I've been working on a fun little side project for a while – The Morning Briefing: a personalised podcast.

I listen to a lot of tech and business news podcasts but something like Morning Brew Daily works on the US news cycle. I wanted a morning show that was ready for whenever o'clock in the morning you get up in your country.

After learning about NotebookLM, I set about wrangling a herd of LLMs, TTSs and RSS and came up with a proof-of-concept "Podcast on Demand". I can pick the virtual presenters, they discuss the latest stories from whatever topics I've subscribed to, add in a bed of music and I've got a customised podcast ready for me when I wake up.

And it all runs locally without using OpenAI or Google!

Here's a podcast from a couple of months ago:

It must be re-run season.

After recently rebuilding Torch in ASCII using Phoenix and Elixir, I was inspired to do it yet again but with the original ray-casting-on-canvas look.

This is a super-simple express server with websockets and in-memory state. The more complicated multi-player raycasting makes a return this time though (no list comprehension shortcuts when we're doing it this way, unfortunately.

I still think there's some fun to be had in this game and maybe in another 15 years or so, I'll rebuild it again.

Github Repo: https://github.com/thingsinjars/torch-js

Operations

1+ players

The aim is to get the highest number possible after using each of your tokens.

There is 1 die

Each player has 4 tokens with different symbols on:

+ − × ÷

Each player rolls the die and the number they get is their starting number.

Lowest score starts. If there's a draw, youngest of those starts.

Each round:

1. Roll the die
2. Choose one of your operations.
3. Perform your operation with the new number and your existing number. Try to get the highest score
4. Discard your operation token. You only get to use each operation once.

Note: When the calculation is a division with a remainder, you can either discard the remainder or continue with decimals, depending on who is playing.

Example game:

2 players.

A rolls 2, B rolls 3. A has the lowest starting number so they start

1. Round 1
   • A rolls a 4. They decide to use their + operation. They now have 6.
   • B rolls a 1. They use their ÷ . They still have 3.
2. Round 2
   • A rolls 6. They use their × . They have 36.
   • B rolls 5. They use their × . B now has 15
3. Round 3
   • A rolls another 6. They've already used their × so they have to either subtract 6 or divide by 6. They use − . They have 30
   • B rolls 2. They + it. B has 17
4. Round 4
   • A rolls another 6! Now they only have their ÷ left. They have to divide 30 by 6. Now they have 5.
   • B rolls 3. They have their − left. B has 14.

B wins.

Variations

• For advanced maths, add in the power and root symbols ^ √
• Try to get the lowest score instead of the highest.
• Try to get the lowest score without going below zero.

I think I've figured out the next break-out TV competition show: The Great British Web App

Round 1: The Microsite

Each team is presented with a PSD and a Word doc. You've got 1 hour to slice up the images, mark up the content and deploy a microsite advertising an event. The judges are harsh on anyone demoing on localhost.

Round 2: The Magazine

Using the tools, frameworks and languages of your choice, design, develop and deploy a magazine-style web site with full CMS and social media share buttons.

Teams are judged on semantic markup, SEO friendliness and accessibility audit score.

Round 3: The Masterpiece

Your chance to show off. You have 4 hours to build the shiniest, scrollbar-misusing, WebGL-heavy, experimental web masterpiece possible to match the client brief "Anything, as long as it pops!".

You only get points if it's mobile-friendly and works on IE 6.

Prize

The Winners of the Grand Finale get a copy of Dreamweaver 4 and enrolled in a Coursera course on how to retrain as a baker...

Bonus Technical challenge for the celebrity edition

Rebuild a classic HTML element using the latest web technologies - implement <marquee> using Web Components or <blink> using Web Sockets.