Week 212: burnt and misshapen

Sunday 9 April 2023

• Hot cross buns. Used a duck egg, forgot the butter, and didn’t have any caradamom or ginger, but I soaked the fruit in the juice of some clementines, which imparted a marmaladey flavour, and they’re the best buns I’ve ever made. It’s important that they look a bit burnt and misshapen, else how will anyone tell they’re homemade?

  Yes I’ve also tried some of the shop-bought buns this season. As you know, I’m dead against the diabolical liberties of chocolate and salted caramel, but the “St Clements” bun (as in “oranges and lemons say the bells of”?) is an agreeable innovation.

• Some work.

  • Waffling (in the US “being indecisive” sense) about fonts. The problem with the default system font is that some people have a questionable one. Maybe that’s not a problem, and part of the beauty of the web platform is that users are free to ruin your pixel-perfect design however they like, smear mustard on their screen and choose a non-native resolution. But. What’s a nice mid sans serif? Several candidates don’t have any ↙← direction arrow glyphs, or I don’t like the look of the tabular numbers, or the “st” kerning pair looks a bit uncomfortable.

  • Started using MRSK. It’s spicy new software and not quite as seamless as all that – there are seams – but my new setup using MRSK is cheaper and better in all sorts of ways (I was using the DigitalOcean App Platform for the previous 31 weeks) so I’m pleased.

  • I’ve a little GeoDjango app that has maybe one user per week or so (a client). Spent the weekend moving it to Google Cloud Run, using Litestream to squirrel away a copy of the database (this example was most instructive). Thanks to scaling-to-zero it should now cost pennies, which is many times less that it had been costing, great.

• 🎦 Air (2023), a film about a basketball shoe? My Nike shoes are maybe slightly too narrow for my wide feet, even though I sized up, isn’t that interesting.

  Turns out the Odeon website seat picker UI (user interface) uses React, so it’s not terribly difficult to use the React developer tools browser extension to see the status of a seat, what a game-changer.

• One of my Twitter bots stopped working, incredibly not the fault of Twitter but just the solar panels API renewing its certificate. So I bothered to repair it, and then went further: from Monday, it will tweet at actual sunset instead of 10pm. I know there are some other ways that bot could be better, but I’m so tired, and ultimately it’s all doomed so what’s the point?