Gosh, it's been a whole six months and nothing on this blog except for "five books I enjoyed" posts. The winter was long and dark, I feel, and for a bit there it felt like doing anything outside of just existing and hitting the regular life commitments was a slog. We're well out of that, and I feel myself swinging back up - while I may not find myself inundated with energy, I do find myself with…
It's the time once again to write about books I've read. The new book-tracking format I mentioned last time is doing me well - I have half a blog post in draft form about the process of building small CLI tools for just this kind of job - and making it really easy for me to review which books I've read, and which I want to talk about. The past six months have been a real dive into genre fiction,…
I started using OmniFocus at the start of my postgraduate, many many many years ago. Now I'm looking at perhaps switching operating systems in the future, and I want my project list to come with me. Which means finally switching task managers. TaskWarrior is what I'm currently looking at. It's a CLi-based, open source task management tool which portable to basically any operating system, and has a…
Digital gardens have been on my mind for some time, but it's only recently that my own has really started to coalesce. So I thought I'd write about it a little. A digital garden, in essence, is a collection of linked pieces of writing. Maggie Appleton's useful summary of the term elaborates: A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date.…
Like a flash, it's the end of the year, and it's time for another of these run-downs. The last six months were charaterised by a number of quite chunky volumes, which means the list is a little less exclusive this time around. It also marks the first time I've got to use my new book logging framework, which I might have to write about some time. The Counte of Monte Christo - Alexandre Dumas . I…
This should have come out more than a month ago, but I sunk a lot of time in to redeveloping the site, and because my ability to use version control drops off a cliff past around 7pm (it seems), I never bothered to keep the activities of mucking about with the website proper and writing articles split. This marks the first of these posts since I decided to track my reading digitally [1] (as…
A quick housekeeping note, more than anything: this blog is now shifted over to 11ty ! I used to use nanoc , a ruby-based SSG for the site, and I've been doing that since, well, it feels like forever. However recently it's been feeling a little long in the tooth, escpecially as I start thinking about building out the garden and running some pre- and post-processing tasks. Shifting everything to…
Dear R––, I know that at the end of our last Fall of Magic campaign, you told me (paraphrased): I would like to play this game again, but I don't know I'll be able to because I don't think it'll ever be as good as that game. I'm writing this because I want to tell you that - as long as you find a group of folk who're on the same wavelength as you - you'll play games as good as that. There's a few…
While the north might be pulling itself out of Winter and into Spring, down here the opposite is occurring. The mornings are getting darker, the days are starting to shorten. Plants are still fruiting, but there's a sense of urgency, like they know what's coming. Ideal time for reflection. I've been reading a lot about websites recently. Specifically, I've been reading about what I'm going to call…
Multicast DNS (or mDNS) is a protocol that allows devices on a local network to publish (and be referenced by) their own addresses (eg computername.local ) rather than forcing everyone to resort to IP addresses (eg 192.168.1.52 ). It's pretty cool because: It's easier to remember your computer is at computername.local than it is to remember it's at 192.168.1.52 . While it's possible to set up your…