Weeknote 2024-02

Starting to get back into the flow of work again. I can just about remember what I do for a living. Heading straight back into evening meetings again has been a shock, but I’m sure I will acclimatise again soon.

Elliot got sick on Friday and was unable to attend childcare, throwing our working balance to the wolves record breakingly early this year.

It’s Liz’s birthday next week, so I’ve spent more time than I care to admit reading baking forums.

This thread, in which user “Doug” provides an exceptionally good diagram of how to cut a cake so as to make a slanted roof for a house, is one of the reasons I still love the internet.

I spent some time over the Christmas period hacking on some updates to this website. Which I’m very excited about.

It’s now powered by Bridgetown rather than Hugo. I really like Bridgetown, the project layout makes a lot of sense to me, and it’s always bugged me that, as a committed Ruby developer, my personal website has been generated by Go.

I’ve also tried to give the whole site a more “professional” look, rather than the previous monospaced font hackerman aesthetic. I’m pretty happy with it, and building it finally forced me to learn a bit more about flexbox and how we lay out elements in 2023/4.

I found myself really enjoying laying things out with flexbox, with one exception:

On my homepage, the “about” section with the QR code has a structure a bit like this:

<section class="short-about">
    <span class="mecard"></span>
    <p></p>
    <p></p>
    <p></p>
    <p></p>
</section>

And I got it laying out how I want it: with the QR code aligned to the top right (where it is currently) and the text to wrap around it and filling the full width where it can.

I did this with something like the following:

.short-about {
    display: flex;
    flex-direction: row-reverse;
    flex-wrap: row-wrap;
}
.short-about .mecard {
    flex: 1;
}
.short-about .mecard p:first-of-type {
    flex: 4;
}

Which does mostly what I want - except for a couple of small niggles.

• the paragraph spacing is inconsistent, between the paragraphs that wrap and the paragraphs that don’t. I had to wordsmith the first paragraph quite hard to make the spacing look ok.
• and related to that: in viewport widths under about 650px wide, the second paragraph doesn’t flow under the image at all, despite looking like it should.

Given that perfect is the enemy of good, I opted to ship anyway. And minor niggles aside I had a lot more fun doing this than I’ve ever had working with floats and clearfix divs, and absolute and relative positioning. So that’s a win.

I got a new camera this week too. I’ve been ruminating on whether to buy one for nearly a year.

I haven’t owned a dedicated camera for about 10 years, when I sold all of my 35mm film gear, so looking at the landscape of digital cameras in 2023/4 was pretty intimidating.

I eventually settled on the OM System OM-5, with a 12-45mm f/4 constant aperture kit lens. It has a Micro four thirds sensor so I’m a little concerned that in a couple of years time when the latest phones are out I’m going to regret not getting a bigger sensor. But honestly the main things that sold it to me were its size, the IP53 weather rating, and that it reminds me aesthetically of my old Minolta X-370. I got it for a very good price, thanks to camera shop January sales, and OM-Systems winter cashback offer.

The only other real contender for me was the reasonably new Fujifilm X-S20. It’s probably a more technically competant camera in most ways, and the 18-55 f/2.8-4 is widely regarded to be one of the best kit lenses available for any camera. But the absolute lack of any weather sealing ruined it for me. I don’t mind a bit of special handling, but I absolutely do not need the anxiety of going somewhere humid, or out in the rain, and worrying if my camera was going to die. Honestly I don’t know what Fujifilm were thinking - even the XT-2, a camera from a decade ago, was weather sealed to some degree.

So far I am really enjoying the OM-5. Although it’s become painfully evident how little I understand the intricacies of modern cameras. Looking forward to learning more.

One thing that I have to think about that I never had to with 35mm is a post-processing workflow. I have literally no idea what I’m doing here, Darktable and the interestingly named RawTherapee seem to be the two big hitters for Linux users.

Shooting Ilford HP5 and developing it inside a dark bag in the kitchen was a lot simpler.

A recent firmware update to my Surface Pro 7 has left the latest Fedora unbootable. Which is clearly bullshit. Thankfully almost all the data on it is ephemeral, and what isn’t lives on a microSD card in the back.

I tried Ubuntu briefly, but while it works, it’s still very much not for me. So for now I’m back on Windows 11 until either: I get brave enough to attempt a firmware downgrade, or Fedora 40 comes out and fixes the issue.

Scoop, and WSL2 are making this machine more bearable than I worried it would be.

Damn! Windows 11 is slow, compared to Fedora on the same hardware.