Three till Seven

I saw the little Windows 10 logo show up in my taskbar some few weeks ago, telling me I could reserve a copy of Windows 10 for free. Cool! I did so and waited with excitement for July 29 to come around. It came and went, and my reserved upgrade still wasn’t ready. I saw articles, privacy concerns, Tweets, and a whole subreddit come about, and I felt like the last person who wanted to upgrade but hadn’t yet.

I’ve been replaying Okami HD recently; coming back to it after several years of not playing made me notice anew all the little details that make the game so great. I really recommend the game on PS3, and I hope they rerelease it on the PS4 or make a proper sequel. I found the game originally because I enjoyed The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and saw Okami listed as being a similar game, at least in so far as you got to play as a wolf. I would say now I prefer Okami to Twilight Princess.

I love working out ActiveRecord and Arel queries in Rails apps. I thought I’d share some of the more fun queries I’ve designed in Arel, spread out over a few blog posts. We’ll start with one for fetching tags separated by account.

Jon got me The Witcher 3 as a gift on Steam shortly after it came out because I was replaying Dragon Age 2, again, and he wanted me to find a new game I might love. He had been watching Destiny stream it and thought it looked up my alley. I had heard of the game and had seen it getting rave reviews on Reddit, but I was dubious since it forces you to play as a set character. I’ve not had much luck getting into games like Tomb Raider, Uncharted, and even the first game in the Witcher series; I prefer games like Dragon Age or Skyrim that let you create your own character. However, the bits of The Witcher 3 gameplay I’d seen looked cool, and it’s a super pretty game, so I tried it. I’m so glad I gave it a chance.

My latest project is Steamy Screenshots (view source). It’s an app I made to extract colors from the screenshots people share on Steam. There’s no real usefulness to it, it was just a fun thing to do. You can look up a particular Steam user and view their newest fifty screenshots, or look at the newest screenshots shared for a particular game.

I’m trying to learn ReactJS and it got tiresome for me to change my file type in Sublime Text from regular JavaScript to ReactJS > JavaScript (JSX) every time I opened a .js file. Fortunately, with a couple Sublime Text 3 plugins, I was able to get this happening for me automatically.

For the longest time, I was a Vagrant holdout at work. All projects we worked on would have getting a Vagrantfile and Chef cookbook set up as a first step, but I avoided using them. It seemed like something was always broken with any given app’s Vagrant setup. vagrant up rarely just worked for me, which was supposedly the promise of using Vagrant + Chef: a consistent development environment that put all developers on a level playing field with each other as well as with the production server environment.