My gaming group has started Factorio: Space Age which means most of my time has disappeared into it. While we only progress the shared map during our weekly gaming sessions, in between I have spent way more time than I will admit on experimenting with various sub factory bits in a sandbox map. Since Factorio often scratches the same kind of developer itch, it means all my other projects have pretty much fallen to the wayside for now. Hopefully I’ll get to a point where I’m not losing quite so much time into a game.

Momentum Replacement

While I have no particularly large complaints about momentum , I want to have a bit more control over my browser start page. I also want to experiment with htmx a bit more for loading widgets and other bits of information. Creating a dashboard is also an opportunity to get me to study css’s grid model better.

While studying the grid model, I found layoutit which has made it much easier to visually understand what is happening while making my own grid layout.

I was never a particularly heavy Twitter user, but the recent drama has been very distracting. Very much like watching a wreck. This has not been good for my work motivation which has already been a bit low recently. Next week I need to be better at blocking distractions. For now, I’ve downloaded my twitter snapshot in case I want to poke at the old data, and am looking at tools like semiphemeral to clean up my old footprint there.

After being employed for 5 years, my company gives everyone 10 days of refresh leave. I received mine almost 2 years ago, but for multiple reasons, I had not actually used mine yet but it was set to expire at the end of this year. I am not alone, as many other coworkers had time that was about to expire, so for the past few months and through the end of the year, nearly every week there is someone going on their refresh leave.

After having two three-day weekends, this week felt kinda long, though it was overall a fairly average week.

Monday was 敬老の日 in Japan which made last weekend a three-day holiday, but a typhoon meant I mostly stayed inside. I ended up working on some DNS tools so that I could apply some git ops to some of my local infrastructure. Most of it is rather unique to my own setup so I’m not sure if there’s much worth publishing there but I may write about it sometime.

Friday was 秋分の日 in Japan making this weekend a three-day weekend as well. I didn’t get as much accomplished as last weekend but was still nice to have a bit of extra time.

This weekend is a three-day holiday but there’s a typhoon crossing over today and tomorrow so I’m mostly staying in my apartment. The past week felt like it was full of meetings. One meeting did not go as well as I hoped but two others went much better than I expected.

On Wednesday, my iPad suddenly refusing to charge, which resulted a quick trip to the Apple store to get it checked out. After leaving it off for a while, it suddenly turned back on and started charging again which was a surprise but I had already made an appointment so I went ahead and had it checked out. For better or worse the diagnostics check could find nothing wrong with it, and sending it off to be repaired would be expensive and I would be without my iPad for around 2 weeks so for now I’ll just wait to see what happens.

I had not planned on spending most of my afternoon prototyping a vscode-worklog extension, but once I started writing, I kept tweaking one more thing until most of my afternoon had disappeared. The code is still super messy and there are bugs I found while writing this post, but at least the basic prototype seems reasonable.

I also spent some of this morning working on upgrading some of my test virtual machines. I probably have a lot of old settings files to cleanup so that may be a longer term cleanup. I had wanted to upgrade to a newer distro so that I have access to a newer system python.

Been making progress upgrading my island sanctuary and my group seems to be ready to finish raft next week.

Review period at work is over for now, but some small outages resulted in me being unable to progress on other larger tasks.

This week, Final Fantasy XIV Buried Memory was released so I’ve been playing that a lot in the evenings. After finishing the main story missions, I’ve been enjoying playing with the new Island Sanctuary area.