82 karma · joined September 6, 2011
I'm holding out as long as possible, hoping that reason re-enters the game, but I'm not holding my breath.
That being said, this week's update that removed Di2 also added some nice location-based auto lap features, which are way more useful than an icon telling me which gear I'm in, which I already know, so I updated.
I'm annoyed that I'm losing these features, too, but they are all firmly in the nice-to-have category. Just like bike computers in their entirety.
I eventually saw the "Add/remove icons" option at the bottom of the screen, and figured out how to turn on the AWS icons, but then I got stuck in that menu. I had to refresh the page to get out of it.
And spending a lot of my day in JavaScript, I always have chop off some digits by hand before any of these tools work, since they don’t detect when values are in milliseconds.
I made epoch.place [1] to try to modernize things a bit. It’s open source [2], and features include:
- Modern natural language date parsing - Automatic detection of Unix timestamps in seconds and milliseconds, with overrides - Multiple output formats always available - Click-to-copy any resulting values - Linkable results - Realtime output of the current time in all formats, and the delta between your input and now
Simple, straightforward, no frills. The page should load in about a tenth of a second, so you can get in and get out.
It uses Chrono [3] for parsing, and runs entirely client side with no cookies, tracking, ads, or dependencies (other than Chrono which is being loaded from jsDelivr).
Mobile support is still a WIP, but I hope this app makes the task of dealing with timestamps a little bit easier.
It has single player, multiplayer, and some simple AI bots. I also just recently added an MMO variant, which allows all players to compete in a single, giant world-wide game (in a completely privacy-conscious way).
With more people spending all day isolated, I hope it can be a source of fun and social time for teams, groups of friends, families, etc. I’ve gotten a few really nice notes from folks lately about how it’s been a welcome distraction from the daily grind. The app does include a few donation buttons, but it is truly free to play, and I have no expectations of making money off it. I’m sharing it simply because I think it’s fun and I’m happy with where it’s at. I make and maintain it entirely so I can play with my friends, but I hope others can take advantage of it as well.
For those interested in the architecture, it’s a fairly standard serverless app running on AWS. All requests go through API Gateway and are handled by a single monolithic Lambda function, and it uses DynamoDB for data storage. The total cost for running it last month was 17 cents. As you would expect, it handles the periodic, bursty nature of this kind of app very well. It’s been fun project to pick away at over the last few years. I often use it to test new AWS features before bringing them into projects at work, and I quite like the Slack API and app platform, so coming up with ways to integrate new features from there is always an interesting exercise.
I hope you enjoy it, stay safe out there!
PS. If you’re looking for a way to spice up your Botzee games, consider a battle royale style tournament, where the lowest scoring player is eliminated each game, until a champion is crowned!
It lives on an external drive that is backed up to Backblaze. Since it changes fairly infrequently, I'll also manually drop copies of it on other clouds occasionally.
The things that made eventually got me to make the switch were:
- I realized email is basically a utility for me. So while I'm happy to spend $30/mo on cell phone, $60 on my home ISP, etc, it was kind of crazy to think I wouldn't spend $4/mo on email - FastMail had great reviews. Pretty much every time I did research to answer "is this really the best choice?" the answer was always yes - They seem to really care about IMAP as an idea. If you read through their blog, they do a lot of work to make sure IMAP is a great open standard for communication. That means their support for the protocol is always getting better, and they're improving OSS projects related to IMAP that they use.
Also they keep getting better. Aside from dropping XMPP support (which I can understand, though I have yet to find a suitable replacement for), their service offerings have gotten better since I signed up. Obviously email is email, but there are many little things that have received constant updates since I joined (better admin dashboard, better mail/contact/cal push support for iOS, more sensible billing options)
I could go on, but paying whatever I pay for FastMail service has definitely gone from "ehh do I really want to pay that much for email?" to me really liking supporting them as a company. If they were to increase prices a reasonable amount at some point, I probably wouldn't hesitate paying it.