Weekly Notes #14

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Reminder: this site is an iterative experiment, so let's put on the janitor hat welcome the mysterious foreign duck:

This week's summary

The 200 year old (!) magnolia tree in my neighbour's garden is blossoming. It's sunny, warm, beautiful. It's been really, really hard to stay inside, but at the same time I felt much more productive this week. Getting out of the house helped me get out of my head and everything feels just lighter.

Past week

Lesson 01: After almost 100 days of writing here (almost) daily I've learned that the best way to guarantee that I won't write about something is to add it to a writing prompt for the next week.

Lesson 02: What works instead (demonstrated by the content shared this week):

• responding to a question sent by a stranger via email → Spikes
• revisiting an old piece of work or expanding on a conversation I had when walking Mango (Tip of the Tongue and Handmade Software)
• sharing something I found funny (Jeremy Bent-ham)
• documenting something I learned about (Talk to the Blog)

I'm still organising this knowledge in my mind and I'll post something more useful/actionable once we have reached 111 days. The fun part is sharing something useful by exploring it with the reader. The difficult part is to making those evergreen notes feel polished and accessible.

Next week

If something doesn't work, change it. But don't fix what's not broken — instead crank it up to 11 and keep pushing it til it breaks! That's my plan for this week: prioritise talking to people, responding to questions, spinning out little (incl. "boring") prototypes and write about them as I go.

What I'm playing with at the moment:

• Tools for Expressive Writing:
  1. analysis/feedback using ML
  2. using Ensō as an Expressive Writing tool (related resources: Using Writing to Process Your Emotions, Summarise My Weekly Notes (With Llamas))
• Messing with smaller realtime projects:
  • collaborative doodles with Partykit, OR
  • analytics GUIs with Elixir + Phoenix

Favourite project

Orb.Farm — a tiny virtual ecosystem, filled wit creates that live, grow, interact and die. If you want to learn how to build your own, check out this recent Coding Train tutorial. This project was created by the author of sandspiel.club.

Related: Sandboxes, Games, and Play

Graphical User Interface Gallery — inspired by a conversation with a new Say Hi friend, I started digging through a list of old GUI galleries and stumbled upon this catalog.

Damn Small Linux 2024 — I don't use Linux much nowadays, but DSL was one of my favourite distros back in the day. I used to run the previous version of it on a my grandpa of computer (60MHz, 8MB RAM) in the early 2000s. I remember it was so responsive I felt like the context menus would appear on the screen before I clicked!

Favourite site

BorisTheBrave.Com — Boris is a developer writing about procedural generation and game design. I spent an entire morning reading up his tutorials on tiling algorithms.

Little Alchemy 2 — a crafting game with an aesthetic reminiscent of the early 2010s Flash games. I'm sharing this since everyone's talking about Infinite Craft anyway.

Favourite piece of tech

LLaVA-1.6: Improved reasoning, OCR, and world knowledge | LLaVA — LLaVA is a multimodal language model I briefly mentioned in Summarise My Weekly Notes (With Llamas). This version claims to surpass Gemini Pro (a commercial model), which makes it even more exciting given its current use cases, such as allowing blind or visually-impaired people to interact with images by auto-captioning them (source).

CoronaFaceImpact — a variable font supporting only one character (you).

Interesting articles

Classification of Tilesets – BorisTheBrave.Com — an article I wish I had read before I played with tilesets in my games for the first time.

Dorf Fort — illustrations of the characters and creatures from Dwarf Fortress.

In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox @ tonsky.me — a visual history of the humble check box, created by the author of Grumpy Website.

jh3yy (birdsite) — a creative coder messing with CSS and modern Web tech. I like the balance between theory and application in his threads. (I wish he kept his mastodon profile up to date.)

Around the World in Eighty Lies | The Walrus — "How a writer fabricated a series of stories for Atlas Obscura".

Things I wrote last week that people liked

• Jeremy Bent-ham
• Tip of the Tongue and Handmade Software

Thanks for reading! See you on Monday!

P.S. If you liked Orb Farm, you might enjoy this or the scaled-up version, here.