Weeknotes 2024 W06: A London visit

Despite my intentions of taking it easy, relaxing and definitely not doing any job interviews, I’m making good progress and I’ve even made it to the final round at one potential future employer.

I’ll be in London quite soon! I’m landing there this evening, and staying for just over a week. Fancy hanging out?

Just in time, I remembered to ask myself whether I needed a passport to enter the UK — turns out that for EU citizens, an ID card is enough, for now.¹¹¹ I was in the UK just a few months ago, so I really should’ve remembered!  Just to be sure, I checked the validity of my passport, and it is valid… until next month. Cutting it close there!

Things 3 has become the place to store things that I’ll need to remember for unspecified moments in the future. “Renew passport” and “renew ID card” are two of those things, as is “do taxes” (which I otherwise tend to forget).

As R pointed out to me the other day, the word helicopter comes from the combination of helico- (helix, corkscrew shape) and pter- (wing). This means that the way I would naïvely hyphenate it — he·li·cop·ter — is rather wrong. It’s unclear how to hyphenate it: I’ve seen dictionaries that say hel·i·cop·ter and he·li·copter. I rather like the latter: not hyphenating the last two syllables at all.

Also, it is considered good style to leave at least three letters before hyphenating, which means that the heli part would not be hyphenated, so perhaps the only good hyphenation would be heli·co·pter. But literally no dictionary that I’ve seen hyphenates this word that way.

Also interesting is how in English, the p tends to be silent: pterodactyl is pronounced starting with a t, not a p. Perhaps I shall, for consistency, start pronouncing it helicoter.

Or perhaps avoid the whole trouble with this word altogether, and call it a corkscrewwing.

I have continued to give away some of the stuff I no longer need. An old desk is finally gone, as is the semi-broken display.²²² I wrote about this display in Week­notes 2023 W48: Ultra-wide failure. 

It now feels like there is a little bit too much space in my apartment. I have just over 60m², which is comfortable, but definitely more than I need. Space tends to fill itself with stuff.

The Free Your Stuff Berlin Facebook group is a great place to list stuff to give away. But it is Facebook, which I have an aversion to… especially because as of late, my feed there has been chock full of Russian propaganda and far-right extremist content. Highly disturbing.

I started using Scrivener in Markdown mode, and I think this will work better for me. It gives me more flexibility, and it integrates nicely into pandoc, which is just an excellent tool.

It also means I can export my writing in a format that fits cleanly on my web site. I’ve played around a little with this approach, and I can see myself writing articles in Scrivener rather than using D★Mark.

I adore Scrivener for its organizational features. The text editing itself, however, is a little odd when using it in Markdown mode: you can use Markdown and semi-WYSIWYG features at the same time, which is certainly confusing. Perhaps just something to get used to.

And yes, I am fully aware that I seem to be spending more time talking about writing than actually getting any writing done. By far the most writing I’ve done is in Bear, where I have written a novel’s worth of week­notes.

My adventures with Swift and SwiftUI continue. I’ve made decent progress on my budgeting app prototype, though there is a ton of work to do before it becomes even remotely usable.

I’ve also realized that writing about my projects makes me less likely to continue them. Some fiction writers have voiced similar things with their writing: don’t talk about ongoing projects. So, perhaps I’ll abandon the budgeting app prototype once again soon. We shall see.

Entertainment:

• Baldur’s Gate 3³³³ Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios, 2023), published by Larian Studios.  continues to amaze me. I’m near the end of Act I, but hopped on a fresh multiplayer game, and it is remarkable how much fun it is to replay the same act I’ve almost finished — but in a very different way. This game has some of the highest replay value of all games I know.

• I seem to have forgotten about Fallout 4.⁴⁴⁴ Fallout 4 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2015), published by Bethesda Softworks.  I did not finish it yet, but… it’s really not a good game (with exception of the Far Harbor DLC, which is miles ahead of the base game). But perhaps I’ll just uninstall it at this point.

• I started reading Doctor Sleep,⁵⁵⁵ Stephen King, Doctor Sleep (New York: Scribner, 2013).  though I’m not quite enjoying it as much as I thought. I find the way King writes his children and adolescents rather uncomfortable.⁶⁶⁶ I wrote about this before, in Week­notes 2023 W47: Closed in. 

Links:

• The UX of LEGO Interface Panels (George Cave): Fantastic!

• Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED (Veritasium)

• 10 things Media gets WRONG about Archery! (David/Blumineck): Actual archer advice from an actual elf!

Tech links:

• How My Blog Handles Images(Luna): Ooh, fancy!

• Brandon Weaver on three job criteria: Good criteria!

• CSS is Logical (Geoff Graham): Makes sense to me!

• Say goodbye to resource-caching across sites and domains (Stefan Judis)