I know I was one of these when I first moved out on my own. The only reason I started saving money was because my friend joined a pyramid scheme investment firm and his manager got to take my case, and my money for a loan that allowed me to start an RRSP.

I know a lot of people don’t end up going that path, and maybe you’re 40 and you have never even thought about saving. I know it can seem (and actually be) pretty impossible with not enough income.

Well this made me consider what ways we can take control of what money we *do* have, and encourage people to do it in a way that doesn’t feel like an attack, a judgement, or the source of a sudden mental fog and the need for alone time.

So I got to thinking: maybe some visibility into where the money goes, with some gentle encouragement could be the answer. Maybe offering insights without judgement will at least help? It’s not going to get rid of the anxiety this subject can create, but it can maybe give someone control and thus diminish it a little.

https://www.lilithebowman.com/budget/ is a tool I hacked together to give people a basic idea of where their money is going and maybe even some small tools to help take control of it. All data is stored in the browser, so use it only on a machine you own, or clear the browser storage when you leave the machine.

Making it offer user accounts and secure storage might be a future goal, but for now I want your data to be yours, on your own machine, for only you to use.

It has a little questionnaire which asks about income, and expenses, and then it lays them out on a calendar by day, colour coded to show expensive days, with a little link to add a reminder the day before to make sure there’s money available for that expense.

As well, there’s a pie chart to show where the vast amount goes. In a lot of my test cases I have listed it as rent because: I live in Toronto and that’s the reality we face. We are financing someone else’s financial goals because they withhold shelter from us unless we fork over half our pay or more! Yup landlords, that’s how everyone else sees you. You don’t provide anything. You hoard it and set the price. This is coming from the child of someone who was a landlord for a while.

If you can think of anything that might be helpful to add, please let me know in the comments!

• Upgrade old Virtual Furnal Equinox worlds from 2021 through 2023 to newer Unity / VCC
• Godot lessons I purchased a while ago. I’ve finished most of the 2D ones, but job hunting…
• Job hunting keeps me busy a lot
• Re-writing my resume based on conflicting criteria from basically everyone
• Finding out it’s really the good old fashioned networking thing that actually gets the goods
• Electronics projects basically all the time:
  • Got a bunch of $80 giant caps from a friend (Mepix) which could be used for fun mischief
  • Got a relay and a bunch of super capacitors (3V 1f) from Mepix as well
  • 3D printing hat hangers for Biku
  • Set up a security camera so I can take fun timelapses out my window
  • Found a few 4K TVs being thrown out, and I like to try to diagnose them for fun
    • Gave a friend a 4K TV for his birthday that only needed a 90 cent part to fix
  • Made a battery bank out of 18650 cells that were perfectly good which someone threw out a whole box of
• Painted a cute little mural on our kitchen wall
• Re-decorating our apartment after the whole bed bug fiasco in this building
• Hung a lot of art while trying to give each room careful consideration
• Stared into the void because the ‘muricans voted that orange turd in again
• Laughing into the void because ‘muricans are all women now (actually non-binary)
• Took up doing some Brilliant lessons because the YouTube ads finally got to me (it’s fun!)
• Surpassed 1500 days of streak in Duolingo for Japanese! No I’m not fluent but much better!
• Took up Coddy because one unknown YouTuber talked about it and it sounded fun
  • The C++ coding challenges are fun since I haven’t touched that much since Trent University
• Read a book on React to sharpen my skills while looking for jobs
• Rewrote a lot of my personal website in React, then shelved that because I have too damn many projects!
• Helping out with and/or attending local furry events
• Working on 3D models for the next CozyCon event happening in September

There’s probably far more, but sometimes it’s helpful for me to write out what I’ve accomplished, so I don’t feel defeated by the brain worms.

What does your list look like?

While I’ve been struggling to find work for over a year now, I’ve been keeping fresh by doing tutorials in various computer related disciplines. I’ve been brushing up on my React skills by reading some great books mentioned in a previous post, but I’ve also bought a Godot tutorial pack from https://www.gamedev.tv/

I started the 2D tutorial a while ago before Cozy Cretaceous and put it down when I had to focus on that. But now that I have some time before Christmas, when it seems as if the job hunt can take a bit of a pause, I’m using my time to work on it again.

Overall the 2D tutorial is very simple, and the core concepts are of course all things that I already know, but having a guided tour through the Godot development experience is very nice. If I were to give it a rating, I would probably give it a 4 out of 5.

I only remove one point for not having a summary of the changes made at the end of each lesson like Unity has at the end of all of their in-house tutorials. I think that’s a nice touch and a way to keep things fresh for the learners.

So check it out if you are interested. I think it’s definitely worth the price of admission.

I need work

On the job hunt front, Toronto has been a desert of employment ever since the large swath of layoffs started last year. I picked a really silly time to give up my previous job, but I had my reasons why I needed to resign.

I’m hoping things start to look up in Ontario, but with how things are going, I feel as if it is only going to get worse before it gets better.

That said, does anyone have tips for applying to jobs overseas? Do you have any ideas for places that are starved for talent? Let me know in the comments!

Gotta Be Productive

Finally, I’ll leave you with this musical interlude by MattstaGraham.

Short story: fast. Slightly longer story, I rolled down my sidewalk and one of them already made creaky noises. After that I rolled off of a freshly re-paved sidewalk with a deep gap around it.

I’m not sure if that damaged the one wheel which fell apart faster or if I had over tightened it while adding the wheel to the board. Either way, it fell apart completely. I was able to get down the street and around the corner before the one wheel flat-spotted and stopped dead. So I walked with it to the grocery store and picked up some things.

On the way back I tried to take advantage of the extremely flat freshly paved road near the grocery store, but that wasn’t going to save the wheel. It was already too far gone.

One could have seen this coming from a mile away. I certainly did. I just wanted to see exactly how bad it was.

The general idea is that I will make a mold with silicone that I can use to cast wheels in resin or urethane or something more durable later. That will be the real test of these snaking wheel designs.

I took another walk today. I went to Kensington Market in Toronto and checked out what was going on there. It was such a lovely morning and early afternoon for a walk.

I went to Canada Computers to check out what they had in the way of PC cases. Basically I’m looking forward to building a ruggedized PC with a handle that I can toss in a suitcase and take with me to conventions.

Rugged PC Build Ideas

That way when I run a VR portal, I will have a relatively reliable and cool machine with more than enough power for the task. Up until now I had been using a gaming laptop for this task. My gaming laptop bit the dust this year, though. I got about 2 years out of it.

So I’m going to try to build my mATX desktop board with 360 AIO cooler and 3 fan 6900XT into some kind of rugged case. My idea for now is aluminum extrusions and acrylic. I have already 3D printed and mounted a motherboard plate to the mATX motherboard.

The biggest problem for this project is obviously the size of the cooler and GPU. Here’s hoping I can manage to find a solution that works.

Optimally I’d like to fit the keyboard, a mouse, and a display into a folding case that opens up like a briefcase PC.

Well, that’s the goal, anyway. We shall see if I can actually pull it off.

React

In addition I’ve been reading more on React and I’m going to try making some modifications to my new website redesign using some functionality I’m learning. Wish me luck!

Because I read some more on React I have earned myself a sugary soda for dinner. What a treat! (Yes this is an extra motivation for me to keep going when it seems too easy or boring.)

You can play with a demo of the Cream the Rabbit Mechanim test here.

It was actually fairly painless. If you name the bones in your armature the same as they are in the Mechanim dialogue it automatically links everything up!

The only downsides I see, is that there is definitely some tweaking to be done around the weight painting in the model.

When the model initializes, her back juts way out because the arms are somehow linked to the back of her dress.

You can also see both eyes inexplicably bob up and down as she runs. Really strange! She’s also frowning which I believe is related to the default pose as well, despite her not having any bones (armature anchor points) directly related to the mouth.

All in all it seems pretty simple to set up, though.

You can play with a demo of the Cream the Rabbit Mechanim test here.

In this scheme, there are days and tasks. Each day represents however many useful working hours you have in a day.

If you work an 8 hour day with an hour lunch break, that’s 7 hours.

Then you have tasks. Tasks are atomic and represent one simple thing.

If this all sounds familiar, it should.

The part that might be novel, is that the tasks all start out by default taking up an even slice of the day. If you have 5 tasks, each task is given 1/5th of the day to be completed.

A task can never have any less than 1 hour of time associated with it. If there are too many tasks, the rest will be shifted automatically to the next day.

As you work, you click on the task you want to work on. When you’re finished, you mark that task as complete. Other statuses could be used such as “ready for QA” which would spawn another task for a QA team to handle.

If you work long enough on a task that it takes up more time than was allotted, it starts shifting other tasks to the next day and the Gantt chart is automatically stretched to show the change in delivery time.

This would effectively handle communication about tasks, the time they take and the affect that has on delivery to all stakeholders.

If you find yourself with time on your hands, you can pick from the pool of tasks already created and use them to fill the rest of the time in your day. This would shift the delivery date ahead in the Gantt chart automatically.

Well, that’s my idea. I’m writing this down more for my own notes than anything.

netstat -aon
This command lists open ports with PIDs.

Of course there are windows applications to show you these things (Resource Manager) but it’s nice to know there are command line ways of doing the same thing.

For the 2nd time my Corsair H60 has started making odd noises and today my CPU went above 100 degrees (190 at one point). My motherboard shut down the system because of the failure. Here’s hoping there’s no irreparable damage to my CPU. (Probably micro-fractures in the die but only time will tell.)

Corsair, to their credit, have already replaced this unit once. The same thing happened with the other one. Pump began making odd noises and then must have failed altogether.

Normally the pump doesn’t make any noise really and doesn’t indicate it’s working, so when it does fail, it tends to fail silently. This design causes damage to your CPU, which is not really the kind of thing you’re looking for in a water cooling solution. Stability is usually one of those things you expect from such a product.

I hope Corsair will be so good as to replace my H60 with something newer. I hope it is something that can indicate whether or not it’s working. Replacing these water coolers in my computer is beginning to be more effort and potential damage to my PC than it’s worth.

[EDIT] Corsair offered to replace the unit straight away and I’ll be getting the slightly newer version of the H60. Here’s hoping the pump seizing issue is resolved.