2025 Week 51
TL;DR: Weeknotes continue! Tried to write daily posts but only managed one before the week happened. Catsby finally found food he loves (baby food in a jar), printed an army of tiny polar bears and fleshy-looking pink reindeer, friendship ended with Fortnite and now Warframe is my best friend, and spent way too much time thinking about game streaming with Sunshine & Moonlight while pondering whether to turn my gaming PC into a basement server.
Meta
Well, here's another weeknotes post! I'd thought maybe I would start doing some semi-daily posts again, but I only managed one miscellanea post and a couple others before the rest of the week happened.
Catsby's Baby Food Discovery
The big cat news this week: Catsby hasn't been eating well lately, and he's lost weight. Then I offered him a jar of chicken and broth baby food. I don't think I've seen him happier in years. He gobbled down 3/4 of it and even batted at the other cats to keep it to himself.
I got a picture of him shoving his muzzle into the jar when I gave him a sniff—gave him a bowl when it looked like he was into it:
The one problem: Cosmo cleans up the leftovers and has gained the pound that Catsby lost. So now I have to watch for when Catsby's done eating and scoop up what's left.
Tiny Plastic Animals
I now have a tiny polar bear army:
Here's the model. I'm tempted to print a bunch more, shove some in my pockets, and leave them random places around town if I have to do any last minute shopping next week.
And now I have a herd of tiny pink reindeer:
Here's the model for these, though I think I might have to putter around with supports or some setting to make the antlers less prone to spaghettify. I'm trying to decide if they look slightly unsettling rendered in stringy pink? Like they're oddly fleshy, almost like axolotls.
Friendship Ended With Fortnite, Warframe is now Best Friend
That said: friendship ended with Fortnite. Now Warframe is my best friend.
I've been getting social anxiety doing trading in Warframe, a video game. You have to message folks, meet them in the game, and exchange stuff. Everyone's been nice, though. My brain feels super broken most days. 🙃 But like, even if someone is a jerk to me in Warframe, I can block them and/or log out? Why brain.
I will say, though, Warframe is where I've gotten hassled the least of all multiplayer games for when I don't know what I'm doing.
Stupid Slothmas Project Idea
I was considering picking up one of those little Dell office PCs to play with as a server. But then another idea occurred to me: what if I moved my gaming PC to the basement, stuck Proxmox on it, then used a Dell office PC as a game streaming client at the couch with Sunshine & Moonlight? I could also make the gaming PC be a server when I'm not gaming all the time. I could also stream games to a Mac laptop or my phone or maybe my Nintendo Switch?
Why would I do this? Because my gaming PC has been working fine for far too long as-is.
I've been trying it out this week—streaming with Sunshine/Moonlight from my Linux gaming machine downstairs to a MacBook Pro upstairs. Using an Xbox controller in bluetooth on the laptop and a wired network connection, playing smooth as can be. It's working surprisingly well?
Miscellanea
Woke up from a dream where humans started metabolizing microplastics to become Lego people
My god, how is "Things Can Only Get Better" by Howard Jones seeing its 40th anniversary?
I'm a lil sad because I lost one of my earbuds when I was on that work trip last week. But, not too sad, because they only cost $15. Splurged a little and got a new pair of Moondrop Space Travel 2 for $30. Maybe I'm just blessed with poor taste, but I've been really pretty satisfied with all but the very cheapest of ear buds? I've given AirPods a shot, but couldn't really tell a 5-10x improvement
Out of the corner of my eye, birds are flitting around and through the branches of a hawthorn tree just outside my office window, feasting on berries. A part of my brain keeps interpreting the motion as notifications sliding away on one of my monitors, inducing repeated tiny panics. (what have they done to us?!)
The Long, Knotty, World-Spanning Story of String - Without string, our ancestors could not have domesticated horses and cattle or efficiently plowed the earth to grow crops
Toaster vs Washing Machine - When you buy appliances, always ask yourself: toaster or washing machine? Toaster is an invitation to use more tech for its own sake. Washing machine is tech that transforms life
China's Clean Energy Push - flying taxis, food delivery drones, and China's ambition to dominate clean energy technologies
The Web Platform is a Triumph of Object-Oriented Programming - every web API you have ever used is designed specifically within the OOP paradigm
Prompt caching: 10x cheaper LLM tokens - It turns out that the math done for the first part of a prompt doesn't change as you add stuff to the end of it. So, you can cache all that math for common context and prompt prefixes.
Reinventing the dial-up modem - "We needed a way to send data to our server without an internet connection. A team member came up with this fantastic idea of using DTMF tones!"
Diabaig - a traditional turn-based ASCII roguelike where you are never more than a few mistakes away from death
The handleEvent() method - a platform-native method for managing all of the events on your Web Component
My HTML Web Component boilerplate for 2026 - everything I've learned from working on Kelp UI
Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work - We need to deliver code that works—and we need to include proof that it works as well
Introducing Ringspace - a proof-of-concept for how we might modernize the webring concept with asymmetric cryptography to provide trust within small human communities