I talk a lot here about using computers freely, how to select programs to use, how to decide if a program is trustworthy infrastructure one can safely depend on in the long term. I also spend my time building such infrastructure, because there isn't a lot of it out there. As I do so, I'm always acutely aware that I'm just not very good at it. At best I can claim I try to compensate for limited means with good, transparent intentions.
I just spent a month of my free time, off and on, rewriting the core of a program I've been using and incrementally modifying for 2 years. I've been becalmed since. Partly this is the regular cadence of my subconscious reflecting on what just happened, what I learned from it, taking some time to decide where to go next. But I'm also growing aware this time of a broader arc in my life:
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Mar 13, 2024
Sokoban
The kids have been enjoying Baba is
You, and watching them brought back pleasant memories for me of playing
the classic crate-pushing game Sokoban. So I went looking
and found a very nice
project that has collected 300 classic publicly available Sokoban puzzles.
Then of course I had to get it on my phone so I could play it anywhere. The
result is the sokoban.love
client.
I finally decided to hang up a shingle on itch.io. My first app there is not a
game. Lua Carousel is a
lightweight environment for writing small, throwaway Lua and LÖVE programs.
With many thanks to Mike Stein who helped me figure out how to get it working
on iOS, this is my first truly cross-platform app, working on Windows, Mac,
Linux, iOS and Android.
crosstable.love is a
little app I whipped up for tracking standings during the Cricket World Cup,
just to avoid the drudgery of resorting rows as new results come in.
Quickly make any LÖVE app programmable from within the app
It's a very common workflow. Type out a LÖVE
app. Try running it. Get an error, go back to the source code.
How can we do this from within the LÖVE app? So there's nothing to
install?
This is a story about a hundred lines of code that do it. I'm probably not the
first to discover the trick, but I hadn't seen it before and it feels a bit
magical.
I love reading Kragen Sitaker as an
endless fount of surprisingly deep programs and analysis. Lately he's been
avoiding the web and writing in a directory of markdown files. He writes so
much that he switches directories every year or so (I think of them as
volumes), and they're all highly recommended for sifting through during quiet
afternoons:
pothi.love
is a simple browser for such a directory of files that lets me add comments
locally to them. Then I can git commit and git push
to publish them.
(The name: 'pothi' is Sanskrit for a sort of loose-leaf book of palm leaves,
'bound' with a single string through a single hole in the middle of each
page/leaf.)
