• 2 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Mostly, it’s the must-have Indie darlings, with a sprinkling of AAA fodder.

    I’ve loved:

    • Rimworld
    • Yakuza 0
    • Slay The Spire
    • Dave the Diver
    • Dredge

    I’ve found that I enjoy playing offbeat adventure games on the deck more than I did sat at a PC. Detention, Norco, Loretta, To The Moon, that sort of thing is perfect for playing in bed, propped against the pillows.

    I’m personally a huge fan of project zomboid, though I had to tweak the controls a little to make it work well.

    I’m sure Stardew Valley is a perfect match for the deck, but I’ve played it too much already.



  • If you’re a programmer rather than a professional typist, you probably can use it at work. It took a couple of weeks for me to adjust, a couple of months to be fluent, but it would have been longer if I didn’t use it all day every day.

    The biggest hurdles for me personally were

    1. I didn’t touch type properly before. I was a fast typist, but my hands roamed freely over the board. I realised that the finger I used to press a key depended on the word where it was used, and that took ages to re-learn.
    2. I bound enter and space to mode shift holds for symbols etc. It works great, but it does mean I sometimes hit enter and send half a slack message instead of typing punctuation.

  • Respectfully, this is why we can’t have an actual conversation about healthcare in this country. What’s objectively a societal good? Medicine? Sure, but I’m not proposing that we stop practicing medicine. Universal access to healthcare, free at the point of delivery? Also good, and a feature of most healthcare systems in the developed world. The specific funding model where the government runs the entire healthcare system through taxation?

    I dunno, seems like it gives good, but not great, results, terrible staff morale, and a permanent state of crisis.



  • The British NHS should be replaced with a system of national insurance. I’m a staunch labour voter, but the current system is subject to endless tinkering by the party of the day, and it’s broken.

    In the UK, the NHS is one of the only institutions that attracts broad unreserved support, though, so this is about as popular as “all college athletes should be locked in churches and those churches should be burned to the ground” would be in the US.


  • The current steam deck isn’t going to be obsolete just because a newer model comes out. I’m happily playing through the new System Shock right now, and there’s a gazillion things in my steam library that I can install and run any time I like.

    At some point there will be a faster, better deck, but this one is going to do me for a while. It is, in that sense, like a gaming PC. The lifetime of it isn’t determined by the manufacturer in the same way, because you can choose when it’s worth paying more for a better experience.

    Like a gaming PC the first question you need to ask is “what’s my budget”, and the second “what would I like to be able to play”. When you have those answered, you can decide whether the current sale price offers value for money. There is always going to be more power available for a higher price.





  • When I first started programming I used a text editor, UltraEdit32. When I moved into .Net, I initially used Ultraedit and wrote all my own build files, but switched to using Visual Studio with all the bells and whistles. When I moved to Python/Node I adopted Vim, and these days I tend to use Doom Emacs.

    There’s a spectrum from visual studio or eclipse, with complex project structures, through vscode and rider which are simpler, to programmers editors like Emacs or neovim, to plain editors like nano.

    I think the most important thing is that you’re comfortable with your tools. I could crunch out a lot of code with Visual Studio and Resharper, but I use Emacs as an IDE, note taking tool, and email client . The familiarity makes me productive.

    It is super helpful to have syntax errors or warnings highlighted when working on code, and a decent editor will make it easier to navigate code - jump to the definition of a function, find the documentation for an API call etc.

    As codebases get larger, you need all the help you can get. You may also find, when you work with others, that their opinionated tooling clashes with your opinionated hand crafting.