Happy New Year everyone.
I didn’t add much to this site in 2019, but I’m hoping to improve that this year. And to that end I’m writing this entry on my new iPad Pro.
How will that help? I’m not really sure yet, but I’m looking forward to seeing if I can create a workflow which will allow me to get content from my brain onto the web in a faster and smarter way.
Last year I participated in a programming competition in which I attempted to solve a daily problem by writing a little program to process input and get a result. To punish myself further, I decided to try writing the programs in a different language each day.
The problem with that approach was that apart from any languages I was already familiar with, I didn’t get a chance to appreciate any of them.
So I got a new iPhone for my wife, and I wanted to put Skype on it. During the setup, it asked me for access to the microphone, the camera and contacts. The first two were obviously needed, but I didn’t think it would be necessary to give access to the contacts. So once I was able to log her in, I figured all was well.
Except it wasn’t. She wasn’t able to make any calls, either to regular numbers or other Skype accounts.
The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars I have a read a few “Young Adult” books in the past couple of years, and I’m not sure really what defines that category. Typically the characters are younger, presumably to be more relatable. They tend to be less dark, less violent, but I guess that wouldn’t necessarily always be the case.
Just what I need leading up to Christmas, typically one of the more stressful times of the year: a month long programming challenge.
As the name suggests Advent of Code is a countdown to Christmas with new coding challenges each day. From what I’ve seen, the challenges are reimiscent of the ones I saw competing in the International Collegiate Programming Contest. Although you aren’t as restricted in terms of language, reference material, etc.
Critical Failures by Robert Bevan
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars This book really causes mixed emotions. Logically I can tell it is crude and rough and a bit forced, but damn if I didn’t enjoy it anyway. I listened to this as an audiobook, and I found myself laughing out loud on numerous occasions. Even when walking in the street, so in these cases I was laughing in spite of myself.
As I mentioned in my last post, I like to read escapist fiction. When you go through books at the rate that I do, it is always good to be able to discover new books reliably. One way to do this is from personal recommendations by people with a similar taste in books.
I use Goodreads to track my books, which helps considerably. They also attempt to provide recommendations for new books as well.
I don’t write about it much, but I am a relatively prolific reader. My usual genres are in the mystery, thriller, techno-thriller range. However, I also dabble in science fiction and fantasy from time to time.
Full disclosure: more often than not, I listen to my books, not reading them in the strictest sense. That is really the only way I can manage to consume so many books while raising two little boys.
You may have noticed that I didn’t use the “Fun Links [Date]” title for this post. While I’m a fan of routine, I realized that both the fun links category and the date were part of the metadata of the entry. Not creating a relevant title was me being lazy.
Creating a title in the past either would have been a matter of repeating the names of the links in a list, or extracting a common theme.
It has been just one day shy of a year since I last posted. In that time I had grand plans of creating an automated system where I would capture fun links and save them somewhere and automatically generate the posts and emails to send out each week. Well, it turns out I just didn’t have the free time or energy to really get that sorted out.
That said, I have been using Pinboard to save any links I think are worth talking about, so at least I have a decent backlog to work with.