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Pretty Good Hat

After a long but tolerable hold, I had a perfectly pleasant and effective conversation with a helpful Verizon rep today. Just putting a little good energy out there, gang.

Look, I know it’s a fascinating miracle of logistics and interlocking institutions that I can mail-order gluten free flour at all, but at the same time I’m so puzzled that it has spent the last five days in the greater Phoenix metro area without getting any closer to my house.

Me, in chat: No, I’m not putting kkk into the shared doc we’re all looking at. I just forget that it doesn’t have vim keys. Again.

One month of no twitter reading (allowing occasional posting) has been the very best thing for my mental health. Recommended!

Screenshot of a sprinkler control app on a phone screen

About a year on, I’m super happy with this smart sprinkler controller. Being able to put plants in the ground, adjust sprinklers and then test them without running to the control box is amazing, and the smart scheduling seems to work pretty well.

Adding Todoist items with an Alfred workflow

I've long had a workflow in Alfred for adding things to my grocery list in Wunderlist. With Wunderlist being retired, I've switched a couple of shared-with-family lists to Todoist, and it's mostly okay; Todoist is much less of a good tool for just making lists, as it's oriented to projects  and lifestyle methodologies, but is good enough for what we need right now.

So I re-built my workflow in Alfred! All you need is a workflow that runs a bash script, and use the following for the code:

  curl https://api.todoist.com/sync/v8/sync \
  -d token=YOUR_TOKEN \
  -d commands="[{\"type\": \"item_add\", \"temp_id\": \"$(uuidgen)\", 
	    \"uuid\": \"$(uuidgen)\", \"args\": {\"content\": \"{query}\", \"project_id\": OPTIONAL}}]"

YOUR_TOKEN is found on the settings -> integrations page of your Todoist account. Specify a project ID if desired (I use the ID of my 'groceries' list as a default here). Otherwise omit the project argument. You can find the project ID by viewing the project in your browser; it will have a URL like https://todoist.com/app/#project%2F123456789%2Ffull, where the 123456789 is your project's ID.

Alan plays Destiny - 2020 Edition

Previous updates:

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It's been a while since I did this, so here's another set of revised win/loss numbers and weapon stats for my Destiny 2 play. The final Iron Banner -- a week-long competitive PVP mode -- of the current season concluded last week, so I thought it was time to wrap up this edition of the perpetually-open fish shell and R Studio session and get on with making a picture of my data. 

Iron Banner holds a lot of fun, nostalgic memory for me from the first Destiny. It was one of the events that offered a chance at loads of high-powered loot that one could use to upgrade gear, and diving into it broke my reluctance to spend time playing in PVP game modes. The current incarnation of the game mode is not quite the same loot-fest, but it's still a game type that I generally have fun with, so I look forward to playing it when it comes around. It's also a nice discrete mode to use as a lens into my game data. Here's a big picture of my games since the launch of the last big expansion, Shadowkeep, last fall:

And the summary of all that data says that I perform pretty similarly across all three of my shooty space dolls, with the edge going to the Warlock. (Which surprises me, actually.)

class Outcome #Games Avg K/D

------ ------- ------ ------ Hunter Defeat 51 12.92 Hunter Victory 57 12.72 Titan Defeat 55 13.64 Titan Victory 58 14.41 Warlock Defeat 41 13.95 Warlock Victory 61 15.49 

This last completed Iron Banner was the first such event in a long time where a non-Erentil was anywhere close to my use of that precious voop-shooter; I had a really good time experimenting with a fun change-up in my loadout, which is probably a good finding, since Bungie will be sunsetting all my favorites in seasons to come. 

Tune in next time, when I might, finally, complete writing up the chain of tools that I use to make this data. If you made it this far and need a buddy in-game, I'm playing on Xbox and on PC these days; let's splode some aliens sometime from our respective quarantines.

Photo of a woodsy trail with sun shining through

I got out for a too-short bike ride this morning! It was short because my thin gloves were way too light for the 33° F temp at 5:30am. I only made it about a mile before turning around for home because I couldn’t feel my fingers (but at least they had stopped hurting!).

Using nextdns.io for a few weeks shows me just how often my TV is trying (and failing, now!) to call home.