Category: Geekery

  • Changing How I Note The Time

    When I started with my current employer, lo the many years ago, I started taking notes in text files. One text file per day, every single day. I have (nearly) all of them, just in case I need to refer back to something I did [mumble] years ago. It happens!

    It’s not a bad system, obviously, since it’s served me well. Text files are easy for the computer to index for searching, to name one useful feature.

    I manually created a new file every day, and at the end of every month (and every year) I moved the previous month’s/year’s text files into an archive folder. Also, I pressed Ctrl+S a lot to make sure I didn’t lose information as I go. The “ongoing notes” and “to do list” sections I maintained at the bottom of the file needed copying over to each new document every morning.

    At home (as it were) I’ve been using Obsidian, the notes tool which saves everything as a discrete Markdown file in its library structure, for all of my personal notes for a few months now. A Markdown file is just a text file with simple formatting markers that reads like plain text in Notepad++ but does fancier things in a product like, well, Obsidian (and others).

    So at the start of 2024 I made the change: A new Obsidian vault in my “work” document folder, complete with automatic creation of the new day’s time file every day, already placed into a year-and-month folder structure. The carry-over notes and to-do list are separate documents “outside” the day/month/year structure but still in the vault. And since Obsidian saves changes as you go, I spend a lot less time hitting Ctrl+S. (Or, I will, once I break the habit…)

    If you surround some text with a pair of equals signs on each side, you get a “highlight” effect. Handy, since I like to flag which time blocks I’ve entered in the ticketing system.

    Was this really worth it? Who knows? Who cares! It feels like an improvement, and “a change is as good as a rest.”

  • Satisfactory: Employee of the Planet

    I met my goal. By year’s end 2023, I made it all the way through the Phase 4 parts shipment. Look!

    This officially puts the “ChooChooingScenery” savegame sequence to bed at 299 hours 45 minutes accumulated play time. Coming up in mid-January: I… haven’t figured out what I’m calling it yet but it’s a new savegame with a very particular focus, and I also want to sort out how I can turn it into more regularly-scheduled material for this here not-a-blog.

    Wait for it! It’s coming! It should be fun!

  • Merry Christmas – 2023

    To those who celebrate, for whatever reason you do so, please have a lovely and pleasant holiday.

    Satisfactory video game screenshot: A big festive tree with lights and ornaments. From the skies above fall holiday presents wrapped up in bows, gliding down on parachutes.
    I was going to just leave it at the simple line of text, then realized… hey, I can add something seasonal AND silly! So here you go, a gift from me to all of you.
  • A Steam-y 2023

    End-of-year retrospectives are as common this time of year as wadded up balls of wrapping paper thrown aside in frustration while trying to wrap presents. I’ll be putting together my thoughts on some of the music released during this calendar year later on, but I was reminded this afternoon that Steam’s fancy “year in review” results are now available, so let’s take a look-see.

    Sadly, most of those 4 new games didn’t connect with me very well. Better luck next year, game studios! My attention is valuable, after all!

    Checking out the full document may be entertaining for you, but if you’d rather just get the high points in summary: I played a lot of Satisfactory, I spent a couple months getting back into Skyrim pretty heavily, and I used my PC to play Gems of War & Ascension a few times (usually I play those on the tablet).

    The amount of Satisfactory I played will come as no surprise to regular followers of this site. (Hello to both of you!)

    No kidding?

    Over 170 sessions, nearly 70% of my entire time spent out of all games from my Steam library. Yeah, that tracks.

    But that’s not the whole story, is it? I play games which aren’t on Steam, after all. Like Honkai Star Rail (my main mobile game), Fire Emblem: Three Houses (several years on and I’m finally winding down on that one), Fire Emblem Engage (for a few months there, anyway), the beta for Palia (the 3D Stardew we keep hoping starts to gel), the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV (just getting back into that very very recently), and a few other odds & ends besides.

    That seems like a lot of games, but again, remember that Satisfactory (and HSR) are getting the bulk of my attention… as do books, TV shows, music, and so on. I’m a “gamer” but only in the mildest, most casual sense of the term.

    And that’s fine!

    I hope you’ve all had fun this year, and I hope you have increasing amounts and quality of fun in the year ahead.

  • Hummingbirds On Video

    Over the course of this year we noticed that some of Vyx’s potted flowers on the deck were attracting hummingbirds. I hadn’t even considered that any of those lived around here, but sure enough, they became our most frequent guests. When the flowering plants ran their course going into autumn, we replaced them with a flat hummingbird feeder and waited to see if they’d appreciate our offering.

    It took them a week or so to realize what was up, but once they did, hoo boy! I’d start hearing their clicks and clacks and seeing them darting between the rails to sneak a sip or two all through the day. After a while they got to the point of just hanging out for up to half a minute, chilling out and sipping that tasty, tasty sugar-water.

    This weekend I realized, oh hey, I have a GoPro HERO9 Black. And it can record 240 frames per second in high definition. A project was born!

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  • Satisfactory: Final Destination Tour Video

    Since the inception of the Final Destination site project in my current solo Satisfactory game, I knew I was going to make “content” out of it. (Sorry, Patrick Willems.) There was always going to be a tour, it was just a question of what format the tour would take. I went back and forth on whether to make it a long post with lots of pictures or just record a tour video and put text bits in it. Both options have merits and downsides, and the internal debate allowed me to put off doing anything for several weeks even after (more-or-less) completing the build.

    Yesterday I woke up and decided, it’s time to record a video. Thus, the following:

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