Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

A lot of software in the space has fundamental issues here. In most cases, tuning the signal path just isn't a thing. Someone picked your settings and that's what you get. It's simple, but the person who picked your settings has never actually roasted a batch of coffee and what they picked is extremely suboptimal.

Reconsidering Typica's configuration system in light of some new capabilities that I've been experimenting with. I already like what I ended up with by the end of 1.x better than what I've seen elsewhere, but I think there's a lot of room to improve on feature discoverability, expressiveness, and making it harder to mess things up.

The cat is offended that I didn't give her any ice cream.

I think the cat has forgotten about my dinner. She's in lap cat mode now.

The cat is sulking because I discouraged her from hunting my dinner.

linter: "you can't do that"
me: "okay, let me try typing that again without trying to figure out what I screwed up"
linter: "looks good to me"

Approved the latest arrival sample. Once the coffee is delivered I'll sort out how I want to roast that and try to get it out for sale promptly.

Sometimes I wonder how people manage to use computers without programming them at least a little. Everything is awful in its own way (different people will have different ideas about what awful is) and a little scripting can go a long way toward making things nicer.

Solving minor annoyances with shell scripts.

The voting van is out in front of my shop today and seems to be good for business. I will, as usual, be waiting for election day and voting at my usual place, but I'm glad stuff like this exists for people who have trouble with that.

The cat will be so confused when I go back to work.

Got an alert that someone got shot multiple times at the corner nearest my shop a little after midnight. For some reason the local newspaper's web site decided to follow the 6 sentence story with 8 photos of politicians in my shop over the years. I'm assuming they've farmed this sort of decision out to some tasteless algorithm what with print newspapers dying and all. Shooting victim expected to survive.

I should double check if L3+R2 really is the control for that. It would make a lot more sense if it were just R2 and a direction to dodge in (which my hands still won't like), but the icon in the tutorial looked like it indicated pressing L3 to me.

Started on Tales of Arise. Combat is going to take some getting used to. The L3+R2 combo for dodge is especially not what my hands want to do for that, but there's always something with that series. I think the only one that felt completely fluid to me was Sophie from Tales of Graces (fortunately I could just put her in lead for almost all of that game and yes, my skill level went way down when the game forced me to play a different character because I went all in on her early).

Also started playing Manifold Garden. I've gotten through Red and so far the main challenge seems to be finding the puzzle more than solving it, but I'm not really up for anything too mentally taxing so that's fine.

Still home sick. Very bored. Just to see what it would say I checked the leaderboard on one of those tile matching games and discovered that it didn't bother to upload scores for all of the levels that I've completed, but of the ones that it had (and a replayed one that I did just to make sure this was working) it had my rank at usually 74 or 85 (yes, just those repeatedly) but my best rank at 35. Kind of think the game is lying with these top 100 scores but it could be super small player base.

I've turned a covid test positive so I'll be off work for a bit, or more realistically, doing work that I can do at home. Fortunately I have a good supply of food, liquids, and medications. Fortunately I'm not noticing any difference in my sense of taste.

Reminder that this was music for a boss fight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDMP7-nlOnQ

The cat is staying with my mom while I'm out of town. The latest update is that the cat decided mom should wake up at 1AM to pet the cat.