/
I'm very angry about the UK government increasing the amount UK citizens need to earn before their partner from another country can live here. It was £18,600 when my wife applied for her first visa and I only just scraped it at the time. The new minimum is going to be £38,700. They are both wrong but the higher amount will affect even more people. It's very personal politics for me.
This BBC article makes the cruelty of the Conservatives clear.
Made a little generator for starting positions for Chess 960
Went to the Science Museum and Natural History Museum today.
The laptop and mug of the woman who designed the Oxford Covid vaccine actually made me cry.
Natural History Museum is massive. Massive. And great. As long as you slightly suspend thinking about how it all got there.
https://github.com/edjw/microblog-cms/assets/6547979/c418bd42-3f5f-4f81-b433-e91a76f8d45f
Did a full day of London transport yesterday. Train, overground, underground, boat, and cable car. Cable car makes zero sense unless you're a tourist mind.
Locomotion at Shildon has the original Rocket and another train called Sans Pareil.
The Rocket is pretty famous. Sans Pareil is not but I find it almost more interesting. It competed against the Rocket in early train trials but had mechanical issues. It's a kind of what-if history.
Did a 8km trail race this morning near Stanley and Beamish in County Durham. Had a great time. Somehow had a ~2min gap in front and behind me for the second half of the race so it was a bit lonely at times! It was my longest ever run and some pretty steep downhill sections meant it included my fastest ever KM and Mile too.
They gave me a souvenir slate coaster
And some photos of the course from yesterday screenshotted from Derwentside Athletics Club's Facebook event
MacOS lets you install websites to your computer as standalone web apps as of MacOS Sonoma.
After some experimentation, here's how you can detect with javascript if your site is in a web app. standalone isn't a standard property of the navigator object so Typescript will shout at you if you don't put add the interface.
interface Navigator {
standalone?: boolean;
}
// Your existing code
if (navigator.standalone) {
// macOS Sonoma web app
} else if (navigator.standalone === false) {
// Safari on macOS or iOS
} else {
// Another browser
}
Just realised that because I added search to this microblog, I can post things I want to remember later to this site and then I can find them later and others can too. Could be good
This is for my future reference really but might be handy 🤷♂️
asdf plugin add nodejs https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf-nodejs.git
asdf install nodejs $(asdf nodejs resolve lts --latest-available)
asdf install nodejs latest
asdf global nodejs $(asdf nodejs resolve latest)
asdf global nodejs $(asdf nodejs resolve lts --latest-available)
And use local instead of global to use a different version for that directory
Using GitHub issues as a CMS for this site still going ok.
GitHub made it so you have to be logged in to access images and videos uploaded to an Issue. So hotlinking to the images isn't doable any more.
Now there's some complicated markdown parsing that looks for links to images and videos and uses Cloudinary's Node SDK to upload those assets to Cloudinary.
I also noticed that the images were making the site slow to load so using Cloudinary to make the images smaller now and now the Lighthouse scores are good again.
Good day around Gateshead today. Went to Saltwell Park which was great and very big. Kind of don't know how we hadn't come across it before. Really good coffee there too.
Also Angel of the North which is always good
Spotted some very remote benches in Teesdale
I did my first organised running race last night. It was around Durham where I live. It rained pretty heavily the entire time including the 20-30mins standing around before the start. It was otherwise fun. I sprinted for a good bit at the end which was nice. Would have liked to go faster but the idea was just to find out what an organised race is like.
Paula Radcliffe gave me my medal at the end. Hello woman who had the marathon world record for a decade or something yes please give me a medal for running 5000m slowly.
Steve Cram was one of the marshalls on the course - just standing, hood up, shouting encouragement at people.
A weird thing I do that I love...
I make pressing the Caps Lock key act as a Backspace. It's on the home row of the keyboard and I make typos! I use it all the time.
I've seen some people remap Caps Lock to a 'Cmd+Option+Shift+Control' key and then use that as another layer of keyboard shortcuts. They call this the Hyper key. But I make typos way more often than I want keyboard shortcuts that aren't already available to me so I think Backspace is better.
Karabiner Elements is the app for this on Macs. Gnome Tweaks will do this for you on Debian/Ubuntu. SharpKeys on Windows.
A gym thing that I wish I'd worked out earlier. No-one knows what training plan you're on. Going slowly or lifting light? It could be a recovery day. No-one can judge what you're doing as your 'best'.
I'm still running! Which is nice. I'm not injured. I'm getting fitter and losing weight too. I'm doing an organised run round Durham at the end of July. Kind of nervous about it but just trying to treat it as a fun new thing and remember that I can just have fun and I don't have to be good at it (though I know I will have a time I'm aiming for).
Tried a bit of SwiftUI today. Not done any coding that's not JavaScript for a long time. Didn't hate it...?
I'm having a great time reading Charlie and the Chocolate factory to my son at bedtime at the moment. He was given it by someone for a recent birthday. He loves it and I love it (which can't be said for all stories for young children).
This evening I remembered that there had been a lot of discourse recently about rewording Roald Dahl books for inclusiveness or whatever and loads of people thought rewording his books was somewhere on the scale of 'a bit unnecessary' through to to 'an attack on freedom of expression'. I couldn't quite see what the problem was at the time.
So I checked the frontmatter and sure enough this is the 2023 reworded version. I read the book multiple times as a child. I've seen the original movie multiple times. We're over halfway through and I honestly had no idea this wasn't the original text just from reading the book. It's still great. Kids (or at least one of my kids) still love it.
There's still assumptions in there about business, labour, and intellectual property that a Marxist would take issue with I'm sure. But any concerns that editing the original would make the story unenjoyable are way off.
Been getting into trail running a bit recently and having a great time of it. I've been carrying too much weight for a long time so this combined with the super low-fat diet I'm on to avoid needing painkillers because of my gallstones will hopefully help me change that up.
Moving house is a massive pain. We're moving from the north-east to the south coast this summer. So much life admin done. So much left to do. So much uncertainty. Fun times!
Big fan of niche museums. I don't know if the limited remit makes them work harder to make them good?
Here's a few photos for the pencil museum in Keswick where they used to make pencils.
The old factory isn't used anymore but fresh art deco paint and typography still there
One of the two oldest pencils in existence. From before 1837
They had a few of these pencils where the lead had been sculpted by an artist.
They also had fun stories like the guy who inspired the Q character on James Bond commissioning them to make a pencil that could hide a map in it. Also the biggest pencil in the world. It was a good time!
I woke up with really bad abdominal pain last night and it hadn't changed by late this morning. I'm on holiday and spent the rest of the day being seen, tested and diagnosed by various departments of two different hospitals I'd never been to before.
No charges. No insurance paperwork. No stress other than getting my pain sorted out. I'll have surgery in a few months. Same again there. Junior doctors are ok strike today but I didn't feel affected as I was an emergency.
Thanks NHS.
Also getting into Aussie rules football. Can't quite see how I'll ever play or see a game live but you never know. Firmly in 'I have no idea who anyone is or where any of these places are' territory
Getting back into watching disc golf highlights on YouTube. I've played a couple of times and it is hard! The commentators are also players and it's cool how the sport is small enough that it can have this DIY feel.
Big fan of this quote from New Zealand's data protection authority
There is no place for a “she’ll be right” attitude to privacy and cyber security.
We bought a used car today. How do people get confident at this making this purchasing decision? Seems so hard to get the information you need to be confident you're not putting a fairly large amount of money into something that's not going to be scrap soon.
My wife and I hosted a Christian Harmony singing at Ushaw College near our house at the weekend. 70ish people came from all over the UK, and a few from Ireland and Germany too. Here's a little clip of the first song of the day
The devil will be in the detail but it looks like the UK government will actually start funding toddler childcare properly soon according to the Guardian.
The plan would provide an extra 30 hours a week to parents of one- and two-year olds
[and] increase the hourly rate paid to childcare providers by the government to deliver their existing 30 hours weekly entitlement
It's too late for my family. But it'll make the world of difference to parents like my brother and sister-in-law who were looking at £1k a month in London. For the government, it should pay for itself with increased tax revenue by allowing more people to work when they've got toddlers.
🤞