Weekly Report #65 - Adventure X Experience, Apple Notes Note Practice, and EpubKit

Preface#

weekly_review_20240721

This article is a record and reflection on the life of the week from 2024-07-10 to 2024-07-21.

It has been a busy week with lots of activities. Besides work, I participated in the Adventure X event, which was a lot of fun. I tried the Remix framework and prepared for a workshop. I met with Randy and planned the redesign and future development of EpubKit. It was like hosting our own hackathon for the "middle-aged hippies" who couldn't participate in the actual event. I switched from Obsidian to Apple Notes and practiced P.A.R.A. I also planned to paint the walls of the garage, experienced Apple Vision Pro at the Apple Store, and had many other interesting things happening.

Adventure X#

This is a hackathon event for developers under the age of 26. I heard about it early on, but unfortunately, I was too old to participate. However, I was invited to be a judge for the "Internet 3.0 Development Tools" track sponsored by OpenBuild and a speaker for the workshop. So I was able to observe the event from start to finish.

There were nearly two hundred developers participating in the event, and I could really see their energy and passion (~~maybe there's a reason for the age limit of 26~~). Many friends I knew from Twitter and Crazy Thursday also attended the event, and I had some interesting conversations with both new and old friends.

Workshop#

adventurex_workshop

My main task this time was to be a mentor and workshop speaker. The theme was "Building a Full-Stack AdventureX Badge ÐApp Using Solidity and Remix".

In fact, I have given many lectures and workshops on various occasions. At first, I was just helping Ian with the OpenBuild community, and I enjoyed writing tutorials and sharing knowledge. But as I got more and more opportunities, I started to change. I didn't want to repeat the same content every time with the same slides. Instead, I treated each opportunity as a chance to learn something new and to create something fun within a limited time frame. Then I would share it with others, which is also a practice of the Feynman Technique.

For this workshop, I wanted to learn the Remix frontend framework. I wrote a simple ÐApp for receiving activity badges, and the experience can be found at "adventure-x.pseudoyu.com". The PowerPoint slides for the workshop can be found at "AdventureX_Workshop_20240716.pdf".

Although I knew about this workshop about a month ago, I procrastinated until the last two days. I spent one night learning Randy's "Introduction to Remix" booklet and completed the UI part. Then I spent another night writing the Solidity contract part, implementing the frontend and contract interaction logic, and deploying it with Zeabur. Procrastination is really a killer.

But Remix is indeed powerful. It achieves the goal of writing a complete application with 0 useEffect and 0 useState. I will see if it can completely replace Next.js in various scenarios.

More people came to the workshop than I expected, and it took almost twice as long as planned, ending around 10 PM. But it was a very interesting experience, and the workshop had a good effect.

"Middle-aged Hippies" Hackathon#

code_with_randy_hackathon

This time, Randy also came as a guest judge from Guangdong. We felt that the atmosphere of the hackathon was already there, and we were just there as spectators, which was a bit boring. So we decided to work on the redesign of EpubKit together.

We discussed the existing operational logic and UI style of EpubKit and had a great time. We developed together for several hours in the evening. It was also a way for us to participate as "middle-aged hippies". We also discussed many ideas and division of work for the future of the product, which is very exciting.

Feel free to download and experience EpubKit to create your own eBooks.

yu_with_randy

As someone who doesn't like taking photos, I happened to be photographed with Randy while looking at the project exhibition. It's a memorable photo.

P.A.R.A Practice with Apple Notes#

Last month, I switched from Logseq, which I had been using for two years, to Obsidian. I have been practicing for about a month, and I have developed a habit of recording more notes compared to when I was using Logseq. Although I no longer need to worry about folder hierarchies, I still need to overcome the mental burden of the process from "recording ideas in my mind" to "creating a new file with a title in front of the computer" to "organizing ideas and adding tags" to "writing down the content".

apple_notes_folders_20240721

Randy told me about his way of using Apple Notes to record all his ideas and notes, categorizing them using the P.A.R.A. hierarchy. He found that there was no need to burden himself with organization. Instead, he could simply open his phone/computer and record ideas anytime, without worrying about formatting or markdown syntax. The core essence of note-taking is to be able to remember and take action.

On Mac, you can use the Quick Notes feature in the lower right corner to quickly record notes. On iOS, you can use shortcuts to quickly save fleeting ideas to the Drafts folder. Later, when you have more ideas, you can move them to different folders. It's a simple yet effective practice that doesn't require specifying tags and categories. When needed, you can simply search the entire content.

Other#

Wall Painting#

car_painting_wall

After trying oil painting and creating a portrait, I found it very interesting. Recently, I plan to challenge myself again and paint a whole wall of my dad's auto repair shop with acrylic paint (~~I'll help out~~).

The results generated by DALL-E, based on my dad's ideas and the reference images we found on Instagram, are quite good. I hope to have a finished product in August 🤩.

Apple Vision Pro#

apple_vision_pro_experience

This Thursday, I went to the Apple Store in West Lake to experience Vision Pro. I had been following it for a long time and read many reviews. I was tempted for a while, but I also had the experience of my Quest 2 gathering dust, so I was still hesitant.

Fortunately, it was also available in China now, so I made a reservation for a half-hour experience. From lens fitting and accessory explanations to experiencing various functions and applications, the experience was better than I expected. I didn't feel any dizziness or pressure from the weight during the 20-minute experience.

In actual experience, the interaction was smooth, natural, and accurate, as I had imagined. However, there were still noticeable noise and the resolution was not enough for an immersive experience, but it was still quite impressive. There are still too few supported applications, so it's more of a novelty. There are no real use cases yet, and the typing experience is very poor, so an external keyboard is still necessary. Overall, this generation is not worth buying. Perhaps I'll consider it when the price is right and the system and application support are more mature.

ChatGPT Plus -> Claude Pro#

claude_pro_sub

Last month, because I was using it frequently, I resubscribed to ChatGPT Plus and also used the free quota for Claude 3.5 Sonnet. I found that Claude had better contextual understanding and the generated results were more usable than GPT4 in terms of code. So when the subscription expired this week, I decided to switch to Claude Pro and try it for another month at the same price.

Guii Experience#

guii

Guii was the most interesting project I saw at the Adventure X hackathon. It allows direct interaction with frontend pages through natural language conversations and directly modifies the source code to achieve interesting effects.

I created a simple cryptocurrency website by interacting with selected elements through dialogue. There are still some bugs, but it is highly playable.

I awarded them the OpenBuild Sponsor track award, which they deserved. I hope they can go online soon 🔥.

Interesting Things and Finds#

Input#

Although most interesting inputs are automatically synchronized in the "Yu's Life" Telegram channel, I will list some of them here. It feels more like a newsletter.

Favorites#

Lakr233/NotchDrop

Books#

Brave New Words, a book written by the founder of Khan Academy, discussing the future of education and the use of LLMs. It provides a lot of inspiration for daily use of language models, and there are many possibilities beyond being just a search engine-like tool.
履单, a book inspired by the discussion sparked by the movie "Run Lola Run", exploring the social division caused by technological acceleration from the perspective of workers. I read it for a while in the afternoon, and the narrative style is very pleasant.

Articles#

Videos#

Music#

Spring Breeze by Deer Squad