This topic is part of a weekly series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss their week.

If you have any plans, goals, accomplishments, or even failures, whether they be personal or work related, I'd love to hear about them. This is a place for casual discussion about your week, past, present, and future.

A list of all previous topics in this series can be found here.

So, what (or how) are you doing this week?

I'm looking to get a couple of remote controlled dimmer sockets for a quite specific use case (heat lamps in a tortoise enclosure), and I'd like to control them directly from a Raspberry Pi. I've found a couple of decent looking fairly generic options - examples from Trust and TKB - and there seem to be several appropriate radio modules, either USB or GPIO.

Detecting and pairing with devices seems (hopefully) straightforward. My sticking point is trying to figure out how standardised the actual messaging is; there seem to be several brands of hub and device that can be used interchangeably, but a few that can't. In my case, of course, the RasPi will be taking the position of the hub and speaking to the devices directly.

I'm having trouble finding reliable info on whether a command like "dim to 70%", or "read output power" will be the same across all devices, whether it will follow some kind of standard but it may be one of several competing formats, or whether it's completely proprietary.

Any insight on how easy it is to programatically talk to these things would be very much appreciated!

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2019/day/9

Join the Tildes private leaderboard! You can do that on this page, by entering join code 730956-de85ce0c.

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>

The 2010s are coming to a close soon, and I'm curious to know what your gaming highlights are from the past decade.

To be clear: these are your personal standouts so don't feel beholden to popularity, critical opinion, review scores, or anything else like that. If a game was great for you and you deem it worthy of mentioning, then by all means go for it. I'm not interested in a list of the "most important" games of the decade but individual lists from individual people.

Please let us know why you loved the games that you're choosing, and what makes them worth mentioning as your personal picks for "Games of the Decade." Furthermore, choose as many or as few as you like. I'm also not even going to limit this to games released in the 2010s, as I know that many games released before then have gotten new life in this decade through patches, mods, randomizers, online communities, etc.

Basically, there are no rules for this list other than "tell me what games you loved these past ten years, and why."

So, I'm currently working up 2 1 gallon apfelweing batches. For a while I was doing many 6 gallon batches, but took a break for a while, and getting back into it.

Any other homebrewers out there? Anything fermented, even kombucha :)

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2019/day/8

Join the Tildes private leaderboard! You can do that on this page, by entering join code 730956-de85ce0c.

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>

Brussels is ridiculously beautiful in December. I feel so lucky to live here.

There's a christmas market where lots of independents sell artisanal products of all sorts. It's incredibly cool.

https://www.brussels.be/winter-wonders

There's a huge christmas tree in Grand Place which looks fantastic. There's also this weird multicolor lightshow nearby which you can walk and dance inside of (must be pretty crazy on psychedelics). Took this photo of it with the girlfriend earlier today.

It's late and I'm kind of too tired to elaborate too much on it, but god damn it's so cool here. I live like… five minutes walk from all this. I've been in love with Brussels all year ever since I moved here last january, and this is like a really nice wedding anniversary gift for me and this city.

As a user of the Reddit Terminal Viewer (client for the command-line), I'm interested in doing something like that for Tildes (and maybe even an Emacs major-mode) in the future.

I understand doing this kind of thing would be extremely hard without an API, so I'm curious: how are things progressing on that front?

Thanks!