I hope Apple start to experiment with different phone form factors soon. Otherwise I think i might end up making the switch to Android, just I can experience something different for once.
Latest YouTube Obsession
#My latest YouTube obsession seems to be watching people play Cities Skylines, where they slowly build a city, with industry, complex road layouts, cool neighbourhood designs, etc. The best channel I’ve found for this game is Biffa Plays Indie Games.
I’m thinking I might have to buy the game myself, but it seems quite complex, so I don’t know if I actually prefer watching someone else play ir, rather than learning myself how it all works.
Scribe - A New Micro.blog Theme
#I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve now completed my third Micro.blog theme!
It’s called Scribe, and it’s my attempt at taking one of my earlier themes, Fortis, as a base. And making it loot a bit more contemporary, with a nice serif font, warm colours, but still maintaining a very readable and clear layout.
It’s all on GitHub, so feel free to use it on your own blog, and if you want to take it a step further, you could always use this theme as a starter and make your own customisations.
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I’m thinking a bit about email at the moment. On one hand, I love the format, it is the closest digital representation to sending a letter. On the other hand, it would be much better if only people could send emails.
Every now and then when I’m using my iPad, I remember that I can detach it from the Magic Keyboard. When I do, it feels like a whole new device. And yet, once it’s connected back to the keyboard, I forget about it and the same thing happens about a week later.
New Fonts
#After using a few different fonts on my blogs, I’ve decided to switch to web-safe fonts. For sans-serif the priority is the apple system font or “Helvetica Neue”, falling back to sans-serif
. And for serif, I’ve gone with “Georgia”, “Garamond”, and then falling back to serif
.
It means extra fonts no longer need to be fetched when visiting my blog, and I also think it looks a bit better anyway.
This change has taken place on my main blog, and also on my micro blog which uses my in-development theme, Scribe1.
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-
This is very close to being “released” as a
1.0
. ↩︎
Childhood and nostalgia aside, I think my favourite film might be The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. The soundtrack is great too.
It’s still early on, but here’s what my latest Micro.blog theme, Scribe, currently looks like.
All I’ve done so far is to take my Fortis theme, and then changed the fonts and style to match my blog. there may be layout changes, but probably minimal.
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Micro.blog Theme Development Update
#There has been slight tweaks to my two Micro.blog themes - Fortis and Pure, but I haven’t been tracking changes properly. So I’ve given them each the version 1.0, and will be incrementing where necessary.
In other news, I’m going to work on another theme. Still a minimal theme, based on the original Pure theme. But I want the style to better match the design on my main blog.
Blizzard: Save the Date - The Future of Warcraft
#Save the Date - The Future of Warcraft:
On April 19, the World of Warcraft development team will reveal the next expansion. We’re excited to show you what we’ve been working on and where your adventures in Azeroth will go next.
I’m very much looking forward to see what the next WoW expansion is. There’s been a lot of exciting rumours recently, and it’s making me think that WoW could be returning to more of it’s former self.
Also:
Beyond World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, we’re preparing to get the first game in the Warcraft Universe designed for mobile into your hands. We will tell you more about it in May.
I know that a lot of PC gamers are triggered by the phrase “mobile game”, but I’m also intruiged to see the Warcraft universe explored in more contexts. By no means am I expecting Blizzard to bring WoW to mobile, but the Warcraft universive is massive, and I’m sure there’s tons of ways they could make great mobile experiences.
SingleFile looks like a very useful browser extension. As you may guess from the name, it saves a webpage into a single file, including images and styles.
I’m already thinking it could be a good tool for archival purposes.
I switched my site to use a serif font for the body text, and I think it gives it a whole new feel.
This may sound odd, but I think the design now matches the style of writing that I want to focus on.
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Maybe I’m being pedantic. But when I see that I’ve hit my daily reading goal, my first response is not to share it or to adjust the goal.
Why can’t there be a prominent button that lets me just acknowledge it and move on. Not a small cross in an awkward position of the screen.
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The way I want to separate my writing online
#One problem that tends to crop up every now and then for me is how I separate my online writing.
Right now I have a main blog, a micro blog, and a dev blog.
My micro blog is more for life updates and more meta commentary, the dev blog has been used for updates on my personal projects. But the main blog has always been where the confusion comes from.
Sometimes, I want it to be a source of well thought-out posts, where I’ve elaborated on an idea, or researched a topic. Other times, I want it to be a central place for links to other articles, short comments, quickly written posts, alongside my other longer posts.
The ideal separation I have in mind right now is this:
- Blog - Medium to long form writing. With me putting a good amount of thought into each post.
- Micro blog - Short form writing, links to interesting things, and also maybe longer personal updates.
- Dev blog - Updates on personal development projects.
- Twitter - Anything that really doesn’t fit on a blog.
I think for this to happen, I’d need to do three things:
- Move all micro posts from my blog to my micro blog.
- Delete all nonsensical posts from my blog.
- Potentially move some long form writing from my micro blog to my blog.
I guess the tricky bit will be actually doing all of this. Maybe the best way is to export my entire blog, organise it locally, and import?
I really want to go through all ~1900 posts on my blog and delete/organise some of them.
Some are old Instagram cross-psots, random micro posts, and also old posts that haven’t survived the various migrations over the years.
Streaming on Twitch
#I’ve been streaming on Twitch a bit today, while I’ve been playing a new character on World of Warcraft.
In no way shape or form do I intend to become a big gaming streamer, but I do find it an interesting challenge to see what could happen if I streamed relatively often.
This idea mainly came from the achievements section on the Twitch creator dashboard:
I found this by accident, and when I saw it, I just thought how incredible this is for new streamers. I know first hand from blogging, that sometimes you can be wondering where to start, what to focus on, and also being able to see your progress. But with this resource, you can track your goals and you get an idea of what you should be aiming for next.
Where it won’t really work for myself, is that when I stream, I stream a game (usually World of Warcraft), I don’t have any camera, I don’t talk through the mic, and I don’t adapt my gameplay for the stream.
However, seeing as I have fun playing World of Warcraft (right now I’m actually playing a new character), I guess I may as well stream it, and see where it goes.
I don’t see myself ever being someone who has a regular schedule, or to ever play a game to simply stream. But I do think I will start streaming, and probably chatting, when I play World of Warcraft from now on. Especially when I know I’ll be playing for a decent amount of time.
So if that sounds interesting, then feel free to come over to my Twitch channel. And if you want to chat, just say Hi in the Twitch chat!
For reference, here is a stream from earlier today when I was starting a new character:
10 HTML tags you have never used before
To be honest, I only knew about half of these.
Fortis - A New Micro.blog Theme
#Using my minimal Micro.blog theme as a base, I’ve now created another theme. This time it’s a bit louder, probably a tad more niche, but definitely has character.
It’s called Fortis, which is Latin for “strong”. As this is definitely a strong theme, that may not suit most people’s tastes.
In many ways it’s similar to the Pure theme, with the layout being practically the same. But as was the purpose of that theme, it served as a good base for more custom designs.
As usual, the theme is available on GitHub, it runs on Hugo 0.91
, and I’m actually currently running it on my micro blog right now.
Here are a few screenshots of the theme:
Post
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Micro Post
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Archive
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I’ve started work on a new Micro.blog theme. This one will take my minimal theme, Pure, and make it a bit bolder and louder. Check it out on GitHub.
Here’s a very early preview.
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Just finished some meta work on my Pure Micro.blog theme, to introduce a rough code style through an automated formatter and linter. I don’t want to be too strict on this, but thought since people are opening (some very helpful) pull requests that it could be useful.
My current Artix Linux install on my ThinkPad.
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My ThinkPad just arrived. Time to wipe and install Linux!
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This is what I class as pure YouTube. Descriptive title, no long intro/outro, no sponsors, no ads, jus a horse kicking a tree, farting on dogs, and then running away. www.youtube.com/watch
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A small (but I’m sure welcome) change in the Pure theme. Now posts won’t show the date or attempt to load any associated replies.
With some luck, I managed to win a ThinkPad on eBay on my first attempt! Specifically, it’s a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 5th Gen. 14” matte display, 8 GB memory, 256 GB SSD. All for £265!
Soon to be my primary Linux machine.