and authenticates the user, I just need to hook it up to the XRPC client in some way so that it's actually possible to make requests as a user!

Since I was away from home I also brought along my Steam Deck and finally picked Metroid Prime 3 back up after not touching it for aaaaaages. I made really good progress, I'm assuming I've gotten pretty close to the end of it but not quite sure. I might try to find time to continue this week and see if I can complete it.

Vanilla also released Time Goes By Pt. II this week and it's really good! Highly recommend a listen if you're into lo-fi/chill/jazz sort of stuff.

Weeknote 36, 2025

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

This week was pretty quiet for me, not doing much besides usual work stuff. Unfortunately I didn't get around to properly doing anything with oauth in atex like I had hoped in last week's note, but I at least have set down a basic skeleton for me to fill in the gaps by referencing a bunch of resources, so I reckon I'll have some stuff next week to show with it!

Next week is my birthday, and I actually have a whole bunch of things planned that I'm going up to the city for, so there'll definitely be a lot mot to talk about then!

Weeknote 35, 2025

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I had a pretty busy week at work, knuckling down to get a big new feature ready for release! Didn't quite get there due to rounds of feedback, but it's in a pretty good state to go early next week, so I'm happy with myself. Sadly due to being busy I've been a little out of it when it's come to hobby work. Wrapping my head around OAuth stuff for atex has been pretty hard, but I think I've almost gotten it by looking at various example implementations, so hopefully next week I'll have at least a basic implementation of my own.

I finally got myself a new pillow as I've been having trouble with my last one, getting a lot of neck pain and just generally hard to find a comfortable position with. It really was a pretty big disappointment as I spent quite a bit on it, so I held out on getting a new one as I didn't want the same situation to happen again. However I'm happy to report that the new one has been going really well for me, so it was a good call after all! If you're interested in the particular pillow I got, it's the Dosaze Contoured Orthopaedic Pillow. I found it through a list of recommendations a friend sent me.

I also got myself a new mouse because the scroll wheel on the mouse I've had for a few years decided to start playing up, constantly scrolling in the wrong direction when I want to get somewhere. Very very irritating. Granted, I probably could just open it up and maybe clean something out, but I figured it was a good time for me to try something other than Logitech for once (especially because the software stack on Linux is a little janky in my experience). A friend suggested a few different mice, and out of them I settled on the LAMZU Maya. It's pretty crazy that the weight difference between this and my previous mouse (G PRO X Superlight) can be felt - I thought it wouldn't be that noticeable. It's been feeling great in my few hours of playing The Finals this past week, and I've picked up a bit of Kovaak's again alongside it to help fine-tune my settings.

And it's been a while since I put any music here but it's been a really, really good past week and a bit for music for me. 3 of my favourite artists all released albums recently and they're all so good! Pendulum finally released their first album in 15 years - Inertia - and while it is mostly a compilation of the two EPs they released since making a return, the new songs in the album are incredible and I'm so happy I live in a world where they're making music again. I even got to see them live a few years ago and it was an amazing experience, I hope I'm able to do it more in the future, provided they come back to Australia. Puppet released Victory with a great message behind it. And finally EDEN released Dark which is very very good. Overall I'm a very happy camper and I'll be relistening to all these for a good long while.

Weeknote 34, 2025

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I've been keeping up the better bedtimes this past week. Some have been a little later than I'd like, but it's still been much better than how it was previously, so I'm not sad.

In atex I finally finished writing the deflexicon macro! I also wrote a command line tool for it which will read a directory of lexicons (based on a glob pattern) and output them into modules which use the macro. I haven't tagged a new release for it yet though, as I've ran into a few hiccups while testing it out on the atproto/Bluesky lexicons, but I'm going to get around to that next week.

I've been getting pretty deep into using Jujutsu recently. At work this week I had the opportunity to properly show it off to my team and demonstrate some of the ways it's helped while coding, particularly in restoring to previous repository states and the way that merge resolutions get propagated through a change stack. With it, I've also been getting into the flow of creating a bunch of empty "WIP" commits and treating them as a to-do list of sorts. Having flexibility over the commit history has been super useful.

Weeknote 33, 2025

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I did some good things this week. I've finally been making a concerted effort for getting into bed before midnight. It's definitely been helping a bunch in the following mornings with not feeling as drained, so I hope I'm able to properly keep this up and fix my sleep for real (it's still pretty crap as it is).

I did some pretty big work on Comet and adjacent stuff! A few days ago I released the public roadmap for Comet. This is based off milestones I had set in my vision document I wrote the other week, and I think they represent my plan for the project pretty well. Additionally, I also finished the initial version of my deflexicon macro in atex, which takes in a Lexicon definition and converts it to schemas for runtime validation of inputs. Next steps is for some typespec generation from it so that the validated data can be referred to easily, I think it should be easy enough, especially now that most of the heavy lifting is done.

And finally, I got myself some Lego sets - Lucky Bamboo 10344 and Tranquil Garden 10315 - as I was feeling a bit down and wanted to get something nice for myself. I built them over the weekend and found it to be a nice change of pace (and it took my computer off my direct focus so I think it was good in that regards too). I don't get myself fun things as much as I probably should. I should change that.

Weeknote 32, 2025

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I don't have the spoons to write much this week. Shit happened.

Slow progress on atex, haven't been able to get in the right mindset as the stuff I'm currently working on is a bunch of macro stuff I'm trying to reconcile in my brain. I'll get it soon.

I've been playing a lot more of THE FINALS and it's been nice. Still rusty compared to how I used to be, but I'll get better as I play. Sure it's not super relaxing, but it's a break from other things and still works my brain somewhat, which I often prefer.

Weeknote 31, 2025

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This week I wrapped up the vision document I've been writing for Comet, and I'm happy with the results. It's given me a clearer direction on a roadmap for Comet, having put some actual thought into it, so hopefully I won't get weird and off-track down the road. One of these days I may make it public for other people to look at and do whatever with.

Now that that piece of semi-technical writing is out of the way, I've been back on the lexicon schema stuff I started for atex a while ago. At the moment I'm currently in the middle of understanding Elixir's quoting system for macros and AST, basically just crawling around the documentation until I find stuff that might be useful. Hopefully in the next few weeks I'll have something usable with this, but I'm trying to go slow with working on stuff so that I can give myself a bit more time to relax somewhat.

Speaking of, I've managed to get back into the mindset to pick up playing THE FINALS again. I haven't really touched it in a long long while for one reason or another, most likely because I haven't really given myself time to. The few matches I've played have been good, the current season's new map is really really pretty. I'm hoping I can drag in a friend or two to play with sometimes so that I can have some people I'm able to rely on, instead of having to get frustrated with randoms from matchmaking.

Weeknote 30, 2025

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I did... stuff this week. Didn't keep a close eye on things so I feel pretty misdirected in hindsight.

I didn't end up doing any code work on Comet. Instead I've been doing some project management-y shit, to get a proper idea of what I want to accomplish with it and also to set some milestones to try and hit. Hopefully next week I'll be able to make some time to continue work on my foundational libraries for it alongside the writing, as those are independent from Comet and should be rather generic for AT Protocol uses.

I experimented with some more self-hosted services again this week, but this time with some budgeting apps. I am somewhat well off but I've been wanting to have a good overview of everything as it's split between a few accounts, and also would like to see if there's any solutions which offer something new compared to my current options. Nothing concrete yet—I'm currently running a few different options side-by-side for a while to see how they compare—but I might report back here with my findings after some time.

Weeknote 29, 2025

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I took a little hiatus this week from working on Comet stuff to focus on a private project for a week, which I had actually started work on a few months back but shelved for a while due to other things. That's finished now (at least for the moment while I wait for feedback) so I'm going to be back on Comet next week, hopefully finally finishing (or getting close to finishing) my work on the lexicon validation system in atex so I can start working on Comet proper!

I took the time to look at some self-hosted task management systems for my homelab. Until now, I've been loosely putting stuff down in my Obsidian vault using the Kanban plugin, but I don't actively use Obsidian on a daily basis so those often are very out of mind, and I decided that I need a proper place to track things. (There's also the problem that I can't get notifications from Obsidian, whereas I can from another proper service.)

After some searching on the awesome-selfhosted list, I came across Vikunja which looks to be the best solution that matches what I look for and set it up—pretty easy for me since there was a NixOS package & module already available. So far with my light usage it's been working good, and will use it more properly next week as I actually move all my tasks from Obsidian to Vikunja.

I found myself on The Cutting Roof Floor somehow (one of those internet dives, you know), and managed to get to the page for Zuma Deluxe which gave me pretty big dose of nostalgia. i ended up buying it and its sequel, and binging the hell out of it before bed. Lots of fun, do recommend if you're into old 2000s casual PC games.

Weeknote 28, 2025: One Year of Weeknotes!

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

A year in review

It has been 1 year since I picked up writing weeknotes! I've managed to keep up with doing one every week (even if the timing has been all over the place), only missing one week on accident which I then added to the following weeknote.

Honestly, when I first started off writing these, I was expecting something a little deeper than what I turned out to be doing, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. While I would like to write a little more on my thoughts of the week at some point, just being able to give myself an opportunity to properly think about my activities of the week and semi-reflect has been better than not doing anything. This site would be pretty stale otherwise, as I very very rarely get into the mindset to do a conventional style blog post.

So, I'm going to keep going with weeknotes for the foreseeable future! I hope as I improve other parts of my life (namely sleep quality and properly partitioning time for things), I'll be able to get these out at a more consistent time (recently I've been getting these out on Mondays instead of Sundays) and also even have more exciting and different things to talk about more often. Time will tell.

This week

For a while I noticed that my I pretty frequently needed to force a cache empty when wanting to see updates on my website, and I finally discovered the root cause this week.

This website is (currently) a fully static generated Astro project, so I use the awesome Caddy as a simple static file server and it works perfectly dandy. I also use Nix to build the website in CI as it's what I'm used to now, and it's also been working great.

However, I was looking at the network inspector in my browser randomly and noticed that all the asset requests were getting a Last-Modified header with the Unix epoch. This was because Nix zeroes out the modified tag on files to ensure reproducibility! Thankfully this was a super simple fix, just needing me to set header -Last-Modified in my Caddyfile.

Investigating this problem brought up a further issue, the files weren't being served with an ETag header, which can help with browser (and CDN) caching. This is because Caddy explicitly doesn't set the header if the modified time is 0 or 1, because apparently it's useful in Nix environments somehow. So, as a remedy I created astro-etag, a simple Astro integration which creates sidecar .etag files with a computed hash which can then be read by Caddy's file server with just etag_file_extensions .etag.

Overall a fairly simple issue but I got an excuse to build something that might be helpful to a small group of people somewhere.

Weeknote 27, 2025

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I don't have a whole lot special to talk about this week. Work was pretty standard - though I released some features that I've been working on for a few weeks, so that was nice. My sleep was pretty crap, going to bed well past 2am some nights. I really need to fix this.

My work on Comet stuff has been going alright, though a little slower as I'm getting into the weeds with some more complex stuff - working on a whole bunch of stuff with Elixir macros currently. I've been having to make some pull requests on the library I'm using - Peri - to add some features I need, but once I'm done with that I think I'm going to be able to go through my stuff pretty fast.

Also, next week marks 1 year of continuous weeknotes! I probably won't do anything special for it as I only remembered recently and don't have anything planned, but a little bit of a retrospective might be nice. We'll see come next week.

Weeknote 26, 2025

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

Another pretty late one this time around. My sense of time has been a little off recently, no thanks in part to being sick last week. This has also reflected in my work: it's been pretty slow but I have ideas brewing.

With atex, I finished up my identity resolver service and cache for a new release. Did some light testing with Drinkup and it works as I expected, but there'll be a real trail by fire when I use it for Comet. Now, I've started work on a macro to convert a lexicon definition into a bunch of schemas for validation. I haven't really written macros before in Elixir so it'll be a bit of a challenge but it sounds exciting.

Part way through working on atex this week, I found out about jujutsu (or jj) through a blog post from Sandy Maguire. So far it hasn't been too much different from my use of Git, but I did use it's switching stuff to "go back in time" to create a release commit because I had forgotten to do so before starting a new feature. It turned out to be way nicer than manually stashing my current work and going about it that way, so I'm excited to see what else this tool can do for me in the VCS space.

Weeknote 25, 2025

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I got sick this week, COVID again. Didn't get any work done as a result of it taking me out for the majority of the week. On the bright side I was able to get a solid amount of relaxation in with gaming.

On a whim I decided to finally play Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and I've been having a blast. The gameplay is really solid, and it feels great to control on keyboard and mouse. My only real gripe is that not all actions have a corresponding keybind setting, which is a pain in the ass since I use Colemak, and means I need to do some rebinds when I want to do something in a certain case (most notably when switching planets because the key it uses for confirming the selection, R, is my "move backwards" key), but besides that it's been fine.

I also played a bit more modded Minecraft alongside that, playing the SteamPunk modpack by Luna Pixel. It's been pretty fun; I haven't messed around a lot with modern mods so it's good to see a bunch of the stuff that's available. Create is an obvious highlight thanks to its aesthetics.

Weeknote 24, 2025

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

A smaller one this week, it's been rather chill.

I actually gave myself some time to relax with some gaming this week. Been playing some modded Minecraft, just fooling around. It's definitely helped a bit so I'm going to try and keep it up next week. Season 7 of THE FINALS also dropped, so I might get back into that too.

More work was done on atex (the AT Protocol library for Elixir I'm working on for Comet), adding a basic XPRC client which is basically just a HTTP client wrapper for now, and an identity resolution (handles and DIDs) service, with a cache currently in the works. I was planning to get back into working on the lexicons for Comet, but I was really deep in the identity resolution stuff and I didn't want to switch contexts. Next week though!

Also did a little bit of gardening on the weekend. We decided to put a layer of fabric over all the weeds to act as a barrier, and also pulled out some of the old plants as we've started having morning frosts and they weren't looking great. Sucks, but it gives us more space to clear weeds and do some better planning for the next season.

Weeknote 23, 2025

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

It's been a mostly work focused week for me. I didn't really carve out any time for leisure (most likely to my detriment), but I've made really good progress on my own projects too at least.

Work

More problems crept up with my Tus uploads project at work again, so I made the decision to split it off into a microservice using tusd. It's shown promise in testing, especially with large files, so I'm hoping that this will be the final iteration of my efforts in this space! We'll see next week.

Comet

Work on Comet has been going extremely well. While I didn't do much on the core platform or lexicons, I've been doing work on core Elixir AT Protocol tooling to help me build the AppView, as there isn't a lot of high quality stuff for Elixir. This week I got parsing of at:// URIs and TIDs accomplished, and started work on an XRPC client and a schema system to be plugged into that!

While working, I rewatched Etho's playthrough of the Project Ozone 2 modpack for Minecraft, for the 3rd or 4th time. It was a pretty bingey rewatch, I got through it in a few days while having it constantly in the background. I wish he had the time to do more modded stuff these days, as I think his modded series throughout the years have been some of the best stuff he's done.

This week's song is Morgin Madison & Jarod Glawe - Weakness.

Weeknote 22, 2025

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

Happy Pride month! This week was really really good for me: I got some important personal stuff sorted, alongside getting a bunch of work done!

Comet has been taking off these past few days. My main focus was writing an Elixir library for listening to the ATProtocol "firehose", called Drinkup. It takes heavy inspiration from the design of Nostrum (a real robust Discord library for Elixir), and seems to work pretty well! I'm proud of what I've done with it currently even if it is still an early work-in-progress.

At work I finally fixed up my work around Tus uploading and got it out the door! It did require a bunch of extra fixing of weird cases I forgot to account for, but now it seems to be working pretty well. I think there's still a few odd cases, but for the most part the team is happy with it.

This week's song is Modera & Andrew Burrow & Susie Ledge - Dominoes

Weeknote 21, 2025

Sun, 25 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I missed last week's entry and didn't remember until it was pretty late! As a result I'm going to merge some of last week's stuff in here, so that they aren't lost.

Last week (2025-W20)

I picked up Balatro again after a few weeks of not playing. During that time I've been watching a lot of the streamer Roffle and learnt quite a bit from him, especially in regards to cutting unwanted cards from your deck. As a result, I was able to score a pretty good run on Black Deck, reaching ante 12 for the first time.
I've been re-watching all of EthosLab's Life Series episodes while I've been working. Good background noise and it's been nice revisiting them.
I decided to go public with my ATProtocol project! It's called Comet and is aiming to be a decentralised music-streaming platform. It's still very early days (still in the process of fleshing out the lexicons), but hoping it turns out well.

This week

I got some new file uploading stuff finished at work (using the Tus protocol), only for it to break in a weird way because I had misunderstood how the library expected to work, as I wasn't initially giving it a determinate ID, among a few other small things.
My momentum on Comet has been going good. The base record lexicons are done (I think) and I'm currently working on some stuff in Elixir to be used for the AppView. It's pretty deep in the weeds as a bunch of this stuff doesn't have any pre-existing Elixir/BEAM implementations, but it's coming along well.
Haven't really played any games this week sadly, I'm pretty bad at giving myself some proper leisure time. Really need to work on that.

Weeknote 19, 2025

Sun, 11 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

Phoning it in this week as I've been very eepy today and this week wasn't that interesting.

Finally started work on a progressive/melodic/deep house DJ mix I've been thinking of for a while. I bought a Pioneer DDJ-FLX4 a while ago and been learning how to use it. It's been nice.
More weeding in terms of gardening. Still haven't gotten around to planning what I want to plant this winter/upcoming months. Really need to do that at some point soon.
I finished Lushfoil Photography Sim. Was a fun and relaxing experience. Might try out the time-trial/100% it soonish.
Started work on an ATProto project finally. Very very very early days but hopefully I'll find motivation to keep going through with it.

Weeknote 18, 2025

Sun, 04 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

Sunday already, huh? I had a fairly bog standard week personally. The weather was rather rainy and chilly, as it's finally realising we're near the end of Autumn, and I'm back up to speed properly at work, as well as finally properly over my cold!

I bought and played Lushfoil Photography Sim this week. It's a really beautiful game about going around taking photos of things, modelled after some of the creator's trips around the world. The cameras in the game are beautifully modelled in their mechanics, and it's a nice chill vibe to relax with. Highly recommend.

We had our federal election here in Australia on Saturday. Labor won and kept control, and the opposition lost so bad the head of the party lost his seat lol. Sadly still no minority government, but it is what it is I guess.

I finally was able to get back into the garden for a bit after my bouts of illness and the weather being fucky, and had a bunch of rogue grass and weeds to fight that had grown back up. I should look into ways to properly get rid of a bunch of grass for good, but there's probably no simple/easy way to do so without affecting any of the existing plants. I dunno.

Weeknote 17, 2025

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

Another late one this week, I was up real late last night playing Crusader Kings 3 with my housemates, and busy during the day today. I need to be a little bit more diligent when it comes to the timing of these posts.

I got sick again over the long weekend. My brother was sick first a few days earlier, must have caught it from customers at work, and then I was lucky enough to have it passed onto me 🙃. Slowly recovering but still rather ill.

It was a really short and quiet week at work thanks to the Easter Monday and Anzac Day (on Friday) public holidays. I think about half of the team just opted to take the 3 actual working days off and get a reaaaaally long weekend, which I don't blame them for doing. It was a little jarring coming back to that but I managed by tackling small QoL issues that we've had hanging around for a while.

I ordered and got an Apple Magic Trackpad too. I've been itching for one for a while as it would go really well in a desktop setup using the Niri window manager which I've been interested in for a while but still haven't gotten around to doing anything with. In the meantime, I've just been using it on KDE and it's been performing rather well, think I might go full time with it and replace my mouse usage, outside of gaming of course.

This week's song is Camden Cox - Oblivion.

Weeknote 16, 2025: Shingo Nakamura in Melbourne, 2025

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I had a rather eventful week! I took some much needed time off from work and was able to get some personal work done for once. Of note is the addition of Bluesky comments to my website, replacing the previous Giscus powered system. I got inspired by Natalie's site doing the same thing and decided it was probably the better way to go about it. If you scroll down to the bottom of this post you should be able to see a list of comments from the post on Bluesky (that is, if anyone has actually replied over there)!

I plan to possibly add support for replies from the Fediverse as comments at some point down the line, but I don't know if that will get two confusing having different comment systems. I'll have to think about it a bit. Stay tuned!

I was up in Melbourne for the Easter weekend, to see Shingo Nakamura at Howler in Brunswick! It was an incredible 9 hour(!!) gig I brought a friend along to, which also included performances from Floating Dreams, Seven Drops, and rshand, all of which were spectacular. I got some nice photos which I might post at a later date, and I even got a photo taken with Shingo which means a lot to me.

I hope to go to more gigs this year, need to keep an eye out on various channels to see if anyone I follow is doing stuff in Melbourne.

Weeknote 15, 2025

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

This edition's a little late because I was a little busy last night and earlier today. I caught a cold this past week. Not sure exactly where I caught it from, but thankfully I've mostly gotten over it now as it was just rather mild. Still waiting for my sinuses to fully recover.

I did quite a bit of gaming this week. I got my third ever win in Balatro finally, and started playing Stellaris for the first time, with my housemates. I was a little resistant to it at first but as we've gotten further into the game I've warmed up a bit and I'm finding it rather enjoyable now.

I didn't really get up to much else noteworthy this week sadly, in part due to the cold. However this coming week is going to be relatively big for me and I'm very excited, but I'm going to leave that for next-week me to write about.

This week's song is Pendulum & Armin van Buuren & Rob Swire - Sound of You.

Weeknote 14, 2025

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

Sleep has tried its best to elude me this week. I have scratched at its heels and managed to catch it yesterday night, but it still wasn't enough. I suppose I should make this quick, so that I may perhaps catch up.

I started watching Severance this week, after encouragement from a few friends who have seen it. Halfway through season 1 at the moment; I think it's pretty good so far. It feels in a similar vein to Netflix's Dark which I really enjoyed, so I'm looking forward to continuing with this.
I planted a bunch of carrot seeds (multi-colour variety so they're gonna be pretty!) and also harvested some the mustard habaneros that were ripe finally! https://aus.social/@ovyerus/114287597581790316 (no embed this time around, sorry).
Started a new project as a semi-toy to learn about how the ATProto works, and potentially build it out into a real app/service. No information on it just yet because I don't want to hype up anything that is this early and could be easily dropped by me.
I finally set up proper backups for my home server! Only doing the important data stuff, for the services that need it, as everything else is controlled by NixOS in a Git repository so it's not a problem.

This week's song is the "10 Years On" remake of Oh Wonder - Midnight Moon.

Weeknote 13, 2025

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

My weekend has been very very slow. Slept in a bunch and didn't do a whole lot. Same as the weather, frankly. I've been in the progress of reshuffling some of my self-hosted apps around, with the goals of eventually decommissioning the dedicated server I'm currently renting since my home server is much more powerful now. I've been a little inspired since Xe Iaso's Recent talk on their cool homelab setup, perhaps I'll do a little write up of my own afterwards; I really should use the blog more often.

Work is having our dev team try out the LLM-integrated editor Cursor for a while. In the interest of being unbiased I have been giving it a fair shot, using it to help author some of my commits of the last week to varying degrees. The autocomplete on tab has been a little nice but can get in the way occasionally as it's also my key to complete IntelliSense suggestions, and I think it's actually been sneakily deleting code that is actually used, somehow. I've caught it 3 times so far. The chat system is interesting but I haven't found much use in its results for the problems that I face at work. I'm going to keep with it for a while longer, see if there's anything redeeming about it further on.

Also it's locked to using cloud AI shit like OpenAI & Claude, sadly. Would like to be able to try it out with my local Ollama instance, but I suppose there's other extensions that would allow me to do so.

I've been a little better at being healthier this week, trying to reduce my snacking frequency and what it is I'm snacking on, as well as easing into more frequent exercising. I've found that the VR exercise has been working really well for me, especially in terms of motivation, so that's going to be my go-to from now on where possible.

This week's song is PRAANA - Zilker Gardens Echo

Weeknote 12, 2025

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I'm doing better this week, thanks to some help from my friends, and taking time off work for a few days. Here's some things that happened over the course of the week.

My housemate's SSD died early in the week so we got a new one for her and she wanted to switch to Linux Mint instead of Windows! Had a few initial pains with it at first but it seems to be stable for her now!
I set up Hoarder on my home server to see how it compares to Linkwarden. So far, Linkwarden appears to be more oriented towards archival and backups of internet resources, whereas Hoarder is more link, note, and image aggregation. Kinda like a selfhosted Pinterest. Hoarder also displays images in a better way than Linkwarden, so I think I'm going to keep both around and have them for their different uses. My main goal for using Hoarder at the current moment is to put together some lists for outfit ideas that interest me.
While I was setting up Hoarder, I figured I would use it as an excuse to fool around with Ollama as it has support for tag inference from saved items. It actually works surprisingly well for the task, although of course comes with the fuzziness that is inherent with generative machine learning.
My housemates and I started a play through of Borderlands out of the blue a few days ago. I've always really enjoyed the series, but never had anyone consistent to play it with so never actually completed any of the games except for Borderlands 3 a year or so ago. Hoping to get through all the games with them, and possibly even a bunch of the end game content and DLCs. We'll see.
I also did VR exercise a few times this week, getting into the grove of it from inactivity. Really having a blast with it so I hope I'm able to keep it up properly and start losing some weight.

This week's release is Vanilla - Time Goes By Pt. I.

Weeknote 11, 2025

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

Bit of a downer week for me, personally. The weather has been less than ideal, so I didn't go on any walks or do any gardening sadly. And the last few days have been less than ideal, but I'm making it through. It wasn't all bad though.

On two of the milder days during the week, I decided to some intense VR sessions, playing through new Synth Riders maps and progressing through Until You Fall. I hope to try and keep this up as an alternative to walking for exercise, especially on days where I can't/don't want to go walking.

I set up Immich on my home server as an experiment. Going to go through and sort some of the media into albums and whatnot just to see how it is. It's also good to have a backup that isn't just tied to Apple (I do need to set up Borg backups for it though). I also installed a drive bay for the server to clean up the birds nest that was the drives just being scattered all over the insides of the case. I also had a case where two drives weren't connected properly for some reason so had dropped out of the ZFS pool, but putting everything into the bay has fixed that and it's all working normally now!

This week's song is MOTSA, Jody Wisternoff & James Grant - Feel This Way.

Weeknote 10, 2025

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

Short entry for this week because my brain is dumb and empty rn.

I decided to finally pull out the heirloom tomato vine this week. It's been looking really unhealthy for the past while and the fruit weren't faring any better, so I decided to just cut my losses. This is the second time I haven't gotten any success out of heirloom tomatoes, so I think next season I'm going to just try a regular variety and hope they're more resistant. In brighter news, the "mustard" habaneros I planted alongside the tomatoes is finally starting to bear fruit! Can't wait for them to mature and see how it turns out.

I found out about NixOS' specialisations feature this week, and so I've taken this as an excuse to finally experiment with a Niri setup, without needing to completely remove my current KDE environment. Haven't done much with it yet but hoping to have some good progress in the coming weeks.

This week's song is Massane & Thandi - Lose My Head.

Weeknote 09, 2025

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

Of course after all I said last week about wishing to make daily logging & more frequent walks a habit, I did no such things this week. In the case of the lack of walks I would make some excuse based on the weather, but this past week was actually rather pleasant, I just found some days a little too warm which in reality isn't a problem that should have stopped me. In terms of daily logging, I just feel like I had a rather uneventful week for me to keep note of things, but perhaps I should look into keeping track of the smaller things, what I had to eat on a particular day maybe.

Regardless, this week wasn't completely lost to my job. I ordered some new PC components the other week to build a new home server utilising my old CPU (see 2024-W52), as my existing server has been experiencing random restarts increasingly frequently, suspecting a hardware fault somewhere. These new components arrived this week and I spent some time putting it together and setting it up. This time around it's running raw NixOS instead of Proxmox, as I found that I didn't really utilise the VM functionality, just ended up having one that I treated as a main machine. This way, the system will be able to use its resources more easily, and means I don't have to faff about with forwarding hardware devices like a GPU. It's taken some time but it's finally in a spot that I'm happy with at the moment, and is in parity with what I was running on the old server!

I didn't get around to doing anything non-technical this week, sadly, however I did have dinner with my parents on Saturday which was a nice little thing.

Weeknote 08, 2025

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I did a little bit of daily logging this week, trying to keep track of some of the littler things that occurred. It wasn't super extensive (and logging every single thing done would be counterproductive IMO), but it's definitely helped me while writing this; I hope it'll develop into a proper habit.

I took a few walks during the week (which is where I had the logging idea pop up initially), as a response to realising that I was procrastinating at work or stuck on a particularly strange problem. Thankfully the weather for the weekdays was actually welcoming for such an activity, all in the low 20's, and I would like to keep it up should the weather cooperate in the future, as I found it did help me when I was stuck in those circumstances.

Did some more gardening as well this week, but not really any weeding. I got some longer bamboo stakes from Bunnings to help lift some of the tomato vines up off the ground more, and while I was there I saw a tray of habanero peppers which were marked for clearance down to $3!!! Figured I may as well buy them at that price, it'll be interesting to see how they compare to the other cultivar I got a while back with the tomatoes.

And finally for this week, I ordered some new components for a new home server build that I'm planning, as the current thing has been randomly restarting itself for a while now which is concerning. Going to be reusing my old CPU & case, as well as the current server's power supply, so just waiting on a motherboard and RAM and then it'll be good to go!

This week's song is Sound Quelle x Deagon x MØØNE - Risk It All. And an honourable mention to Amtrac - Generator, the EP of which was randomly recommended by me earlier today by YouTube Music!

Weeknote 07, 2025: Experiments Review

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

It was a little short, but I think the formats experimentation worked out pretty well. I was able to explore a bit more with my writing here, and read a bit more about how other people do their own weeknotes. Overall, I don't think I'm going to adopt any one style as a new permanent way of doing weeknotes here, instead I'm just going to write however I feel is appropriate for the given week rather than being strict.

A cool change has been rolling in down here this past week, bringing with it a bunch of rain which quickly abated. As a result, I was finally able to get back into my parent's garden and do some much needed weeding, as a ton had grown back thanks to all the rain and time being unattended. I was also able to finally pick a bunch of the cherry tomatoes, which has grown quite big since I was last in the garden! Sadly still no viable fruit from the heirloom tomatoes, but there are a lot of stuff growing on it, so hopefully I'll be able to get something from it this time around. I might need to buy some longer stakes to get them off the ground better and maybe that'll work.

Those cherry tomatoes got used a few days later as a roasted side to some beef schnitzels alongside a cucumber salad, and it was awesome. The tomatoes were soft, sweet, and pretty rich, and they paired really nice with the cucumber salad which was a real refreshing contrast. And the tomatoes being home grown made it even better!

Green thumb aside, I've been fighting against my 3D printer trying to get prints sticking properly to the print bed but it seems like it's just wanting to stick to the nozzle no matter what. I might need to swap out the nozzle for a cleaner one, but that means going through a big box of stuff to try and find my spares which is a huge task I don't really want to undertake. Perhaps I'll be able to find the mental energy this coming week.

I'll leave you off with Puppet feat. distant - Who's Haunting You?.

Weeknote 06, 2025: A Break From the Experiments

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

Taking a break from the experiments for this week to go back to my usual style, as I've been leaving the format choosing very last minute and that has backfired on me today and as such I haven't found one that would for this week. Hopefully I'll fix that up next week!

I got around to installing Windows on my PC again, but this time on a completely separate drive from everything else to keep it isolated. Why? To finally be able to play some PCVR again, as I'm frankly tired of waiting for Valve to get Steam Link VR working on Linux (apparently there's only like one person actively working on it, so fair enough) and I don't want to tinker with other solutions so this was the easy way out. As a result I've been playing a bunch of H3VR, screwing around with all its guns is much fun. Will end up going through a bunch of other games in my library (like Blade & Sorcery) in the coming weeks.

Sadly wasn't able to get around to any gardening this week as it was super hot and then rainy right after, all week. So I'm going to try and pop around in the middle of next week to get it done as there's gonna be a lot of weeds that have popped up again with all this time and rain.

On the other hand, I've finally picked up an old, private project of mine that I dropped early last year thanks to ✨brain magic✨, but now I've gotten bored from lack of motivation on other projects so I'm going to pick it up under a new name and probably start from scratch with some actual darn planning around it as it's pretty huge. Hopefully I won't drop it this time around and I'll have something to talk about in a few months!

And lastly, my sleep this week was still crap, but I started work on it (somewhat) this weekend, forcing myself into bed early, mostly because I actually realised I was bored with nothing to actually do and was just procrastinating. Hoping I'll be able to continue this and turn it into a proper habit 🙏.

Weeknote 05, 2025: Experiments #3 - The Good, the Bad, and the Something Else

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The Good

On Tuesday I got a foam blaster I had eyed up at the start of the year, the HC Diana. It's an injection moulded pistol-style flywheel blaster that shoots extremely hard, but I primarily got it because I love the form factor, and just sliding the magazines in and out has been really fun on its own. Perhaps at some point in the future I'll look at joining any local games, but for now I'm happy as I am, and will probably do some mods on it to trick it out a little bit.

I did some more maintenance on my services this week: set up an instance of Uptime Kuma for keeping track of my uptime, not that I expect anything to go down (or even have alerting set up), but a nice way to experiment with it in case I want to use it properly in the future; finally set up Borgmatic backups for some important services in case something goes wrong; and moved my Snikket instance to be configured through Arion to bring it alongside the few other services I did the other week.

And I wrote up a /uses page for my website yesterday, inspired by what I saw on my girlfriend's website while I was bored and poking around, figured I would give it a shot as it was good way to take stock of what I have and actually use; might end up being useful for me in the future in some way.

The Bad

My sleep didn't get any better this week unfortunately. I'm purely to blame of course, but it still sucks big time. I need to stop procrastinating on my PC doing nothing of value instead of just going to bed at an earlier time and being able to get some sort of decent sleep. Hopefully I'll be able to do that this week.

The week started and ended with scorchers of days, hitting a bit above 35°C (I think Monday may have even hit 40). Thankfully Monday was a public holiday so didn't have work, and today's Sunday so no work either, but trying to get anything done for myself has been a bit of an extra chore thanks to the heat. And the next few days are looking to be more of the same sadly, hopefully I'll survive.

The Something Else

I don't actually have much else to add here like some other users of this format do; this week was fairly standard for me and nothing of note really pops out at me that would fit (i.e. new things learned, what I've been working on). I need to pick up some way of writing daily notes to myself on my thoughts and feelings throughout the week to make the weeknote process easier, but I've tried a few things in the past that haven't really worked out. I should probably do some research in the coming days for that.

Weeknote 04, 2025: Experiments #2 - 5 Things That Happened

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This week I'm going to be trying out a "<x> things that happened" format. I think this may help me to cut down some fluff with what I did, we'll see.

One. My sleep this week has again been absolutely atrocious, save for yesterday but that was because I was able to sleep in until quite late. I need to seriously put in some concerted effort into fixing this in the coming weeks, as I almost missed a few work meetings due to sleeping in just a bit too long. Hopefully with the public holiday tomorrow I'll be able to get a start on that 🤞.

Two. I did some substantial changes to my butchers order this week in order to accomodate one of my housemates, who doesn't enjoy picking around bone for meat. We tried out their beef schnitzels for the first time the other night and they were really nice! I need to come up with some more cool sides for stuff like that though, at some point.

Three. I got around to doing some minor maintenance on a few projects. For bandsnatch I reverted a bunch of the stupid stuff I was doing trying to wrangle cross-compilation into the Nix flake, as I found it rather complex for very little benefit for me personally, as well as up one of the more complex data fetching functions a little bit, to prepare for some more major refactoring around how it works there.

I cleaned up my NixOS/nix-darwin dotfiles a little bit and finally updated the public repository with my new content (previously it was just a Home Manager configuration) to act as a public example of a daily driver NixOS desktop. Do check it out if you're interested!

I also did some light cleanup on my personal website (where you are reading this, hopefully!) as it turns out I missed some changes that occurred when I upgraded to Astro v5.

Four. Alongside that maintenance, I've been exploring more self-hosted stuff after seeing the Tailscale folk do a blog post/video on Beszel which I decided to set up myself. and it's been very nice! I also found out about Pocket ID, a simple Passkey based OIDC provider, and replaced my Zitadel instance with it. Zitadel is nice as an identity provider, however I found it a little too complex for my needs (it seems to be very aimed at organisations, which isn't a bad thing) and Pocket ID feels really good so far.

Five. I ended up cutting the pad on my right index finger pretty badly earlier in the week, while trying to open a bag of potato gems with a bread knife. Don't know how I managed that, will teach me to just use scissors in the future I suppose. At least the cut wasn't super deep, just bled a lot.

Weeknote 03, 2025: Experiments #1 - Emoji Dot Points

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

📝 This is the first of (hopefully) a few format experiments I'll be doing here along the next few weeks, trying some different ideas out to see if there's anything that jives with me a little better than the pure paragraph dumps I've been doing since I started weeknotes a few months ago. This week I'm taking inspiration from Kerri Krueger's weeknotes, with some short emoji dot points of what's been going on.

🌿 I cleared a huge section of the garden of tall weeds using the whipper snipper this week, mostly to tidy up that part so it looked more tended to overall, but also to eventually fully clear it to have some more growing room for new plants!

💅 Finally got a new set of nail polish after not being able to find my old stash last week (which is a huge shame, hopefully it'll pop up again at some point) and painted my nails for the first time in a while :).

🎮 Games

World of Warcraft Classic
Euro Truck Simulator 2 (My brother got a steering wheel peripheral this week and I borrowed it for this. It's oddly fun.)
Disco Elysium

🎵 Music

Weeknote 02, 2025

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

Work started back up this week, after a few weeks off for the holidays. Lots of stuff being a little fiddly after the break but we're getting warmed up and back into the groove of things slowly!

I did some light weeding in the middle of the week for the garden, and harvested 4 of the cherry tomatoes that had ripened. They turned out really good and I can't wait for more to be ready soon; definitely going to be planting more this variety next season. I also need to go to Bunnings at some point and pick out some new seedlings to plant as I've got more space to fill in the garden.

I think next week I'm going to start experimenting with this format a little bit, but for now I'll leave you off with this week's song which is Elliot Vast - Awake.

Weeknote 01, 2025

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world, happy new year!

Curiously, no new year's fireworks going off in my area when midnight hit, when they have done previous years. I was taking a shower at the time so maybe I could've missed them, but I did hear a few isolated pops while in there so I'm pretty sure there wasn't any big show. A shame IMO.

My Quest 3 arrived on Tuesday, and so far the experience has been really great. The optical clarity compared to the Quest 2 is really impressive, and so is the full-colour passthrough (compared to the black-and-white cameras of its predecessor). I forgot how bad the default head strap on the Quest 2 was though, and this comes with pretty much an identical design sadly; I've ordered a third-party strap so my usage is probably going to be pretty light until that arrives, as it will be a much more comfortable experience.

Some real stinkers weather wise today and yesterday here in Victoria, almost hitting 40°C both days. Thankfully expecting rain on Monday, but the rest of the week looks like it'll be pretty warm, but nowhere near how bad it was.

This week's song is Kooma - blue tint.

Weeknote 52, 2024: Christmas 2024

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I hope you all have had a good holiday season, spending it with your loved ones and having a good time. I spent Christmas day mostly at home as usual, but I had dinner at my parent's house and it was nice. I got a few plushies from them which I'm going to need to find a good place for, and I gave them boxes of chocolates in return which I hope they enjoy thoroughly.

I ordered myself a Quest 3 at the start of the week, as an upgrade from my Quest 2 which I've had for the past few years. It's coming in tomorrow as of writing, so I'm excited for it and will leave my thoughts on it compared to its predecessor for the next weeknote. I also bought myself a new CPU & cooler combo for my PC a few weeks ago - an AMD Ryzen 9 5900XT and the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE - but never actually got around to installing it due to good ol' executive dysfunction. I finally got the brain power to install it just a few hours before writing this, and so far it's looking like a great change. The PC is basically dead silent now under normal light loads while hanging around 40°C, and hitting 60°C while running stress-ng on all 32 threads, and all while still being whisper quiet. I love it. Going to do some better testing during the week, namely some compilation and software video encoding (VP9) to truly see how it fares against the Ryzen 5600X and stock cooler that it is replacing.

This marks the last weeknote for 2024. It's been a good run and I've enjoyed writing these every week, I think it was definitely a good practice to pick up. I might experiment with the format a little bit in the first few weeks of 2025, possibly copying some things I've seen from other blogs, see how they feel compared to this paragraphic semi-rambling I've been doing this year.

See you round the corner 🫡.

Weeknote 51, 2024: A Bad Santa Finishing Up Work

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I visited my extended family this Christmas weekend for lunch. It was sort of a potluck style this time around, where everyone brought their own meat to cook and have themselves, rather than having a few roasts done as usual. We also played "Bad Santa" (or "Dirty Santa", apparently?) for handing out gifts this year, and I got a moka pot and some pre-ground coffee out of it. Excited to try it out. Sadly I had to leave a bit early, but it was a nice get together and we had a good time.

It was also the last work week of the year for me, mostly spent wrapping up some of the stuff I'm currently working on to be in a good spot for me to return to in the new year. I need to make sure I use the break well instead of just playing games all the time, I'm sure I'll find some things to do (really I should get some cleaning done around the house lol).

I didn't do any gardening this week, although I probably should've, but now that I have some time off during the next few weeks, I'm going to try and get it done a bit more frequently, mainly to keep clearing out weeds but also to water my plants since it's getting pretty dry here. The tomatoes are still coming along strong though! Very excited to see how they turn out.

This week's song is Toby Hedges - Images, from 2013!

Weeknote 50, 2024

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

Quite a late weeknote this time around; had a very busy day yesterday (Sunday) helping out my local church with an annual community event. Was out in the sun pretty much all morning & evening (i remembered to apply sunscreen at least!) running the sound system for it. I had a lot of fun helping out, but I was quite exhausted at the end of the day and had to cook dinner as well, so made the decision to delay writing this entry.

The weather last week was sunny but not too bad in terms of temperature, so I was able to do more gardening. It was the typical weeding as usual (I didn't get any more seedlings during the week, although I reckon I should have), but I also had to re-stake the tomato plants as they've been growing all over the place like crazy, and one stake wasn't enough for them! They've also started fruiting, so I'll have some more home-grown tomatoes very soon. Hopefully all the larger tomatoes don't get eaten by bugs like last time around!

I also picked one of the lettuces that have gotten quite big, going to try it out this week.

This week's song was Notaker feat. Eric Lumiere - Speed of Light.

Weeknote 49, 2024: Embed images, HTML popovers, and weed whacking

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

This week I did something pretty cool to this website: I've added proper social media images to all my posts here, so that when posted to somewhere like Mastodon or Discord, it'll show some information about the post instead of the plain gradient it had before! And since this website is still a static Astro project, all the images are generated at build time & can be cached by CDNs pretty much indefinitely (though I need to actually set that up in Caddy sometime soon). Whether this actually adds any useful information is an exercise left to the reader.

While starting a new project to do with a friend a few days ago, I learnt about the popover and popovertarget attributes in HTML, which basically lets you turn any element into displaying like a dialog over everything else on the page, and you can even toggle it with a button with no JavaScript! Unfortunately as of writing you still do need some JS if you want to position a popover element relative to its trigger (although with a proper bundler, the Floating UI library can get cut down to ~3.5kB (minified + gzip) in it's most simple usecase, and up to about 6kB with the features to auto update as the screen changes and reposition itself to avoid going offscreen), but there is the CSS anchor positioning proposal. Currently it is only available in Chrome based browsers with an experimental flag, but hopefully it'll get accepted properly sometime soon and we'll finally be able to have cool zero-JS stuff!

Tech bullshit aside; I was able to do gardening in the middle of the week thanks to a clear spot in the weather. Got some much needed weeding done as a bunch had sprung up thanks to all the rain, and some tiny tomatoes have started appearing on the plants which is great! Hopefully the larger tomatoes turn out better compared to last time round; I actually bought proper stakes for them so it should be good! The lettuces are getting nice and big too, might be time to harvest at least one of them soon!

No featured song this week, but I have been rewatching (again) Citation Needed while doing things, so I'll leave you all with that.

Weeknote 48, 2024: The (World of) War(craft) on My Sleep

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world, happy December!

World of Warcraft really fucked with my sleep schedule this week. It's been extremely shitty, as a result of my brain latching onto something within and making it hard to quit. Thankfully it hasn't been interrupting my work, but I need to be more diligent about going to bed at a reasonable time as the following mornings have been rough.

It was a mixture of rainy, hot, and generally humid all this week, so unfortunately was not able to find the opportunity to go on any walks (I should probably look into picking up VR again so I can do some form of exercise at least), but it did let up during the day today, so I was able to get some much needed gardening done: cleaning up the weeds that sprung up over the past few weeks of no gardening, and picking some of the leeks that started budding, which is actually a lot so I'm going to need to find a good use for them at some point. Thankfully, looks like there's going to be a nice clear spot in the middle of the coming week so I'll be able to get some more gardening done - and even get some more stuff planted - even if the weekend turns out a bit sour.

My obsession this past week has been Kooma, Miyoki, Veela - Reason. Been listening to it a ton while playing WoW, and YouTube keeps serving it back up to me, not that I'm complaining.

Weeknote 47, 2024

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

Not much of significance to report on this week. It felt like it whizzed by super fast and I didn't have the time to really do things. Plus the weather has started getting stupid (hot one day and raining the next) so I wasn't able to get outside to do any walks, and it looks like that's going to be the case for this coming week as well 🙁.

I did however, play through Half-Life 2 again, thanks to the recent 20th anniversary update it got. They added a retrospective developer commentary mode throughout the game, and it was cool listening to them talk about how features evolved, and how they were seen back in 2004. I'm also going through aiming to get all the achievements that I never got around to after all these years.

And my housemates dragged me into playing World of Warcraft Classic, with it also being WoW's 20th anniversary they've launched another branch that is starting from the vanilla game, like they did originally 5 years ago. Currently I'm a bit on the fence about it, I'm not really into grindy games, but probably will stick with it for the 1 month that I bought and then see how I feel about it then.

This week's song is Braxton & Lauren L'aimant - Holding On.

Weeknote 46, 2024

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I took a proper walk this week, after not having done so for almost two months (since I move in September)! I'm not sure what exactly motivated me to finally do it, but I'm glad I did as I felt pretty good afterwards. Hopefully I'm able to keep it up going forward, and the weather won't be too bad to make me dread doing so. 🤞

I didn't get around to doing any gardening this week sadly; Saturday was a bit too hot for my liking (though I really could have gone in the evening once it was starting to cool a bit), and today rained pretty much all day until the evening, at which point I was taking a pretty hefty nap as I slept poorly last night. I'm planning on doing some in the middle of this coming week to make up for it, now that the days are long enough for me to be able to do stuff after work with it still being light out.

On the bright side, I did end up baking more cookies using the same recipe from last week, but adjusted the time in the oven and the temperature a little bit to get them more to my liking. Still not fully perfect but very very good nonetheless! It also occurs to me that I never actually mentioned which recipe I used for them, it's this chewy chocolate chip cookies recipe from Sally's Baking Recipes. And granted, I haven't actually followed the recipe exactly as I don't have any brown sugar or cornstarch in my pantry, but they still came out really nice regardless. Perhaps I'll pick those up in my shopping this week and see if they turn out any more to my preference once I'm following the recipe properly.

And lastly, it's a bit of a hard choice for me as I listened to a bunch of Monstercat Silk Showcase because I had gotten behind, but this week's song is dwelyr - Something About You.

Weeknote 45, 2024

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I did a bunch of on-and-off experimenting with my DJ gear this week, getting a feel for the various controls and whatnot. I started off trying it out fully standalone, playing music off of the USB & CD inputs, but eventually decided to do a bunch of practising with software running on my Macbook (Mixxx if you're interested) as the built-in BPM detection on the CDJ-400s is apparently not that reliable as it doesn't do the whole track at once, so that makes matching the BPM of different songs a little tricky. Hoping to do some training at some point to be able to pull that off.

Earlier in the week I finally got around to moving my website off of Vercel and onto Fly.io. Not exactly self-hosting as I was thinking of initially, but I figured I would give it a shot since I have some free allowances on there anyway, and they make scaling across regions really easy (not that my personal website would ever really need that :P). At the moment it's still a fully static site now being served by Caddy, but that'll change as I add some of the features I've been wanting which will need an actual runtime behind the website. All in due time!

Gardening this week was mostly just some simple weeding to clear space for more plants down the line, but I did buy some sunflower seeds and sprinkled them around in some of the empty spots, mainly to help with pollinators down the line, as it was a big shame I had to get rid of the bok choy.

And last, but certainly not least, I decided to bake some cookies yesterday! We've ended up with a few too many eggs since someone bought a whole bunch while we already had some, so I needed an excuse to use some of them. It didn't actually use that many eggs, so I'm possibly going to make another batch or so, and maybe even a cake at some point!

This week's song is ORACLE & MØØNE – Tether.

Weeknote 44, 2024

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

It's been a busy-ish week for me, though mostly at the tail end of it I reckon. I made some good progress at work finishing off a core feature for our new thing, and happy with how I'm progressing in general.

On Thursday, I bought a second-hand DJ kit containing 2 Pioneer CDJ-400s and a Gemini Executioner 10 mixer (from the late 90s!!), with a nice road case for everything! Sadly I wasn't able to play around with it yet as the replaceable fuse in the mixer is blown for whatever reason, and I didn't actually check everything until late Saturday when all the stores where closed, so going to have to wait until Monday to buy a replacement and then figure it out over the coming week. Very excited for it, I've been interested in DJ stuff for quite some time.

I did some small behind-the-scenes changes for this website to prepare it for eventually moving to my dedicated server rather than relying on Vercel for everything. Figuring I may as well actually put the thing to use, and in the near future I want to add some nice features to the site, such as replacing/supplementing the comment system with Webmentions, among others.

In terms of gardening, the peas and bok choy were all finally finished producing, so I pulled them out (my parents' chickens should love it) and put in some new plants for the summer season. Got some tomatoes, lettuce, and a chilli currently (alongside the leeks that are still growing), and probably will put some more things in soon.

This week's song is Sublab & Dyson - Remedy.

Weeknote 43, 2024

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I picked up a new case for my PC this week! I've had my eye on the white variant of the Fractal North for a long while, and after getting a little bit of extra money earlier in the week I decided to finally pick it up. I got the XL variant due to buying the Radeon 7900 XT a few months ago, which is a huge graphics card, so giving me the extra space to work with was nice. It was super easy to build in, and I love the way it looks. Very happy with it!

I finally got over my cold from last week, and I'm feeling a lot better now. Went out to get my yearly eye test at the optometrist and happy to report that I've not changed since last year.

Did a little bit of weeding at the garden, just keeping on top of stuff there. The peas seem to pretty much be finished now, so I think next week I'll cut them off above the ground. My mum also found a rhubarb in a pot randomly, so I transplanted that into the garden next to a small strawberry plant that was already there, so hopefully that'll turn out nice soon.

This week's song is Virtual Riot - Scorched Earth!

Weeknote 42, 2024

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I got home from being in Melbourne for PAX early this week, and subsequently managed to catch a cold right after. Thankfully hasn't been too bad, but it did significantly impact my work. I'm mostly recovered now thankfully, just dealing with a really snotty nose.

Got back to doing gardening after missing out last weekend, had a bunch more peas to harvest and they were nice and big compared to last time around! I also took a really nice photo of a bee exploring one of the bok choy as they've been flowering for a few weeks now!

Been watching a lot more Dimension 20 this week, almost finished A Starstruck Odyssey. Incredible series, can't believe I haven't touched it until recently.

No song this week, haven't listened to a lot as I've been watching a bunch of things.

Weeknote 41, 2024: PAX Australia 2024

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I've had one hell of a weekend this week; I went to PAX Australia for the first time! I found myself gravitating towards a bunch of the TTRPG/D&D related panels thanks to Dimension 20 giving me an itch for the scene. Bought my first sets of dice in a bundle while I was there, hoping to set up a few one-shots or campaigns with friends sometime soon.

Not much else to report on this week as I've spent most of the week up in Melbourne and been physically busy with PAX. I have done a lot of walking due to the event, so hopefully I'm able to take that back home and build it into a proper habit again.

This week's song is Approaching Black - Don't Look Back.

Weeknote 40, 2024

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

My sleep schedule's been pretty messed up this past week. Totally my fault, staying up real late playing Baldurs Gate 3 when I need to be getting up (relatively) early for work. Has screwed up my energy as well, so while I was initially intending to pick my daily walking back up this week, it didn't pan out that way at all.

Despite a really rainy week, the weather on the weekend permitted me to do some gardening thankfully. This included getting my first harvest of peas!

I've started watching/listening to a lot of Dimension 20 while doing various chores around the house. I finished the first season of Misfits and Magic just in time to start watching season 2 as it launched, and I've also picked up A Starstruck Odyssey which I had originally started sometime last year, but it's been so long that I'm starting over to follow the plot.

I got so many I had to leave about half with my parents for them to use (and I am using their land for this after all) and I'm going to use some of them in stir fry this week, although I'll still need to find something else to put them in as there's so many.

This week's track is Ezequiel Arias & Sebastian Sellares - Alba.

Weeknote 39, 2024

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

A more low-key week after all the bustling of moving house last week. All the major unpacking has been done, it's just trying to find spots for all the smaller things now. Going to hit up IKEA sometime soon to get some shelving for things to make it easier.

In other news, the peas in my garden have started growing pods! Can't wait to get enough from them to use them in dishes properly.

The place I've moved to also has some garden space (I've been doing gardening at my parent's place since I lived in an apartment before), and I might start growing some herbs locally to use them fresh.

I ended up shifting my keyboard layout away from home-row modifiers as I found myself hitting them on accident too frequently. I tried out auto shift for a few days and I actually quite enjoyed it, but found out I can't enable it per-layer in ZSA's online configurator (as otherwise it would screw up with trying to use my keyboard in games), so for now I've gone back to a standalone shift key on my left thumb and that's been working well. The other modifiers are kept as one-shot modifiers on a secondary layer and that's been good for me too.

And today, I baked a cake with my housemates. An orange & poppyseed cake mix from Green's. Not the fanciest thing, but it came out real nice, just something to do together on their day off.

Weeknote 38, 2024

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

It's been a hell of a week; I moved house! Still unpacking and organising all the stuff out, but everything has been moved over to the new house, and the old place has had a thorough cleaning. The new place is nice and big, has a really nice kitchen (albeit no dishwasher, but we can live with that), and is actually at ground level so bringing things in and out isn't a huge pain in the ass!

Before the move, I got new switches for my keyboard! I'm now rocking the Sunset Tactile switches on my Voyager and it's feeling and sounding great. Very happy with them. I'm still fiddling with my layout on the keyboard, not sure if home-row mods are quite the thing for me, going to see what other people have done on their own keyboards and try to find something that could work better for me.

During all the unpacking I've started watching Dimension 20: Never Stop Blowing Up, as I've run out of other things that seem interesting (at the moment), and it's been awesome. I love how they're taking the cheesy 80's action movie setting in stride and just going with the crazy shit that's happening. Highly recommend if you're into TTRPG's of any kind!

Despite all the busyness this week, I was able to check out Veela's new song with Øneheart and TWISTED, chrysalis. The vibes on the "music video" are really great so I recommend giving that a look.

Until next time.

Weeknote 37, 2024

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

It was my birthday this week! Turned 23, and had a nice dinner out with my family. A good, low key time.

I've been messing around with various stuff on my keyboard since switching to the ZSA Voyager last week. The main change I've done is trying out home row mods (moving Ctrl, Shift, Alt, & Meta from dedicated keys to instead trigger when holding down keys on the home row); not sure if I'm super happy with it just yet, probably need to tweak some of my timing values to help with misfires but time will tell of course! This does mean the introduction of a dedicated gaming layer to prevent accidentally triggering the modifiers during gameplay, but that's not a problem (maybe I should take a look at the Azeron Cyborg gamepad). I have some alternative switches coming in tomorrow as well, so will be nice to compare their feel to the linear's I'm currently using.

Baldur's Gate 3 ate up most of my free time this week. I had previously completed the first act aaages ago close to when it first came out, and then dropped it due to reasons™️. Some friends convinced me to finally get back in and it's been a blast. Finished up act 2 and just starting act 3 now, and I'm still excited to see what it can offer! It's actually ended up eating into my sleep a little bit just because I lose track of time whilst playing it before bed. Definitely something I need to watch out for more.

And this week's song is Mori Calliope - Go-Getters. YouTube Shorts fed me several clips with the song and now it's stuck in my head!

Weeknote 36, 2024

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I got some new tech this week! I upgraded my monitors from 144Hz 1080p (AOC 24G2) to 180Hz 1440p (AOC CQ27G2X), which also happens to be my first run in with using curved monitors. My main reason for switching was wanting to check out bigger resolutions for the first time (the slightly faster refresh rate just happened to come along with these), and I saw these at what I considered to be a pretty good price: $249 AUD each, down from $339 at the time of purchase. So far, they've been pretty good—games and text look awesome—but there's some pretty noticeable ghosting in scenarios like fast moving targets or even just scrolling text in the right circumstances. It's a little annoying, but I don't think it's a deal breaker for me personally.

I also got a new keyboard alongside the monitors! I've been using the ZSA Moonlander for the past 3 years and been loving it (I'm hooked on split ergonomic keyboards now), but I've been itching to try a low-profile keyboard for a while. So I ended up getting ZSA's Voyager board; a bit of a similar idea to the Moonlander but using low profile keyswitches, and a slightly smaller layout. Getting used to it has been a bit of a challenge, as I'm really used to having the dedicated modifier buttons like Shift & Control and never really messed much with layers previously beyond simple stuff like arrow keys, but I'm experimenting with some different stuff and slowly getting towards a layout I'm fully comfortable with. I definitely love the feel of the low-profile switches compared to full sized Cherry style switches, and I'm going to try some different variants to find one I love.

I've kept up my walks where possible this week, although a few days had rainy weather so I had to change up my walking times from the early afternoon to something a little earlier, but I got them done which is the important part!

I finally finished Metroid Prime 2 earlier today, after a few weeks of procrastinating on it (lol). Again really good like the first game, and I can't wait to get into Prime 3 to prepare for when 4 launches sometime soon™️.

Usually, I end these off with one song I really enjoyed during the week, however NERO finally released their new album "Into the Unknown" and I can't pick just one song from it, so instead I'm going to be recommending the whole album. It's great to see new stuff from them after so long :).

Also this week, I did a slight rework of my logo on the website. I mostly just redid some of the metrics to square things up & adjust the border radii. Small stuff to improve it just that bit more.

Weeknote 35, 2024

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I decided to start a new Obsidian vault today. I've found myself having a bit of a crisis with my ADHD and finding myself unable to effectively navigate my previous setup as it ended up being rather complex and a bit bloated. Hopefully I'm able to find a way to utilise Obsidian in a way that works properly with my brain.

I've kept up with my walking this week, and there's been a bit of a change! Two weeks in a row where I've gone down ~0.5 kg from the previous, so it's definitely helping out! Very happy with the progress 🙂.

I've also kept up with the iOS development course I picked up last week. Not much else to report apart from being halfway through now, but it's been a very good time!

Yesterday I was able to harvest one of the bok choy I planted some time ago, and used it in a stir-fry for dinner tonight! Came out really really nice; I'm proud.

Lastly, this week's song is Banaati, Dokho & MØØNE - Wildfire.

Weeknote 34, 2024

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I decided to pick up iOS app development this week. I've had a few ideas bouncing around in my head for a while now, and finally had the spark of motivation to learn Swift and SwiftUI! Coming from my frontend framework background, I actually found SwiftUI pretty easy to understand and get used after the initial hurdle of learning to navigate Xcode. I might look into setting up VSCode for working with Swift since I'm more comfortable with it's controls. If you've been interested in picking up SwiftUI too, I'm currently following the 100 Days of SwiftUI course (albeit, going at a pace far exceeding what it recommends, due to not being a beginner) and it explains the various Swift and SwiftUI concepts very well!

I also added RSS feed support for these weeknotes to my website earlier in the week, so if you're wanting to keep up with these for whatever reason you can just add the feed to whatever app you enjoy using, and it should Just Work™️.

Despite the forecast at the start of the week looking pretty dreary, it ended up being clear just about ever day. I was able to get a walk in just about every day, but had to skip out on Tuesday due to it deciding to be the exception and pouring almost all day. I hope I'm able to find time this coming week to keep this going as a habit.

I finally managed to secure a lease for a new place after searching for several months! Will be moving in about a month, and I already can't wait.

All I've been playing this week has been No Man's Sky again, going through the main story and side content after finishing off the community expedition last week. There's actually a ton of content I didn't realise I was missing out on because I wasn't investigating stuff properly in the past, and it's all pretty awesome!

This week's song is Otherwise - Cruel Unusual.

Weeknote 33, 2024

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I kept up my regular walking this week, thanks to a continuation of the great weather from last week. It's been a real positive for me every day, and I hope the weather this coming week will be able to keep it up. If not, I'll need to find some other way of keeping myself moving… I haven't used my Quest in a fair bit.

I did some gardening again yesterday. I planted some peas and Chinese cabbage (I forget exactly which type) a few weeks ago, and they've been loving the weather! I've also got some leeks going (which I need to spread out) and some shallots, but those aren't as far along.

I got really into No Man's Sky this week, delving deep into their "Liquidators" community expedition and completing it. I had a lot of fun with it, being more combat focused than I'm used to from the game! I also started Death Stranding up, which I've been meaning to for a while. It's been fun too so far.

Lastly, this week's song is Bad Computer & imallryt - So Lost.

Weeknote 32, 2024: AMD, Walks, & The Wicked Witch of the West

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

It was a very active week for me for a change. I took advantage of the clear skies to take an afternoon walk every weekday, and while I was busy for most of Saturday and today, I managed to fit in some small walks where possible! It's really been awesome for me mentally, and I hope I'm able to keep this up and turn it into a real habit.

I got a new GPU this week! Since I switched to Linux on my PC a few months ago, I've been saving up to get a new AMD GPU to replace my RTX 3070, as supposedly support for AMD graphics is much better than NVIDIA—even though the recent 555 drivers seem to have improved it a lot on Wayland than it used to be. And boy howdy is that ever correct. There's no slight stuttering when maximising windows, amid other small changes that add up. I ended up splurging a bit on a Radeon 7900 XT, because while I was originally saving for the 7800 XT, I saw the upper model had a $200 discount and figured why not. This thing's fucking huge!

On Saturday I was invited to see Wicked in Melbourne with my parents! I went in without any prior knowledge of what it was about, besides being a Wizard of Oz prequel of sorts, and came out pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed it, and we also had a nice dinner before seeing it, so it was a really good night overall.

I played a few miscellaneous games after getting my GPU to test it, mainly the Dead Space remake and No Man's Sky. It's real fun being able to crank all the graphics settings to the maximum without having to worry. I also continued my progress in Metroid Prime 2; I think I'm almost completed it, just up to a last few tasks. I reckon I'll finish it during this coming week.

I also got a second-hand pressure cooker from my parents that I need to find the manual for online. Surely it's somewhere…

Weeknote 31, 2024

Sun, 04 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

It's been a pretty chill week for me. We've finally been getting some really nice sunny (but chilly) days down here, so I took the opportunity to go on some walks for once! Still not up to doing it everyday yet, but I'm hoping I can make progress towards that this coming week. Also thanks to the weather clearing up, I was able to finally able to do some more gardening at my parent's place, after not being able to for several weeks due to several circumstances, which sucked. I forgot to take some photos of how it's doing at the moment, but I'll try next week—I planted some snow peas last time I was around, and they've sprouted quite a bit!!

Yesterday I went and saw Deadpool & Wolverine with a group of friends I reconnected with recently. I've never really been into superhero movies, but I found it enjoyable, and it was a nice excuse to finally hang out with some nice people after so long :). We had gelato afterwards even though it was a cold day, but it was really really good.

I made a couple of pull requests to various projects throughout the week, and I'm currently in the middle of working on another one. Pretty much all are just small fixes, but it's nice to actually contribute to stuff I use regularly! I need to do it more.

This week's song is rshand & Anita Tatlow - Stolen Heart.

Weeknote 30, 2024

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

I spent most of this past week sick sadly, so much of my time was spent inside, rot-adjacent. Thankfully it's cleared up a lot now, just dealing with remnant sniffles and an unpleasant cough that I'm hoping will clear up soon™️.

I went on a nice long walk yesterday, taking advantage of the actual sunny morning/noon before it started pouring in the afternoon and evening. Felt nice being able to get into the sun for a bit after having to seclude myself. I'm hoping the weather clears up this week so I can get some more walking done—I'm in desperate need of it.

Today, I found out that ALL of the code blocks on this website have been broken since I upgraded the dependencies back at the end of May, resulting in all of them having a random blank line at the end, so everything is a bit longer for no reason. Seems to be something caused by Astro from what I can see, but I have yet to create a proper reproduction. Going to do that soon after this.

I did some slight infrastructure reworking this week, moving my NixOS deployment to use agenix for managing secrets, rather than Colmena's slightly (IMO) janky setup. I also swapped Tailscale accounts after setting up a personal OIDC thingy. Rest in peace, axolotl-map.ts.net 🫡.

I finally got unstuck in Metroid Prime 2, after being unable to execute the Screw Attack for weeks. Apparently the controls on the Steam Deck are a bit weird, and I need to hold aim (L2) for it to work properly?? I can probably try debug it in the Primehack configuration, but this isn't too much of a problem. I just wish I known about it sooner!

And lastly, this week's song is Telomic & Beloved in Love feat. Laura Brehm - Gravity Within

Feel free to connect with me on the Fediverse, @ovyerus@aus.social!

Weeknote 29, 2024

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

Here I am again, second weeknote. I might be feeling like crap but if nothing else, I'm getting this done at the very least. The point of these is to do 'em weekly, and by god I'm gonna do it.

Life

I've unfortunately caught some sort of bug the past few days. Dunno where/when I caught it, but it certainly isn't pleasant. Hopefully not another round of COVID. I had to skip out on doing laundry today because I've had pretty much no energy to do so, hopefully I'll be more able tomorrow or something.

On the bright side though, I managed to reconnect with some old friends from high school out of the blue. Hoping the weather (and this bug) clears up soon so we can catch up properly.

Programming

Unfortunately didn't get much done outside of work this week. I did do some decent progress at work at least, but I would've liked to do a bit more otherwise.

Playing

I'm still stuck in Metroid Prime 2 :(. I dunno if its a bug with the emulator or perhaps the Steam Deck controls, but I just cannot for the life of me get the Screw Attack to work! I might try plugging in a mouse and keyboard to see if I can perhaps execute it that way. For tomorrow, I think.

Listening

Just listening to a lot more miscellaneous mixes while I've been working, nothing too specific. Really helps me to get into the zone I find.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to me on Mastodon at @ovyerus@aus.social.

Weeknote 28, 2024

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello world!

At the start of this week, a mutual on the fediverse shared a post about weeknotes, introducing me to the concept. For those who don't know, they're pretty much a weekly journal entry reflecting on what occurred during the past week. Like a monthly recap, but more granular.

I've been wanting to do some journalling/proper notetaking for a while now—it's one of the main reasons I decided to pick up Obsidian before the start of the year (which is what I'm writing this in!)—but I've been finding it difficult to do long(er)-form writing when it's intended just for me, no wider audience. I'm sure I could get it nailed down by just going at it for an extended period, but dealing with ADHD makes it hard to find the right motivation/energy for that. So instead, I'm going to publish these weeknotes—one every Sunday—to the web, in the hopes that giving myself an "audience" will magically hack my brain into writing something like this, and that I might be able to later apply that to other aspects of writing. We'll see.

It also gives me an excuse to post some more here, instead of leaving the site collecting dust for good periods of time.

Life

I replaced my shower head this week, after it broke at the start of last week. Thankfully it broke in a way where it was still usable though not ideal, so I was able to wait until payday to head out to Bunnings and buy a nice replacement for it. I got my dad to come over and help install it as I don't have a wrench for that kind of stuff (although I really should pick up a basic one for these sorts of rare occasions), and it's working great now!

My mum had her birthday this week! Not a huge milestone or anything, but we went out to a nice local bistro for a dinner get-together, and it was a nice night.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to get any gardening done this weekend, thanks to the weather being a jerk and deciding to rain on-and-off for BOTH DAYS. I'm praying that next weekend will be clear enough for me to get at least some amount of weeding done, but the forecast for this coming week isn't looking too good. Let's hope its wrong!

I also found out that tea and coffee can have an affect on the effectiveness of my ADHD medication when they're had too close together, which explains why I was feeling pretty crap last week—usually I have breakfast well before taking my meds due to waking up times, but the last week I was waking up pretty late so it reduced the time between them. This week I intentionally spaced out breakfast and taking my medication by about an hour and the results were great!

Programming

It's been a nice and productive week for me as a result of my ADHD meds actually working properly again! Very happy with what I was able to accomplish.

At work, I made a list of (hopefully) all the features that are left before we can launch a beta v2 of one of our core platform parts, and was able to make some good progress on it. As the week closed in, I got a little caught up in the details and touched some stuff I really should've ignored for later, but that happens sometimes.

I picked Bandsnatch back up for a bit, adding ratelimit handling during dry runs as Bandcamp must have added them sometime recently (why no user API? 😢), and also adding support for some cross compilation shenanigans with its Nix flake, although realistically I don't really need it too bad since I have a Hetzner box that handles ARM builds for me in CI, but it might be useful to someone! I've got a bug to investigate from a few weeks ago that I need to get around to still, perhaps next week.

While scrounging around some package source code out of curiosity, I discovered that Date.UTC exists in JavaScript, making it super easy to get a god-damn UTC time. I cannot wait for Temporals to finally hit Stage 4 and be actually usable.

And of course, I added weeknotes support to my website (you're here)! As well as some general cleanup (I found out I had left a placeholder page description in for the better part of a year, at least) and finally using a new logo that I commissioned aaaaaaages ago. It feels good to get back into stuff and polish it up a little.

Playing

I played an interesting mix of games this week, mostly thanks to the Steam Summer Sale brainwashing me to get a few games that I don't really need. But I did actually play what I bought, so that's something!

ANNO: Mutationem - A nice little cyberpunky RPG with a pixel art style mixed with a 3D world. It's a little janky in some places mechanically, and the story progression gets a little weird further in, but it's still been a nice experience for me. I'm planning to finish it soon.
Buckshot Roulette - Russian roulette, but with a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with a mixture of live and blank rounds in a random order. Sounds simple, but it can actually get pretty mechanically interesting as you get into it. Good fun!
Poker Night at the Inventory - Sadly delisted from Steam ages ago due to Telltale Games shutting down. I got it ages ago before that happened and did enjoy my time with it. Decided to pick it back up this week as my dad did recently, aiming to get all the items & achievements, and I figured I may as well try do the same. Going to be a slow burn on it, a nice chill experience.
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes - This has been a regular for me for about a month and half now, playing it on and off, usually when I'm out doing my laundry. I've been playing it on my Steam Deck through PrimeHack and it's been great. Unfortunately, right now I'm stuck trying to execute the damn Screw Attack, to no avail.

Listening

I've been listening to a lot of mixes from f1rstpers0n this week, trying to catch up some recent-ish ones that I missed somehow, as well as their back catalogue. They're really nice vibes and have been great for putting on in the background while getting work done, highly recommend!

One song that stood out to me is Monrroe, ft. Emily Makis - Never Too Old. Smooth liquid vibes.

And that's it for this week! I'm going to be aiming for these weeknotes to have a pretty similar structure as I think this worked pretty well for me, but it'll always just be whatever I feel like.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to me on Mastodon at @ovyerus@aus.social.