2019 July
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As is my wont, I'm almost never satisfied with a website's layout, so I've been tinkering with this blog's layout on the backend. To make a long story short, I decided to start working on a Hugo theme. It's still largely a work in progress, as there's a bunch of things I wanted to implement. But it was good enough to replace the old one so I went ahead and deployed it, so maybe some bugs here and there on some pages. And I'm still tinkering, so probably some minor/major changes as we go along in the next few weeks. -
I was travelling for most of the past two months, so this covers both June and July, and I guess I haven't been able to watch too much. Maybe? IDK, we'll see. Since I was in the US, I took the opportunity to finish watching Voltron: Legendary Defender which only had two seasons available on PH Netflix. Pretty good adaptation, lots of fun callbacks to the old series. Some annoying filler eps, especially in the middle seasons onwards. I like how they spent the entire series going through the main Voltron villains one by one: first Zarkon, then Lotor, then
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I know I already made a whole post about the MCU after Endgame came out, but after the MCU Phase 4 announcements this past weekend at SDCC I was a bit hyped. I thought it would be fun to look back at the past 10 years of MCU Phase 1-3 and see what I wrote about the movies. Iron Man (2008) Surprisingly, I had written nothing about watching this film at all, and I don't remember going to the cinema to watch it. The movie came out between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, so my hype was undeniably towards
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I have a small mobile app that I wrote using React Native (henceforth RN) back in 2017, currently deployed on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Shortly before my US trip, I got an email from Google telling me about a required action: By August 1, 2019, all apps that use native code must provide a 64-bit version in addition to the 32-bit version in order to publish an update. This past January, we reiterated that this is required in order to make way for innovation and in anticipation of future Android devices that only support 64-bit code.
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People travel for different reasons. My parents travel mostly for shopping purposes. Which meant when I flew back home with them during the recent trip, we came back with an additional 3 fully-packed pieces of luggage full of shoes and clothes and such. As someone who doesn't really indulge in shopping, I can't relate to this, and in fact it runs anathema to my philosophy of always packing as little as necessary when travelling. Then there are people I know (mostly younger people) who seem to be travelling every weekend or every other weekend and they're always at the beach
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The topic of the mythical "10x programmer" has been the topic of discussion recently on tech twitter, due to a thread listing out the supposed signs of being such a mythical beast. 10x engineersFounders if you ever come across this rare breed of engineers, grab them. If you have a 10x engineer as part of your first few engineers, you increase the odds of your startup success significantly.OK, here is a tough question.How do you spot a 10x engineer?— Shekhar Kirani (@skirani) July 11, 2019 The thread received a lot of negative responses, mainly because several of these items can
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I mentioned in yesterday's post that I might take some comparison shots using the A50's camera, so I thought I'd post those now. Note that I am terribly bad at photography, I am well-known for often posting out-of-focus shots and such. Well, I tried at least. This one is a photo of some Deceptions taken using the Samsung Galaxy A50 camera, default settings: Here's a similar photo taken using the Asus Zenfone Max 4 camera, default settings: Things look quite a bit more washed out, is that the proper term? I did like five different takes of this and they -
Since I was going to be staying in the US for more than a month, on my first day there, I went over to Best Buy and got myself a T-Mobile sim card and plan, and the staff there helpfully offered to install the sim into my phone, then the Asus Zenfone Max 4. Upon handling my phone, she commented "you know you're battery's expanding, right? That's dangerous, it could explode or such", but I shrugged it off. I'm no stranger to batteries expanding, it happened before to my old Samsung Galaxy phones and I had to buy replacement batteries
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I had written about travel anxiety before, but I'm revisiting the topic because the recent US trip reminded me how much of a problem it is for me. The US trip was a new experience because I would be abroad for 40 days with multiple travel legs, it involved 4 international flights (back and forth) plus three domestic flights within the US, and on one leg and several flights I would be travelling alone. I had travelled abroad before for a longer period (3 months for London in 2015), but for those 3 months I was based in the same
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After the Seattle part of the trip, I reunited with family for the final leg of the trip where we all be hanging around the San Francisco bay area. We were based in my uncle's place in Vacaville, which one of my friends kindly described as "in the sticks", i.e. basically far away from everything. Like Houston, we had to rely on the kindness of relatives who were willing and available to drive us around. This was the laziest part of the trip by far: not much walking, most of it either just driving to places and taking pictures; or
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First, the spoiler-free review, then more spoilery stuff afterwards. I watched Far From Home while I was... far from home. great movie, lots of fun, and the stakes are a lot higher than the Vulture just stealing some tech off Tony Stark basically a story of Peter Parker the high school student trying to juggle his Spider-Man problems with his high school life, which was one of the best eras of comic book Spider-Man the movie gives us a look at what the world looks like post-Endgame and how weird it is for everyone if you've seen the trailers, you
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- I watched Far From Home while I was… far from home.- great movie, lots of fun, and the stakes are a lot higher than the Vulture just stealing some tech off Tony Stark- basically a story of Peter Parker the high school student trying to juggle his Spider-Man problems with his high school life, which was one of the best eras of comic book Spider-Man- the movie gives us a look at what the world looks like post-Endgame and how weird it is for everyone- if you’ve seen the trailers, you know who the “villain” is and you have
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Seattle was the riskiest part of my trip, relatively speaking, because it was my solo leg - I didn't have any friends or relatives in the city I could turn to in case of an emergency. I had also read online that while Seattle was very much a walkable city, there was a nontrivial homeless population, and some areas may be a bit sketchy after dark. As a friend of mine said though, "sketchy" in the US is probably a lot safer than "sketchy" in Metro Manila. I still worried a little bit, but given where I from, it didn't
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Grand Prix / MagicFest Seattle Photo Dump: I wasn't actually planning to play much competitive Magic this year, at least not on paper, but when the family planned a US trip in June, I figured I'd take a short side trip to attend and experience a US GP. I had the choices of Washington DC on the 14th-16th (Limited), Seattle on 20th-23rd (Limited), or Dallas on 28th-30th (Modern). After some wrangling with the family's schedule, Seattle was the one most convenient to go to, and Limited meant I didn't have to try and put together a decent deck. (IDK how