Building a Monthly Planner
A post highlighting my current planning/journaling/note taking solution, with a custom set of pages printed and bound together each month.
The Proving Grounds
Technical thoughts, adventures, and projects
MacOS Setup Essentials
I recently picked up a Mac Mini to offload some longer running tasks from my hand-warming MacBook Air, and with a suspected new laptop also coming in the future I had to stop myself part way through my trawl through the MacOS settings menu and realized I should be writing
Technical Challenge: Checking For Overlap in a Series of Ranges
Introduction I recently stumbled across a question that seemed fairly innocent at first. Something like: Given 3-5 price ranges, validate that none of them overlap. It wasn't immediately clear to me why this would ever be a validation step that would be required, but that's not
What Day Is It Today?
One of the common phrases I've picked up over the years and reach for on a regular basis is "it's today today", often in response to someone asking how I'm doing. I think it dates back to an IRC user I used
Technical Exam - Valid Chess Moves
This technical exam question involves taking a chess board as a nested array consisting of <colour><piece> pairs such as "wp" for white pawn or "bk" for black knight, and calculating the total number of valid moves for either side. Given a
A Storage Grid is Born
Coming in at just over 6 months after I first detailed then plan, it is time for a bit of an update. The first part of the update is that my initial estimate of "a few weeks, and 10 times the cost of just buying some containers" was
Ludum Dare 51
This past weekend it was Ludum Dare time again! This time in the lead up I made the biggest pre-event change I have made yet, did almost no prep work, failed to take any meaningful screenshots during the event, and ordered a lot of pizza. Time to dive in. Run
Personal Introduction to Mac OS
After reading all the M1 hype, getting ready to buy an M2 device, and then turning my nose up at the increased prices for base models, I've finally taken the plunge head first into the world of Mac OS. It's been 13 years since I last
PHP Logging - Injecting File/Log Context
Introduction Recently a work conversation came up around writing interfaces for log events, and whether it was necessary to require __FILE__ and __LINE__ as arguments for a logging event in PHP. For non-PHP developers these are the magic constants that represent the file and line that is currently being executed
4th of July Barbecue
The 4th of July, Independence Day, has turned into a day of fireworks and backyard barbecues over the years. Thankfully I am not in a country that celebrates the 4th of July as its Independence Day, but that does not mean I can not talk about barbecues. Specifically, Charbroil barbecues.
eBay Lottery - Pokemon Crystal
In January, I came across an eBay lot for a single Game Boy Color game, Pokemon Crystal. The listing has since been removed from eBay entirely and I can no longer view the description (not the first time this has come back to bite me), but to the best of
Technical Exam - Laravel Web Crawler
Question > Backend Challenge Using PHP, build a web crawler to display information about a given website. Crawl 4-6 pages of a website given a single entry point. Once the crawl is complete, display the following results: * Number of pages crawled * Number of a unique images * Number of unique internal