Weeknotes 49

Not much time. Must rush before ---

...oops, been interrupted. Anyway, will continue.

What have I been doing this week? in order of: the order I wrote them down:

• I continued Blummit
  • We continued with the charity hitchhike. It wasn't really a charity hitchhike afterwards, but so long as we said it was and pointed people to the charity, we could occasionally get a free bus.
  • We took a bendy bus! Very exciting. It felt fast like a tram, but had wheels, like... a bus. But, they'd tried to hide the wheels to hide the shame that it was actually a bus.
  • We got a hot water bottle refilled. The kind members of the household also gave us some fruit, including a mango
  • I saw an "only radio transmitter of its kind" in Western Europe. I found this out because I've been playing around with using OsmAnd (not sure what that stands for but it's an offline OpenStreetMaps viewer on Android), instead of (or to supplement) Google Maps, and it has a neat feature where you can toggle Wikipedia entries on the map. In Northern Ireland, there were a lot more articles on bombs and shootings than I'd expected.
  • We went to a museum about linen. We learnt a lot about the pipeline from flax to linen, and got to try out a spinning wheel, which I found very fun.
• I downloaded Spotify to look at my wrapped. My top song was one by Moondog. My second I can't remember. I haven't used Spotify since about September, but my music listening hasn't disappeared, and has instead been replaced by much more listening to BBC Radio 6 Music. So much that I wander through rooms of my house and it's playing in multiple of them.
• I wrote most of a blog post about hitchhiking. It's nearly done, and probably will be released this week. An interesting part of how I have started labelling blog posts (with 2024/12 in the URL, for example) means that all my "prototype" blog post ends up in a folder already labelled with a month. In a way, this is a motivator, as if I leave it too long, I'll have to move all the files (which really isn't actually that hard)
• I (was made) a very tasty broth
• I soldered a CO2 sensor together, based on the one I made in February-ish (https://github.com/alifeee/co2-monitoring), but a much tighter, more permanent construction this time (two circuitboards stuck together with double sided tape, with four wires soldered between them). Next time I'm at the hackspace, I think I'll repeat it, and then send them to a couple of friends who want to monitor CO2 in their households. I also modified my code to blink out the current CO2 levels on the in-built LED of the ESP8266 D1 Mini microcontroller, using https://github.com/RichardLangner/BlinkDigits. A bit easier than an LCD or 7-segment display! ;]
• I went to a gig. The music was fun.
• I shared a pizza
• I helped someone write a blog post for the hackspace: https://www.sheffieldhackspace.org.uk/learning-how-to-build-guitar-effect-pedals/
• I did some organising for the next hackspace month notes. I'm not sure when I'll write it, maybe mid-month, as end-of-the-month I think I will be very busy, and also out of the country (at CCC and beyond)
• Some topics were added to my previous weeknotes by a friend. Thanks! I've all-but given up on adding topics...
• I went to craft night! Someone new was there, and we chatted a lot. They were super nice! I spent the whole time making paper chains for the hackspace, and hung them up around the main room.
• I wrote two notes about geojson. They are https://blog.alifeee.co.uk/notes/making-a-geojson-file-from-a-csv/ and https://blog.alifeee.co.uk/notes/turning-a-list-of-geojson-points-into-a-list-of-lines-between-the-points/
• I used Termux on my phone. It was pretty neat, as I had a bluetooth keyboard, and it felt good to use a terminal on my phone, as I could do all the things I am used to doing on my computer terminal, but on the go. Further, I could use special termux-... commands to do phone-specific things, like get battery information as JSON, or send notifications to my phone. Pretty neat ;]. I'm still thinking of what useful shell scripts I could write that would be useful day-to-day to have on my phone. I have a few nice ones on my laptop/PC that feel enjoyable and productive (like quoting my clipboard or quick-cloning a github repository), but I'm not sure what I regularly do on my phone that could be automated. Perhaps something like stripping tracking parameters from links that I copy, but that's probably quicker to do manually
• I've been enjoying using sci-hub to get open-access research. Which is how it should be.
• I've been reading a lot of https://pluralistic.net/, as I do most weeks. I wonder how different myself and my opinions would be had I not been reading it for several months. I'd love to compare ourselves. Unfortunately, I cannot.

Soon, I should post a blog post about hitchhiking. Otherwise, I must buy an interrail pass (they're 25% off!), make some Christmas presents, and plan a nice amount of rest before my strangely-timed day-after-Christmas Europe trip.

Water your plants.

until next week.

alifeee

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