What I'm Up To

What I'm Up To

as of 2022-03-04

(This is a now page, and if you have your own site, you should make one, too.)

Writing

I’m slowly (very slowly) writing a new course. More on this as the idea gels.

Coding

  • Doing a surprising amount of various flavors of JavaScript.
  • This page is evidence that I just completed porting my site to something based on Vuepress.

Looking At

  • Still looking for a functional language to teach.

Messin’ Around

  • About half-way through a redesign of my workshop. It started with a simple idea: let’s add central dust collection. That was a year ago, and the shop has been torn up since. Slowly making prpogress, though. I just finished a router table that seems to collect virtually all the dust and shavings.

  • Trying to find time to play with my Mother 32.

  • Oh, and we’re trying to build a new house (which in the post-COVID slump is taking forever).

Tools I’m Using

Hardware

Back to the Mac. In the end my one-year Linux experiment was great, but the alternatives to the tools I use (Adobe xxx, Affinity yyy, Graffle, and ScreenFlow) were not quite there. It’s a shame: in many ways Linux is now the nicest overall OS to use.

I’m on a 6x2 core i7 MBP with an old Intuos tablet. I steal one of my kids’ old screens as an occasional second monitor.

Content creation

Adobe Premier Pro, Screenflow, Affinity Designer, Photoshop. Omnigraffle, Quicktime, Numbers, Keynote. I wish I could find a simple animation package. Skim for PDF reading.

Editor

After at least 30 years of resisting vi, my eldest threw down the gauntlet, and I installed Neovim. It took a while for it to become intuitive, but I’m finding myself being far more productive than I was in Emacs, VS Code, or anything else.

I run it in a terminal using Kitty. With a little configuration, I can now do all my window management, both inside the editor and outside in the terminal, with a single set of key sequences.

Utilities

  • Git: for just about everything: my driving value is is “if my machine melts overnight, can I be back to where I was by that afternoon?”

  • Jekyll with a modified Joseph theme for this site (I’ve tried a bunch of others, but they try to do too much and keep getting in the way.)

  • LetsEncrypt/CertBot for keys.

  • Ruby (still): for general scripting