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Tinker Tuesday for August 26, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Well, I started integrating the substack API, but didn't get very far. Despite the lack of documentation it seems pretty easy to handle, though there are some steuctural differences between it, my app, or even twitter, so it's taking me a while to figure out how to map it.

By the way, is it me or is the FOSS community not quite as vibrant as it used to be? Not long ago, the moment someone exposed an API, you'd have at least one alternative client. Twiiter, Youtube, Reddit, all have alt-readers / viewers, but I haven't found anything for Substack. There's one dude that wrote a Python implementation, and otherwise I've only seen complaints about how there's no Substack API evem though there is.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Been refactoring my entire Unreal codebase in order to apply Composition-over-Inheritance, only to run into issues because apparently Unreal really likes Inheritance. Right now I still think I can wrangle it into shape, but it'll take some extra work and I am of course somewhat held back by my own lack of practical experience with Unreal.

Towards the end of last week and on the weekend I actually had a few chunks of free time (a rare occurrence!), but instead of continuing my hacksawing with Unreal, I instead pivoted and checked out Godot's new features (yes I know Redot exists), which included a live editor just like Unity has, and just like the lack of which I bemoaned from the first. So, thinks I, I'm still not enjoying C++ and Unreal isn't making things easy, and there's an engine with C# scripting and the option to use double-precision transforms and it's even patching out its major weak points. Maybe I can check it out again, do my damndest to ignore the politics? Off go I to compile Godot for C# and double-precision, according to instructions. It does not work. I go to the Discord and ask questions as to why. I receive some help, the compilation and subsequent steps work out. I open up my Godot project with this newly built double-precision C# editor, and lo and behold, it indeed gives me errors because I treat vectors and transforms as single-precision. Those are the errors I expected and desired. So I crack open an IDE and...find out that while the single-precision classes no longer work, neither do the double-precision ones. Apparently extra steps will be necessary. I go back to the Discord and ask my questions, and in response I am asked to justify why I want double-precision at all, don't I know it occupies more memory? I explain myself, but the rainbows are silent. I decide that such difficulties in getting to start working combined with doubts about the degree to which this particular engine configuration will even be supported are a little more uncertainty than I like, and give up on Godot. Again.

Back to Unreal, because even if it is a 200-GB-monstrosity that requires a forklift just to get started and three separate bags of power tools to compile - as Zorba said (paraphrased): It works.

And it has double-precision built in, no extra steps required.

In On Writing, Stephen King outlined his writing process in broad strokes:

  1. Get the first draft down on paper as quickly as possible while the idea is fresh in your mind, aiming for 2,000 words a day.
  2. Leave it for six weeks.
  3. Read over your first draft, ideally in one sitting.
  4. Revise the first draft into a second draft.
  5. Allow one or more people you trust to read the second draft.
  6. Using their feedback, revise the second draft into a "polish" (or third draft, depending on how you look at it).

My girlfriend finished reading the second draft of my NaNoWriMo project, and rated it somewhere between a 6.5 or 7 out of 10. She confirmed that it was never boring or cringe, often very entertaining to read and emotionally affecting in places. She had two major criticisms which I'm taking seriously, and a couple of smaller criticisms and suggestions. Work now continues on the "polish", or third draft.

I am 1000% over this chair project. I think I started it in the spring?

Anyways, I'm on the home stretch. Everything is sanded, although I think I need to go back over a few of the back legs and even some things out. I've begun shellacing and waxing all the pieces, and hopefully on Thursday I can glue up the first completed chair. My wife suggested I get a chair finished and assembled at a time to stay motivated, and I think that was a good idea. It was feeling daunting having to finish nearly 80 pieces before I could assemble any. So hopefully next week I have some pictures of the first finished product.