At a Glance

• Ditching Windows: The final steps to ditching Windows
• Expense Tracker: Finally wrapping up the main work for this project
• Taylor: Someone sent me an email
• Interesting Links: Cool things I found this week

Ditching Windows

I’ve been a Linux user for many years now. My distribution of choice is Fedora as I’ve basically had zero issues using it and keeping an install updated for many years. I do basically all of my computing with it.

With Windows 10 finally hitting End of Life and Windows 11 being full of ads, AI, and other garbage I’m finally making the effort to migrate the last remaining uses of Windows over to Linux. This means getting my games running. Thankfully Steam has trivialised this. The only game I’ve had issues with so far is Overwatch but I’m working through that.

Expense Tracker

This has finally hit a point I’m happy with it and can consider it “basically done”. I’ll use it for a couple of months and make any small tweaks I think I need to. I might also polish up the interface a bit more too. I’m too lazy at the moment to anonymise some data and take a screenshot, but rest assured it looks like a developer made it.

The final feature list is actually kind of impressive given it’s only had a few days development:

• Import CSV of transactions
• Create, read, update, destroy categories
• Create, read, update, destroy subcategories
• Create, read, update, destroy rules
• Auto-categorise transactions using rules
• Show reports broken down into categories
• Mobile responsive
• Track account balances from the imported transactions

Taylor

I received an email about Taylor! Someone noticed a bug on the playground and reported it. This small act by them made me feel like I’m actually making a difference with this project.

The thing that makes me chuckle about this bug report is that they’re focussing on the missing y call on the Vector2 but mention nothing about the clearly broken background drawing.

I’m very thankful for this report though, I have fixed both of these issues but I’m still not sure how to tackle keeping regressions like this from happening automatically.

Interesting Links

Disney Comic Strip Artist Kit: Came across this on Mastodon and thought it could apply to game design too.

I put a real-time 3D shader on the Game Boy Color: A very cool tech demo. (CW: minor AI usage)

Let’s compile Quake like it’s 1997!: Running through how to compile Quake using an approximation of the tech stack originally used.

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes: I mean, you just gotta read this one.

On Building Communities in Public: Why I Chose Discourse Over Discord: This gave me some great ideas for the Taylor community site I’m building.

Against the protection of stocking frames.: Look at AI through the lens of it already being a failed technology.

How I Cut My Google Search Dependence in Half: An extremely interesting new idea of using your browsing history as a search engine. The tool is very early days and buggy, but the idea is amazing.

Ubuntu Live CD was Based on Knoppix: A thread on Mastodon showing that the original Ubuntu Live CDs were built on top of Knoppix.

The open source design stack: A look at FOSS tooling for doing design work.