Matthew Kennard

Could we see Apple’s Primephonic replacement launch today?

On the way home from visiting my Mum and the children were playing some noisy game in the back. Glenn Gould came on the radio playing the first Goldberg Variation. Silence - at least for the first minute anyway. Music to make you stop and listen, even if you are 4 or 7.

A couple of new adornments to my desk for 2022. A Lego bonsai tree (Christmas present), and a monitor in portrait orientation.

Back to work today. I stumbled about in Emacs for 15 minutes or so until my memory of the necessary keyboard shortcuts resurfaced.

Christmas Lego bonsai tree completed and ready to join me when I get back to work tomorrow.

Christmas Eve games

Some Christmas edible crafts. The houses quickly collapsed during decorating but were delicious.

Today I’ve finally got around to asking Google how to stop macOS reordering desktops in Mission Control. Turns out the solution is as simple as a checkbox in system preferences.

Big thumbs up for these vegetarian ‘ meat balls’ 👍😋

My son is VERY excited about Lego Star Wars Battles at the moment. Recently he hasn’t touched the Xbox at all - it’s all Apple Arcade games.

Prospect Magazine wins again for first Christmas card of the year

It’s been a long time coming. But I’m enjoying finally getting to use Xcode 13 in ViM mode.

My order from Apple has arrived! Probably the only thing I’ll be buying from them this year.

Miniland (Legoland Windsor)

Just finished Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee 📚. A bleak extrapolation of the near future, but a definite page turner.

What is it with the weird Apple logo my bank is using?

Finished reading: Ready Player Two: A Novel by Ernest Cline 📚

Following on from yesterday’s experiment of offloading thoughts into Tot I’ve been trying to do the same with Org-roam.

I’ve created a little bit of elisp and added it to my .doom.d/config.el:

(defun my-add-to-org-roam-daily-today (text)
  "Add TEXT to the Org roam today daily as an item at the end."
  (save-window-excursion
    (org-roam-dailies-goto-today)
    (goto-char (point-max))
    (org-insert-heading)
    (insert text)
    (save-buffer)))

This creates a new command in Emacs for adding some text as an item to the end of today’s Org-roam daily.

The Alfred workflow calls the Emacs command via emacsclient (so Emacs will need to be running):

It isn’t very forgiving of single/double quotes (and may get confused by other characters potentially), however for my purposes of quickly adding a concise thought to my daily log it does the job.

I’m giving using a pomodoro timer a try again - specifically one from SetApp Session. In order to try and stop myself getting distracted I’ve created a new Alfred Workflow which allows me to quickly offload ideas which come into my head into Tot. Then at the end of a session I can review my distractions and either create tasks for them in Org mode or (more likely) put them in the bin.

Finally the mushrooms come in a container which can be recycled. We need to end the practice of making packaging more appealing at the expensive of how easy it is to recycle.

Land, Birmingham

Some beautiful vegetarian food this lunchtime to celebrate my wife’s birthday.

Finished reading: PACHINKO by Min Jin Lee 📚

I use Org mode clocking for tracking time spent on billable tasks. Until recently I was using Hammerspoon and a hand crafted Lua script to show my current task, and total time spent, in the macOS menubar. However it had an issue - if I put my Mac to sleep it would stop automatically updating. I’ve now made the move to xbar which is so much simpler. I wrote a tiny zsh script to accomplish the same task which in Lua was tens of lines rather than lines you can count on one hand.