the girly who shall end all girls

old pursuits

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 05:14:31 GMT

~~pirate~~ D added me to his Duolingo Plus family plan, so i've been practicing French. it was my minor in college - my reading comprehension remains pretty good, but I haven't held a conversation for more than ten years. i'm enjoying the gamification of language learning but because this is a refresh rather than completely new, part of me is always analyzing their translation choices and how they introduce concepts. (in my head, "il mange" is usually "he eats" not "he is eating". or i think of "ça va?" as "how's it going?" instead of "how are you doing?". but i'm learning to give the owl the answer it wants.) it's been fun re-accessing dormant knowledge - i start a new area and all this stuff comes up out of cold storage. it's pretty cool. looking forward to getting into a place where i'm learning something new.

i quit playing most video games around Gamergate. (yeah, i know, that's what they wanted. but i have so many other hobbies.) on a whim i decided to look into Jedi: Fallen Order when they announced the sequel, and it was all of $10 on xbox. i have definitely gotten more than $10 of joy from it - it's an adventure game with more exploration than boss fights, really reminds me of the joy i got from Tomb Raider back in the day, but with SO MANY MAPS AND HINTS. what the hell, it even tells you where there are doors that you can open and highlights unexplored areas. :old-man-yelling-at-cloud: i wish Cal did backflips, but his lightsaber is cooler than dual Uzis, and driving an ~~spoiler~~ was way too much fun. also, look at this little droid companion:

my mother-in-law has been complaining about not being able to play Civilization II anymore for something like 10 years. so i made a VM image of Windows XP SP3 with CivII installed, had C play a few rounds to confirm it works well, and have written up instructions for the east coast kids to set it up for her. fingers crossed. it's a 1995 game - it starts with a setup dialog about how you need 16MB of RAM to use all the 3D effects.

and hey, i am typing on the laptop after taking it to the shop. i did, indeed, damage the ribbon connector for the trackpad. but there was also an overheating issue they fixed so it was still worthwhile to me.

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mostly victory

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 04:19:42 GMT

i was always about to sit down and write here in May. oh well.

this morning i replaced the battery in this laptop. battery is working well.
( it was a little scary, and i may have broken the keyboard )

then i shoved a muffin in my face and went up to Fiber Fusion NW. they were in a much nicer building this year, more room and better ventilation. (they asked everyone to be masked and i only saw one person who wasn't.) it wasn't crowded, which was lovely for my comfort level but leaves me concerned for the event and the vendors. i came home with a bag full of fiber grown and/or dyed in the region. i am a sucker for farmers - i bought some discount brown Targhee wool just because the story charmed me:

these are four dollars. Pigpen kept slipping out of her coat. when we brought her in [for shearing] she looked like she was wearing a ghillie suit. nothing would get all the vm [vegetable matter] out.

i had enough of the show floor faster than intended, which was fine, since it left me time to pick up flowers for my balcony planters before i had to return the car. the nursery was a madhouse, but i found everything i was planning for: more verbena since the one from last year miraculously overwintered; alyssum for fill and the smell; calibrachoa to trail. on a whim i got a bright orange black-eyed susan vine in hopes that it will climb the railing. they're all planted now and i split the creeping jenny so there was some in both planters (we'll see if the one i moved takes).

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Ideas

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 04:39:36 GMT

dhampreysa is doing some DW automation with a Google Sheet. I remembered hearing that the DW API didn’t really exist/was in shambles. Which is kind of true, but Ye Olde XML-RPC is still out there. And there’s a Python library for it, so maybe I’ll do a thing.

I need to figure out my exact use case; probably my own version of a linkspam builder or recreating my old ‘shiny thing’ quick posts that were killed by gmail formatting woes. Other ideas for machine-assisted posting are welcome in comments, if I do anything it will all end up Unlicensed on GitHub.

In other news, I wrote this with a Bluetooth keyboard attached to the iPad. Surprisingly nice - got it for travel to do double duty as a detached keyboard for the work laptop (a Mac from the era of terribad keyboards) and with the iPad as a sort of substitute for my laptop. I’m not expecting to do much personal coding on the trip and I would like to be able to read comics, so I think this is going to be a great compromise even though I may regret the ergonomics after a full work day. It’s a Logitech k480 which comes with a nice groove to prop your touchscreen device in and of all things has satisfyingly clicky keys. I like it so far.

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Never send a human to do a machine's job

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 06:38:21 GMT

Wrote a “hello world” (plus a lot more because I can’t stop myself) Slack bot tonight. hardest part was that it’s easy to come up with documentation and tutorials that are deprecated. looking forward to digging into this more, it’s a delight.

SIFF is in April this year and I don’t know what to do. sitting in theaters full of unmasked people every day for a couple weeks, two to six hours a day plus queuing and transit rides doesn’t feel good to me. There are still streaming options but that was depressing last time. Maybe I restrict myself to a six pack (that still feels like a lot) at the Bay where I know they have modern ventilation and UV above screen level. I hate weighing this out.

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it's a lifestyle i guess

Sun, 06 Feb 2022 06:49:56 GMT

Friday was the first time I used the new keyboard with the work computer, and i rapidly discovered all the stuff i do at work that i had made awkward with that pass at the keyboard layout. and then i made notes and lived with it so that i did work and didn't spend the work day tuning the keyboard. one of the things i had enabled was getting shift results with a long press. and that's how i learned that i tend to rest longer on some keys than others. it made for some rough work with chatting if i didn't want to look like i was MAking aRt. (plus i put delete under my left thumb, which is going to be great, but for now when i go fast i still hit ' instead)

tonight during down time in my D&D game, i tuned, flashed firmware, tuned again. common macros under my thumbs, complete pointer control on layer 2. the dream is to ditch the mouse entirely.

this is the layout as of this evening, we'll see how it survives typing practice tomorrow.

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clicky

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 06:13:27 GMT

is something an impulse buy if you've wanted it for more than a year?

someone on the PuPPy Slack was upgrading, so I am now the proud owner of a second-hand ergodox keyboard. I had been looking at building one but what with supply chain shit the components are sold out or priced sky high; this one is designed with pop-out key switches so if I decide I want a different feel later I can do that.

meanwhile I will be learning to type again; the former owner said two weeks to get used to normal touch typing with ortholinear keys and two months to really nail your perfect placement and master layer switching.

not sure why I feel like this is the time for doing new things with hands but there you go. It's not like I'm going to take up COLEMAK...

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Fri, 14 Jan 2022 05:19:15 GMT

the access saga from a locked post resolved late this afternoon. at first the person who got it fixed sent me an email notification to tell me. you know, the email I couldn't access. (work slack has an emoji that fully expresses getting a dump of three days of unread emails and calendar invites, :joy_cry_blood:)

I did a chat bot workshop for two of the three fucking business days I had no email. All the workshop environment invites were in email. then they tried to contact me in sibling company's slack instance... which I did eventually get into.

Anyhow, the class was really great when i wasn't nearly in tears trying to get a login while the instructor went ahead mile-a-minute. the pace was just fine as long as I had access at the beginning of the segment. (the workshop was sponsored out of an office on the east coast so I've also bolted my lunch in 15 minutes for two days in a row.) really looking forward to putting it to use, but this has been a long long week.

all day planning meeting tomorrow *sigh*

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we were on a fork of version 1, so...

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 03:09:28 GMT

In all my thinking over stuff that happened in 2021 I forgot to note log4j exploit mitigation and baby's first AWS cert - two other things that made December extremely busy.

Doing the certification exam remotely was a trip. You put some spyware on your computer (they literally tell you not to attempt testing on your work machine because their shit will get blocked) and spend a good 20 minutes waving your laptop around so that the proctor can confirm that you are alone and don't have any notes or access to search engines, etc. And show them your ears and the inside of your glasses.

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a small milestone

Fri, 23 Apr 2021 04:22:17 GMT

I have been finished with my certificate long enough that UW has turned off my pro zoom account.

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a bite of chocolate

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 05:42:00 GMT

had a nice time playing Fate tonight; the socializing was good, and the history sharing was good, and we made progress on our quest.

i also finally got to observe users actively rolling dice in the run of play. i made a false assumption when i was adding Fate dice to Chewie (my Discord bot), that there were times when you might roll more or less than four dice. nah, that's not how Fate goes. it's four dice always.

therefore making my poor users type "4" over and over is a waste. i've fixed it and the update would have gone faster if i wasn't so in love with my overbuilt solution. (i went down a rabbit hole of trying to adapt my results grammar function instead of the correct choice which was a new, dumber function that does only what it needs to do.)

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Sat, 27 Feb 2021 08:05:49 GMT

really pleased with a thing I did for work today (I made a Java thing work via stubbornness and googling).

also it looks like the paladin will survive the night.

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Tue, 23 Feb 2021 02:26:29 GMT

solved a tedious work problem by using a utility module i wrote months ago.

thanks, past me.

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good enough

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 04:46:39 GMT

chewie makes characters, removes characters, and reports on how many Fate points an individual character has when you ask. it offers a reasonably helpful message when you try to do things with a character that doesn't exist. i'm satisfied that it does plenty for us to start playing, and i'll make adjustments after we've used it a bit.

C and i did some Yoga with Adriene tonight and i feel like a wet noodle. still going to run a bath, though. the library finally brought me the new Courtney Milan.

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now with grammar

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 06:01:54 GMT

chewie now handles optional bonuses and (sort of) manages Fate points. as in, one may add and use Fate points assigned to a specific character, and it knows when you don't have points to spend, but no one may see how many Fate points the team members have because i am wrestling with getting the damn thing to read a dictionary into a post.* (i think this is me not understanding the documentation.)

most importantly, when you roll one die, chewie says "rolled 1 die" instead of "rolled 1 dice" because i will die on that hill.

*this is a way of storing key-value paired info in Python, not the reference book

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roll on

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 07:04:04 GMT

we had our first Saturday night session of D&D with our eight-person,* four-time-zone party. the DM and half the party are folks i played RPGs with in college and haven't seen since i moved to the west coast. it went surprisingly well both from a gaming standpoint and in terms of picking up like we never stopped hanging out.

it was interesting to see how other people use Roll20 + Discord.

this game (D&D): Discord video chat, Roll20 text chat and rolls.
Friday game (Savage Worlds): Discord audio, text chat, and rolls.
Tuesday game (D&D, same group as Friday): Discord audio and text chat, Roll20 rolls.

C and i have to train ourselves out of having side conversations in Discord chat, no one is looking at it. (and C has to figure out how to get Discord to recognize his camera.) the other thing is that in terms of using the character sheet, the Friday gamers are much more sophisticated, in terms of using the chat features and the GM tools the Saturday gamers know more. i'm really missing the money we put into the Friday game, where we have copies of all the sourcebooks for our GM and therefore available to everyone in the game. working with just the SRD (a limited free version of the rules) is limiting...but the Saturday gamers know tricks with having other players that own the books do character sheet updates. so it's hacky but workable.

this afternoon (after i finished fussing with my character sheet for the evening game) i added Fate die rolling to my Discord bot, Chewie. it's very basic right now (like it shows your default username instead of your server nickname when it attributes the roll) but it works and in the process fixed an existing bug Chewie had with commands. i need to look at the rulebook to think about what other Fate features it needs after i get the name thing right.

i started by looking at another Fate roller project on GitHub, but it didn't work as written. i know the guy advertised the project on Reddit, but i had to change enough things that i'm not sure that it worked before it was apparently abandoned. or maybe the discord.py library changed drastically between when it was first written and now.**

*our DM asked eight, expecting 30% or so to say no, but no one did.
**i don't know, though. there was a math function that had nothing to do with discord.py that didn't work. and they didn't know how to format line breaks. still, they saved me a ton of time finding the right formatting for displaying emojis for the dice and had a folder of the dice art itself. i should try to contribute back my changes.

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3/5 will do

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 01:06:53 GMT

the tree and wreath are in a pile of trees by the compost bin. dismantling was quick; we've decided the white lights on the balcony are season-neutral and staying because there are a lot of long nights still ahead of us.
* * *
it looks like with the changes in IFTTT that my rube goldberg DW link poster is dead, and i believe the instagram x-poster is dead as well. i did want to come up with some little coding projects to do, so i need to do some personal WSJF on easy link sharing vs mobile photo posts vs text from rocketbook.

since DW still doesn't have an API everything hinges on post by email, so i am going to have to learn more about how email works no matter what i tackle first. (i poked at this earlier in the week as part of the rocketbook experiment - i seem to be able to send a test email via mailx, which is then rejected by the recipient because it looks dodgy. hence the "learn more about email".) any links or book suggestions on email appreciated; i'm hoping to find the proper way to relay through gmail so that this doesn't turn into buying a domain.
* * *
i finally bleached my roots before refreshing my hair color (first time since the start of green hair back in April). this time i realized that the box bleach actually tells you the proper proportion for mixing the reagents in the allergy test instructions, so there's no reason to mix the entire box when you don't need it (the longest hair on my head might be chin length when pulled straight). i have plenty left for the next time, probably the time after, and might not go as long between refreshes. between that and getting the shortest parts of my hair cut down to #1 today (skin-baring but still slightly fuzzy...as my stylist says she's more scared than i am) i feel pleasantly punk rawk.

i think there's a chance that this will be the last haircut i have for a while, since the new strain is in BC and the US.

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A wild bot appears!

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 06:08:37 GMT

I hated my Python homework this week* - we're learning Django and had to refactor our perfectly nice functions from last week into classes.**

To get that taste out of my mouth, I sat down to work on something I actually wanted - a Discord bot for my RPG group. we've been playing FFG Star Wars, which uses goofy custom dice and has a couple other mechanics to track. fortunately there's a pretty nice bot to help, D1-C3. one of the D1-C3 bot features is to allow the GM to randomly generate an alien. B uses it pretty often, and then most of the time we have to go look up whatever that thing is and try to post a picture.

i suppose i could have made a feature request, but i wanted my own bot with blackjack and hookers. so i tinkered around for a few hours and got a V1 working. my original idea was to make a command to search Wookieepedia, but then i realized there was no need to remember another command and accurately type the alien name when it was already being posted in the channel. so my bot listens for D1-C3 bot's random alien post, and responds.

step one was just to get a text summary from the Wookieepedia page.
step two was to add a hyperlink back to the source page.

fortunately Wookieepedia has meta tags that are perfect for this use case - sharing a page will pull up the main image for the page. so the hyperlink got me a picture for free. (i was feeling pretty down on getting a picture programmatically after looking at the wikia API json and just how many images were on the page with no consistent naming conventions. and then it just showed up for me.)

step three was to make sure my code could handle names like Twi'lek.

then i had to get it off of my computer and onto a server.

anyway, it's (as my instructor says) on the gosh-darned internet now and working for people who aren't me.

*This is class 3. I realized that I may not have written (or at least correctly tagged) anything about class 2 of my 3-class certificate. That's because it was absolutely brutal and I never could have done it without the help of lockdown cancelling anything else that I had to do outside of work. one of the other students said we were doing enough work for two courses - they definitely weren't wrong, especially compared to the workload in this course.
**I still don't like OOP. it feels like doing paperwork while Functional programming feels like being a wizard. fortunately(?) my boss is self-taught and has no attachment to it.

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a light in dark places

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 03:56:46 GMT

tonight i made a little light on a microcontroller blink on and off, over wifi.

a steady drip of little achievements keeps me putting one foot in front of another.

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kind of a serious question

Thu, 16 Apr 2020 05:48:23 GMT

why do people fail at FizzBuzz?*

do they just not remember what modulo does?

or do they get tripped up trying to make it as elegant as they can on the first pass?

something else?

*a coding exercise developed for interviews: print numbers from 1 - 100. if number is divisible by 3, print fizz instead of the number. if number is divisible by 5, print buzz instead of the number. if number is divisible by 15, print fizzbuzz instead of the number.

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42/366 I missed my laptop while I was sleeping

Tue, 11 Feb 2020 16:25:20 GMT

I did the thing today where I was in the shower and the elegant solution to a problem I was struggling with in my homework last night appeared fully formed.
I sat down and applied it before I put on pants, and it worked just as I imagined it. Thanks for keeping on top of things while I was asleep, brain.

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16/366 oh, right, this is how this goes

Fri, 17 Jan 2020 07:26:48 GMT

i set up pyenv and thought i was cool.
i need to use IDLE for the beginning of the class and there was a package that was out of date.
turns out getting that package is broken in Homebrew and in pyenv (literally for years). there are workarounds on github but i when i follow the steps exactly they don't work. (i am not alone in this.)
spend over 90 minutes faffing around.
uninstall all versions of python 3 and pyenv (possibly breaking a dependency in something else installed by Homebrew)
install Python 3 from their website
discover pyenv is still in my PATH
remove pyenv from PATH
i swear i saved that file why is this still stealing my command?
remember that i have to restart the shell before that takes effect
accept that i will be typing "python3" and "pip3" forever.

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14/366 tutorial level complete

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 05:34:59 GMT

went to orientation for my class today. commute was easy in spite of the weather and the train construction.

the venue is near the best dim sum and there's a coffee shop next door, so i know what to do if i'm early. otherwise it's bare-bones: tables with power outlets, a projector. the class is diverse in race and age and national origin and gender presentation, which is nice. everyone seemed friendly.

i like the teacher so far. the assistant seems like a good guy but i'm going to have to work hard to understand his accent. the format of the class will be flipped, which should be good for me - what i wanted out of taking a class was a) structure and b) getting to ask questions and get code reviewed.

only (mild) annoyance is that he's a longtime Windows dude. i'll be fine; i hope my other classmates with Macs will be fine. he says he tests everything on a Mac and will highlight any differences.

best tidbit:
student: "why is it called Python?"
teacher: "have you heard of the British comedy group Monty Python?"

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7/366 we'll call it an adventure

Wed, 08 Jan 2020 04:18:03 GMT

today i basically impulse-bought a UW extension class that starts in two weeks.* i chose it specifically because it was starting soon and was in-person. it's being held at their Othello satellite rather than downtown where they usually do extension classes, and that's going to be interesting.

it's conveniently next to the light rail station! unfortunately, the light rail will be broken into two lines with a forced transfer at Pioneer Square the entire time. it's also on Tuesday, which is lunchtime yoga day (and i just paid for the next few months) so i'll be toting my sweaty yoga clothes in addition to my laptop.

*at least i think i did? the university's slightly antique online form says that signing up doesn't guarantee that there's a spot for me. i'm like, you should know how many people have signed up. but okay. i actually had to copy down my confirmation number because they don't send you an email.

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6/366 cloudrig

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 06:21:36 GMT

C loves Battletech. he literally owns almost every game book published under all the publishers that have owned the property. it has zero appeal to me but it brings him a great deal of joy.

C has always wanted the video games, but my household has never been a part of the PC Master Race. C is a native Mac user; i'm OS-fluid but generally like the happy medium of the Mac candy shell over *nix. we had a PC for work-related reasons, but it had business specs (in 2009) and was never going to run games.

we talked about building a gaming PC, but the more i thought about building or buying, the more annoyed i got about getting a giant piece of hardware that might not even get used that much. (frex, the xbox is more overpriced bluray player than game machine. both of us are either obsessed with a game or not playing video games at all. i dunno why.) plus i'm the technician so the build would be my project to do and i just couldn't bring myself to care enough.

so i did some research to see where cloud gaming had gotten to, because setting that up would be fun. and the answer is that you can rent a prebuilt muscular VM*, remote in with Parsec, and run your Battletech game on an underpowered 13in 2015 Macbook. it works fine. i don't know yet about something that's super concerned about lag, but for playing a turn-based strategy game, there appears to be no downside.

well, so far. i just got C up and running tonight. he appears to be fully engaged and experiencing joy.

*it may be cheaper to do spot pricing on AWS in the future, but the Paperspace setup was so turnkey that i have no issue with paying them a few cents more an hour. there is an AMI for Parsec available and i have an account set up with permissions for the instance size i would need, but the AWS interface is really unfriendly - and i need C to be able to turn the VM instance on and off by himself.

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3/366 he sed/she sed

Sat, 04 Jan 2020 01:44:28 GMT

it took three person-hours to determine that my intractable formatting problem was CRLF.* not because any of us were using Windows, but because our text editor was defaulting to Windows encoding. *facepalm*

* Windows uses CRLF as the hidden end of line format, and Unix uses LF. the terminal shell assumes Unix endings and so produces mystery new lines in output when it encounters CRLF. woe betide the team that mixes the two.

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