Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

I've slowed down on the programming practice now that the weather is nice and I want to be outside more, but I'm chugging along.

One month into Codecademy, and I've covered more than I expected. Strengthening old skills, and gaining new ones.

Started with the Command Line class to see how the lessons were taught, and ended up learning a few shortcuts that I apparently never taught myself.

Now I'm comfortable enough to goof off with Python a bit.

I need to keep myself focused and try to double down over the next month.

Playing around with Blender. No idea what I'm doing, mind you, but I made this somehow.

As I finish up the first stage of my python training, I'm searching for datasets that will be useful for my next stage. Just found this, and it's gonna be fun:

https://data.pouet.net/

It's amusing to me how people outside of Washington State seem to think that Seattle has transformed into some sort of barren wasteland over the past year.

It's been a rough year, sure, but the city is fine. And we'll keep doing fine no matter how much Conservative America keeps lying about it.

3D Printing a long plastic tube, and cramming 100x 3v button cells into it to make my own 300v battery.

That's safe, right?

Wipeout came out in 1995, and is set in 2052.

That means we're 45.6% of the way to getting to judge its accuracy.

Spotify seems like it has a lot of music on it, until you close Spotify and look literally anywhere else there's music.

Netlabels are especially fun to explore, and you're going to find extremely incomplete collections, if any at all, on most major streaming platforms.

Archive.org is a great music source for netlabels.

SonicSquirrel is an excellent collection of various copyleft music.

SceneSat has amazing chiptunes, and that's actually something you can (mostly) listen to on Spotify now.

Someone give me an excuse to drop $10k on a volumetric display. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbMk2sP0_i0

If you're not already here, get in: https://streaming.media.ccc.de/revision/revision

#revisionparty

The Revision Party twitch ban is bullshit.

I have no idea what I'm doing, but I think I start here.

https://github.com/Gargaj/Bonzomatic

This is the closest thing to a sport that I can get into. I need to learn to do this. Linking to last year's Revision Shader Showdown, but I've been watching and voting for this years on the live stream.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-0tpXlJLBM

Revision 2021 Demoparty is live now through the weekend: https://www.twitch.tv/revisionparty

I was a bit more selfish with my use of it, and used it to explain to anyone who noticed why I was port scanning the entire IPv4 address space twice per day.

Several years ago I owned the domain portscan.io, and I badly regretted letting it expire, as it was purchased immediately by someone else.

But it seems that the current owner has made proper use of it as a free self-scanning service, so honestly, I'm not mad.

The ability to be a no-code tech worker is pretty neat, but I know I would do better to actually learn how to code.

This is me right now:

So, full disclosure, I have worked in tech for over a decade, I'm skilled at network engineering and software engineering, I work as a support engineer at a software company, and my coding skills are absolute poop from lack-of-practice.

So I dropped like $300 on Codecademy and Mimo training materials, and I'm determined to get myself back into proper shape to program fluently again.

10 days in, and I can program a prime number generator and a fizzbuzz program without docs.