February was not that eventful.

Finally dipped my toe into the Metroid series. Decided to go by timeline chronology rather than releases. Also chose remakes over originals. Which means I finished Metroid: Zero Mission on my, ahem, liberated 3DS. Minus the stealth part, a pretty good game overall and a great introduction to the series.

Curious if Nintendo will release remasters of two other Prime games before Prime 4. Plausible.

Been playing the Picross series on Switch. Finished all E’s and S1 on 3DS a while ago, and now S2, S3, and S4 on Switch. Perfect podcast games. BTW, as a colorblind person, I can attest that their Color Picross variant is quite good.

What I did in January.

Installed Asuswrt-Merlin on my old router. It is a very conservative update, what I noticed: better VPN support, support for SMB2. Bonus point: can go back to the official firmware. I have looked at other firmwares, but at this point not sure if the improvements would be worth the hassle. Maybe a new router. Maybe not.

A Plague Tale: Requiem is in the “was a sequel necessary?” category, but is pretty good, so OK.

There are three last levels in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker that broke me, and soured the overall impression a bit. But otherwise a great game.

You play as Toadette for half the game. And the traditional kidnapping is presented as not really a kidnapping: Wingo wants a star, it’s just that Toad and Toadette can’t let go of their capitalistic nature and that star. Does that give Nintendo a pass? Not really, but I think it is a good example of Nintendo being less evil and more traditional to a fault. They would stick to a structure, but be willing to work on the periphery or in new areas.

Well, started this blog for no apparent reason.

When I started with HTML and CSS, I was using Dreamweaver. It was producing pretty clean code, so many people were recommending it. After some time and the Adobe acquisition, I moved away from visual editors to plain text editors. Now, while something like Visual Studio Code is preferable, I can basically use any text editor.

Something similar seems to have happened with the command line interface. Slowly, through some other programs like Launchy and Everything (alpha with dark mode), I got the idea that text is not only sufficient, but in many cases faster, better and more robust than GUI analogues.

I use Scoop for about 95% of my installs, winget for another few percent, and I would struggle to remember what I installed any other way, especially since creating your own Scoop bucket is pretty simple – here’s mine.

I check for Windows updates with a PowerShell module, I sync files with Robocopy and Rclone, I even install games from the Epic Store with Legendary, among other things.

Hey, I make this blog with Hugo and Git!

Is the CLI good for everything? Of course not! But it is pretty useful.

Cat in the image above, Shalquior from “Dark Souls II”, is by Zedotagger.