December 13, 2020 2:38 PM
Guardian's Crusade
When I was a little kid, I played a lot of Playstation. My family had a PS1, and we also had a decent collection of games. One of my favorite video games was Guardian's Crusade.
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Now even though I loved this game, I was never able to beat it as a kid. This was partly because I was (and still am) just terrible at video games. But I was also never able to beat it because I didn't have a slot on my memory card to save my progress. Crazy, right? I would just keep playing this game from the start over and over.
Yeah...I had a memory card, but it was full. If I was smarter, I would have just freed up space on that memory card. But for some crazy reason 10 year old me wasn't able to figure out that.
Anyway, this is a cute little JRPG where you take in a little pink creature thing who helps you to save the world. I happened to see this game in a used game store maybe 7 years ago? I had to get it for the nostalgia. I started playing it again, and the game is way longer than I expected it to be. (Though, you can apparently speedrun it in about 3 and half hours.)
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At some point, you actually lose your pink companion and have to fight a boss by yourself. I cannot tell you how many times this took me. I kept losing and I kept fighting more monsters to gain more XP just to try the boss again and still lose. Turns out I just had a terrible strategy. But I ended up overpowering myself so much that once I beat this boss, the rest of the bosses were WAY easy.
The navigation in this game is also interesting. They hide chests in hard to find places, so you have to keep reorienting the camera so you don't miss anything. And of course when I do that I end up getting lost and forgetting which way I entered the cave. Before you get to the final battle, trying to get from one town to another is a pain in the butt. You eventually get this "water spider" that allows you to cross the ocean but it moves. so. slow. Eventually the pink thing learns how to fly and you can use that instead, but I don't think it moves any faster.
But one really interesting part of the game is that you get to collect special items called Living Toys. They're like Pokemon, and you gotta catch em all. You even need to collect a certain Living Toy just to get access to the World Map. They also make battle really interesting.
Anyway, many years after I first played this game, and still many years after I re-picked it up later in life, I finally beat it! (Beat as in finished the story. I did not find all the Living Toys) And I did it without consulting an online guide! Afterwards I did check an online guide, and I realized I was playing this in the most inefficient way possible.
Overall, about 24 hours actually spent playing this game, so it's really a pretty short RPG. I had fun, and I'm glad that I can finally cross this off my list!
December 6, 2020 7:25 PM
Educated
I've been trying to read more lately. Like, read things on paper, not on the internet. I wanted something to do during my weekend breakfasts that didn't involve staring at a screen, since I don't think it's good for me to look at a screen so early in the day if I don't have to.
I've been keeping a list of "books to read" and Educated by Tara Westover was on the top of it. I don't really remember when I added that book to my list, but I have a feeling I saw it at a hipster book store and it looked interesting. Plus it was on the New York Times Bestseller list and had pretty high reviews on Goodreads.
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Educated is a memoir, and I like reading memoirs. It's like reading about a celebrity in a magazine, but it's in the form of a chapter book, so you feel like you're doing something productive.
This book wasn't quite what I expected. I thought I would learn more about her education, but it was really about her family issues. It's actually kind of disturbing, especially because it's a true story. But overall, this was a gripping tale. Very enjoyable read.
November 29, 2020 12:11 PM
Thanksgiving site updates
Since I'm not with family this Thanskgiving, I've been spending this whole break writing code and working on this website. And I officially ported over all the blog posts from my old food blog into my new one! I also made a couple of other minor changes:
- I added two links to the top, which allow you to either read from the beginning or from the most recent posts.
- I made all the images full-width. I don't really love that when it's too wide, I can't see the full image, but it also looks weird when the images are all different widths, and I figured this made the site look more like other food blogs.
Next up will be to move the site over to my flailinginmykitchen domain.
I also have a few site updates for this part of the site:
- I edited the CSS so code blocks look a little different and stand out more.
- I added the ability to truncate really long posts. (At first I was trying to do this in a "smart" way by having it count characters, but then I realized that was way too much work. I just have a manual breakpoint that I put in my entries if I want.
- I added another piece of ascii art to the homepage!
November 27, 2020 1:52 PM
Using the DigitalOcean Spaces API
This is a very long post. So long that I cut off the post unless you look at the individual entry page for this post. I doubt anyone would care to read this, unless someone is interviewing me for a job, and they want to know how I approach problems. So, read it if you want.
So, I have a bunch of pictures on my wordpress site that I need to port over to my Spaces CDN. I've got a script that parses an XML wordpress export, and any time it runs into an image, I need to:
- convert the url to a spot in my DigitalOcean Space
- check if the image already exists
- if it doesn't, upload the picture
Simple enough. So what I did was take each image, and extract the path out of it. So for this url https://meyzdaisy.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/img_0308.jpg, I'd need the 2019/01/img_0308.jpg part. I have a bucket that I store all the files in, and each file is accessed using a key. I created a folder in my bucket just for these images that are coming from my WP site called from-wordpress. And with this, the key for this particular image would be from-wordpress/2019/01/img_0308.jpg
Now to use the Spaces API. If you read their documentation, you'll notice that they have examples in JavaScript, Go, Python, PHP, and Ruby. No Perl. Of course there's no Perl. A quick google search for "DigitalOcean Spaces Perl" doesn't seem to come up with anything. Sometimes I think, man it would be so much easier if I just learned Python and used that instead of Perl. But I am a Perl programmer and I will figure this out.
November 21, 2020 10:48 PM
Food blog revamp
My next big tech-y project is getting the food blog back. I've created version 2.0, but right now only a few people know about it, and it's still listed under this domain. I have two main goals that I'm working on:
- Port over all the photos and posts from flailinginmykitchen.com
- Have flailinginmykitchen.com actually direct to v2 of the food blog
My wordpress subscription expires in like 50 days so I've gotta get moving on this!
I'm working on the first part now. I was able to download an XML export of all my content on wordpress, and I'm writing a perl script to parse it and load it into the database and CDN for the new food blog. I've been using the XML::LibXML perl module, and I must say it has excellent documentation.
I've also got some other small food blog updates:
- I modified the color scheme a little.
- I added the tag line back in!
- I now have more than one page of posts, so you'll see the Prev and Next buttons at the bottom.
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