Weeknotes: 2025-W09

Published: 3 March, 2025, updated: 3 March, 2025

Summary

Set a new personal record for earliest tax return. Finished off Assassin’s Creed Mirage. Started easing myself into my plan to watch more movies. Had a surprisingly efficient trip to the Department of Licensing. Had a day warm enough to have my first iced coffee of the year.

Photos

(Based more on time of processing than time of taking…)

Flotilla of ducks

Overhead plane

Sparrow in the cabin garden

Second coat

Enjoying

Reading:
- The Martyr (Covenant of Steel #2) by Anthony Ryan (★★★★☆)
- The Traitor (Covenant of Steel #3) by Anthony Ryan
Watching:
- Captain America: Brave New World (★★★☆☆) - An inconsistent hint toward a positive return to more basic form for the MCU, although I suspect it will be relegated to a “you don’t have to watch that one” status. Let down by the reliance on heroic set pieces that don’t have enough peril/thrill/intrigue, and especially the final act.
- The Gorge (★★★☆☆)
  - Quirky, enjoyable, and generally good-looking.
- 📺📅 Paradise season 1
- 📺📅 The Rookie season 7
- 📺🏃 Earth: Final Conflict season 4
Playing:
- Assassin’s Creed Mirage (★★★☆☆)
  - Completed, platinum/100%
  - A solid entry, overall. You get what you think you’ll get from an Assassin’s Creed game. A smaller, but often dense, open world, fewer and more integrated side missions and collectibles.
- Avowed - bounced off of this quickly for some reason
- Simon’s Cat Story Time (★★★☆☆)
  - Part of my exploration of matching games
  - Of the genre in Apple Arcade, this is probably the most general appeal with a balance of story and mechanic. I imagine if one were a fan of Simon’s Cat, the story might be somewhat interesting. But otherwise a distraction from the fun parts of the game.

Newly discovered

The Teleprompter Paradox

The Teleprompter Paradox helped me think through the factors around teleprompter use (my first recorded attempt would not meet anyone’s standards…).

Highlights

From How Core Git Developers Configure Git from Scott Chacon, a bunch of useful git config settings to consider:

Nobody wants 0.5.101 to come after 0.5.1000, but that’s alpha order. You can fix this by setting this:
    git config --global tag.sort version:refname

Almost certainly what you want to be using is the histogram algorithm (an incremental improvement on ‘patience’), rather than the default of ‘myers’. You can globally change it like this:
    git config --global diff.algorithm histogram

[…] there are also a few more smaller tweaks you can make to git diff:
    git config --global diff.colorMoved plain
    git config --global diff.mnemonicPrefix true
    git config --global diff.renames true

I’ve mostly been using Mercurial/Sapling for over a decade with a bunch of thoughtful company-wide settings, as well as some really nice internal tooling, so this quality-of-life jumpstart for git was quite useful.