Today is Kate's and my wedding anniversary yay! Gonna celebrate in this time and enjoy each other's company in the comfort of our AC - the summer's got hot - damn you, aerosols and bean-eating cows! I have added a dungeon crawling rogue-like game to the website. There are a couple of things that need sorting out, but hopefully within a week I should get them resolved

I was today years old when I learnt this trick to automate cache busting for css

<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css?v=<?= filemtime('styles.css') ?>">

if you update the css file, the version number gets updated automatically and browsers are forced to pull the newest version instead of using the old cached one, breaking your styling

Today I added the SPRAWL section to the about page of the website - it stands for Sipping - what teas/drinks I'm currently into Playing - the game of choice at the moment Reading - the book/blog I'm reading Attempting - current project that inspires me Watching - shows/video series/movies &c. Listening - latest music in my favorite playlist It's like a slice of my interests at the moment, it will be updated as the interests inevitably shift

I have added cute robot avatars to the guestbook messages, now they look a bit more like social platform comments. They are added automatically based on the entry ID. I am constantly tidying things up, checking if everything looks good on desktop, mobile and tablets - tinkering. It's fun and I get this satisfying feeling when a problem is resolved

Today I added a manifesto to the website, which was an honest attempt to summarise my beliefs. I may expand on it at some point, but the foundation seems solid. Also there is a lot of visual improvements going on at the moment - have you seen the clickable buttons of the specs "terminal"? xD

I have tried to make a web skin viewer for minecraft for a long time and it always seemed an impossible task, but now I have managed to combine scraps of code from all over the net with some really clever bits in it to make the viewer work. It has a pre-defined skin (mine) and capes. The only problem left is that it flickers a little on iPhones. Still usable though, and in general, this isn't supposed to be a mobile-oriented website. I try to make it usable on small screens wherever I can, but it has never been a priority

As Kate and I are talking about travelling more and more, I thought it’d be a fun idea to have a digital map, on which I could mark the countries of the world I have been to. A physical map with pins is also cool, but it can’t be taken with you. So, I got a vector map of the world off of GitHub and added it to this website. You can see the countries I’ve been to and some comments about the trips. I will work on the comments and I will add new countries as they get visited. It’s a fun little project

Turns out you don't have to be popular to receive tons of spam messages in your guestbook from bots - over the last few hours alone I have received over 20. So I have implemented a couple of ways to stop them, one of which you might experience yourself - a simple math question - we all know clankers can't math, right? Other measures won't affect real people. On a brighter note, I have assembled the junk PC I was writing about below - it's running a Phenom II and Win7, and it's awesome - I have been piling old games onto the SDD, so far I've got L4D, Metro 2033, the first 2 Stalkers, Borderlands, HL2, HoMMIII, Stronghold, Syberia, Assassin's Creed 2, Skyrim, Vice City, San Andreas, LotR BfME2, LotR Conquest (hell yeah!), Spider-Man 2, the first three Harry Potter games, No One Lives Forever 2, American McGee's Alice and NFS Underground 2. So far I was unable to make LEGO Stunt Rally work - it runs, but the cars don't. I have had some problems running Prototype - it crashes as it loads a saved game, but otherwise runs. I'll try to debug as much as possible. Voodoo isn't always the solution.

Today I added

 filter: hue-rotate(220deg);

to * in css and removed the matrix canvas for the day - i think it looks fun! See in the original

[original]

I have finally collapsed navigation links on mobile devices into a burger menu

I have updated the keys due to the domain change - now they refer to tar@tar.dev. Second time was much easier yet I still learnt a lot about nameservers in the process. If you want to send me a PGP encrypted message - feel free to do so!

I have added the slots game to the website - you can bet “money” to win more, or lose. If you win a lot, you will be able to “purchase” trophies and also your high score gets saved. If you lose everything, you can get 20 “money” for free and start over. Gambling IRL with real money is bad and you will lose money! But not here, because there is no way to spend real money on this website.

I have added hashtags to the blog. I will retrospectively add hashtags to the posts and will keep tagging posts in the future. Eventually there will be a box with tags to find relevant posts

Now you can draw over in Draw even on mobile devices with touch screen. Also, now you can choose brush size

The website has moved from tarandir.dev, which now redirects here, to tar.dev, which I prefer for multiple reasons. For instance, it carries a level of symmetry, 2 sets of three letters, each starting with an ascender-carrying letter.

I've added a drawbox, inspired by this Neocities website. Hopefully people will draw nice things there. I am also getting ready to go to Thailand soon - exciting!

I have revised the font sizes of the About page, fixed the badges and achievements, and I've also added a player to the Vinyls collection. I don't want to put copyrighted music there, but at least one can enjoy some groovy copyright-free tunes and the spinning vinyl now looks like it's doing something. If you have free music suggestions, feel free to leave them in the Guestbook. I have also added a simplified version of the About page

I have taken inspiration from Tim's website and added the quote-of-the-day thingy on top of the blog. I am adding new quotes as they come to memory and I will continue to add more - it's nice to revisit old quotes that I liked in the past and think of the reasons why I liked them. Also it adds a bit of interactivity to the website (it's not really a quote of the day, it's a random quote from a curated database, and it changes when the page reloads)

It turns out my registrar's DNS panel supports neither OPENPGPKEY nor RFC 3597, so making a nameserver record for the PGP key is impossible within the panel. Luckily, the support guys are decent and they have added the necessary record with my specifications manually. It would have been nicer to have more freedom with the records. However, I don't want to move to something like Cloudflare unless I absolutely have to. CF is unstable in here. Nonetheless, I'm having fun!

I am working hard on the website - it's the beginning of the development process in any project that is often the most exciting part. Everything needs a shape, structures start to emerge and are being replaced. Every day there is some change - either subtle, like adding an admin panel, or more visually present for the visitor, like a new page or different styling. I'm drawing a lot of inspiration from people of the webrings, and from my digital neighbours - without them it would have been a much more mediocre experience. I have added likes to the blog, a cryptography section, rearranged the navbar, highlighting the interactive parts of this website, updated some links, made it so that I can now use tags in the blog, but also render code as code, e.g. me bold

<b>me not bold</b>

&c &c.

The fire burns brightly

TIL about webrings. I saw them on Ari's website - what a nice idea! A way to connect decentralized corners of the web into a ring, usually with a common theme, and you can discover so many cool pages by so many cool people. And the indieAuth system is so good! I don't need a third party service (that can be banned tomorrow for all I know - we've had a lot of bans in the past few years), I can just use my own domain. So nice to be learning about these things!

Yay, I'm finally able to use php. Now I can count visitors and have my very own (not external) 𝗚𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗕𝗼𝗼𝗸, with replies! I also now have a self-made blog posting page, instead of having to edit html every time I want to write about something. I can also inject stuff like navbars, so then I decide to rename/add/remove a page, I don't have to manually change the code in every page! I know it's like the first lesson that you smart tech-savvy people get at the uni, but I'm still excited! Woo-hoo!