posts

Since moving to an M1 Mac, I’ve noticed some issues with my second screen that I do not experience with my previous Intel Mac or with my current work laptop, which is a Dell Intel PC running Windows 10.

Rosewater is an exciting science fiction novel set several decades after first contact with an alien called Wormwood, that has established itself as a large biodome in Nigeria. The novel follows Kaaro, a thief whose extra special abilities are forged from an unlikely connection with the alien. The whole thing is part sci-fi adventure and part spy novel.

I find it hard to get started on projects. This may have always been the case. I definitely remember instances of complex plans for school projects that I’d barely have time to finish. I once got up at 6AM to finish making a calendar in French—I thought it was going to be this outstanding piece of work that would genuinely replace my teacher’s calendar! Reality didn’t quite match the idea though.

The Imaginary Girlfriend is a short autobiography by American author John Irving. In it, he explains the interwoven roles of writing and wrestling in his life.

Today I had an interesting bug in some Latex code I am writing. Putting a footnote into a caption caused the document to fail compilation. The problem was that this document doesn’t use a table of figures at the start, so I hadn’t thought to include a short summary caption. Apparently the curly brace in the footnote command does not sit well with that, even if you aren’t using a list or table of figures in your document. The solution is simple, as long as the footnote isn’t crucial to the list of tables!

‘Civilisations’ is a counterfactual historical novel that attempts to extrapolate the future course of history after changing one pivotal moment of the timeline. I usually find novels like this are great fun, another entertaining example is ‘Making History’ by Stephen Fry. The novel, originally written in French, won some big awards in France last year. I read the translation by Sam Taylor.

Today, we transferred our Christmas tree to a new pot. Being root-bound as the tree was, it took ages to get it out of the crappy pot from the store and into the new, bigger pot. And I’m pretty sure it’s a bit wonky, which might make the baubles a bit lopsided next Christmas. It looks excellent next to the new bird bath.

Lifeforms is the 1994 album from the Future Sound of London. A double album (just), it also features the talents of Robert Fripp, Ozric Tentacles, Talvin Singh, Toni Halliday, and Liz Frazer. It reached number 6 on the UK album chart and went silver.

At the moment I can’t compile this blog locally because my ruby-ffi install is somehow wrong and is preventing Jekyll from running on my recently upgraded Mac system. Fortunately the site still compiles on Netlify, or else you wouldn’t be reading this!

Despite my best intentions, I didn’t manage to continue writing posts after the first day of 2022! But perhaps now I can try again as an excuse to test my blogging set up on my new computer.

Hmmm it seems as though the ffi gem as installed by bundler is not compatible with a Mac that has an M1 chip. This limits my ability to preview blog posts locally. I might have to swap to a more modern static site generator (which is probably easier than working out what ffi actually does) - seems like a good February project!

At the new year, thoughts and spare time for writing point me toward writing some new posts for my understated classics series. Expect some new ones soon.