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!

The internet is starting to feel smaller and smaller, or at least the content I find is less interesting or created with the goal to be sponsored.

Nowadays, I basically consume downloaded content, books, shows, mainly old stuff found on the internet archive

Which other sites do you find interesting and worth it?

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?

First of all, I want to say very big THANK YOU for all who contribute to various libre, open source etc. projects. I'm so happy that people love sharing knowledge, skills and fruits of their work.

But to the topic - how do you find time for it?
Whenever I update my Debian or Axpos or any other libre software I see soooo many updates/changes made by (probably soooo many) people. And I always ask myself a question - when did they do that? Where have they found time for contributing? For me full time work makes me so tired that it's the last thing I think about after work hours. Especially in the office job, after x hours of sitting before my monitor I truly hate every next minute after work. I would love to contribute some code, I would realllly love to. Sometimes I find some bugs and try to report them and that's all I am able to do. What frustrates me the most is that I have abilities to code because it's my daily job, but I don't have energy to do that.

So, could you tell me how do you find time and energy to contribute to libre projects?

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.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows 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.

I'm talking Really Big Projects.

NASA plans to have astronauts skinny-dipping in Shackleton Crater by 2030. Norway wants to build the first ever commercial ship tunnel, done by 2030.

That's the level I'm talking about.

And also, I'm not talking about cost overruns or resource requirements, or anything like that.

I just mean, really big, really public, engineering projects -- typically chock full of political complications -- get announced in the news, like ...

"NASA to build Super-Duper-Big Telescope on Olympus Mons, for $8B, by 2034"

-- and everyone knows it's actually going to cost 6-16x that amount, and be ready to use in the late-2040s ... assuming it gets built at all.

I want something vaguely formulaic to calculate how much and how long it will actually take NASA to build that telescope.

Back before he became universally hated, it was kind of a meme-level joke that Elon Musk was already living on Mars time, so all of his project-completion estimates had to be multiplied by 1.88 (to convert from Martian back to Earth years). The funny thing, as a rough guideline ... that was actually a pretty reliable formula.

I want something like that formula, but given a bit more thought and research, maybe some optional variables to take into account the project circumstances.

There are plenty of studies (I've been looking) that seek to identify and calculate the causes of large-project delays and cost-overruns, and how to minimize/avoid them. But I'm not trying to rein in the delays and overruns ... I just want to have a way of semi-realistically calculating, right at the start, just exactly how badly people are underestimating the timeline for building their Big Shiny New Thing.

One thing I loved doing that sort of fell out of my life was keeping a small note book and transferring everything important to a journal. Its what kept me mostly organized throughout high school and uni but things got a bit hectic after I started working. I just jumped to scattered Google Keep notes that are difficult to follow up on. I've since tried Obsidian to scratch that itch but that became even a more chaotic mess than Keep.

Jump to last week and my phone battery and USB port both gave up while traveling. Fortunately the person hosting me was happy to sell the old Samsung Note phone that had been gathering dust. Not a fan of the Samsung Ecosystem or the weird oversized form factor. But the integrated stylus is something I didn't think I needed. I just pop it out and the screen instantly goes into note mode. it's helped when I just need to jot something down or illustrate some idea. I could easily minute a casual meeting and shared the outcomes as an image set. Was a lot more personable than the ignored pdf document or a wall of text in a slack group and people were more likely to check it than ask for information that was right there.

Beyond that, I'm more likely to jot down ideas, reminders and notes, and actually come back to them. I've also found the mazec3 keyboard that let's me write to text reliably and I prefer it to longer typing on touchscreen (used it for this post). The problem is that I really want to combine these tools into an actual workflow. Just checking if anyone has a consistent toolset to easily take stylus notes and to effectively organize and catalog the results?

I've tried messing around with Obsidian Canvas with the ink and draw.io plugin but it doesn't seem geared for spontaneous scribbles and complex shapes. And it all just ends up as a formatting chore that I keep putting off. Also spent some time looking through the Play Store for something off the shelf but everything there is now "AI Powered" and it's another red flag on top of overpriced in-app purchases. It all feels like a data harvesting or advertising scams and google is incentivized to push revenue generators and ad mills over actual functionality.