<p>NASA&#39;s InSight probe has seemingly sent its last signal back to Earth. Some questionable security from iRobot, and a little bit of Twitter drama makes up some of this week&#39;s reading.</p>
<h2 id="in-depth">In Depth</h2>
<p>&lt;InDepthNotes
    source=&quot;Luke Plunkett&quot;
    title=&quot;The Best Star Wars Video Game&quot;
    url=&quot;<a href="https://kotaku.com/the-best-star-wars-video-game-1701922268&quot;">https://kotaku.com/the-best-star-wars-video-game-1701922268&quot;</a></p>
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
<pre><code>I loved this game when it came out. I loved all the games that came out after this too. I wish that Disney would get a game developer to make a good sequel to the Dark Forces / Jedi Knight series.
</code></pre>
</InDepthNotes>

<h2 id="link-blast">Link Blast</h2>
<h3 id="👨🏼💻-software-development--design">👨🏼‍💻 Software Development &amp; Design</h3>
<p><a href="https://www.jamesmichaelhickey.com/how-to-structure-your-dot-net-solutions-design-and-trade-offs/">How To Structure Your .NET Solutions: Architecture And Trade-Offs</a> <em>(James Hickey)</em></p>
<p><a href="https://devclass.com/2022/12/22/microsoft-plans-pre-compiled-queries-for-entity-framework-and-may-replace-old-and-crufty-net-sql-server-provider/">Microsoft plans pre-compiled queries for Entity Framework, and may replace old and crufty .NET SQL Server provider</a> <em>(Tim Anderson)</em></p>
<h3 id="🖥-technology--the-internet">🖥 Technology &amp; the Internet</h3>
<p><a href="https://tfos.co/p/rebuild-social-media/">How to rebuild social media on top of RSS</a> <em>(Jacob O&#39;Bryant)</em></p>
<p><a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/20/no-the-fbi-is-not-paying-twitter-to-censor/">No, The FBI Is NOT &#39;Paying Twitter To Censor&#39;</a> <em>(Mike Masnick)</em></p>
<p><a href="https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/oktas-source-code-stolen-after-github-repositories-hacked/">Okta&#39;s source code stolen after GitHub repositories hacked</a> <em>(Ax Sharma)</em></p>
<p><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-irobot-robot-vacuums-artificial-intelligence-training-data-privacy/">A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?</a> <em>(Eileen Guo)</em></p>
<h3 id="🎮-gaming">🎮 Gaming</h3>
<p><a href="https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/classic-fps-star-wars-dark-forces-has-gotten-a-well-deserved-glow-up">Classic FPS Star Wars: Dark Forces has gotten a well deserved glow-up</a> <em>(CJ Wheeler)</em></p>
<h3 id="📈-business--finance">📈 Business &amp; Finance</h3>
<p><a href="https://www.marketplace.org/2022/12/22/the-free-market-is-failing-us-on-antibiotics/">The free market is failing us on antibiotics</a> <em>(Sabri Ben-Achour)</em></p>
<h3 id="🔬-science">🔬 Science</h3>
<p><a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/nasas-insight-lander-has-probably-phoned-home-for-the-last-time/">After a long struggle with Martian dust, NASA&#39;s InSight probe has gone quiet</a> <em>(Eric Berger)</em></p>
<h3 id="⚾-sports">⚾ Sports</h3>
<p><a href="https://theathletic.com/4026971/2022/12/22/mets-steve-cohen-spending/">Steve Cohen&#39;s Mets spending spree and the ramifications for the rest of the league</a> <em>(Evan Drellich)</em></p>
<h3 id="🎧-podcasts">🎧 Podcasts</h3>
<p><a href="https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-tech/chatgpt-can-write-english-essays-quite-well-how-are-teachers-going-to-deal/">Marketplace Tech: ChatGPT can write English essays...quite well. How are teachers going to deal?</a></p>
<p><a href="https://nodogmapodcast.bryanhogan.net/163-jared-parsons-the-c-compiler-part-1/">No Dogma #163: Jared Parsons, The C# Compiler, Part 1</a></p>
<p><a href="https://nodogmapodcast.bryanhogan.net/164-jared-parsons-the-c-compiler-part-2/">No Dogma #164: Jared Parsons, The C# Compiler, Part 2</a></p>
<p><a href="https://hanselminutes.com/838/cross-platform-uis-with-c-and-avalonia-with-dan-walmsley">Hanselminutes #838: Cross-platform UIs with C# and Avalonia with Dan Walmsley</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/04/28/1095354740/what-leadership-looks-like">TED Radio Hour: What Leadership Looks Like</a></p>
<p><a href="https://hanselminutes.com/872/hachyderms-kris-nova-on-running-a-mastodon-server">Hanselminutes #872: Hachyderm&#39;s Kris Nova on Running a Mastodon Server</a></p>
<h3 id="🎒-everything-else">🎒 Everything Else</h3>
<p><a href="https://timharford.com/2022/12/quitting-is-underrated/">Quitting is Underrated</a> <em>(Tim Harford)</em></p>
<h3 id="🎵-a-song-to-leave-you-with">🎵 A Song to Leave You With</h3>
<h4 id="brand-new---cant-get-it-out">Brand New - Can&#39;t Get It Out</h4>
<p><YouTubeEmbed
    id="\_esbL0or930"
    title="Brand New - Can't Get It Out"
/></p>


NASA&#39;s InSight probe has seemingly sent its last signal back to Earth. Some questionable security from iRobot, and a little bit of Twitter drama makes up some of this week&#39;s reading.

Reading Log - December 23 (#11)

<p>I can&#39;t believe the first half of 2022 is already over. Another month has come and gone and I&#39;m not sure what I have to show for it.</p>
<h2 id="recovering-from-covid">Recovering from COVID</h2>
<p>At the end of May, I ended up getting COVID as I mentioned. Thanks to the vaccine and booster, it wasn&#39;t too bad, but I&#39;ve struggled to get back into the swing of fitness. I was in a nice groove, but now I feel a little &quot;off&quot;. Not physically, just mentally. Between work &amp; hockey, I feel like I haven&#39;t had the time to get my normal lifting sessions in. I didn&#39;t run as much as I would&#39;ve hoped as I&#39;m still getting my lung capacity back. I&#39;m not rushing into anything as I start training for the marathon next month. Figure ease myself back into it.</p>
<p>The other downside of COVID throwing me for a loop is that I&#39;m also figuring this will probably be my best chance to hit my deadlift goal and my goal of hitting the 1,000 lbs. club. I&#39;m hoping to go for 365 on squats and 400 on deadlifts. That, combined with my 235 on bench press will give me 1,000 lbs. on the nose. Maybe I&#39;ll be able to try to work up bench press to 250 like I wanted in December, but I&#39;m not holding my breath. I already hit my squats goal of 350, so if I can hit 400 on deadlifts, and 1,000 between bench press, squats &amp; deadlifts this year, I&#39;ll be quite happy.</p>
<h2 id="the-re-design">The Re-Design</h2>
<p>At the beginning of the month, I released a redesign of the blog. I ended up changing the color and slightly tweaked the layouts. I decided I wanted the home page to have a little more pop. I like the way it turned out. I ended up cleaning up some of the code I used to display what <a href="https://kpwags.com/current">I&#39;m currently up to</a>, the <a href="https://kpwags.com/bookshelf">bookshelf</a> and <a href="https://kpwags.com/movies">movies</a> pages as well. Still got a little bit to clean up here and there, but I like it so far.</p>
<p>I&#39;m hoping to introduce a few tweaks to make posting a little smoother and easier over the next month.</p>
<h2 id="new-york-city">New York City</h2>
<p>I ended up going to New York City mid-month for my birthday. The weather was nice and it wasn&#39;t too hot. Not too much to report, though I was able to go to the Morgan Library and Museum and that was incredible. So many old and classic books, including two Gutenberg Bibles on display.</p>
<h2 id="brand-new-desktop">Brand New Desktop</h2>
<p>After going back and forth for the last few months, I finally ended up deciding to build a brand new PC. I kept my graphics card from my old one as well as the SSD, but got a new CPU, RAM &amp; case. I ended up going with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X CPU and bumped my RAM up to 32 GB. Took the plunge and went with Windows 11 as well. No complaints so far. Figure I should be good with PC gaming for a while. I can upgrade the graphics card later down the line.</p>
<h2 id="monthly-roundup">Monthly Roundup</h2>
<p><strong>🏃🏼‍♂️ Running &amp; Biking</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Running:</strong> Only ran a little over 17 miles this month. COVID recovery and the heat limited me a bit.</li>
<li><strong>Biking:</strong> Nope</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>🏋🏼‍♂️ Lifting:</strong> Not much to report, getting back into the swing of it for my last cycle prior to the marathon.</p>
<p><strong>📚 Reading:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/born-a-crime-stories-from-a-south-african-childhood/9780399588198" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Trevor Noah - Born a Crime</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/project-hail-mary/9780593135204" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Andy Weir - Project Hail Mary</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.manning.com/books/unit-testing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns</a> - Continued reading this.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>✍🏻 Writing</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Started up <a href="https://kpwags.com/posts/2022/06/03/reading-list">my</a> <a href="https://kpwags.com/posts/2022/06/10/reading-list">weekly</a> <a href="https://kpwags.com/posts/2022/06/24/reading-list">reading</a> <a href="https://kpwags.com/posts/2022/07/01/reading-list">posts</a></li>
<li>Wrote about <a href="https://kpwags.com/posts/2022/07/01/mocking-react-router-and-useparams">mocking useParams when using React Router</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>🎮 Gaming</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.bungie.net/7/en/Destiny/WitchQueen" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Destiny 2</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.ea.com/games/starwars/battlefront/star-wars-battlefront-2" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Star Wars Battlefront II</a></li>
<li><a href="https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/wowclassic" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">WoW: Burning Crusade Classic</a></li>
</ul>


June Check-In

<p>May was an eventful month. I didn&#39;t do much because I was exposed to COVID…and then got COVID later in the month. Needless to say, the month could have gone better, but it could have been far worse.</p>
<h2 id="covid">COVID</h2>
<p>Getting the COVID part over with…early in the month, my wife and I ended up getting exposed to COVID. We opted to play it safe and isolated ourselves up in the house for 3-4 days to make sure we didn&#39;t have it or spread it to others. We never got it…then later in the month happened. I got it, presumably from hockey, and while I holed myself up in the basement trying to protect my wife from it, failed at that too. While certainly not pleasant, both of us are fine now and thankfully only had to deal with mild symptoms. Being vaccinated and boosted certainly helped keep us out of the hospital and alive.</p>
<h2 id="data--office-clean-up">Data &amp; Office Clean-Up</h2>
<p>Earlier in the month I decided to delve back into Linux by putting the latest version of Fedora on my desktop to dual boot. I was hoping to extend its life a little bit, but even with Fedora, it is seemingly a little on the sluggish side. I&#39;ll have to play around with it a little bit to see if I can figure out what&#39;s going on. It was beneficial though because it allowed me to pull the data off my old server&#39;s hard drives. I used to run a file server on an old desktop computer. Sadly it died and all my data was just sitting around on the hard drives. I recently bought a Synology NAS and spent the better part of a weekend pulling data off the old drives and put them onto my NAS. I have to do some organization, but at least the data is now accessible.</p>
<h2 id="fitness-news">Fitness News</h2>
<p>I also finally made the decision to run the 2022 Philadelphia Marathon. I&#39;ve been going back and forth on it, and finally decided to run it in an attempt to run a sub-5 hour marathon. I&#39;ll have to trim 15 minutes from my 2015 time, but I think it&#39;s doable. Official training starts in August, but I&#39;m gonna try to slowly up the distance prior.</p>
<p>I also ended up hitting new PRs on both deadlifts and squats. Managed 385 lbs. on deadlifts, and hit my 350 lbs. goal on squats. Yay me! I ended up stalling on bench press so hopefully I can get that going again in June. Want to try to hit my goals by the time marathon training kicks in.</p>
<h2 id="stage-fright">Stage Fright</h2>
<p>I volunteered to give a presentation on unit testing to my company&#39;s development department. I was nervous as all get-out, but managed to do it. Probably could&#39;ve done a little better, but it didn&#39;t go bad.</p>
<h2 id="monthly-roundup">Monthly Roundup</h2>
<p><strong>🏃🏼‍♂️ Running &amp; Biking</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Running:</strong> Only ran a little over 23 miles this month.</li>
<li><strong>Biking:</strong> Nope</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>🏋🏼‍♂️ Lifting:</strong> Ended up setting new PRs on both deadlifts (385 lbs.) &amp; squats (350 lbs.)</p>
<p><strong>📚 Reading:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/the-passion-economy-the-new-rules-for-thriving-in-the-twenty-first-century/9780804172776" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">The Passion Economy</a> - Finished this one. It was not what I was expecting, but some interesting stories about making it in today&#39;s economy.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.manning.com/books/unit-testing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns</a> - Continued reading this.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>✍🏻 Writing</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Started up my <a href="https://kpwags.com/posts/2022/05/13/reading-list">weekly</a> <a href="https://kpwags.com/posts/2022/05/20/reading-list">reading</a> <a href="https://kpwags.com/posts/2022/05/27/reading-list">posts</a></li>
<li>Wrote about <a href="https://kpwags.com/posts/2022/05/12/taking-control-of-your-content">taking control of your content</a></li>
<li>Wrote about <a href="https://kpwags.com/posts/2022/05/29/better-sql-update-stored-procedures">better SQL update stored procedures</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>🎮 Gaming</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.bungie.net/7/en/Destiny/WitchQueen" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Destiny 2</a> - Getting back into it</li>
<li><a href="https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/super-mario-odyssey-switch/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Super Mario Odyssey</a> - Picked up a new Nintendo Switch and this.</li>
</ul>


May Check-In

<p>I&#39;ve been going through my podcast backlog so this week has a lot of podcasts.</p>
<p><a href="https://changelog.com/podcast/455"><strong>Building Software for Yourself (Podcast)</strong></a> - I build a lot of things that I have no idea if anyone will ever see or use. I find it a great way to learn and improve my chops. <span className="domain-name">(changelog.com)</span></p>
<p><a href="https://www.economist.com/business/2022/05/09/welcome-to-the-era-of-the-hyper-surveilled-office"><strong>Welcome to the Era of the Hyper-Surveilled Office</strong></a> - I&#39;m glad I work for an employer who trusts us to get our work done and doesn&#39;t feel the need to constantly surveil us. I feel like a good manager will know when one of their reports is working and when they&#39;re not. I also take the privilege of working remotely seriously. <a href="https://kpwags.com/posts/2022/04/28/two-years-of-remote-work">As I posted earlier</a>, I don&#39;t think I would ever want to go into an office again so not abusing the ability to work from home is important to me. <span className="domain-name">(economist.com)</span></p>
<p><a href="https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-tech/will-the-future-of-ai-repeat-past-injustices/"><strong>Will the future of AI repeat past injustices (Podcast)?</strong></a> - Interesting podcast talking about how AI is taking advantage of poorer people in countries like Venezuela. <span className="domain-name">(marketplace.org)</span></p>
<p><a href="https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/emh36dn/178-i-am-not-a-bot"><strong>I Am Not a Bot (Podcast)</strong></a> - I loved Team Fortress 2 and the bots ruin it. <span className="domain-name">(gimletmedia.com)</span></p>
<p><a href="https://www.techdirt.com/2021/09/07/techdirt-podcast-episode-297-future-libraries/"><strong>The Future of Libraries (Podcast)</strong></a> - I love libraries and it saddens me that publishers are making it hard and expensive to enter and loan digital books. <span className="domain-name">(techdirt.com)</span></p>
<p><a href="https://freakonomics.com/podcast/all-you-need-is-nudge/"><strong>All You Need is Nudge (Podcast)</strong></a> - Having just read <em>Nudge</em>, it was nice to hear more thoughts from Dr. Richard Thayler about the background behind it. <span className="domain-name">(freakonomics.com)</span></p>
<p><a href="https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/ordering-css-delcarations/"><strong>Ordering CSS Declarations</strong></a> - I&#39;ve always tended to put my CSS declarations in groups based on what they style. This is an interesting take that might make me re-think how I order things. <span className="domain-name">(jim-nielson.com)</span></p>


Reading List: May 7 - May 13

<p>April wasn&#39;t a terribly busy month for me. I spent a lot of it just hanging around the house working on my blog and side projects.</p>
<p>I started the month by beating the Halo Infinite campaign. Despite the community&#39;s lackluster view of it, I mostly enjoyed it. Parts of it reminded me of FarCry 5, others definitely had the classic Halo feel. There were definitely some repetitive parts that probably could&#39;ve been spiced up some, and maybe made the open world part a little more open, but I still enjoyed it. The story had some holes to it, but lived up to the game&#39;s name and left open parts for future expansions or games.</p>
<p>Towards the end of April, <a href="https://kpwags.com/posts/2022/04/26/there-goes-the-neighborhood">Elon Musk bought Twitter and that began me seriously reconsidering how much of my time I will spend there</a>. I haven&#39;t made any firm decision yet, but I did use that as an excuse to clean up some things on my blog. I had noticed some bugs so I spent some time fixing them. The main one was my RSS feed. I had properly built my blog to support MDX, but my RSS feed didn&#39;t know what to do with it and rendered custom components as if they were HTML components. You can imagine that didn&#39;t turn out the way it should have. I got that squared away for the most part. Styling isn&#39;t perfect in the feed, but the content is rendered properly. I might try to play around with it some in the hopes of getting feed readers to preview it better, but I&#39;m also not sure how worth it the venture would be. I also ended up adding a font toggle in the footer to allow for users to switch between sans, serif &amp; monospaced fonts. Why? Because why not?</p>
<h2 id="monthly-roundup">Monthly Roundup</h2>
<p><strong>Running &amp; Biking</strong>: Still off the bike.</p>
<ul>
<li>Ran another 27 miles this month. Not bad given the rain and dealing with a hip injury from hockey.</li>
<li>Biking...nada</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Lifting</strong>: I ended up setting a new squats PR of 340 lbs. and broke through both my deadlifts and overhead press plateaus.</p>
<p><strong>Reading</strong>:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/dark-pools-the-rise-of-the-machine-traders-and-the-rigging-of-the-u-s-stock-market/9780307887184" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Dark Pools</a> - Finished this book. It was a good history of the rise of high frequency trading.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.manning.com/books/unit-testing" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns</a> - Started reading this in hopes that it will help me with a presentation I&#39;m doing for work.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Writing</strong>:</p>
<ul>
<li>Wrote about <a href="https://kpwags.com/posts/2022/04/26/there-goes-the-neighborhood">Elon&#39;s takeover of Twitter</a></li>
<li>Wrote about <a href="https://kpwags.com/posts/2022/04/28/two-years-of-remote-work">working from home for 2 years</a></li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Gaming:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/halo-infinite" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Halo Infinite</a> - Beat it as mentioned above</li>
<li><a href="https://www.bandainamcoent.com/games/elden-ring" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Elden Ring</a> - Tried playing this. Just not my kind of game. Might try again at some point.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.bungie.net/7/en/Destiny/WitchQueen" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Destiny 2</a> - Picked up The Witch Queen and have been getting myself re-familiarized with it.</li>
</ul>


RSS Feeds

All Posts

Blog Posts

Reading Logs

Photo Blog

Colors

Font

Posts Tagged
Video Games

Reading Log - December 23 (#11)

June Check-In

May Check-In

Reading List: May 7 - May 13

April Check-In

RSS Feeds

All Posts

Blog Posts

Reading Logs

Photo Blog

Colors

Font

Posts TaggedVideo Games

Reading Log - December 23 (#11)

June Check-In

May Check-In

Reading List: May 7 - May 13

April Check-In

Posts Tagged
Video Games