Quick bits:

• Vote vote vote!

• I voted in the Belgian federal elections. I am stilled annoyed at myself for messing up the registration for the European parliamentary elections, though.

• I converted all of the typefaces from WOFF version 1 (woff) to version 2 (woff2). The space savings are significant, and so my web site should load faster without compromising on design.

• I published my reading list and my movie watch list. Go take a look!

• I spotted a beaver in the area I live in, for the first time. I Initially thought that what I saw, hiding in the bushes, was a small and very wet dog.

• I am making absolutely no progress with any sort of fiction writing. The well is dry.

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I was not sure whether my wallet was gone because I lost it or because I got pickpocketed, but I made a police report anyway. I didn’t expect much to come out of that, but it felt like the right thing to do, and could help if it were to come to insurance claims.

And then, I got a letter in the mail that my wallet was found. So, lost — not stolen! Found with cash still in it, too. I’ve yet to pick it up from the zentrales Fundbüro¹¹¹ Central lost-and-found office.  but will do so next week. Whew!

I had made an appointment for replacing my ID card. This is still needed, as far as I can tell, because the old card got blocked. But that old ID card is expiring early coming year anyway, so I would have had to start the process for replacing it soon anyway.

My replacement VISA card came in the mail earlier this week, so I was able to go back to grocery shopping without having to deal with, uhh, physical money. Bills and coins feel increasingly odd to me.

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Slow progress on the job search. Nothing new to report, except that I’m having more calls and more interviews. For the most part, I’ve managed to avoid (or talk my way out of) technical challenges,²²² I wrote back in Week­notes 2024 W20: Birthday about why I dislike technical challenges.  but there is one big multi-hour one that, ugh, I’m not looking forward to doing.

Over the course of dozens and dozens of interviews I’ve had over the last few months, patterns have emerged that indicate whether a potential employer is a quality one or not. Off the top of my head:

• Does the recruiter add you on WhatsApp to text or call you? Dodgy.

• Does the recruiter call you out of the blue, unscheduled? Dodgy.

• Does the company have no appointment scheduling system? Very dodgy.

• Do the interviewers humiliate you during the interview? Red flag — get the fuck out of there.

This list is not exhaustive.

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I am rather fond of the Courier typeface, but its fixed-width nature makes it difficult to use em dashes. I like my em dashes — they’re fantastic — but in Courier, they take up about the same space as a hyphen. Not great.

So I created my own typeface variant! I used my Glyphs Mini trial to replace the em dash of Courier Prime with a double-length one. Now, my em dashes have the proper length:

Delightful.

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Biking in Berlin continues to be dangerous.

Earlier this week, I went through a right-turning bend, with a car just ahead of me. The driver of the car took the turn too tight, and crossed all the way onto the bike lane. A little bit further, the driver of the car swerved right onto the bike lane in front of me to avoid a speed hump. It then turned into a side street without using turning signals.

On the trip back, a car kept swerving in and out of the bike lane in front of me to avoid the same speed humps.

I wish I could say that these were exceptions, but they really are not.

I’ve been thinking of buying a bike camera. One front and one rear camera, perhaps. The amount of traffic violations that I see on a single bike ride — even if it’s only fifteen minutes — is remarkably high. Some of these violations could have been lethal.

I don’t know what I’d do with the evidence I collect. Take it to bicycle advocacy groups, perhaps?

With biking being so dangerous, it is no surprise that cyclists go onto the sidewalks. But the other day, I got hit by a bike on a pedestrian area while I was on foot.

I’ve found out which vehicles I need to be especially careful around: MILES rental cars and Swapfiets bikes (the ones with a blue front wheel). To no one’s surprise, it is the occasional drivers and cyclists that are the worst.

This week has been so bad that I have been inadvertently developing low-key trauma responses. No good.

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Entertainment:

• I finished Red Team Blues.³³³ Cory Doctorow, Red team blues (New York: Tor, Tor Publishing Group, 2023).  It’s a good book, though perhaps a smidge too close to realism (but then again, that’s Doctorow’s style).

• I’m about 80% through Dishonored 2.⁴⁴⁴ Dishonored 2 (Arkane Lyon, 2016), published by Bethesda Softworks.  I’m getting a little bored by it, though.

• I am enjoying A Catalogue for the End of Humanity.⁵⁵⁵ Timothy Hickson, A Catalogue for the End of Humanity (2023).  Dark stories, but it is up my alley.

  The only downside: the ePub markup of this book is remarkably bad, and my ebook reader does not like it very much. And so I removed the DRM from the ePub file and re-built it from scratch. Effort went into it, but the end result is worth it.

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Links:

• Riven - Official Launch Trailer (Cyan): Well I definitely want this.

• Pace yourself!: Good advice.

• How the FBI Tapped the Encrypted Chats of Criminals Around the World (Tech Won’t Save Us, with Joseph Cox): Whoa!

• Why the US Drops 14.7 Million Worms On Panama Every Week (Half as Interesting)

• Every Kind of Bridge Explained in 15 Minutes (Practical En­gi­neer­ing): I honestly had not thought about all those different kinds of bridges before.

• Badness 0 (Apostrophe‛s version) (suckerpinch): Ooh! The only justified use case for LLMs. And a true work of art. Watched it twice

Tech links:

• I watched Nvidia’s Computex 2024 keynote and it made my blood run cold (John Loeffler)

• Musicians outraged as Spotify CEO claims the “cost of creating content” is “close to zero”: Daniel Ek is a fool.