Programming, espresso, and grumbling.
We went all-in on Chromecast at home. We had a Chromecast Audio in every room, even the bathroom, with a set of speakers. We set up multiple groups like “Full House” and “Kitchen and Living Room” so we could have music playing wherever we were hanging out. We had a Chromecast in the living room and in the garage with the treadmill, so we could watch videos while working out. The living room…
Overwatch launched and immediately became super popular, but I wasn’t sure I would like it. I’d never gotten into Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike: Global Offensive frustrated me, and my time playing DotA 2 and League of Legends was short-lived. Somehow, despite Overwatch being likened to all of these games, I love Overwatch alone. I originally bought Overwatch because my friend Summer got it and…
I went down a 🐇 hole yesterday when I decided I wanted to try a new CSS framework. It started innocently enough, I found Siimple and figured I’d give it a try here. Siimple has SCSS files so I wanted to import them directly rather than used their minified distribution CSS. However, I got an error running Jekyll 2 when importing their SCSS. Though I filed an issue on their repo, I figured maybe it…
I kept hearing about Stardew Valley on Reddit as well as seeing friends on Steam playing it. It was priced at $15 with an extra $5 to get the soundtrack. I very rarely dislike video game soundtracks so of course I had to get the soundtrack, too. I wasn’t sure how well I’d like the actual game, but /r/girlgamers was talking about it and it sounded cute, with $15 being cheap enough that I was…
Jon has done a great job getting our house wired up with Philips Hue lights. I’ve really enjoyed having them and with the right devices, they’re very convenient. I love the bits of color and how much control we have over brightness compared with regular bulbs that don’t have dimmer switches. I wouldn’t have known where to get started, so I wanted to write up the products we’ve bought and our…
Halloween season came around and with it came big bags of candy at the office. Some candies disappeared faster than others, leading exclamations like “aww all the Twix are gone!” or “there’s nothing but stupid 3 Musketeers left” to be heard around the office. Summer remarked that we needed an app to tell us how best to divide the candy so that no one who didn’t want stupid 3 Musketeers would be…
I’m pretty fickle when it comes to music subscription services; I like to try them all. I’ve used Pandora, Rdio, Google Music, and Spotify. I had no particular reason to switch to Apple Music when it came out because Spotify works so perfectly. Then came the reports about Spotify’s recent privacy policy changes ; I decided to try Apple Music after all. What I Like Radio stations I often don’t know…
I saw the little Windows 10 logo show up in my taskbar some few weeks ago, telling me I could reserve a copy of Windows 10 for free. Cool! I did so and waited with excitement for July 29 to come around. It came and went, and my reserved upgrade still wasn’t ready. I saw articles, privacy concerns , Tweets, and a whole subreddit come about, and I felt like the last person who wanted to upgrade but…
I’ve been replaying Okami HD recently; coming back to it after several years of not playing made me notice anew all the little details that make the game so great. I really recommend the game on PS3, and I hope they rerelease it on the PS4 or make a proper sequel. I found the game originally because I enjoyed The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and saw Okami listed as being a similar game, at…
I love working out ActiveRecord and Arel queries in Rails apps. I thought I’d share some of the more fun queries I’ve designed in Arel, spread out over a few blog posts. We’ll start with one for fetching tags separated by account. Say you have a Rails app with accounts. Different accounts have different data, and you want to keep that data separate, including the tags on that data. Say our data is…