As any sports fan knows, the FIFA World Cup is under way. It’s the premier soccer tournament, one that every soccer fan looks forward to even if your own team doesn’t make it. And it encapsulates everything I love and hate about the sport today.

A recent post about finding the keyboard shortcut for debug mode in Animal Crossing (via Hacker News) had my nostalgia senses tingling. It reminded me strongly of my first job: porting Japanese mobile phone games to European handsets.

The NBA finals finished last night with the Golden State Warriors finishing the sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers. On the whole, the Warriors completely deserve the series win: they had the better team, the better coaching and the better play. The Cavs are a limited team lifted to excellence by Lebron James and it showed. If Lebron wasn’t amazing, they were easily dominated. If he was amazing, it was close.

Unheralded: where I wax lyrical about music that you probably haven’t heard before

As part of my work on my custom Linux distribution, I needed an application that: had a graphical user interface, listed a set of keyboard layouts, applied them when changed, used low-level X components only. A very simple set of requirements. And yet, I couldn’t find anything. Most of them are tied to a specific desktop environment, like GNOME or KDE. Or they use their own complex components, like iBus. I knew about xkb but everything I’d used was either CLI-only or were static graphical views.

Linux is the best alternative if you’re not running one of Windows or Mac OS, the two big juggernauts of the desktop OS world. There are a huge number of distributions that cover a range of use cases. But none really hit the sweet spot for me, so I built my own.

In my current job, I’ve been using Clojure as one of the main languages. Every time I go back to it, it makes my heart soar. Ok, I might be overexaggerating a little. But it is great.

Unheralded: where I wax lyrical about music that you probably haven’t heard before

I love basketball. I’ve played many sports, but none make me feel as good when I’m shooting hoops. So today I got to do a shootaround for the first time in nearly five years. Why so long, if I like it so much?

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