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Weeknotes 32

Good Day! We begin the weeknotes. We go until we get sleepy or demotivated. As is the pattern.

This month, the layout, picked from the random wheel of layouts that is the inside of my head, is:

word length

What did I do this week? I...

WORD
1. travelled
WORDS
1. folded paper
WORDS
WORDS
WORDS
WORDS
WORDS
WORDS
1. have been using a keyboard with my phone
2. added an event to the Open Tech Calendar
WORDS
1. observed the passing of the Unicode Emoji submissions deadline
THE END

1 WORD

travelled

I've been away from my house for 7 days, from Friday - Friday. It's good that I tell you that afterwards, as you now can't go and steal from me while I'm on holiday. Anyway, you can just ask and I'll give you what you desire.

2 WORDS

folded paper

I got given a few lovely patterned A4 sheets of paper, pre-folded into envelopes. They were from https://pigeonposted.com. I like origami. I drew a nice diagram for how to fold them, and now I can fold them out of ANY paper. You can't patent an idea. wait.

3 WORDS

visited a museum

I visited THIS MUSEUM IS (NOT) OBSOLETE in Ramsgate. It has no business being so far away from me, because it is a really cool museum. There are lots of synths, old computers, and old technology (the kind of things you'd love if you watched Technology Connections.

organised a gamejam

I am not the only one doing the organising, but my friends and I are going to do the GMTK 2024 gamejam next weekend. I'm pretty excited. It's extended to be a 4-day jam this year, but we're only going to do it over two days. Apparently, there's a special tag you can put on your game to say that it only took two days.

read about ActivityPub

Prompted by a question about the fediverse ("what's the format of the posts?"), I did a little reading about how ActivityPub works. I found https://seb.jambor.dev/posts/understanding-activitypub/ really useful to explain things. It's interesting how it works.

I also came across https://runyourown.social/, which is doing really good at convincing me to run my own social media. I might run a Mastodon instance for Sheffield...

...

brief interlude where I re-read https://runyourown.social/ and consider what would be needed to run such a server

...

Maybe I will. Maybe I won't...

4 WORDS

attended a family do

It was in Norfolk, in a large house. I had a fun time :)

visited Red Brick Market

I popped by again. Didn't buy anything. I still enjoy the concept of it hugely.

borrowed a badminton racket

I'd like to play occasionally. I talked to some friends and they said they would, so I'll organise a trip and a game sometime over the coming weeks.

found Notion quite annoying

I use https://www.notion.so/ to keep track of my projects, and a vaguely huge dump of information about my life. When I started using it, I found the features (databases, rich text, link previews) fun and exciting. Nowadays, I find them annoying, and would rather just have it all in plaintext, as that is both quick, and portable. For now, I stick with Notion because... everything is on there and it would be a task to migrate.

I should use Obsidian, I know...

5 WORDS

started packing up my room

I'm moving house this week. Things are going in boxes.

read lots of Terry Pratchett

Last Friday I borrowed The Colour of Magic and Guards! Guards! from the library. I read them on my travels. I enjoyed them.

Yesterday, I borrowed The Light Fantastic and Mort, which I plan to read.

I've not read Pratchett before (I did read a couple when I was about 10, but I don't really remember them), so I'm enjoying my time.

watched someone create stained glass

You know the tubes with the PVA stuff that you put on glass and it dries and it looks like stained glass? no? ok.

left a sticker in Ramsgate

[intentionally left blank]

engaged in third space tomfoolery

I went to the hackspace yesterday to screw around with a book (below). While there, as well as chatting to a very interesting and friendly new member, my friend arrived, and we went on an adventure around town and back to their house for tea. This was unplanned, and demarcates the reason I love third spaces.

thought about committing some code

I think BookWyrm (see below) is a really interesting idea. I think it's so interesting that I am quite enthused to help with some issues in the code. I don't feel I have a lot of time to, unfortunately, but it would be a nice thing to do, as I really believe in the project. And it interfaces with (the aforementioned) ActivityPub, so you can follow it on different social media! fun! can't do that with GoodReads...

didn't laser cut a book

I started doing it, but

a book is effectively a large chunk of wood, so the laser did not cut very far in
I got increasingly worried as I lasered a lot of paper of a distinct fire risk

(I wanted to make a cool secret compartment in a book. maybe I'll just use a craft knife)

attended a repair cafe meeting

A while ago I was looking into repair cafes. I really like the idea.

I found out there is one in Sheffield! It's https://www.harlandworks.co.uk/repair-cafe

Today I went to an organisational meeting (they skip August) in the cafe, to say hi and discuss various topics. It was very good, and all the people involved are very friendly and interesting. I might help with repairs, and I might help with more admin stuff, too.

applied to a coop hackathon

I applied to https://www.uk.coop/get-involved/campaigns/enabling-tech-and-digital/co-op-hackathon

didn't write a blog post

I should stop putting "negatives" in here. Oh well, I did it. Stop me, I dare you. I was going to write about CGI scripts. I still might. Every Sunday the desire to blog is satiated via the weeknotes, so the blogs reaching my actual blog dwindle. Sad, but true.

bought Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers

I bought https://purplemosscollectors.itch.io/dndg. It's a fun game.

6 WORDS

went to an artspace opening event

I went to Sheffield Artists' Maker Exchange's launch event for a short time. I found out some nice things. They're only looking for 10 members at the moment.

had my Factorio mod starred again

The GitHub for my proximity voice chat mod for Factorio was starred by someone else this week. It's fun to see that people are naturally coming across it. I hope they are enjoying it, I get no feedback if anyone actually uses it or if they're just looking at it for interest.

started using BookWyrm on Rambling Readers

I mentioned BookWyrm above. After a couple screens of scrolling down, I still think it's a neat idea.

I joined an instance hosted in the UK: https://ramblingreaders.org/

I really like that it's integrated with the fediverse, and you can follow my book tracking account using a normal Mastodon account! So much nicer than GoodReads, which I wanted to move away from for a while because of the whole "owned by Amazon" thing.

borrowed a map from the library

I didn't use it, but it's neat that I could have. I returned it yesterday.

found my GitHub history particularly empty

I usually peek at my GitHub graph (along with other things) to find inspiration for "what I did this week" to put here. It was quite empty this week. It makes sense I was away most of the week. There were a couple of small things, including a couple of issues I'd created for a blog project, and I reviewed some things for gspread. I've been thinking more and more of leaving GitHub; I might ask to join https://git.coop/. I may still use GitHub as a mirror and have code in two places, I'm not sure. They really have me hooked into their ecosystem...

7 WORDS

got a key to a new house

7 very short words, but a lot of meaning behind them. As mentioned above, moving house this week!

visited a large house in the country

pretty much sums it up

discussed a general meeting at the hackspace

Sheffield Hackspace currently has meetings once a year. I'd like to see it be a bit more regular than that, as I think a lot of ideas stagnate for a long time, and the space as a whole stagnates as such. I've been sharing this opinion with members of the space this week.

installed a new keyboard on my phone

I was enthralled to abandon https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/swiftkey because of privacy concerns. I installed a few keyboards, but only found one was able to replace most of what I wanted from an Android keyboard, which was https://keyboard.futo.org/. I've been using it for a few days, and I'm enjoying it. I might write a blog post about the other options I tried, but also I "might write" a lot of blog posts...

8 WORDS

have been using a keyboard with my phone

I got a bluetooth keyboard last week. While travelling, I used it on the train and other places, to type on my phone. I also used it today to type from bed. I enjoy it a lot. Not sure if it's able to replace a laptop yet, but close...

added an event to the Open Tech Calendar

I like the idea of- and ethos behind - https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/. There's a show and tell social this week with Creative Coding in Sheffield, so I added it to the calendar on there. Crowdsourced things are neat.

9 WORDS

observed the passing of the Unicode Emoji submissions deadline

I submitted a proposal for an anvil emoji in April: https://alifeee.co.uk/anvil/

The deadline for proposals ended last week. Soon, I'll have a look on the Unicode Consortium's document registry to see if my PDF has ended up on there.

They said that they would reply about the proposal by November at the latest. I'm excited to see what happens!

THE END

No more words. No more ideas.

Think of something that you value. Cast it from your mind.

Until next time.

alifeee

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