#23: Junkbot! 10 years in tech! PLATO!

Aug 25, 2024

Quite a few big articles this month, including one that has been pending publication for 6 months!

New articles

After researching a few historical digital text systems, I created an emulator for behaviour from the 1970s’ “PLATO”: overwriting characters to create artwork! There’s also an explanatory post, but it’s fun to just try various words.
This August marks 10 years of being a professional software developer, a startling milestone. It seemed a fitting time to do a retrospective on the 7 career lessons I’ve learned from my 7 employers so far. This is also a useful resource the next time someone asks me for general career advice, a question I usually improvise an answer to with mixed results!
Perhaps my highest effort article yet, on my Internet History site I published a 4000 word analysis of LEGO’s “Junkbot” game to mark the 23rd anniversary of it’s release. I spoke to some of the original creators for this article, and it was extremely interesting seeing how many are still making or educating about games today.
As is now a monthly tradition, I wrote about the 3 Android games I’ve been playing in August.
I added a tiny new feature to the software my sites run on, adding the ability to add an “Updated” date to an article, released in minimaJake v1.0.15.

The twitter account @dailyobject_ posts a random object every day. Vaguely surreal, always worth keeping an eye on.
In San Francisco, automated Waymo cars have a car park they typically congregate in (sometimes noisily). Astonishingly quickly, a 24/7 stream with chill music & a cat cam sprung up creatively titled “LoFi Robotaxi Hip Hop Radio 🚕 Waymo Depot Shenanigans To Relax/Study To”. Beautiful.
I read a lot, often via my Kindle, and just send them directly instead of using software like Calibre (despite writing a detailed guide 6 years ago). Recently I encountered a few epub compatibility issues that this tiny little webapp solved.
If you’re in the UK and also like trying slightly weird snacks, @newfoodsuk on instagram posts new foods daily! Whilst some are probably sponsored posts, it’s a great way to keep an eye out for new stuff. As a recent example, Walkers’ “sausage sarnie with ketchup” crisps are (in my opinion!) a better smoky bacon flavour.
There’s a Korean family on instagram that posts painfully cute videos, reminding me a lot of a young distant family member! For example, picking who to run to, sharing food,

I posted a picture of Cassie lying in our garden. She’s very pretty as always.
Whilst I’ve been doing some super interesting Android-y stuff on my employer’s app to modernise the codebase recently (version catalogs, Kotlin gradle files, KSP, etc), I haven’t written it up yet. Soon!
After some help from reddit, I figured out a way to get images of all achievements for my “Reddit achievements list” article, and updated the layout etc to be far easier to read.

That’s all! See you in an unknown number of weeks! 🏄‍♂️