May 2020 Micro Posts
Introducing the new Micro posts for this website.
I’m going to be trying to write more to this website.
Usually, I try to aim for a certain standard of quality in my writing, and this can really hold me up from writing about something I want to write about.
Sometimes it takes a week or more just to write one post. Yeah, perfection is killer.
It gets worse when I add images, because I agonise over them.
So I’m going to be writing more things to a lower quality. I’m calling these ‘Micro’ posts, and you can find a full list here: Micro.
They will be just what I’m thinking about, or some small observations, or whatever. Generally without pictures, without proofreading, without rewording each sentence hundreds of times. Almost as if I have a typewriter and a stream of conciousness - no going back to make changes.
If you’re struggling to understand the difference, compare the Ctrl + Alt + Del webcomic with it’s “Micro” webcomic, Sillies.
Because these posts will (probably) be of a lower quality to what I’d usually put out, I’m categorising them differently. Only the most recent few will show on the homepage (and also won’t have images dedicated to them!).
At the end of each month, I’ll publish a monthly summary that has links to all of the micro posts from that month, as well some writing at the top (like you’re reading now!) that might include some reflections on the month. Or maybe I won’t write anything there at all sometimes. Who knows?
I won’t be sending out emails for every micro post either, though I will for the monthly summaries.
Micro posts and monthly summaries will not be considered as a ‘latest’ post. Instead, I have created a new url, for latest micro posts. Hopefully that we be useful for people who like to bookmark things.
As always, everything I write (regular posts and also micro posts) will appear on the archive page. Micro posts will appear in a smaller font.
Welcome To This Micro Blog
Welcome to this daily microblog! I don’t have a hosting solution set up for this yet - I’m just writing text files - so this will be a few days old by the time you read this. What is it? Well, it’s a tiny blog that I’ll write something to... read more
Reflection
Douglas Adams famously wrote his final book - Mostly Harmless - whilst going through a host of personal issues that lead to an unpleasant year. The book suffered for it, ending with most of the main characters dead, every human killed, and the Earth destroyed. What would Mostly Harmless have... read more
Perfection Kills
For the past few weeks, I’ve been porting some of Frequency Central’s eurorack modules to VCV Rack. Being in the digital realm gives us the opportunity to do things that aren’t really feasible to do in real life, like outputting at a better resolution or framerate than was economically feasible... read more
Globalised World
I’m currently staying in a wooden cabin in my dad’s back yard - glamorous I know - and whenever I need to go into the house, I put on my flip flops, cross the pavement, go into the back door, and switch them out for some slippers to keep the... read more
Make Failure Suck
I really hate running. That might surprise some people given that I do it so much, but I do. I hate it, it hurts, it’s hard work, and I don’t often feel that “Runner’s High” that people talk about. That said, I still think it’s important to run. There’s a... read more
You Can't Please Everybody
You can’t please everybody. That’s something I’ve come to realise, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. On some issues, both sides have completely valid concerns, and assuaging one concern fundamentally means that you can’t resolve the other. For example: Lockdowns Some people think a lockdown is the best way forward to... read more
Ni the Nomad
My girlfriend, Ni Luh Ayu Sukrisna Dewi, currently works in accounting for a restaurant in Bali. Because of the situation at her workplace - exacerbated by the Coronavirus Pandemic - she’s looking to increase her skillset so that she isn’t dependent on working in Bali. She’s been learning digital marketing,... read more
Keep It Short, Stupid
In programming, there is a maxim called ‘KISS’ - Keep It Simple, Stupid. The idea is, even though it’s possible to create more efficient code by optimisation or whatever, often the best way is the keep it simple so that it’s easiest to understand and debug. It often doesn’t matter... read more
This Website
As you may or may not know, this website was one of my first forays into web development. Although I have incrementally improved the design here and there, it has remained relatively unchanged since then. I was very fond of it when I first developed it in 2016, and I... read more
Jekyll Author Pages
In this tutorial, I will instruct you about how to create a page to show all of an author’s posts, without using any plugins. This post was inspired by the Jasper2 theme, which is a port of Ghost’s Casper theme. In that theme, the author pages are generated by a... read more
Jekyll Tags and Categories
Continuing on from my tutorial yesterday where I gave you code snippets to use to make a author pages, in today’s tutorial I will give you snippets that are useful for making tags and categories pages. Tags and categories are implemented in the same way in Jekyll, so I will... read more
Domain Names
I have this weird thing with domain names. Even if I don’t have a use for it right now, I’ll compulsively buy a domain name just to make sure someone else can’t take it away from me. I guess it’s a form of brand protection. When I first launched this... read more
Identity
Two years ago, I implored my readers to ‘create their own brand and identity’ rather than choosing to wear, discuss, or identify with something just because it’s seen as ‘cool’ in our current society. I still stand by that; I covered the logos on my laptop, my clothes are fairly... read more
Clap for Key Workers
For those not in the know, Clap for Carers (Now known as, ‘Clap for Key Workers’) is a recurring event every Thursday 8PM in the UK during the Coronavirus Pandemic. People go outside and clap for a minute or two, whilst others play music or bang on pots and pans.... read more
False Nostalgia
I often feel nostalgic for something I’ve never actually experienced. Like travelling through traditional asia, without any information about where to go or what to do, surviving on very little in meagre conditions. I miss having to ask people you meet for information, where travellers would seek each other out... read more
Investment vs Return
It took many years to develop Polygraf, a sequencer. This wasn’t full time work, obviously, but various few-week-long iteration sprints scattered across various summers and winters. It’s something that evolved over time. For the longest of times, it was the product that I was proudest of. Seismograf, a drum module,... read more
Checking PDF links
Sometime last year, Tayda changed their e-shop and many of their existing URLs stopped working. I won’t make any comment on that, suffice to say that links breaking was specifically one of the things I tried hard to avoid when building the new frequency central website. Frequency Central links to... read more
Don't Ignore The Value
This is probably anathema to some people, but you can get value from someone’s work or product without having to like their personality, character, or politics. This applies to companies and organisations, too. Too often do I see someone (usually someone I don’t know, on the internet) take issue with... read more
Adding equations to your webpage
If you work in mathematics or a mathematics adjacent field, eventually you’re going to want to add an equation to your webpage. If you’re in one of those fields, more likely than not, you’re familiar with LaTeX and it’s equations. MathJax is an open source JavaScript library that you can... read more
Bulk crop images
On occasion, we might want to crop a set of images to the same area. Perhaps we’re making minor variations, and want to display them, or perhaps a website gives data in the same place for multiple pages, whatever. Cropping them manually by hand would be very time consuming and... read more
Add knob scales to your synth project
Short article today, just because I want to post about something I found useful. This plugin lets you generate knob scales easily in Inkscape. It’s easily to use; after installing the extension, simply go to Extension -> Render -> Knob Scale… From there, you can generate your scale, and export... read more
Are you meeting the wrong goals?
We all have goals and desires. We have goals and desires that we talk about openly, centring on things we’d like to do, be, or experience. “I will run a marathon this year.” “I want to start a business.” “I’m trying to become fluent in Spanish.” “I’d want to excite... read more
Google's Digital Garage
As I mentioned a few weeks ago in a micro post, my girlfriend Ni has been working towards a free digital marketing qualification on Google Garage. She’s completely new to the field, and has very little prior knowledge about the workings of the web, tools like analytics or search consoles,... read more
Sell something you aren't passionate about
A thought: To learn to sell, sell something you aren’t passionate about. I’m passionate about technology, so it’s hard for me to move out of the ‘development’ stage until I think that my product is technologically perfect. AKA: It’s hard for me to ship because I’m not happy with the... read more
Some days, nothing works
… and it is those days that test the strength of your character. If you can make sure you achieve something, even on days when everything is going wrong, well, let’s just say that your chances for those other days are probably pretty good. Signed, Jet. On a day when... read more
Why are smartphones so locked down?
Why are smart phones so locked down? If my laptop has an issue, I can easily easily view some system logs and the system files to try and detect the problem. If a piece of hardware starts malfunctioning, at best I can install a new driver to fix the problem,... read more
Falling into place
I wonder how many people are where they are in life, purely because that’s where the chips fell. How many specialists have the skills that they have, not because of any passion or desire to be in that niche, but by accident? Perhaps because of momentum and inertia, or the... read more
The Best Times
The Best Times are The Hard Times. My friend Daniel and I often talk about how some of the best/most fulfilling times in our life were the times when we really, really struggled. The kind of period that was terrible to live through, but that you owe your character to.... read more
Everything is a compromise
Frequency Central is launching a new Eurorack audio mixer called Strips. With a mixer, there are as many possible permutations of features as there are people on the planet. Everyone has their own set of requirements. What one person sees as a boon could be seen as a detriment by... read more
Writing Consistently
This post marks a full month of these micro blogs. In total, I’ve written somewhere in the ballpark of 13000 words. I posted a few of the posts a day late, and missed one day (the 27th). I tend to prioritise other things for most of the day, so leave... read more