Packed lunches are a great way to save money, but being limited to foods palatable at room temperature (or colder) can be a little discouraging. In most American workplaces, a microwave oven is readily available in the breakroom, making it easy to reheat a home-cooked meal. However, after leaving a desk-bound white-collar job for one that often takes me into the field, that's only occasionally an option. So I DIY'd a device for warming up food that's portable and usable in almost any situation.

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Spaced repetition is an effective habit for memorizing small fragments of information for, effectively, an indefinite amount of time. The idea is to repeatedly challenge your recall of a piece of information, typically with a sort of flashcard, doing so at a frequency determined by your previous recall performance: new information is challenged frequently until you remember it, and previously learned information is challenged less frequently. The concept is simple enough to implement with a few index cards and a shoebox. Despite the simplicity, the landscape of software implementations of spaced repetition is relatively small. The venerable Anki is the best-known spaced repetition application, and I've used org-drill and org-fc in the past, but other than those three, I'm not aware of many other programs for it. These existing systems are fine, but I have a fairly specific use-case that none are appropriate for: I might want to do my reviews on a system where I'm unable to install Anki or GNU Emacs, and I don't want to have to trust a third-party with my cards. This rules out services like Quizlet and AnkiWeb. It's a simple enough concept, so I wanted to see if I could write a flash card application contained within a single HTML file. All we really need is a spaced repetition scheduler algorithm, a way of implementing the "challenge" piece in the browser, and a way of storing cards and their scheduling parameters across reviews.

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This blog post is about a GNU/Linux rabbit hole I fell down in the belief I was chasing a mighty adventure. It was not nearly as adventurous as I had hoped, but I am nonetheless posting about it in case this information is helpful to someone else. My story begins with a purchase of four wireless gamepads from 8BitDo. I had done little research outside of scrolling past a few positive comments about their products on the Fediverse and viewing enough of their marketing materials to see that the controller I was interested in was supported by SteamOS. That was enough to encourage me to put in an order, so I did, and patiently awaited their arrival. When they were finally in my hands, I plugged two of them into my media center, hoping to play some Mario Kart with Oli. They were clearly working in some capacity because RetroArch pops up a toast when it detects that a controller has been plugged in, but something was wrong. I twiddled the analog sticks and I mashed the buttons. Nothing seemed to happen.

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