Mostly Bits Newsletter - Issue #4

Last Friday was Earth Day, and my inbox was full of (dubious) marketing messages on that theme. It reminded me: most carbon offsets are indistinguishable from scams, at least if your goal is actually shifting the balance of carbon in the atmosphere. But real, durable, verifiable, carbon offsets do exist from Charm and Climeworks, and they sell directly to consumers.

While Tony was out, I started playing with the Playdate SDK. This is my first time using Lua. As someone who mostly writes Ruby and JavaScript, it feels fairly natural so far. And the SDK has a lot of nice convenience methods, like a built-in A* pathfinding algorithm and a way to display a native “Use the crank!” alert for games that require it.

There was a lot of reading documentation and experimenting with syntax, but here’s a quick peek at the progress I made:

At the end of that GIF, the paddle returns to its home planet.