weeknotes for w/c 30/09/24

a rather slow week that passed in the blink of an eye! i'm anxious and excited for next week, as i'm switching to yet another project at work with the view that i'll lead it.

• i normally go in a semi-chronological order, but this was genuinely too cool not to talk about. on Sunday afternoon, i play-tested Proto Garden by arreyne, a friend of mine. 🐝
  • it's an indie game that's factory automation like satisfactory, but the conveyors are bees. it's still a little rough around the edges but holy shit is it good. go wishlist on steam. right now. i'll wait.
  • to be clear, she did not ask me to plug this, but it makes me very happy! full game review coming soon!
• went to a hack night at Newspeak House on Monday night. it was pretty cool!
• went to therapy on Tuesday! it's going well, and i'm understanding myself better. afterwards, i went to the fortnightly pub meet i organise with friends. 🍺
• i'm considering hopping on mastodon to fulfil my need for social media. i want to keep up with cool people doing cool things, but sometimes it feels like my circle is a little too small. 🐘
• i really need to clean my desk, which is really annoying. it's starting to get a little cramped. how do i have so much shite? it's been on my to-do list for the entire week, but i've been a little distracted. 🙈
• cleared up some space on my hard drove, and updated to macOS Sequoia! it's rather pretty, i like it a lot. 🌲
  • iPhone Mirroring is such a good feature, but i feel it probably has some glaring security vulnerability. the magic's got to come at the expense of something, right?
  • the update also fixed my issues with my Notes app on my Mac (mentioned last week). i'm glad i don't need to switch to some self-hosted notes solution, given none of them look particularly good.
• the button-mapping issue on my mouse (also from last week) has also been fixed by the bump to Sequoia. i am now much calmer.
• speaking of to-do lists, i stared tracking my to-dos using plane on Thursday. i have, of course, self-hosted it. i find it's been amazing to have so much more visibility into what i need to do, what i'm focussing on, and how much progress i've made throughout the week. 📝
  • i created workflows using (self-hosted) n8n to automatically create a new cycle each week, add tasks into it and create a draft blog post. i now don't need to remember to do any of that life admin each week, which will hopefully make plane less of a chore to use.
  • this is also a starting point to automating my weekly updates 👀
  • the mobile interface is truly terrible, but hopefully
• got my eyes tested on Thursday, my left is a little dodgy it seems. also managed to purchase some new glasses, and claim them back on work's health insurance. the claim got processed in the same day, which was surprising. 👓
• things at work have been slowing down a bit. as a team, we're in a liminal space between projects as we plan for what comes next. it feels less chaotic, which is good. ☺️
  • that being said, this week has been chock full of whiteboarding sessions (two of which i presented!). i'm getting bounced to a new project next week, as my planning work on this one is complete
• i'd like to self-host some notes so i can do automation around them. however, that's proving incredibly difficult. unfortunately, no notes app feels as "clean" as i'd like it to be. i keep falling back to the simplicity of Apple Notes. 📱
  • anytype has a nice-looking mobile app, but the Docker Compose is prohibitively complex.
  • i tried setting up notesnook, but the login experience was frustratingly patchy and it was impossible to get set up, so i gave up.
• i've realised a massive pain i have with self-hosting applications is the lack of good mobile apps, especially for those meant for productivity. this is doubly difficult as i'm on iOS and don't have an Apple Developer account.
• i tried self-hosting Penpot for whiteboarding. it seemed a little too basic and product-focussed for my taste. 😔
• had a very good Friday night! managed to drag some friends out to karaoke, where i sung Common People. went back to one of their flats, and played Bananagrams and Cockroach Poker until 2am. 🃏
• this weekend, i purchased the parts for my media server, including 5 8TB SATA Exos hard drives from ServerPartDeals. with one parity drive, that's 32TB of usable storage. not bad. i'm excited for the build. 💽