This month consisted of a lot of looking for apartments to move to. My fiancee and I live in the Chicago suburbs, but we are growing very tired of them. It is the worst of every world. So we have decided to move into the city. I'll have to deal with a bit of a commute, but it is not bad for Chicago, and I am not planning on going in every day, at least for now. Our current apartment has brought us a lot of anxiety as well. We've both realized how important it is to have community. It isn't easy to make friends in the suburbs, especially during a pandemic. There is a lot more that will be accessible to us in the city. I am looking forward to living near an affordable makerspace.
Lately at work I've been working on our reservation system. I wrote a plugin system for it that I am pretty proud of, but I know code review will leave me humbled. Writing a plugin framework for a system that is not designed for one forced me to learn a lot about the system.
I spent some time programming for fun. I have been writing a Matrix chat bot with my friend Matt. My latest plugin allows us to clip the last 30 seconds of mumble calls, which I update to a website of sound bites. I've been doing digital spring cleaning as well, getting my directories in order and updating my git repos with anything missing.
I've been playing some video games. I finished Inscryption, which surprised me, and one of my favorite games I've ever played. Everyone says go in completely blind, and this is essential advice. I picked up Black Mesa as well, since I am a fan of the Half Life series, though never played the original. Every night I've been reading some of Leaves of Grass, and sometimes I add in a short story by Chekhov. I spent a few weeks practicing French on duolingo, but have lapsed lately. After the move, I'm planning on looking into adult night classes at the lycée.
Thu Feb 24 update 👍 (1)
My games website games.marks.kitchen is now public. So far, most of the games are either stuff I did a while ago, or simple things like snake and stacker. I am working on a paper airplane game, inspired by Glider Pro on Mac II.
I also have recently added an RSS feed for my website. It will notify of posts on blog and bread (the same posts as are sent automatically via email).
Sat Jun 13 update 👍 (0)
Check out new navigation on our site, an email newsletter, and some new posts!
Thu Sep 19 update 👍 (7)
Before the fall is officially here, I want to send an update on some stuff that I've been up to. In August, I participated in my first ever game jam. It was also my first real game that I made, other than some small arcade-ish games. The game is called Cosmic Cargo, made over a week with a team of (mainly) 2 developers, 1 sound artists, and some others helping with testing. The game is based on Oregon Trail, but in space. You can check it out here. I had a lot of fun making the game and I want to participate in more jams in the future. I also recently moved and started my PhD in computer science. It has been great so far, but also very stressful adapting to a new environment. The CS department here alone has more students than the total at my last school. I created my own budgeting app, which is just a glorified literal spreadsheet. I wanted an easily enter purchases I made into a spreadsheet, but my problem was that editing a sheet on a phone is not fun. So I made a short app that takes the data I want as simple inputs, allowing it to do some data validation and automatically input things like the date. The app then can use the share function to send an email with the content I entered to my gmail account. Emails sent from this app are parsed using google scripting into a spreadsheet. Ideally, I would not need to go through google to do this, but the process works well. The email traces also are a sort of backup too. Eventually, I want to easily add a photo of a receipt too in the app, but my first attempts at doing this were not so easy. Hopefully, some of you received this blog update through email. I have been meaning to set up a newsletter infrastructure with this website and more regularly update it as well. For now, I'll alert the email list that there is a new post at least. If you wish to be added to this, you can sign up here
Thu Sep 19 blog dev update 👍 (0)
Hope you enjoy the updated look of marks.kitchen! I also added a blog, be sure to check it out.
Wed Mar 20 update 👍 (16)