I’ve just been listening to Voice 2 by Max Richter 🎵. The first of this pair of albums was a trigger for me to think more about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and what a landmark document it is - and also how far away so many countries are from it. This second album is worth a listen but lacks the impact of the first which featured spoken extracts from the UDHR.
There aren’t too many places you can go at the moment in the UK if you want an afternoon out, especially if you have a wife and daughter who aren’t big fans of dogs (my son is quite partial to them.) Thankfully we are members of the Birmingham Botanical Gardens and managed to book a space for this afternoon. Like most attractions in England they are managing to hold on using the furlough scheme and I imagine the smaller number of staff they have kept active are working very hard to keep everything open and tidy. We had a lovely couple of hours looking at the trees in bloom, spring flowers and of course the playground.
It’s the Easter holidays so I’ve taken the day off. This morning my son and I have been playing with Gravitrax.
I’ve often finished listening to an album on Apple Music and seen interesting albums in the “You Might Also Like” section. I decided to let this feature guide my listening today. I didn’t get as many albums listened to as I’d planned due to some unplanned calls with clients, but still managed to listen to three albums all the way through.
My journey started off with Stravinsky: Le Sacre du Printemps by Teodor Currentzis. This then led me to J. S. Bach: Harpsichord Concertos by Andreas Staier, and finally to Mozart: Keyboard Music, Vol. 7 featuring Kristian Bezuidenhout.
It would be interesting to see how far in terms of genre and style of music as you could just by following these suggestions. I’m not working tomorrow so maybe a challenge for Friday!
Homemade WHAT THE GOLF?
We like books in our household. Sometimes with children it’s hard to get the quiet time needed for a really good reading session, and it’s too easy just to collapse in front of the TV on in the evening. So Thursday is reading night. As it’s now the Easter holidays our six year old stayed up a little later once his sister had gone to bed and joined us with his book of choice.
This evening my wife, son and I were reading:
- 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak
- The Twits by Roald Dahl
- Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
Had a little look at logseq.com. Looks interesting. Good to see more projects using the Org mode file format being developed.
In the Android emulator not that long ago you could give it a longitude and latitude for testing location based apps. They’ve now made location control more user friendly by providing a map on which you can tap to set your location. My guess is that most developers find this anything other than helpful as we want to provide a precise location.
You can do this using the Android console. I always forget the exact steps required so this is a reminder for my future self for the next time I need to do this:
➜ ~ cat ~/.emulator_console_auth_token rWLLmxgfZpw0sb4D% ➜ ~ telnet localhost 5554 Trying ::1... Connected to localhost. Escape character is '^]'. Android Console: Authentication required Android Console: type 'auth' to authenticate Android Console: you can find your in '/Users/matt/.emulator_console_auth_token' OK auth rWLLmxgfZpw0sb4D Android Console: type 'help' for a list of commands OK geo fix -2.568001 51.809137
(geo fix requires latitude and then longitude, rather than the more usual way around)
Only a few days now until our children are off school for the Easter holidays. My wife has been busily blogging away while she has some free time. I’m sure we’ll be making some of these homemade musical instruments over the next couple of weeks!
Are you looking for something easy to make for your children to play with over the holidays? How about trying out a homemade musical instrument. This percussion instrument is probably one of the easiest instruments to “make” and involves gathering a few items you already have at home. Hours of wholesome musical fun awaits. Or at least 15 minutes.
DIY Guiro - Get Kids Into Music
A web app I’m working on at the moment contains a domain specific vector graphics editor. I keep going back and forth with the client on scroll direction and zooming. I thought it was down to macOS vs Windows. However I’ve just discovered that the Google Maps website and the Apple Maps macOS app both handle scroll direction when zooming differently. On Google Maps if I slide my finger ‘up’ on my Magic Mouse it zooms out. On Apple Maps it zooms in (with the help of the shift key). I think its time to give up - and have zoom work as it does on Google Maps and be counter-intuitive for us Mac types (I doubt any/many macOS users will use this web app anyway).
Listening to Iag Bari by Fanfare Ciocărlia 🎵Something a bit different than my usual listening to start the morning off with.
