Weeknotes 19

I am slowly realising that writing these weeknotes makes me fall under the description of "blogs a lot". I often think that I do not blog a lot, as my blog is not the busiest place. But, I should not think as such, as I spend probably a couple hours every week putting "text on the Internet".

This week, we are going for a new order of events. I describe it as "the order that I remembered and wrote down what I did".

In order of "the order that I remembered and wrote down what I did", here is what I did this week...

I finished my bothie trip
I went to craft and laptop-free night
I tried to find an easy way to blog on mobile with images
I rewrote the CSS Naked Day website
I went to Hull, and...
I had a look at Pint of Science
I bought tickets for a font workshop
I scanned my hand-written weeknotes
I planned a picnic
I got some film developed
I got an XMPP account
I did some gspread maintenance
A card I sent to Australia arrived

I finished my bothie trip

You may notice/remember/be informed right now that my last weeknote was hand-written. I explain within why this was. The trip to Scottish bothies lasted until Wednesday this week. The missing segments of the trip included another stuff-laiden 13 km walk from the bothie, much learning about Crainlarich, and saying hello to a tiny lizard.

If the cosmic alignment of times and events were more fortunate (by the powers-that-be on the sun moving their intense solar storm forward by two days), we might've been sat on Loch Long to see the auroras that were visible in most of the UK on Friday. However, with tired legs and very comfy beds, we also probably would've missed it anyway...

I got back on Wednesday evening, with just enough time to go to...

I went to craft and laptop-free night

This week, I didn't do too much, as I very much had literally just got home, so I was just hanging around, socialising, and having a calming end to the boneless Wednesday. I tied some more trinkets into glasses chain hangers. If my ears were pierced, the number of things I would hang from them might be a force to reckoned with. We just don't know.

I tried to find an easy way to blog on mobile with images

I write my weeknotes about half the time on my phone and half on my laptop (currently laptop), depending on whether I feel like typing a lot, whether I want to lie comfortably in bed, or whether I'm actually near a personal computer at all.

When I started, I said that I wouldn't put images in, as the way I set it up seemed complicated, and I didn't want to deal with this. This is still true, and I still enjoy the constraint that a text-only medium brings.

However, it is an interesting problem, and one I see Lu considering a lot. I had a play around with some apps on my phone and found a slightly-convoluted-but-quite-doable way of adding images to a markdown file using a markdown editor (Markor), which can then be pushed to Git (using MGit on Android).

I rewrote the CSS Naked Day website

I enjoyed CSS Naked Day this year. I also enjoyed rewording some of the website to make it (in my opinion) clearer, or releasing more information. I also like contributing to random open source projects. So, when I was poking around the issues on their GitHub, one titled "Use Static Site Generator to generate the website" certainly caught my attention.

Eleventy was suggested as a static site builder, which I keep using to make websites (such as this one!), so I thought it would be neat to give it a go.

I gave it a go.

I didn't realise how popular CSS naked day was from 2006-2009. There are thousands of sites on those pages. I spent a while clicking random links on there to see how many websites from back then are still alive. It's not many, but some. I think it's an interesting list of personal websites.

Anyway, part of the change was putting each person in the list into their own file. I used a bash script at first, but this was problematic as you can't parse HTML with regex, so I switched to using BeautifulSoup in Python.

There were a few problems like

characters not being suitable for filenames
some names including "/" (also not suitable for filenames)
some names starting with "." (being hidden on UNIX file lists - not technically a problem but took a while to notice)
some names being duplicated so I had to append "_1"/"_2" etc.

But in the end I got all the thousands of old websites into the new static site builder. Sometimes, it took a while to build because there were so many tiny files.

Now, I forget that I did it until someone reads the pull request and responds to it.

I went to Hull, and...

I played badminton

Badminton is fun.

I laser cut a birthday card

I went to Hull Makerspace to say hi, and also designed and cut a card out of some plywood scraps. Last time I was in the Makerspace I had not used a laser cutter, and this time I was able to mostly do it all myself, so it was a good view of the confidence I've gained with a laser cutter.

I'd like a Hull Bus Sign

Hull Makerspace has a few old bus signs that I've hacked into before. Since I seem to be getting into putting things on train and bus signs, I am interested in acquiring a bus sign, that I could use in art installations, for example.

I had a look at Pint of Science

At the start of next week it's the Pint of Science festival, where scientists run talks in pubs. It seems to be happening all over Europe, which is fun. I had a look at the events near me, and I've noted down the ones I could go to. If I have the energy, I will go to one.

I bought tickets for a font workshop

Hang on, I'm supposed to be the one running font workshops? Well, other people can too! There's an event about type and fonts in Sheffield this week, and as someone who keeps running font workshops and font talks, I thought it would be interesting for me to go.

p.s., I'm running a computer font making workshop at EMFCamp!!!

I scanned my hand-written weeknotes

I used a physical scanner on a printer to scan last week's weeknotes. I could have taken photos with my phone "as a scanner", but I like using technology for what it's designed for. Plus, it feels novel in some way, and there's a sense of having to go somewhere to "scan something in" (I tried to go to a library, but it was closed, so I did it at the hackspace.)

I planned a picnic

I'm having a picnic for my birthday. It should be very good.

I've found a lovely park to do it in, which has everything I could desire apart from a stream (which is quite difficult in Sheffield, a city of five rivers).

I got some film developed

We took a disposable film camera for the Scottish bothies adventure. I went to a camera shop and asked for some physical prints. They should arrive in a few days and I can go and collect them.

The systems and processes make me want to get into film photography, and develop pictures (assigning more of a sense of importance and meaningfulness to photography), but... I don't feel I have the time for that at the moment. Maybe later.

I got an XMPP account

A friend was telling me about XMPP. They had set up a server and client on their server. This week, they set me up an account. I haven't logged into it yet, as I need to download a GUI client, and I haven't really been at home.

I did some gspread maintenance

I'm still maintaining gspread. I organised some issues into milestones this week, and cleared out my GitHub notifications.

A card I sent to Australia arrived

[sic]

I must now disappear to help upload the latest lipu tenpo (or perhaps to go to bed).

Live well & laugh long.

alifeee

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