Okay, so I wrote some more Second Earth. It’s feeling good. It’s getting a bit late but I want to take a look at the GCM service for per-user encryption of data for my boat app.
Also: note to self, I want to write a guide on how to build what I’ve built for blog publishing via git. It’s great. I love it. I think others would use the same thing.
I’m back home again after a week relaxing on my Mum’s sofa with her dog, reading, napping and watching Netflix. Pure relaxation. Apart from that I’ve also been going on nice walks in the countryside around my home time.
And now I’ve got renewed motivation to make things.
I’ve had this a few times recently and not actually started working on anything so I’m going to ease myself into it. Firstly, I want to make a bit of progress one of my novels. There are too many and I like all of them but the one I made most progress on was the one set on Earth in the future where civilisation has collapsed due to a climate catastrophe.
Apart from my novels, I want to continue working on my projects. The last project I was working on was a component library and editing tool. It was more of a prototype for a tool designed to help build design systems. I think it’s promising but I think it makes some assumptions that don’t hold under certain design systems. We’re planning to build a design system at work, which will be a great opportunity to see what tools if any are useful when doing this in the real world. It will also be cool to see if the design system we create can be specified within the restrictions of the project I was working on.
Tonight I want to write a bit more of that novel, and maybe work a little bit on the mental health app I was working on.
I got this idea today for a sci-fi story in which civilisation triggers an ice age at the polar caps but not before erecting enormous walls running the perimeter around each one. The idea is to keep the Earth as near as possible to having an ice age triggered without the civilisation-crushing consequences of the entire planet being covered in kilometer-deep ice.
The story follows an engineer stationed at one of the monitoring bases tasked with measuring any movement occurring between the wall surface and the Northern glacial mass, North Cap.
240 stations encircle each of the caps, providing active analysis 24h a day, with 10 stations active at any one time. Each engineer works alone, to reduce resource consumption. Contact is achieved through wired communication supported by a ring connecting that encircles each cap, both connected to the rest of the planet.
Access to monitoring stations is limited because of their location mounted high up on the wall surface. Each station was designed and built by one of three super continental powers, each with their own design but all adhering to a set of globally accepted standards and conventions.
Kohli, nick-named ‘brock’ (as in ‘brock-kohli’, get it?) by other engineers is stationed at N19, the 19th North Cap station. For four years she trained alongside the best and brightest in the Eastern continental capital, Beijing 5, for an opportunity to serve time on the wall. Every engineer starts with a year on a lower encampment on the wall. After a year of orientation she started her first shift, here at N19.
Engineers rotate on a yearly basis. If all goes well, she’ll be rotating westward to N18 in a few months. Rotations give a change for new eyes to see each station, spotting discrepancies that might escalate to a full-blown inconsistency in the wall. The slightest disturbance is something feared by many a good wall engineer.
Anyway… spoilers 🤫
Hi. I’ve been watching Netflix for about… 5 months now. And I think I want to start doing something more productive in my spare time. *Cue blog-based montage*
The last few months seem to have gone by really quickly. I’m not kidding when I say I’ve been watching Netflix all this time. This was mostly in an attempt to stay sane and really focus on keeping my mental health above water. And I think it’s going really well from that perspective thankfully.
And as things start to open up now that covid is on its way out at least in the UK, I’m beginning to feel much more hopeful for the future and motivated to think about it too. Oh, and spending more time with friends in person is a blessing that I will never again take for granted!
I’m moving in June so I’ve got to find a new place to live; probably another rental because the timeline for buying a place is likely too short (1.5 months).
I’m also keeping an eye out on https://matrix.org and how things are going over there, and it’s really cool to see everything that’s happening there.
I noticed that someone has finally implemented a matrix-based comment system for web pages https://gitlab.com/cactus-comments/cactus.chat that I thought would be a great alternative to my (sadly) abandoned project, journal.
As far as I can see (finding this hard to believe) but no one seems to be offering the matrix-powered “WordPress” CMS
- comment system package. And like… I really wanted journal to be this but I just never had the time for that.
I’m actually really pleased to have my own blog in the way I do currently, using the same tech that most in the same space would use. And I’m a huge fan of the “git push to deploy” mechanism I’ve got going, although it took a non-trivial bit of set up to get going last summer.
I wonder if there’s some kind of project resembling this that does full git-based CMS from the terminal. Probably millions right? But none based on matrix, I bet.
Imagine a world where you could:
- start a git server to track all of your projects as you deploy them
- control the server by pushing commits, which automatically deploys the changes
- edit + commit and push changes of local files with your
favourite editor
- potentially via some sort of GUI
It seems this kind of thing has been tried before but nothing seems to have taken off. I wonder if a component of this is the fact that CMSs depend a lot on the hosting provider and not everyone can be bothered to run their own thing.
The Hugo site lists a few of these on their site https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/
It seems likely that due to the nature of these, most devs would be more than happy to use their favourite editor + browser to preview things.
Conversely, non-devs are so unlikely to want to use anything that isn’t centralised that it doesn’t make sense to add an extra complication of a shiny UI-based editor to the dev-centric solutions. And maybe that’s why it’s never taken off.
Anyway this has been fun and I feel like making something matrix-y. I would love to revive the idea of blogs on matrix, I really feel like there’s a use-case there. Who knows, maybe the performance of Synapse has been improved enough to the point where hosting blog content in a room is really feasible.
Wow this place hasn’t seen any action recently. Time to dust off those cobwebs and write stuff.
I want to write a life update (which I guess can be covid update 5).
Also, I would really like to get into doing at least one generated art piece per week next year because I miss making that stuff.
I want to automate things to remove the annoying tasks that are required when posting something new.
Hello. It’s been a while.
I’m making something new. This time it’s an app to help people plan their busy busy social lives, which let’s face it, no one has a social life right now. If you do, you’re either cheating or you live in a big house with lots of people, well done.
But more specifically, I’m going to add a feature to my app to get it to detect URLs in chat messages, and then provide a confirmation mechanism for the links to be set as structured data.
Tonight my brain is in thinking mode so I’m up and I want to make something.
I just finished watching “Giri / Haji” on Netflix and it was AMAZING.
I mean, I cried several times so it must be good.
The critics agree, it got a 100% on RT https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/giri_haji
SO GOOD. WHAT CAN REPLACE THIS??
I’ve been messing around with Firebase Security Rules to see if I can get a prototype for an app I’m working on up and running.
It’s turning out to be a bit of a faff.
Once it’s done I can focus entirely on getting the app to update the firebase store.