I tend to use Hugo whenever I need a static site. But my magpie tendencies have driven me to take a look at Eleventy, and I can definitely see the appeal. Going through the Eleventy quick-start guide, I’m quite impressed with how easy it was to setup a bespoke layout for a single site. I’ve done similar things in a few Hugo sites and while I wouldn’t describe it as “hard”, it’s certainly more involved.

Well, believe it or not, my standing Christmas Eve Mass organ gig has come around once more1, so it’s time to decide on this year’s Song of The Year. This is the second post in this series, so please see last year’s post on what this nonsense is all about. This year’s nominees are (not too many this year): Wooden Ship, from Antarctica — Suit for guitar and orchestra by Nigel Westlake.

Had a play with Evergreen.ink this afternoon. It was pretty fun. Made myself a test story called Test Creek which you can try out (the story was written by me but all the images were done using DALL-E). The experience was quite intuitive. I’ve yet to try out the advanced features, like the Sapling scripting engine, but the basics are really approachable for anyone not interested with any of that.

On Reconcilable Difference #221, Merlin and John introduced the concept of “Best, First, Favourite”. For a particular category, which would you consider the best (i.e. closest to a perfect representation of that category, in however you define it), which would you recommend someone who’s interested in starting should experience first, and which one is your favourite. I thought it was a fun idea, so I’ve put together a few of my own.

Sort of in-between projects at the moment so I’m doing a bit of light stuff on Mainboard Mayhem. I had an idea for a new element: a remote control which, when picked up, will allow the player to toggle walls and tanks using the keyboard, much like the green and blue buttons. I used ChatGGT to come up with some artwork, and it produced something that was pretty decent. Prompt: pixel art of a remote control with a single red button styled like the tiles found in Chips Challange, rotated 45 degrees to the right.

Well the “big presentation” was today, the one I thought would be a good canditate for trying out iA Presenter. And after spending the last couple of weeks preparing for it, I’d thought it would be good time to give my thoughts on how it worked for me. First, I must say that I can appreciate using an app that is opinionated. This is not a drop-in replacement for Keynote1: the app really does try and steer you towards a particular presenting style.

It’s been 10 years to the day when I had the opportunity to tour the Pacific as part of my job at the Bureau of Meteorology, the so call “RA-V Missions”. This last month or so, I’ve been writing about them in my journal, trying to get it all down before I forget. I had grand plans of publishing them on a travel blog, which I shelved a couple of months ago.

I see that Gabz, Robb, and Manique — along with many others — have posted their defaults after listening to Hemispheric Views 097 - Duel of the Defaults!, which was a really fun episode. I thought I’d do the same. Mail Client: Fastmail. Web-app on the desktop and app on mobile Mail Server: Fastmail Notes: Obsidian for work. It was Obsidian for personal use but I’m trying out Notion at the moment.

This question was posed to me in the Hemispheric Views Discord the other day. It’s a bit notable that I didn’t have an answer written down for this already, seeing that I do have pretty concrete reasons for why I really like Go. So I figured it was time to write them out. I should preface this by saying that by liking Go it doesn’t mean I don’t use or like any other languages.

Opened my work email this morning and received a greeting from the following spam messages: Webinar to “overcome the fear of public speaking” from some HR Training mob A training course on “accelerating innovation in data science an ML” (there’re a few emails about AI here) Webinars from Stripe, Slack, and Cloudflare about how other companies are using them Weekly updates about what’s happening on our Confluence wiki (this probably could be useful… maybe?