New post: Exploring desktop Linux; Part 4

I’ve been tweaking hardware and software and making myself at home on Linux.

New post: Describing beauty

In which I try to describe a painting in words, and probably fail because it is difficult.

I saw this and immediately thought of @jean but I think many of us could use a video of a Parisian guinea pig called Dindin enjoying a Debussy piano recital.

youtu.be/2fpIa30D6…

New post: Exploring desktop Linux: Part 2

In which I figure out Aylur’s GTK Shell and how to play my music files.

Finished reading: Artificial Condition by Martha Wells 📚This series keeps getting better.

Finished reading: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 📚I wasn’t sure if this was too close to ‘what could have been’ in our own pandemic to be enjoyable, but ultimately I found it uplifting.

I just came across my Corel Linux Tux toy in a corner at work. A blast from the past as I got it with the CDROMs to install the distro if I remember correctly.

New post: Exploring desktop Linux

In which I talk about buying a mini PC and experimenting with Linux to figure out whether I could switch from macOS full time for my personal computing. More to come over the next few months I am sure!

Finished reading: Death and Fromage by Ian Moore 📚

New post: Devilish fun with a modeless modal editing mode.

In which I mess about with devil-mode in Emacs.

Finished reading: The Sussex Downs Murder by John Bude 📚Very much a book of its period (Golden Age detective fiction) but enjoyable.

Despite all that, I had a really nice time sewing, but I am a bit pre-occupied with where the end of that broken needle ended up, as I can’t find it 😬

You know those ‘Site Safety’ boards reading ‘Number of days since last accident’? I think I need one of those for sewing which reads ‘Number of days since all the pins spilled on the carpet’. Current count: 0. Perhaps also, ‘Number of days without a sewing machine needle breaking’ (also 0).

New post: On the ‘Emacs From Scratch’ cycle

Here I go round again…

Finished reading: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus 📚Loved this: it had strong Mrs Maisel vibes, which is a great thing in my opinion.

Finished reading: Death and Croissants by Ian Moore 📚This was a fun read.

New post: Spinning on the Electric Eel Wheel e-spinner

I’ve bought an e-spinner and have been having huge amounts of fun spinning yarn with it.

Such a good morning: I spun my first 30g or so of Jacob fleece on my new Electric Eel Wheel 6.1 e-spinner, listening to May Day/Beltane themed folk music by Lisa Knapp, Goblin Band and others. Bliss. #handspun #spinning

Day 30: hometown (well, kind of). And now it is home time. #mbapr

Day 29: drift #mbapr

New post on ‘but she’s a girl…’: Wolfwalkers

I review a second viewing of the Cartoon Saloon animated film (and cry. Again).

Day 28: community #mbapr Ozzy the mechanical bull has become part of the community since the Commonwealth Games.

Day 27: surprise #mbapr. (Trying this again) We were surprised, when turning a corner in this ‘twitten’ in Lewes, to come across Virginia Woolf’s windmill, which she and Leonard converted to live in.

Sigh. Photos are not appearing in posts again, despite apparently uploading ok? I feel as if I should just post the accessibility description and let everyone imagine what the photo might by have looked like 😋

Ok, where has Superkey been all my life? Elegant, beautifully functional, and an insta-buy from me.

Day 26: critter #mbapr. This one has been ‘helping’ me work from home today.

Day 25: spine (we call her Spines)

Day 24: light #mbapr

Day 23: dreamy #mbapr. The castle of light at night, Lewes, Sussex.

Day 22: blue

Day 22: blue #mbapr

Day 21: mountain (well, not quite, but the best I can do in the Midlands) #mbapr. This is British Camp, an Iron Age hill fort in the Malvern Hills.

Day 20: ice #mbapr

Day 19: birthday #mbapr

Day 18: mood #mbapr

Day 17: transcendance #mbapr

Day 17: transcendence #mbapr

Day 16: flaneur #mbapr. I didn’t go out forr my lunchtime wander planning to take photos, but spotted these spring flowers and paused.

Day 15: small #mbapr. Much smaller than the real thing!

New post on ‘but she’s a girl…’: The joy of folded pyjamas

I have become the sort of person who irons their pyjamas and then folds them carefully every day. Who even am I any more?

Finished reading: Black Summer by M. W. Craven 📚Another pacy read.

Day 14: cactus #mbapr

How did I not know that Netlify had its own image CDN which can resize images on the fly? I had been looking for an external service, but they all seemed to be built for huge commercial sites, not tiny weeny blogs. Anyway, I tried it and it seems to work well!

Day 13: page #mbapr

Day 12: magic #mbapr

Maybe some people think that the coins will magically grant their wishes?

Day 11: sky #mbapr

Finished reading: The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers 📚 What a beautiful, moving end to the series. I found some of the later scenes quite overwhelming. I think we need more books like this where characters - however imperfectly - try hard to understand what it is like to be the person they are talking with.

Day 10: train #mbapr

Day 9: crisp #mbapr (one from 2017)

Day 8: prevention #mbapr

Day 7: wellbeing #mbapr When I am anxious (as I am today), I find coding oddly soothing. There are rules, there is order, and if all else fails, you can mark something !important.

Day 6: windy #mbapr

Day 5: serene #mbapr

Day 4: foliage #mbapr

Day 3: card #mbapr Mr Bsag knows my relationship to chocolate very well.

Day 2: flowers #mbapr

Day 1: toy. Mr B spotted some kids zooming around in this shopping cart a few days ago. #mbapr

The clocks have gone forward, and our kitchen wall clock (that we need to use a step ladder to adjust) has gone back to reading the correct time. Ish. Who says laziness doesn’t pay?

Somebody is chilly today.

I’ve been playing around today with Nitro the RAW photo library/editing app for macOS (with an iOS version on the way). It’s really good: a nice workflow, flexible, easy to use, but a lot of power too. It’s also very reasonably priced, with options to pay once or subscribe.

Well, this is fun: The Mortimiser, generating names to Bob Mortimer’s formula. My favourite so far is ‘Wolfgang Sideboard’.

I’ve been off with ‘flu this week, and not for the first time, I’ve wished that there was some setting on the Apple Watch to tell it that I’m sick, to pause all the ring closing nags and somehow put the fitness stuff on pause. Counter-productive when I should be resting.

Finished reading: Dagger of Death at Honeychurch Hall by Hannah Dennison 📚Good fun, though a lot of characters to keep track of.

Ignore me, just testing I can post now…

I love people, but I find face to face (or Zoom) time exhausting. 5 back to back contact hours yesterday wiped me out waaayy more than 7+ very focused grant writing and budget creation hours today. Both required a big effort but only the first made me want to crawl into a quiet cave afterwards.

I made a /now page.

I forgot to post this on Wednesday - it was an incredible sunset.

Finished reading: All Systems Red by Martha Wells 📚 Loved this and will seek out the next books in the series. Not what I was expecting, but in a great way!

I am wrestling with an irritating tech problem. I have a script which fetches webmentions using the webmention.io API. It works perfectly when run locally. Then a GitHub Action runs this script automatically on a schedule. It errors each time, with an invalid response from webmention.io. I’ve checked that the token is correct, and double checked the scripts till I am blue in the face, but I can’t figure out why it is not working.

This is my solution to Bianca sitting on top of my keyboard mat (and therefore on top of my keyboard). Turns out that if you build it (a cat-sized rectangle), they will come 😄

As part of my ongoing tweaking, I have finally entered the 21st Century and upgraded my fruitbat avatar in my profile from a 40px to a 400px version. Still the same original from the 1911 edition of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.

I’ve been pottering with my site, having a minor revamp (that ancient Twitter link had to go!) and adding IndieWeb features. I’ve also signed up for omg.lol which I will gradually add more to, and their Mastodon instance.

It’s Friday, so it’s peanut butter sandwich day. I don’t have particular foods I habitually eat on other days, but I like the clear signal to myself that the weekend is approaching. Plus, I really like peanut butter so would eat it every day of if I didn’t artificially restrict myself.

I’ve been having a fun Sunday pottering with my ‘macroblog’, trying to add Webmentions. I think have all the moving parts assembled, but trying to send a webmention from here to one of my articles doesn’t seem to have produced anything in the Webmention.io dashboard. Patience, I guess?

Finished reading: Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner 📚 Funny, poignant, joyful, and a brilliant feminist book.

New post: Productivity rethink

In which I discuss a change in my tools and workflow, prompted by a trial of Sunsama, and the release of OmniFocus 4.

I’m really loving this book. So many bits of wry humour.

Finished reading: The Puppet Show by M. W. Craven 📚I wasn’t sure if this was going to be too gruesome for me. Thankfully, those parts were not too frequent, and the excellent characters and pacy plot made it very enjoyable.

Today’s sewing music is Han’s Zimmer’s soundtrack to Interstellar. Grading seams has never felt so epic!

New post: Christmas Crafting

In which I talk about my sewing and knitting activity over Christmas.

Apparently I’ve adopted yet another hobby (English paper piecing), simply in order to use the offcuts and ‘waste’ from one of my other hobbies (garment sewing).