Mnemozzyne

Start your holidays with a meta-alarm

Back in 2022 I wrote about how annoying it is, with all the built-in smarts in a smartphone, they still wake me up even when there are like a hundred ways they could detect that I don’t want to be woken. I now have a solution! If you work, or have children to get to school on time, or otherwise just need to be up and about before you naturally wake up in the morning, you have doubtless got a scheduled, repeating alarm.

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PGN files from handwritten chess notation

Our family has been playing quite a bit of chess recently. The younger members - initially insistent that all games must be “full chess” - have been persuaded to complete a few exercises with just pawns, practise some end games and get the ideas about planning more than one move ahead. We got a chess puzzle/exercise book and it’s proved a hit. I’m now routinely losing to a 9.5 year old - he has had more practice than his big sister.

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Souvenirs des villes européennes

Visiting European cities I always notice big, green cross-shaped pharmacy signs. They’ve kind of worked their way into my memory and I feel a little tingle of holiday excitement when I see them. Spending most of my working days staring at glowing rectangles made of pixels hasn’t stopped me from admiring the glowing notrectangles and their dancing LED patterns. So it is with some nostalgia that I share my latest hobby project, pretentiously entitled “Souvenirs des villes européennes”.

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Pic'n'mix reinvented

What unites salted butter, cans of gin & tonic, Branstonnaise and Quality Street? That’s right: they’re all sold mixed up. Or as I’ve been calling it, “with added entropy”. Salt, butter, gin, tonic, Branston pickle and mayonnaise are all readily available. And now, in a move I thoroughly approve of, Quality Street have taken entropy out of their product. The individual flavours are being sold separately - John Lewis in Cambridge has a big fancy dispenser.

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Super slow-mo Tetris

A new gadget entered my life a while ago: Father Christmas brought me a Badger 2040W. It’s a wifi-connected computer, that runs python and has an e-ink display. It has fairly low power consumption, and is easily programmed to sleep most of the time. Also e-ink retains an image even when power is removed, so it ought to be able to show something that updates fairly slowly, and run on battery power for many days.

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Skill swaps

Late last year I finished (after probably taking too long) (also, when is a website ever finished?)… a website. This one is a little Django site for a friend of mine who’s a very talented artist. The site showcases paintings, and it has the world’s simplest home-made CMS and a contact form. Nothing super clever, but it was fun to build. In return, Sammie gave our family the best souvenir ever of happy holidays - a painting of “the big house” - where we’ve spent many summers swimming; eating, drinking; watching shooting stars; chasing and being chased by bats and hornets and debating who goes down the hill for an armful of pasty and baguettes every day.

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Times Table Hack Stars

Time will tell if this was good parenting or not. Finn has been saying he’s interested in coding. We’ve enjoyed building games together (he loves setting up cheat codes in the little scripts). It seems to work best if I code and commentate: although he likes getting the machine to do his bidding, the details don’t seem so interesting to him. Anyway, Finn has also been obsessed of late with an online times table challenge shared at school.

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Long, crustless hypotenuses

Branstonnaise is a new one on me: I’ve just discovered the third high-entropy food product to feature on this blog. It has prompted me to share a recipe for a sandwich. Ultimate Cheese is its name, and Sarah invented it while we lived in New Zealand. It doesn’t contain Branston pickle, but it does contain mayonnaise and another brown, tasty sandwich sauce. Note: the recipe is opinionated re: bread colour and cheese form (sliced over grated).

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Standing up a prototype

24 hours with an upgraded standing desk at home and I’m really glad I went for it. But I wanted to write a few words about prototypes, minimum viable products, and describe my original standing desk for posterity. It started during Covid, working at home for many consecutive days. I made the most ergonomic “normal” desk I could, balancing a laptop on a pile of books to bring it to eye level.

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Optimising the FA Cup

The early rounds of the FA Cup are great fun to watch. This year I followed from the 3rd Qualifying Round. My team is Liverpool and they don’t even enter the competition until January (on current form, they may exit the competition before February). So instead, I like to follow a reasonably local team, but to provide some sort of journey through the Cup, without early termination, I pursue an unfaithful support-whoever-wins system.

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