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Just some thoughts by a guy you don't know.
Also, you should definitely hire me!
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Weeklog for Week 47: November 21 to November 27

Progress

I was at "trivago tech get together" this week, met some old friends, played some games and generally enjoyed a day off from K8s. There was some inspiration in there, too, that I'll have to work into some essays and maybe stories.
This also means I had a lot of time on the train, which I spent reading books and writing tools for myself.

I sometimes send packages with Deutsche Post. When you do that, you get an A4 shipping label that you should print and attach to your package. The only important information on that page, however, is the address, the QR code and the two routing bar codes. You might also have a field for additional services on there. I have a Brother label printer that prints 62mm adhesive labels. Trying to use the device with regular software and the official printer drivers leads to hilarious but not very useful resultsI have to admit that I previously got this working, somehow. I think it involved an unofficial printer driver and setting the paper size to something very weird. And it didn't work this time anyway., so I mainly use the printer with brother_ql_web, which talks directly to the printer in its own language. Since it can also print images, I wrote a tool that extracts the useful parts from the shipping label PDF and sends it to the printer directly. This process is very fast, produces perfect shipping labels and works every time. I might open-source it at some point, too.

Apart from that, more K8s.

TWIL

echo $? will show the exit code of the last run program on the shell. Note that this command then exits with code 0, so you can only do this once.

The tee command can be used to write output to a file and to the screen. If you want to mix stderr and stdout or route them to different endpoints, it gets more complicated. This SO question has excellent details in the answers.

Articles

Books

  • Fifty Shades of Red Riding Hood: ok, ok, ok, I know, but bear with me! So I was looking in an online retailer for Jasper Ffordes newest book Red Side Story, which is the successor to the slightly-unfortunately named Shades of Grey. On the results page appears a book with the manageable title "Honestly, Red Riding Hood Was Rotten!: The Story of Little Red Riding Hood as Told by the Wolf (The Other Side of the Story)". And from there, somehow combining those, I found FSoRRH. It's just a very short story and calls itself a parody, and also contains this wonderful praise on its page: "Repetitive, badly written and poorly edited, ‘Fifty Shades of Red Riding Hood’ has all the ingredients necessary to become a runaway success." I had to read it.
    Well, it's not good. Or, let's say it lives up to its own praise. The only redeeming quality I could find was that in the end there's a warning against abusive relationships. Oh and it's short. Which makes it better than other, similarly named booksAlso: still a better love story than Twilight..
  • What The Hell Did I Just Read by David Wong: I've long been a fan of David WongGrammar question: Is it "fan of David Wong" or "fan of David Wong's" or "fan of David Wongs"?, and I read all his novels. All that I knew about, at least, which were John Dies at the EndSpoiler alert and This Book is full of SpidersIt's not.. And now I learned that there's a third book in the series that came out five years ago and another one coming out this year. So naturally I have to catch up. This one is just as good as the others, so go get it right now! It's hilariously written non-stop-action horror that is just so good. The ending is a bit 'meh, ok', but the book is really, really good. 10/10

Backlog

  • Honestly, Red Riding Hood Was Rotten!: The Story of Little Red Riding Hood as Told by the Wolf (The Other Side of the Story)

Board games

  • Magic Maze, very nice, very humorous and whimsical and engaging play. I don't like that you play with each other but not with each other. We only played three or four rounds into the tutorial because then it simply became too stressfulThis is something I noted in my playing of any games: I'm not into stressful games any more. As soon as a game becomes too hard or too much work or takes away from my relaxation, I'll stop playing it (or cheat). I simply don't have the time nor energy for, well, games..

Games

  • Hot Wheels Unleashed works perfectly on Steam Deck and is great fun there, too.

Backlog

  • Creeper World 4 (from waitlist)
  • Dwarrows (from waitlist)
  • Damaged in Transit (from waitlist)

Recipes

  • Köttbullar i Gräddsås
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