This is a collection of my notes. If you use a feed reader, you can subscribe!
My partner treated me to a couple of days stay in the Tokyo Station Hotel for my birthday. Weโre in the south dome, and I can see the gates and folk come and go from up here. I donโt know how they did it, but itโs totally silent here. Absolutely no station noise at all!
A couple of weeks ago I took part in an unofficially record breaking (number of participants) hackathon, with around 6000 others as part of a work summit.
Voice interfaces are so bland. I want Hetfield doing the beasts-under-your-bed voice from Enter Sandman.
Iโm in a queue for swag in the summer evening sun at a company event and the person in front of me says something including โโฌ500โ. It took every ounce of strength not to shout โYOU WONT SEE PENNY ONE FROM ME YOU SLAGโ in a cockney accent. Nobody would get the reference and I would definitely be fired.
Iโm in Toronto for Shopify Summit.
Over recent years thereโs been a growing population of rooks to complement the jackdaws, magpies, and crows in my neighbourhood(and very occasionally a jay in the nearby cemetery). I think the rooks are my favourite though. Theyโre extra shaggy and have interesting calls.
Good grief. Appleโs big integration of generative machine learning models into the OS is impressive, but the energy overhead is going to be staggering. I wonder if itโll all be powered by renewablesโฆ #wwdc
I got a Keychron K3 Pro through work and I absolutely adore it. Itโs a joy to type with and sounds satisfying without being too noisy. It came with linear switches, which I donโt usually use.
One of the best things about living in Brighton (UK) is the density of pubs.
After a year and a half working on Scala 2 applications, I've gone from enamoured to jaded. It's proof that smart people can design extremely stupid things.
Oh, you want an example?
Try 0L until Instant.now.
It's a range, right? It's the interval of long integers, containing the numbers , so it's completely expressible as a pair of longs.
BUT NOT TO SCALA. Scala is like fuck you there aren't enough regular ints to make this long int range.
So, so stupid.
In 2009 I moved to Japan for my first postdoc position. I was still living like a student, so I got a room in a foreigner house. When I moved in, I didn't know what to expect and my Japanese was basically non-existent. Fortunately for me, everyone living there at that time spoke English as a second language. Unfortunately for them, Estuary English is a really odd accent and to them I was just a weird guy drinking tea in a bathrobe making very English noises. Eventually I realised and adapted.
Inspired by Chris Newtonโs work on captioned images in Markdown, I decided to alter rendering of images both to add an optional caption, but also to include alternative formats and scales using <source> elements. I was previously doing this all by hand with inline HTML and it somehow hadnโt occurred to me!
I accidentally took a photo of a beeโs arse.
I was gonna blog about my time co-organising and attending IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024, but instead I've spent the evening debugging and fixing the webmention dispatcher I 100% perfectly authored and broke at some point.
I spent most of Dune: Part Two trying to get rid of a persistant earworm in form of Fatboy Slimโs Weapon of Choice. If you know, you know.
I walked the Under Cliff Walk between Brighton Marina and Rottingdean last weekend.
Group photo for #IndieWebCampBrighton day 1.
I finally found time to visit Ikigai Coffee in Brighton. It seems like the baristas in all the other places rave about it, and I can see why. The coffee is amazing.
Iโve been solving #AdventOfCode23 with Swift this year, itโs not been completely smooth sailing, but I really enjoy the language.
Hello #IndieWeb enthusiasts. Iโm holding an unofficial Homebrew Website Club at the Lord Nelson Inn near Brighton station tomorrow evening. Iโll be there around 17:30, wrapping up around 20:00. #ffconf folk most welcome!
Iโll post more information when Iโve found a spot, but if you look for a balding dude with a beard and a dubious waxed moustache the odds are good that youโll find me.
Big skies over Brighton these days.
I made a cheesecake the other day.
I got to see Pip Blomโs first ever acoustic set at Resident Records in Brighton. It was amazing fun!
A high fibre diet promotes regular shit-posting. This lad installed ours today.
Iโve only been away on business since Sunday, but I miss my family so much. Thank goodness Iโm on the way back.
Toronto at dusk.
Jet lag has its perks! Up before sunrise for a coffee at a nice little place called Fahrenheit in downtown Toronto.
Iโve arrived in Toronto on business, and the hotel has pie.
Unexpected upside to having a mouse problem in the neighbourhoodโฆ a falcon just perched on our garden wall! Unfortunately I wasnโt fast enough to snap a photo of it.
Text should be hidden behind a warning.
This talk on documentation here at #BrightonRuby by Kaitlyn Tierney is gold. Iโll definitely use some of these tips for my personal site.
Iโm tantalisingly close to replacing LaTeX statically rendered to SVG with MathJax with presentational MathML. Itโs bulkier to write, but not difficult. Browser rendering (chrome seems quirkiest) isnโt quite there yet though.
Iโve been trying to get a photo of our local rook for months. It doesnโt stay put for long, and the light is usually all wrong. Finally I got this while eating breakfast just now.
Iโm on a BA flight, somewhere over the Bearing Sea, and BA have decided to enable free streaming of the coronation over Wi-Fi. Also they gave me a packet of Eton Mess flavour popcorn.
The one issue I have with my iOS shortcuts flow for posting images to my personal site (and by extension mastodon) is that the input box for alt text appears over the image Iโm posting, so I have to remember what the image looks like. Not a problem on a tablet or larger device because I can do it side by side, but I mainly do it from my phone since itโs also my camera.
Yesterday I visited the Hikawa Maru in Yokohama. Itโs a museum now, but started life in the โ30s as a luxury liner. I recommend it. Anyway, I took this photo at 12:05. Five minutes earlier the horn went off next to my head and I nearly shit myself.
Not a whistle.
I love it when I find a good spot for a coffee. This one has it all. Fairly calm and quiet. Close to the museums in Ueno, so some foot traffic for people watching. Trees. Shade.
Now Iโm in the Hitachino Nest Brew Lab in the converted Manseibashi Station arches. Itโs full of is Western Folk and blasting English pop music from ten years ago but itโs still pretty good in here. Ironically I was at the actual brewery in Ibaraki yesterday.
Next up, Kanda Matsuya. This is a highly regarded soba restaurant which I walked past every weekday for two and a half years and never got around to trying. Very tasty.
High on the list of places to see which I missed before was Kanda Myojin. I know, shameful given how important it is.
I'm on my own in Tokyo for a few days (back from the countryside). I arrived early this afternoon, and I'm allowing myself just the remaining hours of today to visit old haunts.
I might allow myself a bit more time though, toward the end. While most of my time is set aside for some site-seeing of things I missed back when I lived here, I think it's important to just do nothing in a place to really take it in.
Absolute scenes.
Through the power of โจphysics โจmy son managed to throw a stone at his own head.
Iโm at my in-laws, and the place is wonderfully remote after a week spent in Tokyo.
It's been a few years since I was last in Japan, and my phone now supports Suica for travel and low value purchases. It's really, really good. My only complaint is that if I want to use my watch the readers are all on the wrong side of the train turnstiles.
Posted from a plane somewhere probably over Nepal.
Last time I visited Japan (about four years ago!) mobile data was kind of a pain in the ass. I would rent a little mobile wifi hotspot. This time it looks like eSIMs are so well supported that I'm just going to use my phone.
That doesn't sound like a lot but it'll be huge. It means my partner and I can always be connected, even when we're off doing different things. Those hotspots run hot too (I guess the clue is in the name), so I always had to plug them into a battery, which meant I had to carry a bag (not enough pockets for all the things). This way I'll be able to enjoy my time there as if I live there again.
I went to see Devin Townsend and his touring band play at the Bexhill De La Warr Pavilion on Tuesday. It was a good concert, even by his standards.
Ever since I figured out how to build monochrome (black and white or any other pair of colours) PNGs Iโve been thinking about hiding secret messages in the unused bitsโฆ
Monochrome PNGs have a bit depth of 1 (when encoded efficiently), which means that each pixel only needs one bit. Each row of the image is an integer number of octets though, so when the number of pixels in a row isnโt divisible by 8 you get some unused padding bits at the end.
Testing tweaks to my plain note shortcut.
I should probably make some sequence diagrams. My setup is a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine, but it's surprisingly robust and really convenient to use. For example, sharing photos happens right in the iOS photos app because shortcuts integrates into sharesheets. #indieweb
I'm really enjoying my POSSE setup. I publish to my micropub endpoint using my own iOS shortcuts for photos or study sessions (as events). For plain notes and bookmarks I typically use Omnibear.
The micropub endpoint pushes to a repository on GitHub, and an Actions workflow picks them up and syndicates photos, notes, and bookmarks to Mastodon. The workflow is fast enough that stuff frequently reaches Mastodon before Netlify has finished building my site. #indieweb
Word gets aroundโฆ
A pop up gallery below Brighton station.
Last night we went to see Mogwai at The Brighton Dome. Just amazing.
One of the doves (they fledged last year) is roosting near us again this year.
An example of a more pragmatic approach to image uploads, for example, is the mastodon API. You still have to use a separate multipart request for an image, but the description (alt) text accompanies the image as an additional field. I think you can probably use the same image (and by extension its alt text) for multiple posts if you want. This fits because alt text is descriptive, so it shouldn't depend on the context the image is used in. #indieweb
I get why microformats documents came to look like this. It comes from their roots as data embedded in HTML. But it's not very pragmatic. Why would a document have more than one name or content? Why would photo (singular) be used for a plural field. It's all out of whack. #indieweb.
I love the #indieweb, but the aforementioned micropub thing isn't the only friction. JSON encoded microformats-2 documents are just plain weird. Everything is an array for some reason. Unnecessarily complex to consume. We can surely do better...
One pain in the ass thing about micropub is that there's no way to send photos and content together in a single request and include alt text. It can only be done with a multipart request to a media endpoint for the photo and a JSON request to the regular endpoint. Why not allow both in a multipart request? #indieweb
Photos never do a sunset justice, but this was a magnificent one.
I may have a problem.
I'm vain, so I have one domain for my personal site, and another for shortlinks. The personal site generates a text file, which the build of the shortlinks site uses when it builds.
I had Netlify set up to trigger a build of the shortlinks site after the personal site builds, but most triggers were redundant (I don't have them for notes etc.).
I decided to replace the hook with a build plugin. https://github.com/qubyte/qubyte-codes/blob/main/plugins/update-shortlinks/index.js
I've run out of time to publish it this year (still 2022 here for almost an hour), but I have a full year of language study sessions (special micropub posts with durations in) to crunch the numbers for. Should make for a few interesting plots!
Work in progress render of revision 2 of my custom split mechanical keyboard.
Another syndication test. This is a photo of a new pedestrian bridge close to where I live.
Iโm testing syndication of notes from my personal site to mastodon, so hereโs a photo of an icicle.
A sample of the Christmas cards for this year. They were rushed, and certainly minimalist, but Iโm happy with the result.
I designed and built a keyboard! This is build for my comfort (despite how it looks). I designed it from the PCB and plates up! It uses kailh choc switches for a low profile, and a QWERTY variant of Miryoku to minimize finger and thumb movement.
I built a keyboard. Hopefully it's more practical than it looks.
GitHub sent me a one-time donation as part of their thank you to OS contributors to software GitHub uses (who have their sponsors dashboard set up). I originally set it up in hope that someone would send me the occasional buck or two for a coffee. That never happened (at least not yet), but $550 as a one off makes up for it!
This cat is attempting to be adopted by us and is in no way subtle about it.
I live so close to this countryside, but rarely take time to visit. Itโs the perfect weather for it today.
ๅค่ชญ time! First up, ใใใใพใซใใง
I bought the keycaps.
I'm using Safari for personal use these days. I wanted to use omnibear for micropub stuff, so I compiled the JS (a normal build step for it), and then ran the command below. The only change I had to make was to add a description to the manifest.
xcrun safari-web-extension-converter /path/to/my/extension/
In Safari, the Allow Unsigned Extensions option must be checked. Xcode generates a wrapper application for omnibear. After booting it, you can quit it and go to Safari -> Preferences -> Extensions to enable the extension. I'm posting this note using it!
I finally caved in and ordered myself parts for an ortholinear keyboard. I've gone with a Preonic through Drop, and paired it with Holy Panda X switches. The wait means it'll be a nice birthday present for myself!
I guess the reason for rolling my own webmention receiver is that I don't want to rely on services I don't manage or pay for. Now, an argument could be made that I'm putting everything on Netlify, so my eggs are all in their basket. My counter to that is that the functions I'm writing fairly portable. All I'd have to do is wrap the functions in a little server. So, the important part is to own the logic! Of course, there's also the fun part of reading a spec and implementing it.
This afternoon I'm playing with webmentions again. I've decided to implement my own endpoint and migrate away from webmention.io (which is fine, I just want to build my own).
First concert since December 2019. Back then it was seeing Devin Townsend. This time it was seeingโฆ Devin Townsend. This time was stripped back and very tight. They played some songs I never thought Iโd see live, like Dynamics and Almost Again. We got upgraded to a box in The Royal Albert Hall too.
A bridge being built close to where I live.
I found an old picture of me holding peanuts.
A caterpillar.
A little autumn weather isnโt putting folk off the sea.
An interesting path close to home.
Feels good to wander around Brighton.
I made an excellent banana bread the other day. No sourdough involved though.
I made some sourdough hot cross buns!
Sourdough brioche. About 25cm in diameter.
I finally found a use for that physics PhD.
Itโs good! I got lucky!
My first sourdough loaf!
The sourdough starter is finally ready to use! It seemed to go a bit dormant, so I fed it some rye flour and it seems to have done the trick! The rubber band marks where the top was at its last feed six and a half hours ago.
The sourdough starter is growing!
First batch of white chocolate and macadamia nut cookies!
After a day Iโm supposed to discard half the sourdough and feed the remainder. This is the discard, and itโs already showing some signs of activity!
I began a sourdough starter yesterday. Due to a lack of whole wheat flour I used 50:50 very strong white flour and buckwheat flour. Iโm hoping the latter will donate the yeast!
Want: Recipes to label their ingredients in groups, so I can keep them together in the same bowls and save on washing up. Also good for knowing when things need to be ready.
From yesterday: Vegan buckwheat pancakes with caramelised banana, chai spiced coconut cream, coconut chips, and cacao nibs. Eaten at Black Mocha in Brighton.
Rainbow sunset with Venus.
Fox in the Pavilion Gardens.
No context conference slide.
Reminder for later... Paths are predicable enough in my setup that I can improve the netlify config to apply headers only to HTML by batching routes with wildcards.
Morning mist over the Sussex Countryside.
Next thing to do: add handling for h-reviews so I can rate mince pies.
Work in progress.
๏ผๆฅๆฌ่ชใง๏ผๆๅใฎใใผใใ
Testing out syndication of a note from my blog.
Between Lewes and Newhaven by train.
An interesting local mural.
Another nightmarish thing my partner bought.
Versioning edge case discovered on the Node.js website.
Hideous gnome.
The sea.
I'm not a huge webpack fan, but I'm wondering if I might change my own mind my porting my static site generator to it. As it stands my generator tries to be as efficient as it can be, but only for a single shot compilation. It doesn't cache artefacts. It looks like webpack, with a custom loader and plugins, might provide the necessary mechanics to make incremental builds while writing a blog post much faster.
Originally I was going to do a sort of dark-battenberg theme for dark mode on my blog, but now I'm rethinking. Since more and more devices are beginning to use OLED screens, I want dark mode to mean "mostly completely black" to save some energy on those devices.
I wrote a while back about how promises and event emitters in Node.js can play badly together. Since then, Node and JS have changed enough that I should write a follow up post.
I have a real completionist streak to me, which is a lot of fun as it interacts with IndieWeb stuff like microformats. The next thing on my radar is WebSub. I'm keen to implement both the hub and publisher in one as a glitch.
Next up, Iโm considering micropub for posting full article entries. Hosting an editor and managing storage for drafts is a bigger task, but I can increment on that. Posts would be in markdown though. I wonder if thatโs considered bad...
Idea for later: I need to markup each publication in the publications page as an h-cite.
I like the idea of a links page for things I've read and think others might enjoy. I'll probably build one soon.
I think I'll work on putting some of the sharing stuff at the bottom of each post into a
I think it's time I started writing some tests for the static site generator.
Itโs possible using sed, jq, and date to read timestamps from scheduled posts and git mv and push them. This would be superior to the current Contents API approach because the content of the post will be properly attributed. Itโs also lighter and agnostic with respect to git hosting.
The command to get a time stamp will be something like: sed -n โ/^---$/,/^---$/pโ < post.md | sed โ1d;$dโ | jq โ.datetimeโ | date -f -
Now Iโve got a handle on the GitHub contents API, itโs tempting to build an editor into my blog. Could be a rabbit hole though...
Idea: Set up a web hook for webmention.io which posts to a glitch which in turn opens an issue on the GitHub repository for this blog.
Another possible set of articles I could write is on tips for writing kubernetes configuration files. I've accumulated a number of them over the last few years.
I might make the repository for this blog open soon. It's embarrassing in places, but I'd still like to show what I've done and compare notes...
Homebrew Website Club is this Thursday, so I need to either think of a blog post I want to write, or think of an enhancement to my blog. Iโd quite like to integrate an editor, but thatโs a big task. Something smaller, or an enhancement to an existing feature might have more impact...
Tickets booked for the next trip to Japan. Our first with the little one. I can't wait for his grandparents to meet him!
I can think of no better tribute (albeit late) than to wish the World Wide Web a happy 30th birthday on my own weird little personal site.
I have a glitch which tweets out new blog entries. Right now it just looks at changes in the sitemap. Reminder to improve it to include tags.
The selector to use is '[rel="tag"]'.
Reminder to myself to write a post about my recent contribution to Node.js.
All micropub client implementations appear to be a bit lacking (none seem to support a media endpoint very well). I'm considering making my own client and embedding it in my blog...
Testing alternative micropub server implementation.
I've come to refer to my preferrred way of creating microservices as "calving". Start with a monolith, and move bits into microservices where the coupling is weak (like a big iceberg calving off a smaller iceberg).
One of the cool things about micropub is that I can use a third party client really easily. This post was created with micropublish.net
Now I need to reconsider my landing page. It'd be nice to have the notes there, and some information about me.
I implemented #indieweb notes on my blog using a Netlify function and the GitHub content API. I'm using Keith J Grant's omnibear browser extension (in FireFox) to post. Not much to see yet, and it's a very basic implementation, but not bad for a couple of hours of work.
Notes are live! ๐
Testing again, 456.
Testing, 123.