Weeknotes #291

After last month’s forgetting-Marine-Day-was-a-public-holiday mishap, I was careful not to make the same mistake with August’s Mountain Day. I did not in fact get to any mountains but I did get through a mountain of work. Well, no, that’s not true either. What I did was finally put Emma’s bed together. We still need to get some curtains for her room but with any luck we’ll be able to move her in there this coming weekend.

Emma read Roald Dahl’s Matilda (in Japanese). Matilda was my favourite book when I was about Emma’s age so I was pretty excited she was able to make it through the entire book. I’ve got her the BFG to read next.

I mentioned last week that I sidetracked myself while working on an IRC client with a project that translates my own variant of Markdown into mdoc, a syntax that manpage readers like man can understand. Well, the IRC client is still on the backburner but I did make a public repo for the Markdown translator. It’s called Predoc and I’m pretty proud of it. I wish manpages were a bigger thing than they are and I think one of the things that limits their appeal (in terms of creation) is how unwelcoming languages like Groff and mdoc are to the average programmer. I’d be ecstatic if Predoc helped change that. At the time of writing, it shouldn’t really be used by other people but I’m continuing to polish it and hope I’ll be able to get a bit of interest in places like Hacker News and Lobsters.

On the topic of manpages, I came really like the way that Mohamed Akram collates and displays the macOS manpages at manp.gs. Apple used to provide this documentation publicly on their website but they don’t any more so it’s great that someone like Akram has picked up the slack. Maybe when Apple has a market capitalisation of US$5 trillion, they’ll be able to spare a few people.

It felt like it’d been a while since any of the video essayists I follow on YouTube had really hit one out of the park and then, wouldn’t you know it, two go and do it in the same week:

• The first is Patrick Willems’ hour-long video on the Daniel Craig run of James Bond films. This is Willems at his best: bringing more insight to mainstream cinema than it really deserves.

• The second is Big Joel’s 1.5 hour-long essay on the comedian, Bill Maher. This doesn’t quite reach the heights of Willems’ video but in some ways that’s because what Big Joel is trying is more difficult. If you enjoy media criticism, it’s great stuff.

I continued playing Jedi: Survivor primarily on the iPad (using Xbox Cloud Gaming). I remembered I had a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller I don’t really use and I’ve been playing with it instead of the old PS4 Controller. One awkward aspect is that although the Pro Controller includes an ABXY array of buttons, their positions are vertically reversed from where they are on the Xbox Controller. The controls in the game are by default bound to the same letters so the most common actions are in the ‘wrong place’. Fortunately you can rebind your controls.

When I linked to Hilltop Hoods’ single ‘Laced Up’ back in July, I wrote that it was ‘a solid entry in their catalogue of catchy hooks and clever wordplay’. I’m pleased to report that the recently released album, Fall From the Light is entirely like that (Apple Music).