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01.02 – 01.08

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Work

It’s impressive how quickly I can get used to doing very little and my mind and body forcefully rejected the notion of work for a while post-merrineum (errr, what happened to hyper-indungence, sofa club and endless free childcare?).

Once I got over that, I spent most of the week fighting iOS Safari in an attempt to discover why and when it choses to add parts of wellcomecollection.org’s articles to its reader view. I have a not-at-all-well-tested theory that client-side fetching of related content was throwing it off, and moving that outside the <article> tag seems to improve things.

Life

I’m in nine iOS TestFlight Mastodon app betas. Which is silly. And I can tell I currently care slightly too much about the delivery mechanism and not quite enough about the content. But UX is key and it feels like an exciting time for it so I’ll probably continue to test out apps and nag developers to implement things that I’d like to see.

As a long-time Tweetbot user, I figured I’d love Ivory (by the same team). While I waited for a spot in the beta I played around with several others and found it easier to read the text in some more than others. Almost all of them use San Francisco (I like it probably because I spend a lot of time looking at it) and have the ability to change font size (good), but the thing that seemed to have the largest impact on my ability to read was line-height. When I did get round to using Ivory, I was struck by how cramped the text felt. I never noticed this with Tweetbot, but perhaps it’s a function of my age and/or just how much I’d disengaged from Twitter before I jacked it in for good. And likely also due to the amount of other apps I now have to compare it with. I want to like Ivory (not least because the iconography is :chef-kiss:), but unless that’s something that becomes configurable within either the app or the OS, I’m going to struggle with it. The upshot of all this is that a not insignificant portion of my life is now spent pestering iOS developers to increase the line-height in their apps.

In the meantime, Mastoot has become my daily driver. It doesn’t do nearly as much as many of the others, but it does plenty, it does it elegantly, and it has a public roadmap/feature/issue tracker. Importantly, I find it easy to read — a feature of underrated importance for what is predominantly a reading app.

And here’s me using a monospace font on my hipster blog. Don’t at me (and/or subscribe to RSS and choose your own typography adventure).

I’ve been thinking about how to put together a good system for blog drafting/posting because it’s another thing I can do to put off writing the content. But if I make it frictionless enough, I’ll be more likely to write something (is the theory). So far, it involves iA Writer on my phone and laptop, Working Copy on my phone, and Git/GitHub, where ultimately the main branch gets built by Eleventy to Netlify. It feels like keeping drafts in iCloud (automatically synced without recourse to Git) is the path of least resistance, as long as I don’t care about my drafts history (I don’t think I do, as a writing team of one). Then posting involves moving a post from iCloud to the posts directory (which can be accomplished through iA Writer on Mac and iOS) and pushing to GitHub (either through Working Copy on iOS, or the command line on Mac). I think there might be a Working Copy feature that would allow me to integrate iCloud and Git. Perhaps I’ll procrastinate some more and look into that if things get desperate edit: things got desperate, I did it.

Attended a trustees meeting for BTMAT – only the second meeting since its founder, my dad, passed away. Can’t hide from the fact it feels very sad without him.

Watched Stick Man and Zog more times than you did.

Failed to break the spine on a sketchbook.

Reading

• Inside look at modern web browsers, part 1, 2, 3, 4 (not sure I’m much the wiser, but hopefully something went in).

Listening

• RHLSP with Sarah Keyworth – enjoyed it a lot.
• Running Commentary – to get me through the washing up while I’m not running much.
• Gulliver’s Travels (mostly in order to get to sleep – haven’t heard more than five minutes. Hard recommend for insomniacs.)
• The Coming Storm – listened to this last year, but thought I’d have another go since the anniversary of the storming of the US Capitol rolled around again. Fascinating.

Running

I’ve spent the past three weeks off games with self-diagnosed metatarsalgia. And in the time-honoured tradition of the injured runner, I spent my spare time buying kit. I picked up a pair of Saucony Peregrine trail shoes to deal with winter having concluded that it was my previous pair of trail shoes that led to my injury. I took them out for a gentle 5k in the week (a bit of a shock to the system) and managed some hill repeats on Sunday. I didn’t wind up totally broken, but so far don’t feel confident that the injury has gone away.