davesnider

davesnider, 18 days ago to random

Who says you can't play RPGs by yourself! Room one of my Ker Nethalas dungeon delve. Gonna draw a monster for each room.

davesnider, 25 days ago to random

Up early to smoke some pork.

Big green egg with smoke coming out.

davesnider, 1 month ago to random

MLB is so funny. I pay a decent chunk of change for a Flex plan for Orioles tickets (live). I pay for MLB TV. They blackout the games because I'm local and they want me paying for cable. I pay for a VPN to get around it. But MLB still has one game a day exclusive on Apple TV. I don't need that, so I'll just watch a pirate stream.

The money I'm paying to get around this bullshit id happily pay directly to them, bypassing all this middle man shit.

Makes zero sense. Miss the days of antennas.

davesnider, 1 month ago to random

Somehow I'm enjoying Remnant II despite always bouncing off of other Soulslike games. I think the immediacy of hitscan guns does it for me. I'm always too impatient in the slow, heavy combat of Dark Souls.

I also like that most of its game mechanics aren't obscured by lore. I'm OK with clicking "make my game public" rather than needing some weirdly named item only a wiki would explain.

davesnider, 2 months ago to random

I just bought a crokinole board after learning about it this morning. It's basically Canadian shuffleboard?

davesnider, 2 months ago to random

When will we see the first successful nostalgia act on the web? We're around 30-years of Internet culture at this point. The early years had a small audience, but each year that passes there will be more people that remember "the good Internet".

At some point an old brand / personality will be able to do a "come back tour" the same as Guns and Roses and capitalize on people's fond memories.

davesnider, 2 months ago to random

My eight year son has unsurprisingly gotten really into Halo since I introduced it to him.

Does anyone know if the novels are any good? He burned through the entire Percy Jackson series in two months so I need to find something to keep him reading. Otherwise I was thinking of getting him into Redwall.

davesnider, 3 months ago to random

Lost a buddy today. You were a good dog Ava.

davesnider, 3 months ago to random

That Rivers Cuomo discussion on HN gave me an opportunity to talk with a co-worker about how good / under-appreciated Maladroit is.

Also, for Weezer fans, this oral history of the early days is a really fun read.

https://phawker.com/2018/12/11/excerpt-the-complete-oral-history-of-weezer/

davesnider, 3 months ago to random

We live outside of city gas, so I have a fancy heat pump / propane heating system. It essentially kicks into propane mode when certain outside conditions are hit. For some reason I can never set it right, which results in my house being freezing if it's cold outside, but not cold enough to kick in. Basically it's great when it's in the 20s, but not when it's in the 40s.

It makes me wish things like this had physical knobs rather than displays.

davesnider, 4 months ago to random

I love my wife. She wanted me to find some obscure, out of print George Jones albums. I found the mp3s (they fell off a truck, she's happy). She doesn't need physical copies, but is now disappointed I can't find the liner notes. Adorable. The search continues.

davesnider, 4 months ago to random

Here's a video preview of a tutorial I'm writing up about how to build a Vim / FZF / Xata powered bookmark / personal web tool. Did this quickly in an afternoon.

https://www.davesnider.com/file/3GwwAXYm15HJyOp9

davesnider, 4 months ago to random

Old World is one of those games that very subtly upends a lot of "known" systems in a genre. It's take on settlements, workers, combat, religion, diplomacy and event chains are a leap forward from Civilization.

The work order system is brilliant. Yes, you have all these workers, soldiers and things you can do, but you only have so many orders, so you need to figure out what you can get to right now.

I'm having a lot of fun with it and can immediately see how I'd play different next game.

davesnider, 4 months ago to random

Follow up movie. The Andromeda Strain. Haven't seen this one since I was a teenager.

davesnider, 5 months ago to random

I'm a big fan of using a balanced hand with TypeScript in a project. Just because you add some occasional non nullables or anys to a codebase where the shapes / responses get tricky doesn't mean TypeScript isn't helpful, and doesn't mean you're negating the benefits of TS. Most of the time it's really helpful, but sometimes it's a pain in the ass and I'm confident in the code use.

Unless you're writing deep library code, there's likely better things you could be doing that solving that puzzle.

davesnider, 5 months ago to random

I was able to score opening day tickets for the Orioles in March. The same week I'm taking the family to Assateague for a camping trip during Spring Break. Three years in, we're cliche Marylanders!

My favorite part of camping in Maryland vs. California is the ability to have fire pits. The least favorite part? Mosquitos are a thing.

https://www.nps.gov/asis/planyourvisit/marylandcamping.htm

davesnider, 5 months ago to random

ChatGPT for a designer is so handy. Years ago I would hand write JSON arrays to scaffold patterns I wanted to see in visualization data. Now I just explain the function I want to see and the parameters and generally get back something that can generate things with decent variance.

davesnider, 5 months ago to random

Changed up the onboarding in @xata . I always think it's weird when evaluating a new DB system (or any tech) and they expect you to go through an hour of reading docs and learning SDKs just to see how it works. We now give people a full codebase alongside the db so you can play around.

Some people don't like this method of learning, and you still have the more traditional option for them. Even further. Who needs the stuff? Just skip it. Some people hate onboarding. Give users choice.

Some commands to set up the sample project.

davesnider, 5 months ago to random

Meant to do a write up like this for years. Here's a list with commentary on 25 of my favorite films of all time.
https://www.davesnider.com/posts/movies

davesnider, 5 months ago to random

Picked up Returnal during the Steam sale. That game hits all my buttons. The gameplay loop and gunplay are soooo tight. Dig the atmosphere and voice acting.

davesnider, 6 months ago to random

As promised. Here's a detailed tutorial on how to build your own screenshot upload application from (nearly) scratch. It's a love letter to why I love using Linux as my desktop.

https://www.davesnider.com/posts/screenshot-app

davesnider, 7 months ago to random

I captured 17,000 screenshots as a designer since 2010. I've published more than half of them publicly on my website.

Introducing the museum! 😅 Built with @xata, Google Vision APIs and an Astro/Svelte front-end.

https://www.davesnider.com/posts/museum

davesnider, 7 months ago to random

This is a picture of my Dad from the late 70s that I adore. I asked him what the book was. He said... I don't know... they put that there to make me look smarter than I was.

davesnider, 7 months ago to random

I sent this to a European coworker that said he had a fast car and wanted to drive around outside of SF. Only now to I realize this is barely usable. Luckily I provided it with a real set of Google Maps links.

This is similar to when I have a design in my mind and don't have enough time to explain it. Just trust me, it'll be awesome.

Also, yes. I'm the person that recommends people need to go to Rancho Nicasio!

davesnider, 7 months ago to random

This weekend I hope to finish my "13 years of screenshots" application. It's already pretty cool. I have all the images running through Google Vision to auto-gen tags, color properties and read text. All of the data gets stored in @xata to make things searchable / filterable.

I used this project as an impetus to learn Svelte, which has been a pleasure along my Astro system. That setup means everything is a little more MPA based, but that's fine for a smallish site.