Week 39, 2024

Think of any activity you might do together with your kids for fun and I'm sure you'd never think of disassembling and reassembling a computer together (ok, to be fair, I wouldn't have that as my first, top of the head thought, either). But that's exactly what we ended up doing.

It all started when my son came back from Japan and brought along his desktop computer. He tried turning it on here in Brazil, only to find out it wouldn't work. The computer started and turned off less than 3 seconds later. Long story short, we researched what could be wrong and found out the frequency of electrical appliances in Japan is different from the frequency used in Brazil. The simplest solution? Purchase a new PSU for the computer, one that would be compatible with our national specifications.

Though I assembled a couple of computers myself when I was younger, I'm far from being an expert, even though I'm a Computer Science graduate — yeees, boys and girls: graduating in IT is not synonym with being able to assemble a computer. 😅

But believe me: we managed to get by and exchanged the PSU adequately after approximately 1 hour. And better yet, the computer turned on as expected in the end, yay!!! 😁 — lots of family fun!!

Balatro came out for Apple Arcade this week. It's something I had been anticipating, to be honest, as I find this game one of the most entertaining ones I've played this year — I'm past 60 hours with it on Steam, and I wonder what kind of anti productivity vortex the mobile version will drag me into... 😅

I kind of had a feeling for it: in two days I've amounted to almost 4 hours of mobile gameplay. I even beat my first mobile game!! Part of it, I believe, was because this mobile Balatro experience is brand new and appealing — but I have to admit, too, that the porting to iOS was amazing. The user interface is seamlessly integrated to iOS and the UX is amazing.

The only downside happened because the game froze twice while I was playing: both times I was deep into advanced antis — once in the last round, and I was forced to restart the app. The pattern was clear for me, as the freezings happened after notifications. First freeze happened right after a spam call banner showed up, and the last one after one of my alarms set off at the programmed time.

Fortunately, though, the dev was fast to correct the problem. This Friday he released a fix for this and a couple of other bugs the game had — what means I'll be able to continue enjoying Balatro on my iPhone, fortunately.

Talking about games, I thought it would be nice to mention I've found a very entertaining puzzle this week, in a place I'd never have thought. I'm talking about LinkedIn, and its Queens game.

Queens is a visual logic game, which resembles Sudoku, where you need to fill the proposed grid so that there is one queen (👑) in each row, column, and colored region, with no queen touching another (even diagonally). I have played it only twice — new puzzles come out daily —, but I was instantly hooked.

Interesting enough, while looking for iOS versions of Queens, I learned the game derives from an earlier game, called Star Battle, this one a Dutch puzzle style created by Hans Eendebak for the 2003 World Puzzle Championship which took place in Arnhem, Netherlands.

Simple and clever, it's perfect for distracting yourself when you've got a couple of spare minutes. One good web version of the Star Battle game I found was at this website, but if you stumble across a nice implementation, please let me know.

Some days ago me and my son watched Uglies, a movie released this year, that he found on Netflix and suggested us to watch. In the story, which is actually based on a series of four books by Scott Westerfeld, we learn about a future, dystopian world, where everyone is considered an "Ugly" until they are then turned "Pretty" by extreme cosmetic surgery when they reach the age of 16.

In this world, a teen named Tally Youngblood rebels against this enforced conformity after her friends Shay and David show her the downsides to becoming a "Pretty". The movie has received bad reviews by many people, but it appealed to me in the end because of my fondness for stories with dystopian scenarios. So much so that I decided to take Scott's books for a spin, and I'm currently reading the third installment. It's not the best, specially because it's actually teen literature, which means there's a lot of girlfriend x boyfriend quarreling and conflicts, young doubts and the like amid the dystopia — but, hey, this is far from being 1984, right?

I guess what's been keeping me turning pages is the fluid way in which the author writes — to me, rendering the books as way better than the movie, which was indeed poor. I expect to read all four books soon, and then maybe write about the whole series. I'll see.