147078481.22-jake-very-occasional-lee.html

<p>Okay, maybe it’s been like 10 weeks since my last post. Don’t start, better late than never, eh?</p><p>I’ve been as busy as ever, although not all of it making it into posts!</p><h2>New articles</h2><ul><li><p>The first of 3(!) articles around Android games, <a href="https://jakelee.co.uk/android-games-june-2024/">this one from June</a>. Next up, the games I was <a href="https://jakelee.co.uk/android-games-july-2024/">playing in July</a>. Finally, I took a look at Netflix’s <a href="https://jakelee.co.uk/android-games-netflix/">Android games</a>.</p></li><li><p>I did an analysis of my employer’s Android reviews in a spreadsheet, so wrote up a <a href="https://blog.jakelee.co.uk/exporting-google-play-reviews-to-google-sheets/">brief guide for next time</a>.</p></li><li><p>Also for work, I needed to figure out a way to make parts of the app (Jetpack Compose Boxes) transparent in arbitrary areas, so of course <a href="https://blog.jakelee.co.uk/how-to-make-cutouts-in-jetpack-compose-boxes/">wrote a guide</a> for when I inevitably forget how.</p></li></ul><h2>From elsewhere on the internet</h2><ul><li><p>A surprisingly engrossing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHP942Livy0">half hour video about how dishwashers work</a>, and how to improve performance! I still think they’re some sort of magic, but at least now it vaguely makes sense.</p></li><li><p>Milk, cheese, cream, quark, yoghurt, whey, butter, cottage cheese, how on earth do they all relate? Turns out there’s <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ad/Milkproducts.svg/2000px-Milkproducts.svg.png">a giant wikipedia chart</a> for that, it’s interesting seeing how seemingly unrelated items are actually just a simple process away.</p></li><li><p>I found a silly GitHub repository with <a href="https://github.com/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee">examples of how to write “e”</a> in many programming languages, and <a href="https://github.com/davepagurek/horse-drawings">another with lots of awful horse drawings</a> (I added mine, it’s especially awful).</p></li><li><p>Unicode contains WAY more characters than you think, and <a href="https://unicodes.jessetane.com/">this site shows them all</a>. Scrolling through and finding what bizarre symbols are available is weirdly intriguing.</p></li><li><p>Heating a metal dish scrubber on “piezo contact mics” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_anGFyEfOpU">sounds like a submarine’s hull creaking</a>, and is a very odd noise.</p></li><li><p>Greggs pasties &amp; sausages are <a href="https://x.com/wonderpusgospel/status/1811157345197527537">technically accessible</a> since they have different patterns! Maybe more for staff to touch than customers though…</p></li></ul><h2>Everything else </h2><ul><li><p>A couple of people at work asked me for book recommendations, so I made a list with <a href="https://notes.jakelee.co.uk/books.html">recommendations for various genres</a>. It’s very much a first draft, but it’s a start!</p></li><li><p>Whilst investigating a font-based thing, I discovered the “PLATO” system from the 60s &amp; 70s had the ability for characters to “overwrite” each other to combine. This idea was <strong>very</strong> interesting, so I <a href="https://plato.jakelee.co.uk/">built an online emulator to play with the idea</a>! </p></li></ul><p>That’s all! See you in an unknown number of weeks or months!</p>