Weeknotes 12.

• Crossword improvements - I’ve had some lovely messages from people who are enjoying using Several People are Solving. I’ve also seen the traffic jump from 10 people a day a month ago to more than 250 people a day now. I’ve spent a bit more time on it and there are now more links to crosswords from the home page. I want to colour-in moves so you can see who made them, but I’m not sure the best way to do it to have some continuity for a user’s colour across games but also avoid clashing. I’d like not to have to create an account system either.
• Lower latency - In pursuit of more reliable video calls and lower-latency Geforce Now I set up a Powerline ethernet connection which works great. I’ve played more Cities Skylines and I’m likely hours away from buying the Sunset Harbour expansion that was released this week.
• Keeping a routine - After spending a whole week either at my desk working or on the sofa watching TV, I felt unenergised and my days began blurring together. I’ve instead tried to go for a walk before starting work to help refresh myself and get me out of bed on time and doing indoor-exercise in the evening using FitOn or a cross-trainer.
• Splitting strings - Skills matter and their library of videos is back online! I made a copy of my Splitting Strings video for safekeeping. I re-read some of the discussion about my talk and post on Reddit. The, perhaps not explicit enough, point of the talk was about the surprising complexity of seemingly simple functions and how there can be logical reasons this complexity and differing behaviour. So much of the discussion devolves into what programming language is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Oh well.
• Veg - We found our nearby farm shop has a bountiful supply of vegetables that our local supermarket is missing. I also got to use my drill to help Pauline put together a raised bed so we can grow our own. We have some broccoli, cabbage and bean seedlings that are almost ready to go in.
• Brownies - I wanted to put the last two eggs in the fridge to good use so made brownies. I usually put espresso powder and whisky since they both go so well with chocolate but instead used some port leftover from Christmas. I used this recipe with the addition of a medium wine-glass worth of port into the butter and sugar mix. I was VERY happy with them.