Sketchbook Ends.

After going through all the nine stages of disbelief, I have finally accepted that Sketchbook had ended. Seriously and utterly accepted that fact. So this is the final mention of Sketchbook v14 on this blog. The previous one is here. But this is the final one. Totally last one where I share some pages from the second half of the volume and my guesses at what they’re all about.

Juju, Nagisa and Sora are discussing the crawling curve of a caterpillar and comparing it with the Greek letter Ω. Also it seems that’s how a futon should look when used properly!

Sora and Ao in the kitchen with their food related antics. At least, Sora seems to be enjoying them.

Asaka is trying to showcase usage of a gourd that she made… As a container for a genie?

Just for the Hazuki’s serene pose and obviously, also for how a lint roller should not be used!

What little scenes of everyday life. Sheer brilliance! I’ll miss these in my everyday life. Also, this is from the last comic-strip-style chapter of Sketchbook. It is followed by 3 normal-manga-style chapters. The “first” page of the first such chapter.

Finally, Kei and Takane seem to have decided to join the Art Club, officially. This chapter then goes on to welcome them with a party where everyone tries to cook something or the other in the club room… I guess.

This chapter ends with Sora sketching “everyone” as the party ends with the usual approval from Ooba-senpai. The second regular-comic-style chapter is of course about the Cats. And I will leave the third chapter a mystery.

Well, that’s all. No mention of Sketchbook from now on here. Yes, not at all.

Apart from the pending

Scanlations

Work from Home…

In these depressing times, as we all work from home, humanity and sanity slowly slips away through our soapy hands.

In these tough times, as we don’t know what to prioritize, developers loose their valuable users/customers. I don’t know how true that last sentence is but I have definitely lost the one and only user (my superpartner) of my MATLAB program ‘AcBook’. But that doesn’t stop me from releasing its next update (officially at the end of this month but the installer has been already available for quite some time now).

In this release, I have mostly focussed on replacing the old exchange rates provider by a new one. Because the older one got a bit greedy and reduced the number of data requests one could make from 1000/month to 200/month in the basic free plan! Not that I was using the full quota. Even on a busy month, I don’t think I made more than 100 requests so 200 was more than enough given that nobody else is using the program now. But what really bugged me was that the rates were now updated daily instead of hourly! So if another provider could still support 1000 requests per month for free and the data was updated hourly, then why would I not transition to it. That’s exactly what I thought and did. In the transition process, I also learned that MATLAB can handle JSON formatted web replies quite well. That has made the startup time of the program a bit shorter and less error-prone as fewer file read/write operations are needed now. Also, made the ExChanger future-proof in case some currencies are added or removed by the new provider. Overall, I’m quite proud of the achievement and to give credit where credit is due, here’s a screenshot of the program’s login screen:

In these pandemic times, as we hurtle towards the end in one way or another, let’s keep it light by listening to Sandi Toksvig at

Vox Tox