Note #2: Week 39 in Review

Posted on Sun 28 September 2025 in notes

Due to my accelerated AWS study schedule I haven't had much time to work on projects this week, other than some self-hosting maintenance. Instead, I spent some time eyeballing the game launches coming out this month:

  • Hollow Knight: Silksong
  • Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles
  • Hades 2

All are great games for handheld, which is unfortunate. I have a Switch but don't buy many games for it because Nintendo has a history of pulling support for previous generations.

I don't want a Windows handheld due to the high price and worse user experience. (Bazzite fixes the UX problem, but not the hardware pricing.) I also have comically small hands - a friend is 6 inches shorter than me and our hands are the same size - so the Steam Deck feels unwieldy.

Tragically, the Switch is what I'll be playing these on. I think the pro gamer strategy is to buy now for Switch and wait for them to go on sale for PC. Switch games famously never go on sale, while PC ones regularly appear on 90% discounts.

Cool Stuff from the Web

I've been using geeqie for organizing slides from Adrian's videos. I love its bulk renaming feature, because it enables a very efficient way to study:

  1. Watch videos and take notes on my Kobo. Why not in NeoVim? See On Notebooks and Thinking Better Thoughts. Using a notebook forces me to take less notes, which means I have to concentrate on what the slides say and don't say.
  2. Use flameshot to take screen captures, dump them into a folder for a section of the course.
  3. Flip through the images I collected at the end of a section and rename them to things that make sense (e.g. dns-1.png).
  4. Combine the slides with my notes for later review. Bonus: creating this document is a form of review in itself.

Also, AWS launched refactoring as part of CDK, which should greatly simplify making stack changes in Cloudformation. This is huge for my work, which involves dealing with dozens of CFN stacks, but less exciting if you don't happen to be an AWS admin.

Project Updates

misc

I noticed that my immich backups to the home server were failing. It turned out this was because I was running 1.131.0 when the latest release is 1.142.0, and there was a database format change between these versions.

One thing led to another and through sheer incompetence I managed to corrupt my library. Fixing my snapshots last week was a good plan. In the end it turned out I corrupted my database. Luckily, immich is designed for robustness and stores database dumps on a daily basis. I restored the database, downgraded to 1.131.0, and all was good.

Then, I actually read the manual and upgraded via 1.133.0 to the latest release. This worked and I can now back up from my phone again.