Weeknotes 171

I didn’t get out much this week. I’ll go to LRUG tomorrow to make up for it.

Having given myself permission to hack on my WebAssembly interpreter whenever I want, I’m now having trouble choosing which part to look at first. Maybe it’d be fun to write a parser for the .wasm binary format? Or maybe I’d enjoy simplifying the AST by moving the rest of the text format abbreviations into the preprocessor? This project was easier when I could rely on test failures to make decisions for me.

I forgot to say last week that I, unlike some internet nerds, really liked the weird Plazir-15 episode of The Mandalorian. I wish there were more of these self-contained side quest episodes, and fewer of the ones about the Big Overall Plot, about which I give not a solitary shit.

In general I’m enjoying season three of The Mandalorian even though I barely remember, and therefore barely understand, what’s meant to be happening in the Big Overall Plot. They’ve done a good job of making each episode adventurous and exciting even if you don’t know what anything means.

Would it make more sense if I’d watched The Book of Boba Fett? We’ll never know.

The first three episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season five made for a cosy, unchallenging Friday night treat.

I tried to play a game on my Switch for the first time in over a year and found that one of the joycons was drifting badly enough to be unusable. Fortunately Nintendo recently announced they’ll repair joycon drift for free in Europe and I decided to take them up on it.

LIE: So I sent it off for a repair! Now I just have to wait for a working joycon to arrive back in the post.

TRUTH: The repair process is unloved, with contradictory information and hostile vagueness at every step (do they need the serial number of the console or the controller? console purchase date or controller purchase date? do they need to see a proof of purchase if it’s already out of warranty?) but I eventually filled in several forms by guessing a plausible interpretation each time. Now I’ve got a PDF of a shipping label and no printer to print it with.

In hindsight I regret having bought several of my favourite Switch games as physical cartridges rather than digital downloads, to the extent that at various times I’ve been tempted to re-buy those games digitally. But they’re just so expensive! Even Breath of the Wild, the first Switch game I ever bought, still has its original price of £60.

So instead I lump it and put up with the inconvenience of swapping cartridges when I want to play a different game, but I’m definitely not going to make that mistake again. I wish Nintendo would run a cartridge amnesty programme where you post them any Switch game & a £10 note and in exchange they send you a download code and drop the cartridge into a woodchipper.

I’ve been beta testing version 3 of Prompt, which is quite good and certainly less wonky than Prompt 2 on iPadOS 16.4. I’m starting to believe there’s some fundamental limitation of iPadOS which makes a rock-solid terminal emulator unachievable but this is the best one I’ve used so far.

Still no fine. 🤷