Roy Tang

Programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart.

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Weeknotes 2020-09-13

It has certainly been a week, yes it has. The world continues to turn (and burn even).

I’ve been busy. Not so much with work, though there was a bit of that due to a required emergency software change (aren’t they always emergencies?). I wasn’t doing the emergency work myself, more like consulting and advising how to approach it, so not much to tell there.

I did quite a bit of work on my personal data processes/backups/workflows. It involved streamlining my backups, dedepulication, going through old records and cleaning them up, and so on. Some combination of Python scripts and manual work was required. One specific thing I did was to get a whole bunch of my old photos out of Google Photos and onto disk backups, and also had to do some deduplication there. I was able to remove around 1300 duplicates from over 12000 photos, so around 10% ish duplication rate, not too bad. My original intent was to remove them from Google Photos, dedupe, then add them back, but now I’m not even sure I need to add them back. The main advantage of Google Photos has been that they make the photos more searchable, but I don’t seem to have an urgent need for that anyway, and probably there are other ways to do that? I guess I’ll look into it when the time comes.

I have also been browsing some old (physical) albums stored around the house. There’s another few thousand photos there, I’m thinking of eventually digitizing them, as a means of backup, but that’s a lot of work, so maybe in the future.

Gaming was good again this week. I finished Uncharted 4! I guess any week where I manage to tick something off the backlog is a good week. Last weekend I mentioned I was near the end, that was so untrue lol. Turned out more than half the game was still to come. My SC2 buddies and I started to play this 3-player coop version of the Wings of Liberty campaign (avaiable as custom arcade things), that’s been fun. Then the usual stuff: Blood Rage with the Saturday group. Quiz nights/codenames with the trivia team.

I kind of want to get into SFV again, presumably there’s a flood of new players coming in recently since it was free on PS+ this past month, so hopefully it won’t be so hard to find matches this time?

My desire for a Nintendo Switch is being tempered by two things at the moment:

  • rumors of a new, upgraded Switch coming out next year. It wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve purchased a console just before it’s successor came out though.
  • frustration at the difficulty of the special stages in Super Mario 3D Land lol. It’s a stark reminder that I’m getting old and I’m not as good at these games as I used to be.

During this week, I binged four seasons of Superstore. It’s a reasonable enough ensemble comedy, though it’s no Brooklyn Nine Nine. A lot of the characters’ problems are of their own making due to selfishness, that’s always annoying. But it’s good enough for side-watching while I’m doing other things.

I also started watching Cobra Kai, not even halfway through the first season yet. It’s slightly painful, since it casts Johnny Lawrence as the POV character/protagonist, and he’s kind of a loser asshole, but we’ll see how it goes.

My desktop PC seems to be showing it’s age. It’s like recently I’ve been hitting 100% CPU and/or RAM much more often. I’ve tried uninstalling some unneeded software, hopefully that helps. I got this PC back in 2015, so it’s not unreasonable that I might need an upgrade soon, but I’m not sure I want to spend that money yet. I’m kind of hoping it can still hold on for a few years still.

Same thoughts for the rest of the world, I guess.

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