One of the more annoying parts of working for a large, well known company is seeing a constant parade of news stories that you'd love to comment on and knowing that it would be an absolutely terrible idea to do so.

Visual Studio Code's setup process has become self aware!

(As in, it is literally aware of itself and thinks the fact that it is running is a problem.)

Modern arcades are a thoroughly depressing place. Like, make no mistake, arcades have always existed to suck money out of kids pockets. But the modern version has taken all the lessons of scummy microtransaction-driven mobile games and somehow made them worse.

You buy cards with abstract "points" to obfuscate how much you're spending. And you can only pay in bundles of, say $20 for 50 pts, and the games are like, 8.5 points to play or some nonsense, which guarantees that you overpay every time.

The direction in this documentary feels a little scattershot, but it's a really cool look into the development of Half-Life 2! https://youtu.be/YCjNT9qGjh4?si=pYGlCKBp-CyMOkH_

Fun tiny hardware project! My kids got a couple of MagiQuest wands. They're basically just IR blasters used to play a game scattered across the hotel we stayed at last weekend. I built my own receiver at home and now my boys can turn their bedroom lights on/off with the wands!

Built on a ESP8266 board, synced up to Home Assistant for control of the lights

Got annoyed reading an article that didn't have a date on it, which feels like table stakes for pretty much any text you put on the internet.

Then I realized that I didn't have dates on any of *my* articles at https://toji.dev. 😅

Well NOW I do! The moral high-ground is mine once more! Ha!

Interesting to watch my follower count on BlueSky grow pretty fast over the last month or so. Doesn't seem to be bots either, a lot of the new followers have profiles that indicate they're in a similar tech space as me.

I still see more of the tech community on Mastodon, and I like the structure of Mastodon better, but it feels like BlueSky is benefitting more from Xwitter's ongoing decomposition.