Since we’re now well into the year 2022, it’s time to post a followup to Best Things And Stuff of 2020!

Great blog-posts / articles read

Football 17776 is worth reading even if you have absolutely no interest in football or sports at all. I’m literally speechless when trying to to adequately describe it.

Internal Combustion Engines is a great example of an article using WebGL and explorables to explain complicated concepts.

Hitchiker’s Guide To The Latent Space is a thorough compilation of different methods for using machine learning to create what can occasionally be considered art.

For more in the media synthesis vein, I enjoyed this retrospective about EleutherAI’s first year.

A handful of other interesting articles/blog posts/tweets/stackoverflow threads, presented without comment:

• How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%

• How can I run newer Unity games on OS X 10.9 Mavericks?

• Emoji Under The Hood

• The NCAA Erased My Career

• The man who didn’t invent Flamin’ Hot Cheetos

• Programming language subreddits and their choice of words

• The Fate of the World’s Largest ETF is Tied to 11 Random Millenials

• Bringing emulation into the 21st century

• Sid Meier and the Meaning of “Civilization”

• Fixing USB-C charging on the PowKiddy V90 for $0.01

• What The Hell Is This Company The 76ers Just Partnered With?

• TIL Portal 2 crashes if you have too many cores.😬

• Welcome to the land that no country wants

Most viewed blog posts by me

In the time since I posted 2020’s recap, I set up Google Analytics, since it seemed like the path of least resistance for answering this question. Apparently my most viewed article was my Cue Health Unboxing. I wouldn’t be surprised if the vast majority of those views are my own, which gives this category a bit of a double meaning

Favorite technical books discovered (and read)

N/A. I may get rid of this category in future years, since I’ve never been a technical book kind of person.

Favorite non-technical books read

Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

A Pail of Air by Fritz Leiber¹

Number of books published/written

0

Number of books read

21

Number of blog posts written

3, which is well short of my goal of one per month. I think I’ll recalibrate my blogging goals for 2022.

Miles ridden on my bike

407

This was a surprisingly hard question to answer when all of the data is stored in Strava. I ended up using this snippet of JS on each of my Strava activity pages (using the page’s filter to limit the rows to just cycling). Then I took each page’s subtotal and added them up manually.

Array.from(document.getElementsByClassName('training-activity-row'))
  .filter(e =>
    e.getElementsByClassName('col-date')[0].innerHTML.endsWith('2021'))
  .map(e =>
    parseFloat(e.getElementsByClassName('col-dist')[0].textContent))
  .reduce((sum, dist) => sum + dist)

Miles driven in my car

4,548². 75% more than last year!

Miles driven in other people’s cars

I think only 4.8, when I retrieved a vehicle from a friend who was quarantining in the Hotel Covid.

Favorite musicians discovered

Anderson .Paak

Ros Sereysothea

Stoned Jesus

Favorite films/shows

Sneakers

Get Back

Ted Lasso

Station Eleven (although I haven’t finished it yet)

Favorite games discovered

Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020): It makes my computer struggle, but it’s technically impressive while also having fun core gameplay.

Crying Suns: It’s heavily inspired by strategy roguelikes like FTL, but it brings some really unique and fresh twists on the formula. I really liked how the game weaves the permadeath at the end of each run into the story.

Rising Storm 2: Vietnam: Scratches the itch for a semi-tactical asymmetric FPS.

Favorite programming languages (or related) I hacked on/with

Probably python although I still don’t love it as a language

Programming languages used for work-related projects

SQL, Java, Kotlin, Go, Dart, as well as some text configuration languages

Still haven’t read…

The copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach I’ve had for years.

Life-changing technology “discovered”

Maybe not lifechanging, but I’ve had a lot of fun with different forms of media synthesis.

State of plans from 2020

In general, take things one day at a time: ✅

Improve plant soil sensor: I got some hardware that should help it last longer on battery, but haven’t gotten around to putting it together: 🤔

Write more blog posts: I utterly failed at my goal of writing 12 last year: 🤷

More bike riding: I think I succeeded on this one. On top of slightly increased mileage, I also commuted to work on bike a handful of times and really enjoyed it: ✅

Waste less time: ❌

Plans for 2022

Commute to work regularly via bike (if I have to go to the office regularly…)

More travel

Reintegrate with post-COVID society

6 blog posts for the year