James Potato Finger

I have acquired a large stainless steel frying pan and have this morning made fried bread and tomatoes for breakfast. Its nice having a big pan for cooking for the family all at once.

Made a rooky error and left it on a hot hob while I ate, not on just still hot, and the remaining oil polymerized on the bottom in a thick layer. Bit of vinegar and a little scrub and we are nice and shiny again though.

Keeping non stick free. I abandoned non stick cook ware several years back, and I would never go back. My pans will likely last me out now.

The great thing about playing games is that they are fun.

I honestly believe that Reason 3 was the pinnacle of DAW design. Being able to build a little rack, flipping it over and patching the cables, cruddy sequencer, endless limitations. It was just perfect in every way.

I miss it a lot.

There really was something beautiful about a DAW that said "you have Subtractor, Malestron, and this drum sequencer. Make of it what you will" instead of pitching a limitless sky at you.

It was really nice this week after an RPG session with old friends I have reconnected with to find that they still, as a couple, reference old jokes and characters from games we played together years and years ago. It was nice because some of those characters and events pop into my mind still but I didn't have anyone to laugh about them with.

Its nice to know these things were not just big for me, but for everyone involved.

Just nipped to my parents to do a quick job for them and have been rewarded with some fresh rhubarb!

For those of you that have a small veg patch, like myself, and have struggled with slugs I absolutely recommend getting a hedgehog.

You know the one thing that still tickles my brain with computers? Making things happen in the real world.

I had an ultrasonics sensor hooked up to a serial port today and wrote a little bit of C to take a ranging and read it back.

When I run the command it sends a message out of the serial port to the pinger, the pinger makes a little vibration in the air and waits for it to bounce off something and come back, then it sends a message back to the computer, and the computer tells me how far to my left the cupboard with all the wires in is.

Still makes me smile when stuff like this comes to life several decades on from when I first did it.

Got my Summer reading list lined up.

Frankenstein - Mary Shelly
In the Springtime of the Year - Susan Hill
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K Le Guin

If I get all of them read by the Autumn I will consider it a very good feat.

Picked up a bottle of alcohol free gin and some lemons, so virgin Tom Collins is the drink of the evening here. This is how it always is on hot days.

I spent much of the day trying to get a Qt project to build with CMake that bought a cross platform library in on windows.

Built fine on Linux.

Built fine on OS X.

Windows still doesn't build.

Why is everything on Windows so hopelessly complicated to achieve all the while. From problems with not having compilers, to winrc not being found, to Ninja just not working.

In all if I ever see a windows computer again it will be too soon.

After trying out KDE plasma for a while (it is quite nice actually, but I have gone back to XFCE) I am once again been left sad that there are few file browsers that support Miller Columns.

For all of the faults in OS X the finder has a lovely Miller Column implementation that I have had set in all finder windows on any Mac I have used at home, or work, for roughly 20 years.

The guy who sometimes comes and sits to use the apple computer next to me at work experienced them for the first time when he sat at that computer and still often comments about how he wishes all other computers he used had the feature too.

Are we just a minority of two whom likes them, because I always felt like they should have wider support.

I have been looking into a bit of mentalism work and I have to say, I really am not into it. It just doesn't spark the joy in me that other magic does.

I have found the most interest in work with little slips of paper but that is almost all that interests me in the field of study so far.

I understand that mentalism is a very mature form of magic which has more or less been complete for a long time in contrast to coins which had a much more recent boom is new techniques and theory.

Watching a good mentalist work is a wonderful thing, but I just don't feel like the practice engaging for myself.

Sitting in the shade of a tree listening to Mr Oizo, and reading Frankenstein (1818) while the kids play with water.

What a day.

Traditionally click passes are done one coin at a time so you get that one coin, two coin effect.

You also can't friction pass two coins because two coins going into your hand should make a noise. This is why two coin click passes are big thing.

I have been playing though, and I present the friction click pass.

Innovation!

You can't beat home made carrot and sweet potato soup.

And now we reach the point where I am going to play Sleeping Gods again tonight and it starts to feel more like an obligation to get it finished than a joy to play.

That is because if I don't play it all this week it is likely another year before I can pick it up again by which time I will have lost my place and starting over would be the best way forward.

Do not get me wrong, I still enjoy plating it, it isn't a drag, but it does feel like I should play it rather than I just will play it.

One thing about Sleeping Gods that annoys me is that there is a ship location "Sick Bay" but on the sheet where you track the ship damage it is between sessions it is "infirm", which is short for infirmary.

This is a small thing, but it really irks me.

The reason for it is because sick bay would not fit in the title space of the column for ship damage. The result is that it scans badly.

Our eldest has just finished reading his second Eerie-on-Sea book and I can not recommend these books enough.

I highly recommend them to anyone, not just kids, who enjoys spooky seaside mystery adventures.

The eldest loves them, and I am quite fond of them too if I am being honest.

Something happened today and the computer crashed due to a network error, but it did so during an update and so broke itself and would not boot.

Today has been an arch-chroot day.

On the upside while I was tinkering I gave myself a nice fancy grub menu screen while I fixed it.

I am on a Mac today for a bit doing some stuff and things and I once again am noticing how good fingers miller column implementation is.

It's just a joy to use.

What if I made some small music's using nothing but my machinedrum? That would be fun, wouldn't it? Noisy nonsense, yes.

I was this many days old when I discovered that Lawn Bowls and Crown Green bowls are two completely different games.

Crown Green bowls sounds amazing.