๐ชต minilog ๐ชต
October 9 2023
On my phone I have:
- Via browser 5 tabs open
- Firefox 9 tabs (and 3 collections with 17 tabs)
- Chrome 7 tabs (13 really cos some are nested)
- Duck duck go 15 tabs
- Lagrange 5 tabs
- Adblocker browser 4 tabs
- Einkbro 2 tabs
- Opera 4 tabs
- Bing 280 tabs (any time I click on anything in an AI search it leaves it in a tab, just noticed this!)
I find it useful to use different browsers and it's somehow more manageable to know where things are
September 13 2023
I got an eink tablet (meebook p6) and it's so nice to read on, to look at Gemini, even comics look fine in black and white. I'm typing on it now and the keyboard is quicker than I'd expect. It makes such a difference to have android apps, really versatile.
July 8 2023
I'm happy that twitter and reddit are imploding. I've been into smaller social spaces for a while:
- an experimental music slack
- a therapist WhatsApp group
- a therapy research email group
And more public spaces
I hope threads and bluesky take off so that mastodon doesn't get overrun with idiots and celebrities. Similarly I hope there's a new reddit that gets popular; it's nice that lemmy has been more vibrant but too many people are trying to turn it into reddit. Well there's always station, bubble and the Midnight!
January 10 2022
So glad I've come back to web minus 1
(gemini)
November 5 2021
haven't added to this page for a month! Time flies when you're wasting your life.
The tabs open on my pc right now are
- ableton live 8
- audacity
- vlc (just finished an album and listening back)
- Firefox (only 7 tabs in there)
- 3 folders
October 6 2021b
i should do this
is generally shorthand for
someone says (i should do this) but it's not right for me
October 6 2021
Had my haircut for the first time in over 2 years. The price has gone up a lot but still only works out as a pound a month so I'm ok with that. It was getting in the way with a mask and headphones and trying to put my hood up. Its a shame notions of female beauty are so wrapped up with long flowing hair.
September 26 2021
- beautiful
I think this is as much about aesthetic qualities as how it's perceived subjectively. Each perceiver recreates a piece of art internally
- meaningful
I like art that is a conduit for multiple ambivalent meanings. I'm interested in meaning stirred up and contemplated. To force a heavy handed meaning is rigid and boring.
- personal
That comes from a place of depth and intuition. Art that is easy to make but has taken a lifetime of experience.
September 23 2021
At primary school I loved drawing borders around the page. Spent more time doing that than work. I got told off coz my borders encroached more and more into the centre (like an obnoxious tv ident)
I don't mind that there are no horizontal line breaks in the spec, can just do something like this:
..-+-.."..-+-.."..-+-..
September 22 2021
Itโs been late-stage capitalism for a while now
On holiday in Ireland as a kid there were road markings
slow
Then
slower
And finally
slowest
Hopefully it's later stage and soon last stage capitalism
September 19 2021
Happened to notice one of my tracks was played by zoviet france on their radio show the other day. I'm always happy when my music is played on resonance fm, really like that radio station.
September 17 2021
https://across-multiverse.com/
Beautiful browser game where you explore the multiverse
Reminded me of ecco the dolphin
September 16 2021
We got some cheap chocolates called
Bradbury's Maltballs
Out loud it sounds like I'm saying 'Cadbury's meatballs' with too much claggy chocolate in my mouth
September 9 2021
I like this idea of resurrecting link pages
I've expanded my bookmarks page
It now includes gemlinks, weblinks and 'offline' stuff (books, music, tv).
September 7 2021
The electric fan was on directly above me upstairs. A really low frequency rumble I'm guessing ~20Hz; barely liminal. When my partner moved it from the floor to the shelf I felt a weight lifted.
She's the opposite: she can hear super high frequencies that don't bother me in the slightest.
She just got a cat scarer because of all the poop on the garden. I thought she might be able to hear it but she can't.
August 29 2021
Fraught relationship with technology this week
- toothbrush stopped charging ๐ฆท
- water flosser got water damage(!) ๐ง
- Alexa has gone wappy ๐ฎ
- coffee grinder making funny noise โ
- coffee machine flowing slowly ๐
- ariane update lost bookmarks and certs ๐
- obnoxious family at the pool all on their phones with a cacophony of videos and sounds ๐ฑ
What else? I'm sure there's more.. Oh yes!
- the volume is really low on phone calls, sometimes I can barely hear people ๐๐ผ
It's so interesting at the gym. The phone looks like an appendage on some people. They'll walk into the steam room with their phone! Before the world changedโข phones were banned poolside, but now it's encouraged almost: they've installed small lockers for valuables
August 22 2021
Think a port to Gemini would work well using circle colours emoji
๐ด๐ก๐ข๐ต๐ฃโซ๐ค
August 21 2021
I wrote about my shrimp at smol.pub
We tend to get our magazines through the post at the same time of the month. The Psychologist and my partner's Good Food arrived today. The other day it was The Journal of Person-Centred & Experiential Psychotherapies. Quarterly, we'll get Nature's Home, The National Trust Magazine, and Granta through.
I barely look at them but I love hearing them plop down from the letterbox to the mat.
August 20 2021
Listening to Mother by Goldie.
A 60 minute track that flows from classical to drum n bass back to ambient and classical. 20 odd years ago I found the piece indulgent and boring, but now the way it gradually changes seems masterful to me.
August 18 2021
Love seeing pigeons race over this time of year
If I was feeling poetic I'd call them shooting stars
But I was reminded more of bowser in super mario kart!
August 16 2021
Reading Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed:
all his explanations ended up, after two or three of Shevek's questions, in floundering.
The verb 'to flounder' is not used enough. It's good to read some sci-fi with a deep sense of humanity. I just finished M John Harrison's kefahuchi trilogy and it was at times brilliant and fascinating but often frustrating and unconvincing; It floundered between these modes. (sorry).
August 14 2021b
- i
- haven't
- done
- any
- lists
- seems a bit superfluous to the spec if you ask me
August 14 2021
I keep having a vague feeling-memory of being at a festival today. The smell of cigarette smoke and a burger van were evocative earlier.
I just sat outside in the warm dark and I could hear parties and fireworks and distant music. It's ten years since I went to a proper festival, maybe that's why: my memories are often cyclical.
My body is remembering a trauma from five years ago. It's strange because I feel calm and relaxed but out of nowhere I'll suddenly spasm or get really unpleasant muscle pain.
August 13 2021
Thought it'd be nice to do some translations of my flounder index page. Just auto translated: I'm barely a monoglot. It's weird that for some languages the formatting was amended and emojis deleted. For Japanese it decided on a different hashtag: ๏ผ not #
Took me a while to work out why that wasn't parsing.
August 7 2021b
Alexa, shuffle my music
I'm sorry, I can't do that right now
Alexa, play my music
shuffling your music
Hmm.
August 7 2021
We're staying somewhere between Liverpool and Manchester for a few days. The lounge is a big conservatory, there's a stubbly wheat field behind and the crackle of rain on the roof. There's loads of canada geese resting in the field with rabbits. The geese glide towards a nearby fishing lake. A martin, or maybe a swallow, just flew past.
August 4 2021
At my old gym i used to stare at the word steamroom and think of anagrams. My favourites were 'o marmoset' and 'moo master'.
At my proper gym i stare at the walls and the tiles.
The back wall has a vista of beach, sea and sky stretched across. The clouds are reversed and stretched in Photoshop and the sea is reversed to and fro palindromically. An uncanny effect.
The tiles are more impressive: there are 4 colours (white, two greys, black). Over ~50 meters it fades gradually from white / grey to black / grey. There are thousands of tiles and I can't work out an efficient way of doing this.
August 1 2021
My 'proper' gym reopened today. It's so much cleaner, they took my temperature as I entered; it's designed to feel like a spa.
The gym I'd been going to the past couple months was pretty dirty, there's a used plaster in the sauna that's been there at least 6 days, and a staff member spouting anti-covid conspiracy theories (and soon after was off with covid) was a memorable incident.
But *relief* I'm back at my proper gym.
They remembered that I like the relaxation room and told me I could use it because it's quiet (there's a sign saying it's just for people having spa treatments at the moment).
July 29 โ2021
There's a new dentists down the road and their motto is
We're in heaven,
When you smile!
Seems absurdly over the top. How will they up the ante? 'We're in religious ecstasy, when you smile'? 'We orgasm furiously, when you smile'?
July 28 โ2021
Managed to use my ariane client cert in lagrange
The instructions were easy enough for me to follow
Just had to install openssl.
Annoying that I set the expiry date of the cert to a year when I set it up, dunno if there's anything I can do about that.
July 27 2021
Got a takeaway menu through the letterbox. There's a child chef next to a bottle of whiskey. The logo is a fish skeleton but instead of a skull it has an anthropomorphic slice of pizza.
> what does this do
Hmm I'm sure i read something about >> doing something
July 26 2021b
I do want a way of doing inline links
I think it looks fine like that, where I construct a sentence that encompasses the link and fits a line but that could be convoluted.
I don't like the academic [1] style which is why I do the tongue in cheek 2021b for duplicate daily minilogs.
July 26 2021
Walking home kept seeing 'knot grass' marked on the pavement, wonder if it's similar to Japanese knotweed.
Chalk: the original augmented reality
July 25 2021
got a mini laptop because my partner bought a car and i felt left out
third thing i installed was lagrange!
July 23 2021
Might not bother getting my music on the main streaming services. People pay about 10x as much on bandcamp.. It's not really about the money, I offer pay what you want which I prefer to ad supported revenue. And bandcamp just seems closer to listeners and more supportive of artists. At the same time, more people use spotify et al, artist discovery is better, and the apps and web players are better.
July 21 2021
Need to find a free music distribution service. Soundrop have just changed their model, they're gonna charge a buck for each track uploaded. I've got thousands of tracks on spotify etc so that's unfeasible: I only get like $20 every few months from streaming. Previously they were charging 15% on profits.
I tried routenote but it took ages to upload and then crashed, lost everything. Tried novecore which didn't work on Firefox, quick to upload, instant chat support, but they rejected my release for 'bad metadata' with no more info.
I want to find a service that let's me have lowercase titles and unadorned cover art. The problem is apple who are awful gatekeepers with ridiculous style requirements and the distro services just go along with it.
July 18 2021
Trying to geminize (geminify?) my web browsing experience on android.
I couldn't force Firefox into defaulting to reader mode. I settled on the via browser which is small, minimalist and highly customizable. You can add scripts, so to implement a kind of reader mode I've changed the background colour to white and text to black. There's a setting to change the text size and you can block images easily.
I've changed the default search to wiby.me which searches the 'classic web' and I've got a tab open for search.marginalia.nu which prioritizes older websites.
July 15 2021
Well I might not've been on facebook or twitter but I've been on station, lemmy, lobste.rs, tilde.news, midnight.pub, todon.eu, dolphin.town, federated mastodon timelines, and now collated a load of reddit subs for remini. Something tells me I might not be over the whole social media thing.
July 14 2021
Just found a book I've been looking for after years of waiting, and it was only a few quid!
There's a psychotherapy imprint and I pretty much like everything they publish. I have a tab open with a particular abebooks search and I try to remember to refresh every day.
It's interesting watching how the prices shot up over lockdown and gradually going down now.
More interesting is how arbitrary the pricing is; a seller will put a book on at a low price and gradually the same book from other sellers will auto adjust, driving the price down. It's fun trying to find the sweet spot where it's near the lowest price but before someone else nabs it (or, frustratingly, the seller claims it's 'unavailable').
I'm in a battle with the algorithms.
July 13 2021
Feel so much happier when it's sunny and hot. I'm on the lounger in the garden and the neighbours aren't around. Peace and relaxation!
12 Jul 2021
just wanted to test a simple template in excel and then copy paste that across to flounder
let's see what happens when I click enter
Dunno why i called it excel when it's the android sheets app. Can't choose the date format I like in the custom formats. Won't save any time typing into a sheet just to come back to the browser.
July 10 2021
Listening to a lot of French chanson chanteuses today: Carla Bruni, Atlantique, Lhasa, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Camille.
I don't mind poppier music as long as I can't understand the lyrics.
July 8 2021
I wanted to read cosmic voyage on my kindle. I went to a gemini proxy on the kindle browser which felt like a fun way of accessing the protocol but the font was too small for actual reading (or too big).
I toyed with using wget on termux to generate a txt file but I can't be arsed with command line stuff.
I used a mass downloader extension on vivaldi which annoyingly saved everything as html files even though it claimed they were txt files. Tried to drag and drop hundreds of files into libreoffice / acrobat but both involved clicking ok hundreds of times.
Then downloaded coolutils html converter which batch converted to one docx file really quickly, and emailed that to my kindle address.
Yay! I now have cosmic voyage on my kindle but I feel like there would've been a much easier way.
July 5 2021
playing with the alpha of ariane 4
It looks beautiful, tabbed browsing and automatic inline images work well.
Listening to music on NewPipe, so much better than the youtube apps. I can actually turn the screen off without pausing the music!
July 2 2021
Keep going past a sign for chish & fips, didn't notice the first couple of times because I often spoonerize what I'm reading.
Went to a model village which seemed like a smol thing to do. All the little buildings were adverts for real businesses. It was really heteronormative and stratified. So, more like the web.
Back home tomorrow, could do with a longer break.
June 30 2021
I can hear seagulls, magpies, peacocks and the chirrups of smaller birds. Radio 3 is barely liminal and there's a faint doppler shift of occasional trains.
The background hum of an industrial estate and traffic.
It's nice that the only things I'm worrying about are telling the difference between swallows and martins, between guillemots and razorbills, and whether the sun will come out.
June 28 2021
I'm on 2% battery. I like not knowing if my phone will just turn off.
We're away for a week in the countryside near Bridlington. I get a sense of place from the sounds. I can hear pigeons, thrushes, skylarks, blackbirds, peacocks and even the occasional unidentifiable sound from a zoo round the corner.
1%..
June 24 2021
The gaps between these minilogs are growing. I don't see myself as someone who likes logs, but as someone who likes novelty.
But that's not true: I've kept a personal daily journal since 2002 (I really like writing with a fountain pen in a decent diary). I keep client logs, supervision logs and cpd logs for work. I log the books I read and the music I listen to. The music I release is an audio diary. It's more that I hate the words blog and scrobble.. And, eurgh, glog: Vogon poetry. And more importantly I don't want likes and comments and followers. I remember every glib dismissal. I want discussion and connection.
June 20 2021
The only soccer surname homonym I've noticed is 'Hazard' which is disappointing because it kind of looks like a surname anyway ("Steve Hazard, bounty hunter")
I thought I saw 'Subitizer' which would've been great: subitizing is a pre-conscious form of counting where we see a group of objects and know how many there are. Most people can subitize about five objects, but it can be improved a bit with practice.
June 16 2021
I've been watching the football. I'm not really into sport but I want to feel connected to the world again.
Sometimes I'll listen to the commentary on bbc while walking to the gym and the sound quality is amazing: really immersive, crystal clear crowd sounds, almost feels like I'm there. It sounds like some reverb has been added and I wonder if there's some algorithmic surround sound stuff too.
Conversely, I've been watching on the telly with the sound off and subtitles on. I've been looking for unusual homonyms where a surname is also an unlikely word, trying you guess if it's a subtitle typo. 'Immobile' and 'Trippier' have been good ones so far.
June 14 2021
I was listening to the remaster of Like Weather by Leila. Fantastic album, somewhere between IDM, trip hop, and soul. I first got it from the CD library at uni back in '98, copied it onto one side of a c90 tape, and left off the tracks I wasn't into (I always did that, didn't have many tapes)
Hearing those missing tracks now though is a bit discombobulating, like they don't belong on the album, and interestingly they still don't sound as good.
June 11 2021
There's a primary school (elementary school / infants school) behind the house. It's disco friday and it's so weird hearing the kids sing along to 'this girl is on fire' by Alicia Keys: they're on beat and in key. The stray teachers trying to sing are not.
It's chaos in the garden today. Two neighbourhood cats had a vicious fight, fur flying, screeching, vying for territory.
There are bluetits nesting in a bird box on the side of the house. One of them gets so stressed out, flapping, jumping, screaming, looking run ragged. They hate the cats.
Oh no, now the macarena has started.
June 8 2021
Watching the swifts fly over, silhouetted against the sky. Sometimes they catch the evening sun and turn light and bright.
I haven't logged into Facebook or Twitter on my new phone - been over a week now!
June 6 2021
Listening to an old Colin Dale radio show from 1993. I might've listened at the time: I had a powerful radio on my walkman and could pick up kiss 100 from over 50 miles away. Fond memories of listening in bed when everyone had gone to sleep, trying to stay awake as late as possible.
What's weird is he played a track by basic channel and I thought I'd only discovered them last year. I would've heard their stuff nearly 20 years ago.
June 5 2021
Next door are having a kids party. 90s dance and a bouncy castle. Usually the screaming and crying would get to me but the low freq hiss drone of the bouncy castle blurs the noise in a pleasant way. I wonder how expensive portable noise cancelling speakers are.
June 3 2021
Had to get a new phone. It's got 6 gig of ram, 128 gig storage.. and I've mainly just been on gemini!
June 2 2021b
I've got to remember to stop wearing bright t-shirts when it's sunny. The bugs think I'm a giant flower and I don't want to accidentally squish them: I'm basically turning jainist at this point.
June 2 2021
Re-joined my old gym. It's lovely to be back and surprisingly quiet in the pool. It's been refurbished: a new sauna, a lick of paint, a new clock, and a new ant. The sauna wasn't working.
The handle by the Jacuzzi makes a resonant sound reminiscent of a bass violin or cello. It's a big metal pipe that curves round and attaches to the floor; not sure what they're called. I want to sample it but I might be too self conscious (standing there near naked, rubbing a pipe, frowning at my phone).
June 1 2021
Thought I'd try out this brief format. I like the idea of journals encapsulated on a page, with no restrictions as to length.
So nice to be able to sit in the garden in the sun, really helps to relax and decompress from work
sev.flounder.online/