Breakfast: The Most Important Book About the Best Meal of the Day by The Editors of Extra Crispy

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Received this as a gift.

I guess I’m spoiled by Milk Street, Meathead Goldwyn, and America’s Test Kitchen, but reading a collection of blog posts put into a book with a bunch of vague recipes (although some seem to be better written) was just kind of meh.

For the past six years, since Google Reader closed in 2013, I’ve been self-hosting my RSS feeds via Tiny Tiny RSS. Overall it’s been OK, except for a few years I missed that the update method had been changed and I hadn’t updated. Then I learned the new method was to clone the git repo. I did it and kept up with it. There was something I didn’t set up way back when with my MySQL so it’s got a weird miscount between the app and the tab header. But otherwise it was working just fine enough.

This is copied over from my Hackaday.io page.

BBQ Thermostat: Arduino MKR 1010 and Therm Shield measuring temperature during a smoke

Today I was smoking a turkey so I figured it was a good time to do a live test of my project. There was good news and bad news. I think it’s illustrated quite well by the following graph:

Grafana graph of my BBQ Thermostat while measuring the smoker temp

Went ahead and upgraded. Only had to get rid of python2-twitter and an older nvidia package. Other than that it seems to be running relatively smoothly.

The sixth, and final, game of the Udemy class on Unity 2D was a tileset Metroid-Vania game which the instructors named Tilevania. I never played Metroid and maybe only played Castlevania once, but its legacy does persist in some newer games like Spelunky.

Tilevania in the Unity UI

This was the closest I’ve come to making a Mario clone. My favorite part of the development process was creating the tile editor rules that allows me to drag around the tiles for the foreground and have it automatically determine if it should be a grass piece, dark, or full of rocks. As usual with the games we used to learn concepts for the course, there is a lot left to do to make a fully-fledged game. I made note of a few items in the tickets on the Github page.

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 132 by Neil Clarke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Antarctic Birds: Some kind of science experiment with genetic engineering - I’m a little confused at first about what’s going on. My least favorite kind of story - at the end I still barely understood what was going on.

Little /^^^\&- - A very weird story about planet-sized aliens (or planets that have gained sentience?) messing with Earth. Wow, that ending was profoundly weird. It was still a pretty fun read, though.

Make: LEGO and Arduino Projects: Projects for extending MINDSTORMS NXT with open-source electronics by John Baichtal

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had been waiting to mark this book as read until I finished all the projects, but the reality is that might take years; not because the projects are hard, but because I can’t quite get the wife to justify all the extra expenses for toys.

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 131 by Neil Clarke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With this issue, there were a ton of stories that had killer endings and worlds that I wanted to spend more time in. Strongly recommend!!! See below for a per-story review that may expand on my status updates:

Twisted Knots: A story involving a character who sees the world in geometric terms. It turns out to be a beautiful story about loss and dealing with loss.

Grave Peril by Jim Butcher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Harry Dresden continues to grow, making less of the same mistakes and earning new friends. I particularly loved his partnership with Michael and how their personalities compared and contrasted. This entry in the series finds Harry trying to figure out why there are more ghosts than usual terrorizing Chicago. This one was a little harder to try and predict the solution to the mystery, but it did make sense as things went on.

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 130 by Neil Clarke

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Another awesome series of stories compiled by Mr. Neil Clarke. I loved all but the last fiction story and enjoyed the non-fiction. Here’s what I thought of each story/article:

An Age of Ice (a translated story): A story involving a multi-generational family and a world in which cryonics are realistic. About how the world changes because this exists. It’s a very short story, but quite poignant.