This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

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What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

What's something you grew out of/moved on from/phased out?

How do you feel about it now? Fondness? Embarassment? A nostalgic ache?

Why did you end up moving on from it?

Was it a conscious decision, or was it something that happened over time?

Does anyone have any idea on how different online translation "services" actually rank now? I was thinking about this today (after I saw the TranslateGemma announcement) and realized that I had not really updated my view on translation apps/services in quite a while.

There is Google Translate, Apple Translate, Kagi Translate, DeepL, etc., but I have no idea how these would rank, especially if it comes to different use-cases.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

After deciding to get back into the gym after a long hiatus, I was shopping around my area and trying to decide between Crunch or LA Fitness, each for about $40/mo, plus steep initiation fees and annual fees. Searching for a way to get a discounted rate, I stumbled across One Pass Select, offered by my health insurer, United Healthcare. While I was fully prepared to dunk on United, because of how often Dr. Glaucomflecken does, this particular member benefit turned out to be pretty great.

One Pass Select essentially functions as a gym aggregator, offering multiple memberships for one flat rate. So rather than paying Crunch or LA Fitness $40/mo and being subjected to their terms/conditions, I pay One Pass Select $36/mo and get access to:

• Crunch
• LA Fitness
• Anytime Fitness
• Workout Anytime

And a handful of other gyms I haven't signed up for, because they're not convenient to me. Four gym memberships for $36/mo is pretty cool. Plus if I ever want to cancel, I just cancel my One Pass Select membership from their website, instead of having to sacrifice a squirrel on the 8th day of the sabbath under a blood moon while chanting gregorian monk (the level of difficulty it felt like the last time I wanted to cancel a gym membership).

A quick Google indicates that other insurers offer similar programs:

• UHC has One Pass Select
• Cigna/BCBS/Kaiser have Active&Fit Direct
• BCBS also has Fitness Your Way
• Aetna has GlobalFit

This was a great find for me, that I'd never even heard of before. Sharing it to hopefully benefit someone else, as well!

Hey, I'm headed to San Diego in March after getting selected for a work conference. The last time I was in California was San Francisco more than a decade ago with my dad, so I'm excited to be visiting again.

The first few days will be the conference (which includes a recreational afternoon for networking, I picked the San Diego Zoo). I purposely scheduled my plane flight to be a few days after the conference ends to I can explore the city, but it'll be my first real solo trip; originally, my sister was going to tag along in my hotel room, but she had an injury and needed to drop out.

I fly in on March 18th, check out from the conference is the morning of Saturday the 21st, and I fly back home on the morning of the 24th. That gives me almost all of Saturday, and all of Sunday and Monday to explore the city.

Definitely, one of the things I want to check out is Balboa Park, though I would appreciate advice on specific museums, since I can't imagine it's possible to see even half of them in a day.

Another thing I've considered is a day trip to Tijuana to walk around. It's been a while since I had a good opportunity to practice my Spanish. Worst case scenario I can get a dental cleaning if I can't come up with any other ideas 😂.

Eating out alone isn't really something I've done before either. I think I want to do a nice sushi bar Omakase one night just to treat myself, if people have suggestions on where, and I'd love other suggestions for places to try where it wouldn't be too weird eating solo.

Does anyone have any suggestions for other things to do, places to see? Where I should stay after leaving the Marriott Marquis, since at >$500/night it's a little expensive for me? I won't be renting a car, so ideally, something either in walking distance or easily accessible via transit. I'll probably do a mix of ride shares and public transit for travel.

I'd love to hear ideas, along with what anyone else here has done in San Diego. Worst case scenario, I'm sure I'll figure it all out, but it's nice to poll the crowd sometimes.

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/2

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/1

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

I'm currently running Kubuntu in VMware on a Windows 11 host. I was on Windows 10 but was getting lots of display/graphical issues after pulling my desktop out of storage and I didn't qualify for extended support updates and just felt like I needed to eliminate all driver and software issues by reinstalling OS clean. At that point I figured I might as well go to Win 11, so I used rufus and did a clean install without a Microsoft account.

I feel like I need Windows for gaming, even with Proton compatibility on Linux I still expect I'd have some issues with some games and my desktop is my primary gaming system so I just want something that works. But like many others I don't like the direction Microsoft has gone with Windows so I'd really like to adapt to using Linux otherwise. I considered dual booting but I did have an issue with my system where the motherboard had 30+ second long boot times. Like it had nothing to do with my SSD or OS install, the Asus AM4 TUF x570-Plus motherboard boot time was just excessively long and seems other people reported that as well and there was no UEFI/bios update that fixed it. So I really didn't want to dual boot and wait 30+ seconds switching between OSes, that's just not fluid enough for how I wanted to use them. I really want the Windows install to just be gaming only basically or anything I can't get working in Linux.

So that's how I arrived to running Kubuntu in VMware Workstation Pro. I tried Hyper-V first but had issues and bailed on it. Initially I had audio issues with it in VMware but I found a reddit post that linked to the fix, prior to that, ChatGPT was happy to lead me down rabbit holes to nowhere. I do have a few browser issues with video playback, tried in Vivaldi and Firefox, video and audio are in sync but video is choppy and can't keep up with fast motion. It's otherwise acceptable for basic video playback so it's not really a huge issue for me. I tried playing videos in VLC and did not experience any issues so it is capable of smooth video playback in some circumstances on this setup. I have my own Plex server installed on another system but the Plex Linux application just won't work for me, at best it would produce choppy video if I installed from snap but the flatpak install just won't play anything back properly.

The other thing I couldn't quite resolve but mostly resolved is that in my Win 11 host, I have resolution set at 2560x1440 but I can't get that option in my Kubuntu VM. I currently have it as 2048x1152 which is as close as I can get while keeping 16:9 ratio. It will offer resolution options above my host system but not 16:9. I then stretch this to fill screen and run it in exclusive mode so it's basically like my primary desktop interface, but it would be nice if the resolution was better as I can tell it's slightly stretched, text isn't as crisp as it should be.

I will say, I'm quite impressed with how far Linux has come from when I last tried it as a daily driver 10-15 years ago. I added flathub as part of the app discovery repository so I can get many applications through that. I've had a few that I couldn't, scrcpy was outdated there so I had to follow some command line copy/paste script to install that and Vivaldi wasn't available either. Vivaldi did have a .deb file which I guess works like an .exe in Windows, because I just had to click to install, so that's nice. I still think I had to run something to add Vivaldi to app repository so it would keep it updated if I understand how that worked anyhow.

The Kubuntu VM does seem to destabilize quite a bit over time, it's already locked up on me a couple times, but I think it could be a RAM issue, so I've dedicated 12GB of RAM to it right now (it was at 8GB before). If it continues to happen then I guess that reinforces I'm doing something wrong or need to go in a different direction.

I've noticed my boot times have improved, I don't know when this happened, but now the boot times are about 15-20 seconds (I check the BIOS boot time in Startup tab on Windows task manager, but I've timed it and it matches actual time). Still seems kinda long to me but maybe it's fast enough to dual boot now, not sure.

I guess before I commit to anything too heavily, I was curious if what I'm doing now is not very wise or if there's something better I should try. With my bios boot time where it is now, I'd possibly consider dual booting as then I could probably just set up games that work in Linux. At that point, I wonder if I could/should use SteamOS or stick with Kubuntu or something else? Is SteamOS capable of being used as a daily driver OS or is it better just to use for gaming machines?

Also my PC specs are
Asus AM4 TUF x570-Plus motherboard
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor
32GB RAM
AMD RX-580 8GB

What projects would you think would interest my daughters the most? The oldest is 11 years, super creative and builds the most intricate stuff out of plain paper, tape and cardboard. I have learned programming from about her age, but feel like software would not catch her attention the same way hardware would. They already experiment with programming and microbits in school (what a truly lucky generation!!!).

I am looking for stuff that is not too complicated/expensive that it will just collect dust on a shelf because it took a lot of time to build. Specifically I would like to try something that could be dismantled and reused for other projects. Maybe a barcode scanner or something that has a connection with real life applications.

Previously Tildes have had a few discussions on good quality Youtube channels one, two, but I couldn’t find a recent discussion.
I would be interested in peoples recommendations!
Personally I would like to get recommendations for intermediate/harder science or engineering videos. Most are too basic, or very dry lecture based. I know a few good ones like:

• 3blue1brown
• Smarter every day
• Looking Glass Universe

But I would like to know other people’s favourites (including non science ones)!

I’m a software engineer. I graduated in 2021 so I’ve only been one for around 4.5 years and definitely still feel fairly entry-level (at least, any time I look at jobs, the number of years of experience required for “senior” positions seems to have increased by one) and it feels like companies don’t particularly want anyone without a lot of experience anymore (and every time I do look at new jobs, the number of years required for “senior” positions seems to have increased by one). Meanwhile, I think it has its uses but I don’t actually enjoy using it. I want to solve problems and think and write code, not talk to an AI and become a full-time code-reviewer. My company is rebranding to have AI in the name shortly and, since early December, have been forcing us into 2+ hour long AI trainings once or twice a week. A lot of my coworkers seem like they’ve drank the Kool-Aid and are talking about new models and shit all the time and I just don’t get it.

I guess I’m kind of rambling but I just feel weird about all of it. I want to program but I don’t just want to use (or be forced to use) LLMs for everything, yet it seems like companies are just trying to get rid of actually human software engineers as fast as they can. I’ll even admit, Claude is way better than I expected, but I don’t actually enjoy sitting there typing “do this for me” and then having to just spend time reviewing code. I don’t know. I don’t think this is really even me asking for advice, just a rant, but yeah, just felt like I had to get something out there, I guess.

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.