Tony

On today's episode of "Bake Something Interesting!", we have a Dundee Cake.

A slowly baked fruit cake. What makes it interesting? The two tablespoons of 12-year-aged scotch whisky in the batter.

The cake has a kick to it!

#baking

I had a case of the Mondays today. Very slow start to the week. Too much weekend fun, oops.

#Wordle 1,906 4/6

⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

"The Ministry of Time" by Kaliane Bradley - 4/5 stars.

I picked up this book because I'm a nerd for all things time travel, but I was delighted to discover I'd been tricked.

While it sounds like a scifi story on the surface, it's actually a thoughtful, slow-burn romance, slice-of-life thought experiment where a modern British-Cambodian woman and a 19th-century Commander from the British Empire become flatmates and spend their time smoking and going on bike rides.

The book took its time to explore a range of topics - colonialism, subservience, sexuality - before the gripping spy drama finale full of twists and turns.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199798179-the-ministry-of-time

#books

The bank holiday always messes with my sense of the week. How is it Thursday already.

#Wordle 1,902 5/6

⬛⬛⬛⬛🟩
⬛⬛⬛⬛🟩
⬛⬛⬛🟩🟩
⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

As with most things on this project, I often found myself spending more time playing it than actually coding it.

Here's a look behind the scenes at the simulation interface that I used during the QA phase for the new terraforming mechanics in Replicant Space.

All the internal rules and parameters for the engine are stored in a shared json file, so I could run the simulation with confidence that the in-game system would work the same way.

On the left we have the seven environment attributes and the comfort ranges for our target species - in this case the Gwynhari.

On the right, various terraforming devices are activated and adjusted. Thermal lances are pushing up the temperature, while aquifer taps are releasing underground water into the atmosphere, and a gas separator is carefully controlling oxygen levels.

The world is always trying to drift back to its natural equilibrium, calculated from its gravity, orbital distance and mass, so you're always countering that. Let the atmospheric pressure rise too much, and you trigger greenhouse runaway. Get the biosphere index above 50 to activate natural toxin scrubbing. A range of coupling effects at different thresholds.

And if the world is particularly stubborn, we can just drop a heavy Kuiper object on the surface or skim a carbonaceous rock through the upper atmosphere for some extra bio drama.

Once the attributes are holding steady, the player can activate an atmospheric regulator to handle microfluctuations from solar flares and occasional tectonic events.

Will hopefully put a nicer version on the website. It's good nerdy fun.

#replicantspace #indiedev #gamedev

Spotted a toot earlier about a fireball, which reminded me of something very silly I did last week.

It was my daughter's birthday, and I needed to light the candles on the cake. The lighter was empty, so I took it to the kitchen sink to refill it.

The valve was jammed, and every time I pressed the butane can against it, the gas sprayed out instead of going into the lighter. I tried this several times.

What I failed to appreciate at the time was the sink gradually filling with butane vapour.

So, naturally, I tested whether the lighter was working by clicking it. *WOOMP*

Some of my eyebrows still feel a bit singed a week later.

Things have been a little quiet with feature development on Replicant Space recently, but this was a nice command to run just now.

git commit -m "Final tweaks to planetary physics engine"

https://replicant.space/

#replicantspace #indiedev #gamedev

I hate clickbait so much these days.

"Lunchboxes should be banned in schools, Prue Leith says"

There's me thinking Prue Leith was a nice person, why would she want to ban kids from having....

... oh she said all schools should provide free food instead.

So hyped to see that Nicholas Cage is the new 007

Figured it was time to move from TODO.md files for managing my project tasks. Didn't want Trello - been there done that.

Found this: https://easykanb.app/ - it's quite good and so far hasn't annoyed me.

#software #productivity

Saving this for the next corporate meeting:

"I don't want to count the raindrops in the storm, just tell me where the lightning's going to strike."

Replicant Space is going down for maintenance in a few minutes.

I have a list of devops jobs to carry out during the planned outage, but we'll be back online soon, and with all the Season Three content ready to go.

#replicantspace

A successful day of digging back under the hood of my testing framework.

Replicant Space has 2,842 tests that ensure all the complex interactions between devices actually work smoothly. While new tests are being added with every release, I try to spend a day each month actually going back over them and tweaking performance.

Today's focus managed to reduce test-run time on my staging box from 2m 10s to 59s.

Very chuffed.

About to watch "Lucky" from Apple. Is this going to be good? The hype reached my corner of the interwebs.

Oh, so that's how you clone S3 buckets. Why did I think it was so much harder than that.