Weeknotes 2022 W48: Snow

Berlin has been white, covered in snow. It’s pretty. But also cold, gray, and dark.

This week has been stressful, for reasons that I can’t (yet) talk about in more detail. That has taken up a significant amount of my time and energy. The week­notes this week will be a bit sparse because of that.

I’ve been struggling with physical paperwork, and have set aside some time to go through it all and bring some order to it.

I feel mostly clueless as how to physically file documents in a way that I can retrieve what I need quickly enough. I can Organize electronic archives by year well enough, but physical documents are a different beast entirely. At this point, I’m considering creating archives for 5-year periods, so 2021–2025 would be the one we’re in right now. Then, every five years I can go through old archives and trash whatever is no longer relevant by then. Minimum effort, maximum effect.

I’ve been off Twitter for a week or two now, and focusing on Mas­to­don as my Twitter alternative. (You should follow me at @denis@ruby.social.) It’s been great: no advertising, and no random content pushed to me by a capitalist algorithm.

And no crypto/web3/NFT spam either.

I pushed two Nanoc patch releases, fixing a couple of bugs.

After the 4.12.13 patch release, one more issue surfaced that needed a fix. It turns out that File.write doesn’t work when you want to write lots of data, and the fix is to use IO.copy_stream to write a string (wrapped in a StringIO) to a file opened for writing. This used to be not a problem, because Nanoc was using Ruby’s PStore, which presumably deals with large files properly under the hood.

I fixed that, and then realized that compressing the data in tmp/nanoc/ would be quite sensible, so I did that too. Ruby comes with so much useful stuff, and zlib is part of that.

In Week­notes 2022 W41: The Office, I wrote about the broken hard drive, which I’ve now replaced with a new one I bought. The new drive is used a backup drive, for both Time Machine and Arq Backup.

It’s still unclear what is broken about the old drive. Perhaps I’ll connect it to a non-macOS device so that I prevent the OS from mounting it as soon as it’s connected, and erase it so that I can use on macOS again. I’m fairly sure this is not a hardware error: I would’ve noticed a S.M.A.R.T. status change, and the drive is really not old anyway.

I gave denisdefreyne.com a new favicon. It’s prettier and cleaner. A bit more formal and serious too, which I think good.

Entertainment:

• I had already finished Star Wars: Andor last week, but it’s stuck in my head because it’s such a good show. It is worth saying again.

• The Peripheral season 1 is finished, with a bit of a disappointingly open ending. TV series that don’t properly wrap up story lines are frustrating.

• I might be getting a bit bored of the Assassin’s Creed games. I’m still playing Assassin’s Creed: Unity but I’m not very into it.

• I rewatched Minority Report. It’s still pretty good.

Links:

• Andor: Anti-fascist Art (Sage Hyden): This explains what is so great about Star Wars: Andor in a way that I never could. Watch Star Wars: Andor, then watch this.

• Marvel’s Defenders of The Status Quo (Pop Culture Detective)

• Capitalism, The Web, And You (Heydon Pickering at ffconf 2022)

• FTX Was (And Is) A Complete Mess (LegalEagle): Everything related to cryptocurrencies is still terrible, and here’s some more of it.

• Bye, Twitter (Tim Bray): I also deleted Twitter off my phone, and don’t intend to use Twitter anymore going forward.

• HIV vaccine candidate induces immune response in early clinical trial (CNN): This is fantastic news.

• What went wrong with the Tube Map? (Jay Foreman)

• Willy Wonka and the Myth of the Lazy Poor (Sage Hyden)

Tech links:

• An Interactive Guide to Flexbox in CSS (Josh Comeau): CSS Flexbox isn’t super easy to understand, but this guide helps a lot. With interactive examples!

• Semantic Versioning Will Not Save You (Hynek Schlawack)

• Bots Should Punch Up