I’ve learned a lot since starting to sew, but I think the most important thing is this: it is impossible to predict how much of a magnet for cat hair a fabric will be, even if you can feel the fabric. ‘Field testing’ (or should that be ‘felid testing’?) is the only way.
New post: Building a hand-wired Corne keyboard
My latest keyboard building adventure, which has been quite the marathon. But now I have pretty lights!
I’ve finished my hand wired Corne keyboard finally! Too tired to blog in long form about it now, but I’m planning to do that soon.
I may be the tiniest bit obsessed with building Corne keyboards. I was determined not to be defeated by LEDs, so I’m building a semi-hand wired one. Only one half done so far, but it works 👌
Finished reading: All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison 📚 A vivid picture of rural Suffolk life in the 1930s. It isn’t at all rose-tinted though, and deals with the darkness as well as the beauty. Edie is a wonderful protagonist.
Finally got around to fitting the 3D printed case for the second Corne keyboard I built.
Well, that didn’t go as planned: I was trying to make a cup of tea and - tired after work - knocked a small glass out of the fridge which smashed to pieces. Have spent the last 15 mins trying to keep hungry cats out of the kitchen while sweeping up the many, many tiny shards.
New post: Emacs from scratch again
In which I admit that I’m going around the ‘from scratch’ merry-go-round again, for no other reason than I felt like it. I’m tempted to add ‘Emacs configuration’ to my list of hobbies…
We’ve been stating the radio alarm clock to BBC Radio 3 for a gentler start than the news doom of R4’s Today Programme. This morning I woke to the 3rd movement of Chopin’s Sonata No. 2 (aka the funeral march). You know the one. That was a weird vibe to wake up to.
One of my favourite neighbourhood oaks looked lovely in the light this morning.
I spent most of today fiddling with my QMK settings to make the OLED displays on my keyboard useful and pretty (mostly pretty). I now have an animated doggy, layer and modifier indicators, and WPM counter. Time well spent!
Sometimes you’re just in the mood for a big dumb film. This was that film, and it hit the spot.
New post: Learning stenography with Plover.
In which I justify, I mean explain, why I’m spending a lot of my free time learning a whole new way of typing words on a computer.
Finished reading: The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes 📚. This didn’t grip me in quite the same way as Circe by Madeline Miller, but it was a good to read the Oedipus story from a female perspective.
Finished reading: Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott 📚. It took me a few chapters to get into the genre-bending style, but then I was all in, and raced through the rest. Can’t wait to read the next two books!
New post: Building a Corne low profile keyboard
Some details (plus backstory) about my recent foray into keyboard building.
I can’t quite believe it, but I have made myself a keyboard. And it works! Full post to come at some later point, when I’ve recovered from the shock of it working first time…
I wanted a cheap project to practice through the hole soldering on so this Conway’s Game of Life kit from The PiHut was perfect. The plan is to make a keyboard kit next.
Guess who taught herself to solder from YouTube and has soldered her very first project? Quite proud 😊
Bella is keeping my trackpad warm. She kindly left me a small corner to work with.
I should really take my keycaps off more often: good lord there was a lot of cat hair lurking under there. I know some people fit o-rings to damp the sound of keys, but the sumptuous bed of cat hair under each cap was doing a similar job for free!
On a whim, I bought some Gateron Clear key switches (linear, 35 g) and installed them on the main alphanumeric keys of my Ergodox EZ yesterday. I love them already: very smooth and light, and they make typing feel much more serene.
It took me so long to write that last post stenographically (and I dropped back to qwerty for the links). I’m at about 3 WPM in normal usage, with a lot of looking up, but it’s mesmerising when whole words pop out when you mash several keys together!
I’m having fun trying stenography, using Plover and a layer on the Ergodox EZ. It is a bit brain bending, but great fun!
New post: Ginger jeans 4.
In which I make my fourth pair of Gingers on my new Pfaff sewing machine, and manage to pull the slider off the zip (again).
Finished reading: Underland by Robert Macfarlane 📚. So lyrical and curiously moving in places. I don’t read much non-fiction, but this was a page-turner.
Getting there. The complicated bits are done. 🧵
Ah, Sunday morning. Chopin nocturnes on the speakers and a new pair of Ginger jeans under the needle of my new (to me) Pfaff. Bliss. 🧵
New post: Apparently I collect sewing machines now.
I’ve added another machine to my accidental collection, and it’s a Pfaff. But I can stop any time!
New post: Exporting references from Zotero to Tiddlywiki.
In which I expand on the rabbit hole that @jack opened up!
I blame @jack for pointing me to Soren Bjornstad and his Grok TiddlyWiki book. I’ve been messing around with TW to see if I like it better than org-roam. This weekend I wrote a Go/Keyboard Maestro workflow to export references and import with metadata as Tiddlers. Geeky fun!
Finished reading: London Rules by Mick Herron 📚
This is the 5th book in the Jackson Lamb series, which I have devoured. Jackson Lamb is my favourite anti-hero of all time. Herron is a fantastic thriller writer and these books tread a perfect line between action and comedy.
New post: Singing with nightingales.
We finally got to attend a Singing With Nightingales event, and it was an incredible and magical experience.
While in an interminable tailback on a motorway today, I spotted a sticker on a white van that made me laugh: “No pasties left in this vehicle overnight”.
New article: Creativity.
In which I reflect on the effect of deadlines on me in an attempt to better equip future me to cope with them.
I’ve just had most of my hair cut off for the first time in more than a year, and I can’t tell you how good it feels. I feel like myself again.
TIL (via Kate Davies), that in the 16th Century, the City of London had sock police, described as “sad and discreet” persons, who would go around checking that no-one was wearing the wrong kind of socks, as laid out by the sumptuary laws.
New article: Learning Go
After having fun building my Alfred Workflow for Johnny.Decimal systems, I’m really getting in to Go. It’s a lovely programming language which is friendly for beginners, but powerful enough to do some very impressive things.
I got us a tree tag for our wedding anniversary lately through a charity (Heart of England Forest) which is planting a new public forest. While we were looking for our tag, I found this one which brought a lump to my throat. What a lovely thought ❤️
Johnny.Decimal fans on macOS: I’ve just realeased the first public version of my Alfred workflow, alfred-jd! 🎉🥳
It’s still very new, so make sure you have backups before using - nothing bad should happen, but safety first 👷♀️🥽🧯
I know there are some Johnny.Decimal fans here, so you may be interested in an Alfred workflow I have been developing. I’ve been having huge fun with Go to write it!
New post: Digital spring clean
In which I talk about switching banks to one that doesn’t have an online banking system fossilised in the 1990s, and setting up a Johnny.Digital system for my personal files.
Hornbeams.
There’s a house near us which always has spectacular Christmas decorations. This year, they have left the tree and sleigh out and decorated it for Valentines Day and now Easter. Eggs and bunnies hanging on a Christmas tree is confusing!
Oh, nice! Ulysses also lets you make scheduled posts to Micro.blog, as well as saving to a draft.
Great to see that Ulysses now enables you to post to Micro.blog! I also like using MarsEdit for that, but it’s nice to have options, particularly as this means you can post from Ulysses iOS.
Woohoo! I got my first COVID-19 vaccination today. I had to resist the temptation to high five the nurse who gave it to me 🙌 😷
My latest letter to nature: Falling tree.
After reading about HEY World, I had a whimsical idea to use it to write a series of love letters to the natural world. I’ve no idea if I’ll keep it up, but the first couple of letters are here. You can subscribe to it as an email newsletter, or get the RSS feed.
I had forgotten how hypnotic this track is. I haven’t listened to it for a while, but I’m celebrating getting my RasberryPi DAC connected back up again after some wifi issues.
Part of my digital de-cluttering has been to rationalise multiple email accounts into 2 hey.com accounts. I tried the service when it launched, but it didn’t click with me at the time. Now I really like it. It is making me feel more in control.
I don’t know why, but over the past week or so, I’ve been in a frenzy of digital de-cluttering and simplifying, and DIY fixing of long-standing issues in our house (busted pendant light fittings, wonky hinges, that kind of thing). It can be hard to know when to stop!
New post: Re-visiting poetry
On which I think about the way that the meanings of poems change throughout our lives.
I made a homemade Valentines card for Mr. B with a geeky touch.
This film is everything you might want from a Peter Strickland film: weird, creepy, funny, delightfully loopy, and visually arresting. I loved the whole thing from the skewed 1970s aesthetic, which reminded me of the satirical ‘Scarfolk Council’ publications, to the Nosferatu-like Department store manager. I think I’m going to have to watch it again to catch all the subtle detail on posters and so on in the background.
New post: Using the tab-bar in Emacs.
In which I get to grips with configuring the tab bar to provide a workspace-like environment.
Setapp continues to be my most valued subscription. Example: I had wifi issues and wanted to see whether my new router would solve. A quick download of WiFi Explorer, and I had the info I needed.
Yesterday I tried a couple of the Apple Fitness+ dance classes. I danced like someone who has checked really carefully that no-one is looking, I winged it a lot of the time, and I closed my rings. I can’t dance for toffee, but I had fun.
Conditions were perfect for my walk today, and the sky was a crisp pink-blue gradient.
New post: Cutting my own hair 😱
I woke at 5am this morning and looked out of the window at the pre-dawn snow. Just at that moment, a fox - a warm russet flame flicking across the snow - trotted down the road. It felt like a lovely gift for a Saturday morning.
Foggy morning walk from a couple of days ago.
Goodness, macOS Big Sur is buggy! First my external drive wouldn’t mount so I had to format it, and then I had to reset the SMC so that System Prefs would let me unlock the settings. Let’s hope stability improves over time.
I’ve always found expand-region really useful in Emacs… when I remember to use it, which is rarely.
That all changed for me when Henrik Lissner (developer of Doom Emacs) posted a clever key binding on Doom’s Discord server:
(map!
(:map 'override
:v "v" #'er/expand-region
:v "V" #'er/contract-region))
This is only useful for those using evil (Vim) bindings in Doom, but it is spectacularly useful because it uses the v binding for visual mode, in visual mode. This means that you can still hit v and then a movement command to select a word, sentence, block or whatever, but if you hit v repeatedly, it activates expand-region, selecting progressively larger contexts (e.g. the contents of a pair of quotes, then the contents and the quotes, then the sentence, then the paragraph, etc.). You can hit V (capital v) to reverse and contract the selection progressively.
This is genius because whenever I don’t quite know what I want to select, I tend to use visual selection. Now I can just keep mashing v until I’m happy with the selection, using V if I overcook it and want to reverse.
Moon caught.
