Well, that was pretty quick. This morning it was in the packaged state and, checking just now:
When I've bought hardware from Valve before, I'm pretty sure it's taken around 3 days to get here, coming from the Netherlands. I can see this is shipping from there too, so I'm going to guess about the same amount of time.
So, some time early next week at the latest, perhaps?
I've finally made a proper start on the planned migration to webp for images. I did consider writing a tool that would go through and migrate the files, and update the Markdown, all in one go, but something about that makes me kind of nervous. While it wouldn't be a destructive approach (the whole blog is under version control after all), I just have this niggling feeling that I'd miss something and it would sit broken, unnoticed, for ages.
So instead I've decided to take a one-post-at-a-time approach, making the migration by hand. As well as having the benefit of letting me go slowly and check my work as I go, I can also do some tidying up of old posts. So while I do this I'm also going to tidy up obviously broken links when I notice them, and also remove embedded tweets (swapping to the simple blockquote version).
Another thing I'm doing is adding cover images where possible. I'd been running this blog for a long time before I started to use cover (it might be that I didn't start until I moved to Pelican). Since then I've tried to use it any time there's an appropriate image in a post. More recently, I added cover images to the graph view so they're even more useful now. Back-adding a cover to older posts will make them more appealing to discover in the graph because those older notes will acquire attention-grabbing thumbnails too.
One thing I wanted to do was have an easy way to keep track of where I'm up to in the migration. It's going to be a steady process that's going to take a few days, doing a few posts at a time. So to aid this I've added this to the Makefile of the blog:
cd content/extras/attachments
find -E ./ -iregex '.*\.(png|jpg|jpeg)$' | cut -d'/' -f2,3,4 | sort -u
With this I get a handy list of dates of posts that still have unconverted png or jpeg files.
Of course, for a wee while, this will not get to an empty list because I want to make sure some of the more recent posts still have their older images available as they might be in feeds out there. More recently I've only been using webp for images, so once the webp-using posts fill the main RSS and Atom feeds I can clean out the last of the bulkier images.
Following on from what I wrote about GitHub recently, I thought I'd check out Codeberg. While I'm aware of it (it is supported by Hike after all), I've never actually used it and have never had an account there.
I was delighted to find my preferred user name was actually available, which made me more inclined to create an account. The account creation process itself seemed a bit of a faff. I can't remember the details now, but it took a couple of goes and necessitated a password reset and recovery to actually get in (I recall there was some sort of error when I tried to use the activation link sent in the email, which took quite a while to turn up, but the rest is hazy, and I wasn't taking notes). It might be that it didn't help that I was signing up in a mobile browser.
That aside, though, I got up and going in the end.
At this point I'm not quite sure what I want to do with the account. While I'm nowhere near being willing or able to move my GitHub activity over there, it at least feels like it might be a viable backup location via which I can make code available. Also, and probably more importantly, it makes it easier for me to follow projects that use it as their primary (or only) forge.
This morning I found myself following a link to a project hosted there. It looked interesting, it looked like something I'd want to follow. It didn't go so well. I hit the star button and... busy circle.
This lasted for a while with nothing happening. So I refreshed the page, no star on the repo, so I tried again. Same result. I tried a third time and got something different right away.
At some point I ended up with a big fat 500 page.
Do I see this as an issue? Of course not. Could be I caught it on a bad day. Stuff happens. I've seen a 500 from things I'm responsible for before now. I'm not going to expect perfection. But it does remind me that leaping from one forge to another, to chase platform stability, and in doing so give up a long history, is a risky endeavour without a guaranteed payoff.
After a day of no movement, I wake up to see this:
One step closer to getting my hands on it!
I'm oddly kind of invested in getting my hands on this. A regret I have is that I never bought one of the originals. Back in the day I did buy (and still own) a Steam Link and it served me well for a while, 4 homes ago. The 1st gen controller would have been ideal with that but somehow I just never got round to grabbing one.
And, sure, while I have Xbox and Sony controllers kicking around (I especially like my Death Stranding 2 DualSense controller), there's something very appealing about a controller that feels the way the Steam Deck does; I find it a really pleasant gaming experience in the hand.
So, this time, I'm not missing out.
My primary intended use at the moment is to pair it with my Steam Deck and use it as my "Steam Console", plugged into the TV while I game from the sofa. Eventually I hope to be pairing it with a Steam Machine, of course.
Meanwhile, since moving last year, I've not set up my Windows gaming machine yet. It's a bit bulky to have in the current living room setup, but not impossible to set up in the office. Perhaps... perhaps I should actually dig out the Steam Link again and set it up with that!