Weeknotes 2022 W05

This week was exhausting. Not sure why, but on several nights I slept 9–10 hours, which is a lot.

Earlier this week, a German court fined a web site for using Google Fonts without user authorization. I took the opportunity to remove my use of Google Fonts for my own web site, and self-host the fonts instead.

It turns out that Source Serif (which I use alongside Source Sans) now has multiple optical sizes. Google Fonts didn’t have those. I’m now using Source Serif’s subhead optical size, rather than the text one, for the smaller headlines.

Speaking of fonts: I subscribed to David Jonathan Ross’ Font of the Month Club. I just could not resist Warbler Text. You could say I’m, erm, font of it. I used it in my own copy of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and it looks fantastic.

Shower thought: Eating Marmite feels like cultural appropriation.

I got my M1 MacBook for work this week. I decided to go with a clean start and copy over what I needed from my previous (Intel) MacBook. That was quite time-consuming, but I think I’ve pretty much got it all moved over now.

I was very excited, but now I’m more worried. I got a kernel panic (not supposed to happen) earlier. Also, the new laptop feels significantly slower than the Intel Mac, at least for development. It’s measurably 3× to 10× slower. I attribute to the switch to Docker, which is excruciatingly slow on Mac.

We had our first Crafting Interpreters book club meeting at work. It turns out that even about a concept as “simple” as scanning, there is a lot to talk about.

I had thought about extending my scanner to support Unicode, but it’s a lot of work. Unicode is not straightforward, and multibyte characters means that I’d need to start thinking about how to avoid accidentally quadratic scanning (because string indexing is linear, not constant).

Virtually no progress on any of my side projects. There are some bits and pieces left in the closecontact AWS account, such as DNS and web hosting. I’ll move those elsewhere hopefully coming week.

The budgeting app prototype seems to be dead in the water. I can’t get the motivation and energy to pick it up again. At least I’ve still got YNAB.

The article on implementing equality in Ruby (mentioned last week­notes) is far more work than I expected. This is a subject that I am quite familiar with, yet it’s still tough to write it down.

In every article I write (this one included), I end up doing research that teaches me new things. This makes me wonder: Are good articles are written by people who do research, not by people who know things?

In entertainment news: I finished the main chapters of Red Dead Redemption 2, and am now in the epilogue. That game is extraordinarily well made. For a game that’s about gunslinging outlaws, it has solid character development, and gets intense and emotional at times.

I enjoyed The Sinner season 4. It has old-school thriller murder mystery vibes, but feels fresh and modern. As I accidentally skipped season 1–3, I’m now in the process of watching those. I’m not sure why Netflix decided to start with Season 4. Netflix knows that I haven’t watched the preceding seasons. Netflix, why?!

I re-watched The Big Short (last week already), because I remember not quite “getting it” when I watched it the first time. I don’t think it holds up so well, but maybe disaster movies are just not my thing anymore, given that we’re, erm, inside one right now. Or inside multiple.

I had a similar reaction to Don’t Look Up. I can’t properly judge the film right now, because I’ve got all these emotions racing around. It’s too real. It’s too close.

Maybe in a decade from now, we’ll see a disaster movie on the topic of cryptocurrencies, and how they disrupted the global economy. And when I say “disrupted,” I mean that in a quite negative way.

But all in all, entertainment is supposed to be entertaining, you know?