Henry Catalini Smith

I'm Henry, a software engineer based in Malmö, Sweden.

The Tinder Box is a Morrowind Let's Play

When I was little my grandad used to read me this book called The Tinder Box. I got hold of a copy a few years back in order to have something with some nostalgic value in the bedtime story rotation. I've been reading it quite frequently ever since.

Soldier in a red andw white uniform holding a tinder box in his right hand and a helmet full of gold coins in his left.

It is a deeply strange and unpleasant book which probably shouldn't exist. It's also gradually dawned on me that it follows the narrative structure of a Morrowind playthrough. Now I need to express this idea in order to be free of it. So that's what you're about to read.

The story kicks off with the protagonist – a soldier – walking around in the countryside. He stumbles on an NPC who sends him into a cave on a fetch quest.

'Soldier, would you like a lot of money?', called the witch. 'Very much' said the solder, 'What would I have to do?' The witch pointed to a big tree. 'That tree is hollow', she said. 'I want you to climb down inside. I'll tie a rope around your body and pull you up when you call. Then you'll be rich.'

During the course of his fetch quest the soldier repeatedly becomes over-encumbered with loot. Entire pages are dedicated to inventory management in order for the soldier to minmax the value of the loot he's carrying.

There were so many gold coins that the soldier gasped. He threw away the silvrer. He filled his pockets, his knapsack, and even his cap with gold! Only then did he put the dog back on the chest.

After leaving the cave, the soldier opts to kill the NPC who assigned the quest instead of completing it. He has no good reason to do this apart from XP farming and to further minmax the cash value of his inventory by holding onto the quest item.

'Where is the tinder box?' screeched the witch. 'Give it to me!' The soldier shook his head. 'First of all, tell me why you want it,' he said. 'I won't!' the witch screamed. 'Give it to me at once!' 'No,' said the soldier, and he killed her with his sword.

Upon his arrival in town the soldier heads straight to the vendors to spend his quest loot on gear. The remainder is spent maxing out his disposition with local NPCs.

The soldier set off for the town. It was a splendid place, and now he was rich. He took a room at the very best inn. He ordered the best food, and bought new clothes. Soon he became a fine gentleman, and had lots of friends.

The very first time he runs out of gold the soldier figures out an infinite money glitch involving a talking magical creature and begins to exploit it.

He brought out the tinder box. As soon as he struck a spark from the flint, the door of his room flew open. In came the first dog he'd met, down inside the hollow tree. 'What are your commands, lord?' the dog asked. 'Bring me some money!' cried the solder. In a flash the dog vanished. He returned with a bag of copper coins in his mouth.

Eventually he gets carried away using his summoned dogs to mess around with NPCs in the town and gets caught by the guards and jailed. He glitches his game-breaking magical artefact back into his inventory, escapes, and then summons his dogs to kill all the guards and stage a coup d'état,

The dogs were so fierce that the king's men bolted. The dogs seized the king and queen and ran away with them. They were never seen again. The people cheered the soldier. 'Marry our princess', they cried. 'Then you shall be our king and queen!' And so the soldier married the princess, which pleased her very much. Their wedding lasted a week, and the three dogs were the most important guests at the feast.

The book ends abruptly here with the soldier having been richly rewarded for his ruthlessness and greed. If there's a moral to this story, I'd say it's "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must". In a way it was the perfect bedtime story for an 80's baby.

Glory Days Or Bust

18 months ago I was all-in on VSCode. lol

Once upon a time, the main tools I used for work were Vim and tmux. And until recently, once every few months I'd get this compulsive urge to try to recapture those glory days. That urge has stopped lately though. Visual Studio Code has reached a tipping point where the Vim support and terminal emulator are a better package than anything I can hack together with lua plugins and tmux config.

Maining VSCode Terminal

Hasn't aged well! Have you seen the VSCode website lately?

The open source AI code editor

Yikes!

So now I'm all-out. It's glory days or bust!

Real happy with my init.lua for Neovim. Doing Vim config in Lua is such a dream come true. For everyday work, my core needs are simple enough.

  1. LSP diagnostics (to highlight my mistakes)
  2. Git integration (to highlight my changes)
  3. Format on save

Those use cases are so mainstream that you're spoiled for choice regarding how to set them up. I landed on lspsaga, gitsigns and conform.

Screenshot of neovim editing this blog post. The text displayed is the same as the text preceding this image.

It's such an incredible relief to be back working in proper Vim instead of some IDE's bootleg reimplementation. You really learn to appreciate how finely crafted Vim's core text editing functionality is by spending a few years seeing talented people trying and failing to reproduce it in competing software time and time again. Zed's implementation was decent, but even that had quirks I never quite got used to.

Zellij is fantastic too. It's like a fully configured tmux right out of the box. And while keybinding conflicts between Vim and tmux used to be a big pain in the ass, with Zellij I've managed to move all its keybindings onto the ⌘ key where there's no conflicts at all. Its vanilla out-of-the box UX is what I've been trying (and failing) to coerce VSCode or Zed to be all these years too.

Wasn't such a difficult switch to make in the end. This community-built tooling has become really fucking slick over the last few years. And with all the commercial tooling focusing so intensely on AI it seems reasonable to expect that balance to continue to shift in the coming years. I mean if you're a product manager on VSCode and all your KPIs are about AI, why even prioritise fixing code editing bugs if a degraded coding experience could arguably drive AI adoption?

Nice being rid of tools that are funded with blood money and all. Did you know Microsoft recently fired a group of No Azure For Apartheid protestors? Or that Zed recently took money from Shaun Maguire & co? Increasingly I find myself wanting as few points of contact with this type of depravity as humanly possible in my everyday life.

I had actually underestimated how good this integrity boost would feel. Seems I had become quite numb to the dissonance of sharing in the mundane everyday spoils of a genocidal war I was otherwise willing to boycott a beloved event for. Cool as hell to discover that the high road is increasingly the best one too these days, at least when it comes to devtools.