this weeknote is archived for the sins of being over 1 month old.

if you have good reason to read it, show anyway

Weeknotes 20

Welcome! The 20th weeknotes on the 20th day of the 20÷4th month of the 2024th year (greg.).

This week, the sorting is broadly "FONTS" and "NOT FONTS".

What have I been doing?

FONTS
NOT FONTS
THE END

FONTS

I went to a typeface event

This week, "Late: To the Letter" ran in Sheffield. There, there was:

a pen plotter, full with pen-plotter caretaker. I spent a while staring at the pen whizz around, asking questions about pens and SVGs.
a human typewriter... this one I took part in: it was a group of people, each with an assigned laser-cut foam letter and a black inkpad. An orator read out letters one-by-one and we ran up and stamped our letter on a large sheet, spelling out a message.
letraset: I pressed a few letters into some paper
a badge maker: I didn't use it, but I watched some people collage some small badges. It reminded me of my desire for a badge maker
chinese brush calligraphy. I didn't take part, because I was busy being a human typewriter, but it reminded me of a Japanese brush calligraphy set that I'd tried and gifted to an art-lover
font workshop interest. I told an organiser about my font workshop and they were quite interested in it, and said I should email them and they might run it. Fun!

I did some blackout poetry

This isn't exactly font based, but a theme is a theme. We took a passage and blacked out words until we'd either made a poem, or massacred the original intent of the author.

I mocked most of the Adafruit GFX library

For the Openbenches Train Sign, I want to be able to test the graphics without acquiring and compiling a microcontroller. To that end, I wanted to run the Adafruit GFX Library on Windows, so I could test the draw functions on Windows (i.e., rendering and wrapping text, drawing images), and then when happy with that, put it on a microcontroller.

However, Adafruit GFX is made for Arduino. Thus, it has a lot of #include <arduino.h> and similar lines. In my head, all it's doing is writing pixel values to an array-esque thing, so there's no reason it shouldn't work on Windows, or any platform. However, by default, it doesn't.

So, I decided the easiest route was to mock the library, by re-creating it. Here is my attempt. As of writing, drawing pixels and using the default font works. Using a custom font still eludes me, and is what the next effort will be.

I desire a smaller font so that more words can fit on the low-resolution display.

I will continue with this in due time.

I got letters...

...for my birthday. Apart from the typography-pun, this is also sectioned here as letters include an intimate type of font: handwriting. I greatly value physical post, and love to send and receive it always.

NOT FONTS

As much as I'd like to include everything as a sub-heading right here, my need for categorisation takes over.

I PLAYED...

...a bunch of games this weekend. It's been a while since some good video-gaming, so it was good for the brain.

I played Wildermyth

Wildermyth is a very interesting and fun game, where you control a few characters on an adventure. It's half combat and half procedurally generated story. I played with three others, and we each got our fair share of narrating funny voices and personal character developments.

It's a game I'll return to every few months to years, as it is always fun to make funny voices and laugh together.

I played Slipways

Slipways is a game I enjoy greatly. Lore-wise, it's a game of connecting planets to each other to give mutually beneficial resources. Practically, it's a game which greatly scratches an itch of connecting things together and making them spin and make happy noises.

I've been watching friends play it as well as play myself, and it has worked its way into some dreams. I think that might mean that's enough of it.

It's fun though.

I CREATED...

Some of a sleeve

At craft and laptop-free night at the hackspace, I started making a pair of sleeves from some light white fabric I found.

This week, I cut the sleeves into shape, and sewed them together. I hemmed and fed elastic through the top of one of them, so it can stay attached to my arm. Next, I'd like to elastic the other one, and then gather the sleeves around 2 or 3 times to make a "puffy" looking thing. I'm enjoying them a lot already.

A collage

I went to collage club, and made a collage with some "ale lovers", and some runners. Those were the two magazines handed to me that I cut from.

Some film photographs

Not really my creation per-se, but I got some film photographs developed. I'm going to ask soon if the camera shop has any physical photo albums. I've been looking for them for a while, and I haven't been able to find any.

I DIGITALLY...

Helped release lipu tenpo

The newest edition of lipu tenpo, nanpa jaki was created this week. I helped release it, by sorting out the toki in the issue, posting a social media post, and sorting out the print+post, which I have to submit a print order for tomorrow.

I did some work on gspread

I co-maintain gspread, a Python API for Google Sheets. There were some bugs and features hanging around in issues and pull requests. I sorted these into milestones and my co-maintainer made a minor release with them.

I made a GitHub randomiser

Not sure why I did this other than it seemed fun. If you visit this link, you'll get shown a random one of my GitHub repositories. If you refresh the link, it will be a different one.

https://server.alifeee.co.uk/github/html.cgi

It lives on https://github.com/alifeee/get-random-repository/. In theory, you could set it up for your own GitHub, on your own server.

The only place I've started using it is on my already-quite-full GitHub profile: https://github.com/alifeee. I might put a link on my website, in particular the SVG link, as this will be different whenever anyone visits.

I'd like to make a weeknotes graph

Like, a "similar topics graph". I'll represent what I mean.

weeknotes 7  factorio  fonts  crafts
weeknotes 6      |     fonts     |    bothies
weeknotes 5  factorio         crafts     |
weeknotes 4  factorio                 bothies

So, a system to show the travel of topics through my weeknotes, as I often speak of the same things week to week. If I wrote a small list for each (this one could be: "fonts", "train sign", "craft night", "collage", "lipu tenpo", "gspread"), then I could write some software which made some kind of graph, like the above. I'd probably want it to be HTML.

If I made one column per "tag", I could then "squish" the columns by moving each to the left if there is space for it. I could turn that "array" into an HTML structure fairly easily. I don't think it would take up too many visual columns. I'm not sure how to join lines between them though, which feels like the whole reason to do it. I'm sure it would be possible.

Maybe I'll do it when I discover an infinite time lifehack.

THE END

The final thing I did this week, which was chronologically the first as it happened last Sunday, was visited Spurn Point. In theory it's one of the most interesting coastal geographical features in the UK. In practise, you are distracted from that point by the nigh-infinite caterpillars, and a big lighthouse. Very neat.

Until next quarter-rotation of the moon.

Eat well.

alifeee

Comments

Email me :) -> alifeee.web@outlook.com or message me on any social :) -> https://linktr.ee/alifeee