Roy Tang

My stuff:

• This week’s pandemic notes.
• Some days still hot, but weather beginning to turn for the better. Sleep kind of better and a bit more regular too.
• Did my quarterly medical checkup this past week (slightly delayed). No issues, but I need to do an FBS test for next time.
• Sleep schedule kind of settling back into my usual biphasic sleep. Although the second phase seems to move around a lot…
• Not much work-wise the past week, and a bit more family-related expenses. Medical and government stuff.
• Gaming:
  • still playing a lot of Final Fantasy VII Remake. I think I’m already in the final chapter. I am quite happy with the adaptiation, bit I’m not sure if I’m going to bother with achievement completion for this one; it requires hard mode completion, but that’s not the issue. The problem is the abundance of these dexterity-based minigames! I thought everything was fine when I did the squats thing, but then later there’s a harder pull-ups thing! And I haven’t even cracked the bottom of that darts leaderboard…
  • Divinity OS2 inching along slightly. But probably will be finished after FF7R at this rate.
  • there’s a new trivia app by the makers of the QuizUp, which we used to play a lot back in the day. The name is Trivia Royale, it’s currently iOS only and it’s basically battle royale quizup: you join a game with 1000 players, and you play 10 head-to-head matches until you get a winner. Took me most of the wook to actually win my first one.
• Quiz:
  • did poorly in the AboutQuiz and PopQuiz games this week. Actually, we’ve been doing poorly for a while now lol.
• Watching lately:
  • Nothing to log. Maybe a good thing?
• Side projects:
  • More work on triviastorm stuff this week. Most of it are some backend fixes to make later planned new features easier to build. Planning to clear/reset leaderboards at the end of the month. Some roadmap things:
    • allowing users to submit their own questions
    • make the discord bot usable for public usage, i.e. let other people add it to their discord
• I should probably write more.

Recent links:

• I’ve been reading a lot of posts off lobste.rs lately, so I finally pulled the trigger and asked around for an invite to the site. A helpful person provided me one via Mastodon. It’s an interesting site, basically an invite-only reddit-like site, mostly focused on tech stuff, so in theory the discussion quality should be fairly high. The chain of invites is public too, each user’s profile shows you who invited him, so in that way it’s kind of similar to a certificate chain of trust? We’ll see if this scales up well.
• I enjoyed this recent article about the 90s web. I will easily admit that I am an easy sucker for any post that appeals to my nostalgia for how the web was better “back in the doy”, rose-tinted glasses or no.
• I’ve always enjoyed the song Fast Car, so it was interesting to read about its origins and its surprising popularity.
• The founders of BaseCamp recently released Hey, a new email service that has some interesting ideas about new features to support the typical email workflow. I don’t nearly use email enough on a personal basis to pay for it (though I do have an invite!), but I’m glad someone is innovating in this space, although they don’t seem to be using open standards. They promptly got into a fight with Apple over App Store policies which has sparked some debate in the tech community on the value of curated app stores. So maybe they’re actually going to push for innovation in two different areas?