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Life

I didn’t do much this week, owing to busy times at $DAYJOB and then having my semiannual burst of motivation which had me doing a lot of work on Claw.

I finished reading The Knife of Never Letting Go, after which Bookwyrm helpfully reminded me that I was halfway through the year but only a quarter of the way through my reading goal of 24 books a year 😔✊

That said I have been reading more frequently (started the sequel: The Ask and The Answer) during the multiple hour-long power cuts throughout the week (thanks Indiranagar) so hopefully I’ll catch up at some point. Or cheat by reading short stories, I don’t know.

Meta

This site has seen some minor tweaks: the “divider” between the header and the content should be slightly better aligned now, and we can now render Mermaid diagrams!

I’m working on a blog post about the stuff I’ve been doing on Claw where those will come in handy, stay tuned for that to be published soon™ _{psst you can read the current draft here}

Work

I’m finally free of my self-inflicted deadline jail, and went right back to my cosy janitorial duties of refactoring ugly code and accidentally stumbling upon latent bugs. All in all a great week at work!

Personal Projects

Energized by the aforementioned periodic burst of motivation, I managed to wrap up a handful of large changes to Claw.

• The search button now expands in-place rather than taking you to a separate full screen destination [PR]
• All the HTML parsing logic is now delegated to a Zipline-based module, which means I can now do over-the-air updates of that code without a new app release. This will significantly improve the time-to-fix for site markup changes, and also ended up being a pretty interesting exercise in general. The draft post I linked above covers this work, and I hope to finish it off in a few days. [PR]
• I talked on the Fediverse some time ago about how the ability to log into the app was causing my pre-login tagging feature to break down. This week I implemented a simple solution to it after being massively disappointed by Codex’s attempt at it. [PR]

I checked my Miniflux unread count at the start of this week: it had breached the 100 posts mark again, which made me wonder how that keeps happening because I look at it at least once a day, often more. To determine the issue, I sketched up a very basic “algorithm” involving gathering all entries for a specified period, calculating the time it takes for them to go from created → read and bucket those based on feed and tags. This gives me a very rough idea of what kinds of posts stay unread for long, which was good enough for what I had in mind. I let Codex loose on the problem, and obviously it was unable to follow a detailed spec and implementation plan, instead writing an empty shell that just had a bunch of no-op methods where the actual analysis would go 🙂

It took a lot of prodding to get it all to a proper spot, and I’m still tweaking it as I’m writing this weeknote because I like to suffer or something. You can find the slop code here if this seems interesting for any reason. My own instance is behind Cloudflare Access because I don’t trust even this fully static HTML by a clanker.

Gaming

This week was even more CONTROL with Amogh as we finished the base game and explored the DLC, getting my ass kicked by random side missions and continuing to unravel the mysteries of The Oldest House. I enjoyed this playthrough a lot more than any of the previous attempts by a huge margin, who knew companionship makes things more fun. Since Amogh also hasn’t done much of the DLC it’s been a fun time for the both of us to come across abominations beyond mortal comprehension.

Food

As promised, the pasta from last Sunday in all its glory (I ate a second serving on Monday so it counts as this week, hush). With Yash back from his Europe trip we were back in the kitchen, and made a big pot of Shakshouka with 6 eggs instead of our usual 4. I was working from home on Friday, so I whipped together some plain ham and cheese sandwiches for breakfast and a simple garlic-based Greek yogurt dip, with a nice Coke Zero to round it all off. Sandwiches are awesome 😄

I was feeling the feels this morning for some reason so decided to treat myself to a nice breakfast at the nearby Cafe Muziri’s and also get some reading done under the pleasant sunlight. Eternally grateful to Rohan for introducing me to this place, the vibe is always nice and cosy and the hash browns are to die for.

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See you next week!