Denis Defreyne

Weeknotes 2025 W52: ABIDE K9

December 22​–​28, 2025

Quick bits:

  • New ink for my fountain pen: imperial purple. So pretty.

  • This was a very short workweek, working just Monday and Tuesday. With most of the team out, it was very quiet.

  • It has been freezing for the past couple of days. When it stopped freezing, it started raining, and so the city turned an ice waste on which it is difficult to stay upright.

  • My dreams have been intense and bizarre lately. I initially thought it was the melatonin I occasionally take, but the dreams have been weird and intense without them. Lots of death for some reason!

  • This week, I realized that my synesthesia turns “ABIDE K9” into a rainbow. Woof, I suppose.

  • I’ve been adding ginger to my spiced coffee (in addition to cardamom and cinnamon). It makes regular supermarket coffee rather tasty. It’s very Christmassy — or perhaps Arabic? Or Indonesian? Or all of the above?

  • The YouTube mobile app now immediately starts playing a random video on opening. It’s genuinely awful behavior. Enshittification to drive up the views?

    Also: my phone has started autocorrecting “YouTube” to “torture,” which is très apropos.

  • I’ve moved on to Tarmak-3. More typos are to be expected. The R/S switch is a pain. I’m using monkeytype to help me along this path, and I love how customizable it is.

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate!

I keep telling myself that I want to visit a Christmas market, but I never really do. Technically, I did visit one (and only one) Christmas market this year, purely because I was a little hungry and so I bought some roasted almonds. Tasty.

I don’t care much for Christmas. I don’t have family in the area, and traveling around the end of the year is not fun — and my family knows that I tend to not visit anyway. I do like all the extra free time though!

Speaking of Christmas: I am randomly reminded of the time that the head of HR of a previous company asking me whether I celebrated Christmas “in my culture,” and that she was not familiar with the culture I am from, and so she wanted to be considerate and respectful of my culture.

I’m, uhh, Belgian. Very standard white West-European culture. What a strange, strange thing to keep going on about “my culture.”

I signed up for the next acting class. It was bound to happen; when I said “I’ll have to think about it” last week, what I really meant is that it’ll just take a bit of time before I come to the inevitable conclusion that signing up for the next class is the only right thing to do.

My acting teacher told me that this is a good opportunity to train my voice as a solo artist. He’s not wrong. And so, this week, I took some time to figure out what I want to get out of this acting class. I don’t have an answer to that just yet, but I did some writing specifically for solo pieces to perform. Whether or not I’ll put them on stage is to be seen; I feel quite self-conscious about my own writing.

After being very tempted last week to buy a camera, I convinced myself to give iPhone photography another try. It, alas, ended in disappointment.

Halide cannot retain manual settings; while I was on a photo trip, it kept resetting the white balance and returning to full automatic constantly. I could not figure out how to fix that. The image quality of the iPhone 14 Pro leaves much to be desired. Even with plenty of light, details get all washed out in infuriating automated post-processing that I cannot turn off. Hair and fur meld into a smooth, featureless blob. My phone camera is also stuck at outputting 12 MP images, even though the camera is supposed to be able to do an impressive 48 MP. I also am unable to import some photos to my laptop; they don’t seem to exist when transferring.

A new and proper camera is definitely on my wishlist now. I’m eyeing the Sony α6400. It has the features I am looking for (mirrorless, interchangeable lenses, decently light-sensitive, APS-C image sensor, video) without being pricey. It looks like I’d be able to get a kit for €700–800, though there are a few accessories that I know I’ll need: a prime lens and a spare battery, at least, and perhaps a tripod.1 That drives up the total cost a little.

My previous camera was a Nikon D40, which I gave away a few years ago. It wasn’t a very good camera — 6 MP, noisy even in dim light, no autofocus motor in the camera body — but I genuinely liked the feel of a “proper” camera, and I’ve missed it.

I’ll mull my purchase decision over for a bit longer.

While experimenting with incremental computation/compilation, I got the idea of adding metadata filters to Nanoc: allow filters to not only return new content, but also return new metadata.

Among other things, it would enable extracting data from content (like getting the page title from a <h1> and storing it in the :title attribute), storing source maps alongside the content, and using AsciiDoc’s built-in metadata format.

At the moment, Nanoc freezes metadata after the preprocessor has run. Therefore, populating metadata has to be done in the preprocessor, which is always run. This is slow and inflexible.

Allowing filters to return new metadata could be a game changer. It would allow doing what the preprocessor is typically used for, without its drawbacks. My goal is to eliminate the need for a preprocessor altogether, so the metadata filters concept is very much in line with that.

Implementing metadata filter support is possible, but it won’t be easy. More research and experimentation is needed.

Entertainment:

  • Phantom Thread2 is dripping with delightful romantic tension.

  • The Witch3 is right up my alley. How did it take me so long to watch this excellent film?

Links:

Tech links:

  1. I have two tripods and they are the most infuriatingly flimsy things. I barely trust them with my phone. ↩︎

  2. Phantom Thread, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (Focus Features, Annapurna Pictures, Perfect World Pictures, 2018). ↩︎

  3. The Witch, directed by Robert Eggers (Parts and Labor, RT Features, Rooks Nest Entertainment, 2016). ↩︎

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