Last Updated: 22nd November 2024
I’m currently in Edinburgh, studying BSc UX Design at Edinburgh Napier University, where I’m in my third and final year. I’m wading very deep into my honours at this point; I’m now looking at the management of antiquarian books in a digital age. I’ve had a lot of work to do with that recently, so excuse the recent lack of blog posts/now page updates!
I’ve been doing a lot of radio recently. I bought my very first Meshtastic node, and a good old PMR446 handset with the CTCSS/DCS tones disabled to open up my transmissions to as many contacts as possible. I’m trying to join in the 8@8 net which runs every Sunday, but haven’t found a great spot to reach people from in Edinburgh yet.
I’m also still obsessing over MarkDown and using Pandoc/LaTeX. As you may have noticed, the site works slightly differently now with a new tagging system. I had a day “off” my honours work yesterday (read I instead sat and wrote 700 lines of fantastically terrible Python code) in order to implement the new site. The build process is all handled by Pandoc, which does an excellent job of handling everything uniformly and automatically. It certainly makes it a lot easier to write new blogs - all I need to do now is write some MarkDown, press build, wait a few minutes (that terrible Python script again) for the site to build and then commit it to the repository. GitHub Pages does its thing, and within a few minutes of clicking build I have a fully automated blog post with all the right links in all the right places. It is a significantly better experience than that which preceded it - manually rebuilding things like the home page from scratch every time it needed updating.
I’m also working on a POSSE system for my new notes slashpage. This will be yet more terribly written Python, which will take a copy of the RSS feed for notes, identify new entries, then use the API to engage with Mastodon and cross-post. I’m looking forward to having that done soon.
Most of my walks recently have been radio-centric (ie. up hills) which has been brilliant for fitness. It’s been very cold in Edinburgh recently, but I really enjoy this sort of weather. It’s so fresh and with the blue skies and sunshine, it’s just like summer but cold. It’s been a particularly nice autumn this year I feel, certainly better than last year’s!
I’ve been reading most stuff from my RSS reader recently, and haven’t had the time for a good link-hopping session, so I’ve not got any links to share this time. The indie web takes work - whether that’s for the people making it or the people using it, and so finding the gems can take an awful lot of hopping around.
I’m going to be free of coursework (for a bit at least) from around the middle of December, when I’ll be resuming work on my research project into the Ouseburn Culvert. I’m seriously looking forward to getting back to a good bit of history after months of not being able to do all that much research!
Find out about Now pages and see hundreds more!
If you wish to view old Now page entries, git clone this
repo then execute git log against this file.
Tagged as: now-page utility-pages