#006 - Summer time
Hey ❤️ and happy Pride 🏳️🌈!
Welcome to the end of June, it's a lovely time and place to be in. The nature is blooming, sun is shining and I just started my summer holiday this past weekend.
When I started my new job two months ago, I set a ban for the most addictive video games in my collection, the dreaded trio: Stardew Valley, Factorio and Balatro. I hoped to maintain somewhat civil and society-compatible sleep cycle by avoiding gaming sessions that accidentally slip into the early morning hours. So obviously, the holidays kicked off with a full day of gaming.
June has been wonderful so far. The Finnish midsummer, juhannus, is always a highlight and the weather really treated us well this year.
Jukola orienteering competition is another highlight of June every year. It's one of the greatest sports events and it's quite rare in that in the same competition, world's best athletes, hobbyists and non-orienteers in friend groups and company teams all compete in the same competition throughout the summer night.
And sports didn't end there. NHL playoffs got the climax it deserved with Panthers hoisting the cup and football did come home in the UEFA U21 Euros in Slovakia as England won the trophy.
Basketball didn't leave us cold either with FIBA 3x3 World Cup in Mongolia where we saw incredible matches and upsets. In Women's competition, the home team of Mongolia picked up a couple of glorious victories and reached the finals and in Men's, Switzerland topped first Latvia and then Serbia only to fall to Spain in the finals. Whether you're a fan already or have never seen a 3x3 game, I recommend checking out Mongolia vs USA Quarterfinals match. It doesn't get much better than this.
Stuff I made this month
With the community organising being on a summer break and the work load at the new job not yet overwhelming, I ended up doing a bunch of tinkering and arts and crafts – stuff that had tangible impact in the non-digital world.
I discovered that my decade old video projector has capabilities for remote network control which led me to purchasing yet another Raspberry Pi from a colleague and setting up Home Assistant and building some automations.
The first one was automatically starting my AV receiver and video projector when my Playstation 4 boots up. It turned out to be one of those small but impactful quality of life things where I don't have to try to find two remotes around the living room but can start everything necessary automatically.
A few years ago, I saw JP Coovert's video How To Make Awesome D&D Tokens! and have ever since wanted to make similar things. Now, I don't play tabletop RPGs like DnD actively but they are handy for all sorts of games and nice for prototyping.
Last weekend, I finally got my hands on a 1" hole punch, magnetic circle bases and epoxy stickers to start creating these beautiful tokens. They look gorgeous and one of the first real-world use cases is to replace the meeples I use for Onitama (that I play with my Potluck deck) with nicer looking tokens.
I also did some digital crafting and built phpBB-notifier. It's a command-line tool that allows users to follow forum threads on their favourite PHPBB forum threads and get native macos notifications when new posts arrive. It's a self-contained Python script that takes advantage of uv's support for PEP 723 style inline metadata for dependencies. To make VS Code be nicer to use with that style, I also created a shell alias to find the virtual enviroments.
For my blog, I wrote a couple of pondering posts about what kind of environment I want to thrive in and how web is much more than just a source of information to be consumed through chatbots.
And I wrote a guest post about debugging in Onni's blog in which I share my best general tips for becoming better at figuring out why the computer disagrees with you.
Community activities
Both Turku ❤️ Frontend and archipylago are on a summer break so I'm getting some much needed time to take a breather after a challenging spring.
PyCon Finland is returning to the conference calendar after a 9-year hiatus in October in Jyväskylä and tiny ruby #{conf} is coming in November in Helsinki so I have two local conference to look forward to this fall.
We published the talks for Future Frontend 2025 in Youtube and there's a lot of great talks there. I can highly recommend especially Stephanie Nemeth's and Sebastian Obel's The Joy of Finally Finishing Something: Rebooting Myself by Restarting a Discarded Project. And the dates for 2026 conference have been set: June 8-9 2026 in Dipoli, Espoo.
Lovely bits from the Internet
Hyperlane Nomads
I have recently been enjoying Hyperlane Nomads, a Star Wars fan comic that has been running already since 2019. Its episodes have crossed my radar multiple times throughout the years in other places but this month I decided to finally read it through in order.
The author describes the comic as
Republic forces, bolstered by their victory at Geonosis, are deployed to front lines being drawn across the galaxy as the Separatists lure more and more systems away from the Republic cause. In the Mid Rim, Republic Agents on the planet of Zolan have dropped out of contact. Fearing a Separatist plot on the planet, a team is prepared for a stealth mission to learn of the fate of their agents and the wider plot brewing on the surface.
The Gr8 TTRPG System
H. Tucker Cobey's blog post I Am Begging You To Play Something Besides D&D or Pathfinder - Epic Table Games introduced me to a lovely, tiny table top RPG system called The Gr8 System.
While I haven't played a tabletop RPG session in a long time — being adult is hard and finding time for a group of adults to be in the same place at the same time is even harder —, I adore the creativity in the scene and regularly follow different creators and designers in the space.
The Gr8 System boils down to three rules:
- Do not make the characters look like losers when they fail.
- When the characters fail, have them fail in a way that changes the circumstances.
- Read Rule #1 again.
and rest of the stuff is up to the imagination of players.
Autopeli
Otto Ojala published 1.0 version of his Autopeli racing game in itch.io. It's playable on the browser or downloadable for Windows, macos, Linux and Android and has classic split screen mode with random-generated tracks.
Here's a cute otter
If you're in Fediverse, I recommend following Hourly Otters to refresh your feed during these times when the world seems to breaking down all around us.