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M sent me a track to listen to on Spotify the other day - actually it was a link to a playlist, or so it appeared to me initially at least, but it was actually meant to be just a link to an individual track, which it was on second click - and I listened to it and I liked it. She sent it to me as it had vibes of Biffy, Pixies and someone else I couldn't put my finger on at the time and still can't…
Back in December, I posted about vibecoding (I'm really sorry) a new Pebble watchface, mainly to see how 'easy' it is to do this using an LLM that has ingested the SDK and knows how to structure code. I had some success and that blog post is here: Vibecoding my way to a Pebble watchface Fast forward a few months and I've been alpha testing the Pebble Time 2 ever since then - which was a bit rocky…
For this post I thought we'd take a nose around a cool little radio station - in celebration and recognition of the amazing Radio Survivor reaching TWO HUNDRED radio station visits over at their fantastic blog. If you've never seen it, it's a fantastic archive of tours and interviews at US college radio stations conducted by Jennifer Waits and it definitely stands as a formidable archive of…
Lately I've fallen into a habit of listening a small set of downloaded radio shows on my commute and I've been bad at passing on my recommendations. They're mostly very niche so I feel like I should shout about them. So this is me shouting! My standard go-to listens (particuarly for those early morning train rides) are shows from the wonderful NTS - I'm a subscriber - and they tend to be woozy…
For more than a decade I've been doing website admin work for the Katherine Mansfield Society. Initially from about 2013 it took the form of logging into their CMS and posting edits and updates. And then eventually in late 2020 this gave way to me taking on the website fully, creating a new Wordpress site while trying to archive the old site which was rich with content. The older website had been…
I know I said I would try and stick to one particular way of blogging so that I can embed the process and get good. Well, I realised last night that my current process relies on using github's codespaces, in a browser. I load up a webpage and it dumps me into a virtual machine running VS Code. I can do this from a computer nicely - but what about another device? Like... a mobile? Or a terminal?…
It's been a while since I stopped to reflect on my use of the Pebble watch I've been wearing daily since last July when the Pebble 2 Duo was relaunched. But it's not just one Pebble I've been wearing - I've actually now got two. I don't wear them both at the same time, mine you. In December I received an alpha test unit of the Pebble Time 2, a new, larger, colour Pebble. The Pebble 2 Duo I had…
A busy weekend, and part of it was occupied by me giving a talk on Charles Paget Wade to a room full of about fifty people. I think it went well! It was a lovely warm atmosphere and there were some good questions at the end which is always a nice sign of engagement. I rattled through my slides quite quickly - my eagerness to show people everything trips me up quite often - and inevitably missed a…
I received a kind message from a mutual friend (let's face it, if you're reading this blog, you'll know Peter) and he gently pointed out that my lack of an update had prompted him to wonder if my blog's RSS feed had broken. But no, I've just neglected to actually write anything recently. Part of the problem is I essentially forget how to update my website. As often as I write a blog post here, I…
I recently had a bash at vibecoding my first Pebble watchface, using the super helpful SDK, tutorials and a hefty dose of ChatGPT trial and error. Below is a Mastodon thread that should really have been a blog post. Resolving this week to vibecode my way to a functional Pebble watchface. Okay day one this has gone better than expected... Day two and a half or so: this morning's commute was spent…
Sometimes a new concept just clicks. Just the sum of various different things I've learned or figured out snapping into place at the right time. Sometimes it's a task I want to complete or a thing I want to test. Other times it's brought on by a software update or a new feature that makes me realise something that hadn't occurred to me before. And other times it's just learning that something is…
As usual, this blog post is nothing if not simply a way for me to check I can still remember how to update this website. I've taken down the hardcoded 'pi' link as I haven't been running the pi webserver for a while. This is partly because I got over the novelty of opening ports on my router and pointing to hardware in my own home that I can directly access on the internet. And that's because I…
Sometimes I just need to fire up Eleventy as much to remind myself which machine I'm using it on as to remind myself how to even do it. As usual, every time I sit down to upload a new post, I'm doing it in a slightly different way just for the love of playing with tools. I am a tinkerer. Not a writer. I like to muck about with tools and apps and processes and settings. HOW To wit: I'm writing this…
A brief round-up of recent things. MARNIE My favourite recent Marnie developments: she does this gentle pat-pat with her hand on my shoulder/arm when I pick her up and it's quite possibly the most adorable thing she's learned to do yet. This is in a world of adorable things she does. It's just the most reassuring little pat-pat and I have no idea why she does it. But it's lovely. ONE Marnie turned…
Had a lovely sunny weekend of first birthday parties (three of them!) in the park and some gardening. But I've also been metaphorically squirrelled away working on a little project I've been semi wanting to do for years now: set up a self hosted web server. Now that fast fibre and a fixed IP are both realities for me (not to mention a reliable connection in general!), and I had an old Raspberry Pi…
I took an impromptu daytrip to Tunbridge Wells yesterday with Marnie as it was our day together and I had a train ticket on my flexipass to use up and no other plans. Lovely weather. We basically just used it as an excuse to get out of the house, go for a train ride (Marnie loves a train ride) and an opportunity for a picnic in a park and an explore of a new one we'd not been to before. Daddy also…
A recent post from Ava caught my eye and made me reappraise my current approach to music consumption and discovery. Am I lazy music listener? Certainly I've become lazier, and aside from radio listening, I've drifted almost exclusively to consuming music via Spotify. Once in a blue moon I'll grab something from Bandcamp, but this is far from my default. Mostly I'll either hear something somewhere…
I noticed the description on my /about/ page of how I edit this site and upload it was slightly out of date - I no longer use VSCode or FTP. So I thought I'd update it, if only for my own benefit. I now pretty much exclusively write my posts (end edit config files and so on) in the terminal, or occasionally a text editor. These are saved as .md files, and then eleventy whizzes them up into HTML…
A brief post mainly for the RSS feed readers amongst you to say I've just added a whole new section to my website under /letters/ which is a concept I started three years ago over on an old neocities project. Basically I started writing letters which are formatted to look like... well, letters . I've just always loved websites that look like physical things and I always wanted a blog template that…
So this is quite amusing: I've got Termux running on my Pixel phone, which is in a cradle holding it up towards me, and I'm using a.. ten year old? fifteen year old? Bluetooth keyboard to fuck with it and type this entry and... it's a vibe! Cyberdeck? We don't need no stinkin' cyberdeck! Although they do look cool. From memory, this keyboard had a very slight lag or issue that meant it dropped a…
Desperately trying to remember the name of one particular member of the livejournal "a day in my life" (adiml) community on livejournal around 2008-2010. She was from Finland and either studied or worked at a university and posted fantastically detailed admil posts of her days. It also just reminds me how much I loved that community and how much I got from it. I don't want to forget those…
For reasons of pure experimentalism and just-because-I-can-ism, ive built my eleventy blog engine to run via a terminal emulator on my Android phone and it... seems to work? I think this is a win. update: obbiously in doing this I managed to knock my website offline due to a permissions issue to do with the file system used by termux. Hilarious. Lesson learned. Onwards!
Extremely meta and brief blog post that serves as 1) a reminder to myself how I achieved something and 2) potentially to help someone reading this (though it's unlikely). I run this website via eleventy, and I create the blog posts as .md -flavoured text files. They all have the following at the start of every file: --- title: "Creating a 'new blog entry' shortcut for creating blog posts in nano…
This will be one of the most boring blog posts I've ever written, but bear with me as it's mainly an aide memoir for me. A few years ago we bought a light fitting for the landing that has ten (yes, ten) individual lights, and hence needs ten individual lightbulbs. Not a problem, I thought, as we have been led(!) to believe that LED lighting lasts years and years where incandescent bulbs do not.…
I recently noticed, on separate occasions over a number of weeks, that the station clocks at two stations I use regularly were showing the wrong time, or just weren't working. Not the dot matrix train announcement signs - they're electronic and Just Work (Except For When They Don't) - I mean the big glorious round things with hands and Roman numerals. The one at Charing Cross station has the…