Welcome
Posted on 28 January, 2025
So it would seem that the Pebble smartwatch is coming back again. As reported by The Verge the operating system has been open-sourced and Eric Migicovsky (leader of the team behind the original Kickstarter) is talking about releasing some 'new' versions of the old watches.
Might be time to dust off some old code ...
Posted on 03 September, 2024
Joshua and I were very fortunate last weekend to be able to go the Italian grand-prix at Monza, thanks to a friend who works for FOM (the management company for F1) and arranged 'VIP' passes for us.
We stayed in an Airbnb in Milan and got to the circuit by train/bus each day — which works really well, so long as you don't mind queuing a lot (we thought it was bad on the Saturday after qualifying ... and then found out what bad really is after the race on Sunday). There was also quite a lot of walking involved — we covered something like 35 miles over the three days.
Takeaways:
- We should have booked seats in a grandstand — we watched most of the actual race in the fanzone, which was fine
- Commentary at the track during the race is much worse than TV commentary! It didn't help that a lot of it was in Italian (which I only speak a tiny bit) but it was also just not very good
- As a result, we actually knew less about what was going on during the race than we would have done if we'd been watching at home (I think this is quite common)
- Everything else about the weekend was fantastic — F2 and F3, F1 practice and qualifying, historic cars, the paddocks ... thoroughly enjoyed all of it!
Highlight of the weekend has to be getting to walk the pit lane on race day.
... morePosted on 27 August, 2024
This week I decided to make a concerted effort to add WebC to some of my 11ty projects (not, ironically, this one ...)
What?
WebC is one (of several) templating languages that is supported in 11ty, and is actually the brainchild of Zach Leatherman, the developer behind 11ty.
Why?
The key attraction of WebC over my preferred Nunjucks is that it enables easy bundling of JavaScript and CSS, alongside HTML — which means:
- JS and CSS will only be built on a page if it uses the relevant WebC component; and
- WebC components can easily be re-used between projects, in theory without needing to copy across separate JS, CSS and any 11ty shortcodes/filters that are referenced
What's the catch?
The drawbacks of WebC are that it's (at least to my eye) a little less elegant than Nunjucks; I don't think it's as flexible as Nunjucks; and (at the moment at least) the documentation is quite sparse and there's not that many articles/posts etc out on the internet when you get stuck in the minutiae of implementation.
... morePosted on 01 June, 2024
For years I've wanted to have a lightweight coding setup that I can use to do work whilst travelling — and I may, finally, have come up with a "good enough" solution.
The brief
My main development machine is a MacBook Pro. I'm extremely happy with it in every circumstance other than for a travel (specifically, commuting) setup.
The reason for that is that development isn't my day job, and I have a "work" laptop that I need to carry around with me. Carrying a second laptop is too much weight and bulk, and I'm not at liberty to use the "work" laptop for development (and probably wouldn't want to anyway).
The obvious answer (for a Mac-using type at least) is an iPad — and indeed I have a (older, 2018) iPad Pro; but there are many limitations with iPadOS which have, in the past, made it too cumbersome to use.
... more