I’d like to acknowledging a preference for GitLab over GitHub. Obviously GitHub is the popular choice, but I have a soft spot for the underdog… especially the open source optionally self-hosted underdog. My evidence is anecdotal, but Github Actions is a gentle learning curve compared to GitLab’s CI. It could be because I learned GitLab first and had new concepts to wrap the ol brain round. The option to use other people’s reusable elements in GitHub is sweet.

Why? No one Reads Blogs I don’t know, I don’t even average 1 post a year. Let me have my fun. What changed? I switched to Hugo on GitLab. Wordpress feels like overkill and it mysteriously stopped working. The hard part was ensuring redirects to old projects worked. Okay “projects” is ambitious, “project” is correct. The only one that matters is the link from xkcd 1190 to geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190. I made some minor changes to the original project so it can be served from GitHub pages.

I use GNUCash for my personal finances because I don’t trust services that require me to give up my financial institution’s username and password. Not only does this feel wrong, it might be a terms of service violation. Either way, it seems like a security kerfuffle waiting to happen, so keep track of my finances locally. Yes it’s a lot more work, but I really feel like I have more control over what I want to see and a better understanding of what it means.

Long ago, back in my bachelor days, I had built some 8-bit NES sprites out of Lego and hung them on the wall. Recently, my wife asked me, “What happened to those?” and “Why did you never hang them up here?” She doesn’t realize it, but she just gave me permission to nerd out for the next few weekends. This weekend I pulled out the old Legos and learned more than I expected.

I decided to dive into Phaser 3 and Tiled with my next game project. I was looking to make a room change similar to Link to the Past (the SNES Zelda). The implementation is simple and the result was pleasing so I wanted to share. Playable demo! I’ve used Tiled a little in the past but this is the first excuse I’ve really had to dive in to it. If you’re not familiar with Tiled, there are a million ways to learn more.

A short post about a game I made about a year ago for a class at the University of North Texas, CSCE 4210: Game Programming 1. I took the class because I heard the professor, Dr. Ian Parberry, was good at teaching game design and was an interesting fellow (I heard right on both counts). I cannot claim all credit for this game because I worked with a partner. He was awesome and the only reason I don’t mention him by name is because I didn’t tell him I uploaded this and no longer have his contact info.

I was reading all the tax law news so I updated my tax slider from 2015. 2018 Tax Slider I used this Forbes article to get the new tax bracket info. I’m not a fan of Forbes, they have too many advertisements. I used this article because it had what the 2018 tax brackets would have been if there was no law passed. It was fun, and gave me something to do.

You know what really grinds my gears? When I’m signing up for a service that requires an email account and they don’t know how to properly validate email addresses. The + is valid in an email address. It’s not only legit, it’s really useful. What do you do about it? I use the dots if it’s something I really need to sign up for. Also, any message I get from a website that doesn’t have the jamespryor+something@gmail.

I do love Sudoku, and I play it too much. Not long ago (before this semester started kicking my butt) there were two things I wanted to play with: Local Storage and a Sudoku library. This is what I came up with: http://geekwagon.net/projects/sudoku/ I also play in pen because I’m a glutton for punishment. I didn’t use a library for local storage, for some reason I wanted to do it the hard way.

Despite WildStar’s critical hit on my free time this past month, I’ve managed to code a little. Let me introduce both of my blog readers to the buggiest and most poorly coded version of Tetris they’ve ever seen. http://geekwagon.net/projects/flipsy/ Someone sucks at Tetris Don’t ask why it’s called Flipsy. That was just the name of the folder when I started and I didn’t bother to change it. I did follow the Tetris guidelines to the best of my coding ability.