Ttiki's November month letter

Mastermind's gas mask

SORRY I'M LATE! I've been working for the end of my semester at college. It's been pretty rough, and I've been really really busy, that's why I'm late this month. Anyway, I've got some news about many things (Changes are coming.)

And I did not take this intro from my Kickstarter's newsletter for Twisted Minds!

Today we will talk about:

1. A little article about usernames and having too much of them
2. Ideas for future newsletters (and how should I structure them)
3. Projects I made for college (my thoughts and their future)

I won't call this first newsletter a real "newsletter," it lacks a general structure, and I went in all directions. As I said, I didn't have much time to write it, and I wrote it quickly because we are already in the middle of December.

Having too many names

I've been on the internet for a while now. I've grown with it and met many people over the years. This means I've seen many names and pseudonyms passing over the years. Some funny, others a reference to something, and others were using their name and scrambling the letters to make up a pseudonym. However, I don't think I've seen as many pseudonyms as "too_many_names" or "nameless." At first, these kinds of pseudonyms were funny and seemed originals. However, as time passes and new users took the same idea over and over and over again, this joke lost its charm, and it always made me wonder why are people still using this username?

Well, now I may have found the answer to this question. Now that I've got multiple names online Ttiki, Lord Ttiki, Lord Clément Com-bier (not a username, but still a pseudonym I use online from time to time), Akats, Akats_, Lord Akats, Lord Akats_ . Many of these are just variations of one another. However, when you've got so many accounts, on so many different websites, (each with their respective ruling system), and sometimes a user already owns your username, well, you've got to find new ways to let people identify you! 

I try to stay consistent on user-naming over my social media and online in general. Ttiki / Lord Ttiki is my default username, Lord Clément Combier is more for my personal accounts, Akats usernames are for my art account. Yet, I sometimes lose myself with which username I've used for which website.

I did eventually find a way. It was not renaming myself "to_many_names"! No, I launched my Git Hub personal page ttiki.github.io, and even tho it's just a domain name here, the website's name is Ttiki's HUB. On this website, I store information, do some code testing for fun, publish apps I wrote, and, is generally a HUB for all my accounts. I've built a social media board where you can find a list of places where you can connect with me, order by speaking languages (if I only speak French, if I speak French and English, or if I only use English.)

And even tho the name is TTIKI's HUB, I've stored information about all my different usernames. Links to LordAkats_ social media and website, Ttiki's related social media, etc.

I've also used the custom URL LCTCA (or LCTCAA) for Lord Clément Ttiki Combier Akats, in a way to combine all my usernames into one URL. (I may change my page domain name if I've got a couple of euros to spend on a domain name later down the line.)

The conclusion and the question I would like to ask is if it's a good idea to have so many usernames and variations of username? Well, I've got three main usernames as stated above, Lord Clément Combier, Ttiki, and finally Akats, each used for a particular instance. Akats being my art accounts, Ttiki (my main), and Lord Clément Combier my personal. I've got multiple variations for each one, mainly being a final underscore (_) at the end or Lord at the beginning.

I've thought many times if it wouldn't be best to delete these variations using Lord by default at the beginning (and using _ for my Akats accounts). It wouldn't be necessarily hard to do so, but rather a long process. It may be trickier on some websites to change because of policies and whatnot. The thing is, I like simple usernames, and adding Lord doesn't necessarily mean it makes my username complex, yet, slower to type. I've been debating for a while now, and I still have to decide what to do. Destroy most variations and put Lord at the beginning and _ at the end for Akats related accounts? Keep all the variations and don't waste time changing every one of my names? 

The problem is still present for some websites. Some will ask me no spaces or no special characters, and thus, may mean I would have to create new variations in the future.

Now, does it means it's a bad idea in general? I don't think so. You can have multiple names for multiple needs, and sometimes you may need to create a variation to respect a website's or platform's policy. However, if you stay consistent, you can get away with your list of different usernames and not change your username to "too_many_names"!

New ideas for following letters

After this big dissertation about user-naming, I would like, in this section, to speak about ideas on how to populate this newsletter and get a general structure for future editions.

Mod of the month

First, I had an idea about writing a little article about the Mod of the Month. If you don't know what Mod of the Month is, it's a live stream run by RunThinkShootLive.com every month, where Don AKA Unq plays a Half-Life or Half-Life 2 mod and reviews it live on Twitch. 

I've always been found by these little streams, making such discover hidden gems in the Half-Life community, and I would love to write my reviews. I'm a huge fan of Half-Life and its universe (and Valve's universe in general). I can imagine myself playing a new mod every month, (maybe not in its entirety depending on its size), maybe live streaming it on my (French) Twitch channel as well, and then writing a little section about it here.

I would most certainly pick the same mod played by Don AKA Unq over on RTSL's Twitch channel, or I may pick a random mod from RTSL or ModDB, depending on what I want to play, my mood, etc. 

I already did this a couple of years ago on my second YouTube channel Ttiki's maps, live streaming a mod from time to time and reviewing it. In any case, I'm waiting for a cable to arrive as I can't steam without it.

Indie game of the month

Developing from this first idea, I had the same where I would play little indie games and not mods. 

LordAkats_ art of the month

The third idea, making a piece of digital art for Lord Akats_, publishing it here, and speaking about the process of making it, what it means (if it means something). When I launched this account (Lord Akats_) it was meant for me to have fun with my software, build digital art, and publish it every week. It did happen for two consecutive weeks, but I did not post anything new since. I love creating art, and it makes me practice my software, making me learn new things, and eventually get better for commercial usage down the line (for my games). However, publishing once every week meant I would have to spend too much time I didn't have. But, I can make one piece of art every one to two months.

Story of the month

A fourth idea, similar to the one above (LordAkats_ art of the month), I would like to publish a short story every month, to improve my writing skills, world-building skills, and storytelling skills. Writing takes a long time. I first have to find an idea (original), then find the characters, the spatiotemporal location, a good twist, and plot in general, and finally, find a way to start and end. That's why I may not publish every month, but more like every two to three months? 

Of course, this will all depend on my imagination and inspiration. I know I can have lots of ideas from time to time, and no idea at all the rest of the time. Even though my mind is pretty big on imagining stories, I can't exploit everything.

These stories will probably be horror themes, as it's my primary genre which I love. I may try different genres (I would like and try writing Noire genre). To help you imagine what kind of story I would write, I could speak of goosebumps. They will not be as long, less than ten pages. I can't say for sure, it will all depend on how many characters, the complexity, etc.)

Also, I would like to get your opinion! I may link to a Google Form, where you'll be able to make some comments on the story itself, the writing, etc. And you will also be able to comment directly under the month post as comments are open for all!

Thoughts on movies/series/books I watch/read during the month

I still need to find a name for this section! But as the name already suggests, I would talk about movies and series I have watched during the month. As a pretty big consumer of movies, series, and sometimes books, I would love to share my thoughts and opinions. 

My projects 

I also want to use this newsletter to make updates about what I've published and what I'm working on. 

As I said in the introduction, I've been working hard for my university since the end of last month (at least)! This period is now over, this means I couldn't write a proper monthly letter, I didn't work a lot on anything interesting. I'm looking forward to next month, where, hopefully, I can write a proper monthly newsletter.

Anyway, even though I've only been working on University projects, I still want to talk about some projects I've made public!

University projects

If you are interested in reading the source code, you can find it on my GitHub account!

A health app on Sailfish OS

It's probably the strangest experience as a developer and student I ever had while building a project. First of all, I would like to introduce Sailfish OS to anyone who doesn't know what it is.

What is Sailfish OS?

Sailfish OS is:

 Sailfish OS is a Linux-based operating system based on free software, and open source projects such as Mer as well as including a closed source UI. The project is being developed by the Finnish company Jolla. 

The OS first shipped with the original Jolla Phone in 2013 (its sale stopped in 2016, but it was supplied with software updates until the end of 2020), then the Jolla Tablet in 2015 and from other vendors licensing the OS. The OS is ported by community enthusiast to third-party mobile devices including smartphones and tablet computers, Sailfish OS can be used for many kinds of devices - Wikipedia 

A little paragraph about Jola: 

Jolla Oy (sometimes referred to as Jolla Ltd.) is a Finnish technology company; vendor and developer of Sailfish OS. Headquartered in Tampere, Finland, Jolla has its own research and development offices in Helsinki, Tampere and Cyberport, Hong Kong. Jolla was founded in 2011 by former Nokia staff of the MeeGo project team use the MeeGo opportunities and its "endless possibilities". - Wikipedia 

Sailfish OS has mainly been designed for industrial devices and has some big changes compared to most OS for phones and tablets.

Our project

The goal of this project was to build an app from scratch by designing it (Class diagram, use case diagram, writing scenarios, etc.) Then, we had to write the whole app. Each group had a designated platform, mine was Sailfish OS. We had never heard of Sailfish OS before nor the QML scripting language. So, we had to learn everything (from QML, the workflow of Sailfish OS, building apps with QT Editor IDE... 

The project had to be related to Health, so we made an app to follow some health stats like BMI, Sleep tracking, sport seances, etc. We could only develop BMI and Sleep tracking (kind of), and we had a starting app made by last year's students. 

Our first problem was installing QT Editor, Oracle VirtualBox, and making sure we could start a project and launch a build (and, of course, test our app with VirtualBox). We put a month into designing the app, (mockup, diagrams, scenarios, etc.). Then, we lost another month trying to install QT Editor VirtualBox and make sure we could compile our project. Whenever we did get a computer that could run everything, compile and run our app correctly, we had one final month to build our app. As said already, we did get the source code from the app of last year's students, which already made an IBM indicator, with user profiles and record databases. So we didn't have to build up our database. We could re-use the old one and adapt it a little bit. Also, the IBM part was already done. The first new functionality we wanted to implement was graphs. Sailfish OS can run JavaScript. We can mix QML and JavaScript to add more functionality. 

I'm not going to lie, this last part I didn't quite understand about QML, JavaScript, and Sailfish OS. In any case, we wanted to add graphs and we had the idea of using the D3.js library, a powerful JavaScript library to build graphs and data set visualization diagrams. Yet, for an unknown reason, every time we tried importing this library, our app crashed. So, going out of time, we decided to forget this functionality for now and implement sleep tracking into our app. What an idea...

Any developer reading this knows HOW HARD IT IS TO WORK WITH DATES AND TIMES. Of course, sometimes, an API is well done, or languages smartly handle dates and times. However, this is not the case here. I think if we had more time on our hands we could have figured out dates and times. The problem was we didn't have this time to remodel the app and handle dates correctly. 

Also, before I forget to talk about it, the documentation is not that great either. When searching for code examples or explanations or just simple documentation, we were sent to websites written in broken English or in straight Cyrillic, which we can't read. Making the process of finding help with code and APIs hard on this platform. 

In general, it was a pretty bad experience, and I'm pretty happy it's over now. We couldn't add any functionality, sleep tracking not working at all, but we did quite a presentation. 

The fact we were obliged to work on an unknown platform, using an unknown language to us, made this project not as enjoyable as we first thought.

I can't judge Sailfish OS from the first use. I would need to do another project, finish this one and get more experience before I can put a judgment over it. But it's sure if I don't need to develop a project on it, I won't return to developing for it before quite some time.

iPhone projects

One of the courses I had to take at the beginning of this last year was app development for iOS. We had to build lots of projects during the duration of this course. Each one introduced a new iOS concept. 

When the pile of projects grew to a few, I decided to put them on my Git Hub. You can now read and test each project following this link: https://github.com/Ttiki/UniersitySwiftProject

I've made a README to describe each project, and you can find each project under its own branch. I still need to finish the last project "RecetteDuMonde", and I still need to write a different README for each project explaining in more detail the project.

Whenever I will finish this last project, I will archive the repo, and I will have one last project to publish to Git Hub, and it's a really big one. I wanted to talk about it in this month's post, but I want to keep it a little longer in secret, as it's not only for this course.

Other projects

I've got other projects I would like to talk about, but I can't for now. Maybe I will talk about them next month or soon, yet, for the moment, I can only talk about those projects at the time.

Thank you very much for getting at the end of this month's letter. I hope I will write a better-structured newsletter next month. Feel free to read my other newsletter over on Kickstarter!

I speak about a big change happening soon, which I don't want to repeat here. 

See you at the end of this month for the December newsletter. Happy Christmas, holidays, and news year! (Well, hopefully, I will write the December newsletter on the 31st of December for the last day of this year. Or maybe on the 1st of January to start this new year?) I don't know yet, but what I know is I will try not to be late for once and not wait until the middle of January to write the December newsletter.

Thank you,

Have a nice day.

Clément 'Ttiki' Combier,

Agur.