Quick bits:

• I made sourdough bread for the first time in months, and I am pleased to say that I’ve still got the skillz:

  

• I am slowly making good progress with job interviews. Perhaps I’ll have an offer on the table in one or two weeks!

• I moved my off-site backups from B2 to a Hetzner storage box. It is cheaper, faster, and gives me more space. The latter is especially important as I find it important to do a full off-site backup of all my files.

• I was about to destroy some old/unused/broken HDDs, but I checked the S.M.A.R.T. status and they seem just fine. I suspect my previous troubles with them were due to faulty cables. So I’ve changed my plans for them: I’ll keep them and perhaps use them as extra backup drives (though I really have enough backups already).

• As you might know, the word “queue” is just the letter “q” with a bunch of silent letters waiting in line. It stands to reason that you can add more “ue”s as you see fit. Queueue, perhaps? The number of “ue”s could even reflect the length of the queue: I stood in the queueueueueueueueueueue for hours!

• I have paid approximately € 80 000 in rent in the last five years, which feels like it could (or should) have been a hefty down payment instead. Renting sucks.

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The only reliable way for me to make progress with my writing is to leave my apartment and head out. The Shut Up & Write meetups are particularly useful for those, though I don’t end up going there as often as I’d like.

I started a short story earlier this week, tentatively titled Friendship, though progress is slow. I daydream about the story often, though don’t make enough time in front of Scrivener to get the story into words.

Back when I was working full-time, I felt that I didn’t have the time or energy to do the amount of fiction writing I wanted to do. Now that I have time off from work, though, I still don’t have the time or energy. The problem is, I bet, in that I am not good at making time.

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Out of the blue, I decided earlier this week to clean my mechanical keyboard. Good lord was it dirty. So dirty.

It was remarkably difficult to put it back together. I intuitively know the keys on a keyboard, but putting the keycaps back in the right spot was not at all trivial.

It also did not help that some of the keycaps have worn off completely. I could get replacement keycaps, but I don’t need them, and they’re an expense I can certainly do without. But still… I could get fancy colorful keycaps with special designs… I could… no, no… I must resist the temptation… aaahhhhhh.¹¹1 There is a mechanical keyboard store in Berlin, and I must go there avoid it at all costs. 

Cleaning my keyboard made me realize that there are other things I need to clean as well. Next up are my windows, I suppose. They are so dirty that I’m embarrassed to have visitors over.

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I’ve been cleaning up the CSS for my web site, denisdefreyne.com, and moving further away from utility-first CSS. I wasn’t using Tailwind, but I had my home-grown utility-first library built with Sass.²²2 I wrote about a similar process in Week­notes 2022 W08: Depleted. I think I had forgotten that I was working on moving away from utility-first CSS. 

Overall, I am finding it much easier to stick to meaningful class names, like footer-links, rather than, oh I dunno, pb-3 lg:pb-4 c wtf it mw-50. The former is easier to understand and thus easier to maintain.

The only place where I find that utility classes are still useful is in spacing elements (with margins and paddings). The space around elements is often dependent on its context, and I found it difficult to encode that in CSS.

The amount of CSS has decreased, and the reduced size of the compiled CSS makes me level up in the 512KB Club. Not that it’s a competition, but… well, it really is a bit of a competition, is it not?

Removing so much of the CSS utility classes brings me closer to removing Sass, which in turn will enable me to use advanced modern CSS features like @layer, which I’ve really missed in Sass.

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I’m making slow progress with the budgeting app prototype that I’ve been working on for ages now, though Swift and Xcode can be quite the pain occasionally:

• Swift has no format strings. It has string interpolation, like "the price is \(price)", but it’s not powerful. I wish it had something like C’s printf syntax, or Python’s format strings.

• Xcode can be so buggy. The Xcode UI state gets out of sync rather often, necessitating reopening the project window or cleaning the built artifacts.

• SwiftUI’s real-time previews in Xcode are generally unreliable, and the SwiftUI error reporting is occasionally awful — it’ll just tell you that something is wrong or that the compiler failed to generate an error message. Not at all helpful.

It’s been taking some fun out of my hobby projects.

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Do the hands of a clock ever line up at any other time than 12:00:00? That is what has been going through my mind as I see the time pass by on my iPhone when it’s in StandBy mode.

It is clear that the hour and minute hands line up eleven times per 12-hour period. But when they line up, does the second hand also line up?

1. The first time all three hands meet up is at 12:00:00.

2. The second time the hour and minute hands meet is just after 01:05:27. The hour and minute hands meet, but the second had does not (because 5 ≠ 27).

3. The third time the hour and minute hands meet is at approximately 02:10:55. The hour and minute hands meet, but the second had does not (because 10 ≠ 55).

4. Fourth time is at approximately 03:16:22. No match.

5. Fifth time is at approximately 04:21:49. No match.

6. Sixth time is 05:27:16.

And so on. Continuing this, it’s clear that the only time the hour, minute and second hands never meet up except at 12:00:00. So sad.

Now you know. Was this useful? Nope. Was interesting? Hell yes!

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Entertainment:

• I finished Doctor Sleep.³³3 Stephen King, Doctor Sleep (New York: Scribner, 2013).  I quite liked it, though I felt the resolution was weak. The previous Stephen King book I read, The Institute⁴⁴4 Stephen King, The Institute (Scribner, 2019).  had the same issue with its ending.

• I made it to Act III in Baldur’s Gate 3.⁵⁵5 Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios, 2023), published by Larian Studios.  Still a fantastic game. The intensity is ramping up. This game is full of choices that matter, and I find myself wanting to start another play-through where I take different paths.

• I started reading Attack Surface.⁶⁶6 Cory Doctorow, Attack surface (New York, NY: Tom Doherty Associates, 2021).  I got it as part of the Cory Doctorow novel collection on Humble Bundle, which run for another two-plus weeks. My first impression is that it’s genuinely well written and well-researched, though the latter is no surprise because Doctorow knows his stuff. The book feels real.

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Links:

• The direct influence of Twin Peaks on Zelda

• Palestine (Shaun)

• Airfoil (Bartosz Ciechanowski): Wow! Bartosz writes the most well-illustrated articles.

Tech links:

• The Subversive Hyperlink (Jim Nielsen)

• CSS :has() Interactive Guide (Ahmad Shadeed)

• List of 2024 Leap Day Bugs (Matt Johnson-Pint): Leap years are so common — so why are there so many leap year bugs?