I’ve never been an enthusiastic exerciser, at least not exercising for the
sake of it. I’ve always enjoyed walking and cycling, but as a beneficial
by-product of going somewhere interesting and enjoying the outdoors. Apart from
a brief period of running while I was at Oxford, and practising Tae Kwon Do in
my teens, I have never really done an organised exercise program. That wasn’t
too much of a problem while I could be active as part of my normal day, but
during lockdown, that outlet mostly disappeared. In truth, I had already started
to realise that as I was getting older, I needed to get serious about doing more
weight-bearing exercises to prevent my muscles from wasting away. Predictably,
my plans to do something about that always started tomorrow.
I haven’t sewn as much as I thought I might during lockdown — partly because
I’ve been busier with work than I expected — but what I have sewn has been a
joy and something to be savoured. This weekend I finished making a second pair
of Persephone Sailor Pants, this time using some lovely linen mix fabric from
Clothspot.
I look at you and see
My life that might have been
Your face just ghostly in the smoke
They’re setting fire to the cornfields
As you’re taking me home
The smell of burning fields
Will now mean you and here
[…]
Ooh, the thrill and the hurting
The thrill and the hurting
I know that this will never be mine
[…]
I want you as the dream
Not the reality
— ‘Never Be Mine’ by Kate Bush
Great works of art (of all kinds) have a tendency to make you think, and to
encourage your mind to make connections which you might not have thought about
before. Yesterday I watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire and absolutely loved it.
I can’t stop thinking about it and it has made all sorts of interesting links in
my mind.
I don’t really know what I was thinking. It’s just that sometimes I get an
idea in my head and I run with it. I’m pretty sure that it is going to
be a good thing (or a very good thing) in the long run, but it has challenged my
poor old brain a good deal, I can tell you.
It started when I got one of the regular newsletters from ErgoDox, the makers of
my keyboard. They were featuring a ‘layout of the month’ produced by Graeme
Geldenhuys which used the BEAKL15 keyboard layout. I was intrigued. Typing has
felt much more comfortable since I got the ErgoDox, but there’s still plenty of
room for improvement as QWERTY still involves awkward reaches and an unbalanced
workload between the hands. Since I could just download and tweak Graeme’s layout to
try it, there was no reason not to, and so it began.
There’s a kind of quiet joy to be had in walking the same route every day, even
when it is forced on you. My daily walk takes me on a roughly 2 mile route, the
middle part of which is a circuit around our scrubby local ‘nature reserve’. The
sweeping, majestic plains of the Serengeti it is not. It’s a strip of land on
either side of a small stream, circled on all sides by housing estates. But it
does have wild flowers and some mature trees, and — as all I’ve had in the way
of nature during lockdown — I have come to love it.
I learned recently that you can turn a Raspberry Pi into a networked DAC which
can act as a Roon endpoint. I’ve always wanted to play with a Raspberry Pi so it
seemed an ideal easy project to try it out, and also to replace the ageing
Squeezebox player which I currently use as a Roon endpoint. I ordered all the
bits and put it together on Sunday — it was fun and successful (the best kind
of project)!
I was in the middle of the activity I’m about to describe below and listening to
the BBC Radio 4 programme A History of the World in 100 Objects about the
Olduvai stone chopping tool when I heard something that made me smile. Neil
MacGregor said something to the effect that one of the defining features of
humans is that we make things more complicated than they need to be. Busted!
Well. I don’t want to dwell, but I can’t avoid the elephant in the room. This
wasn’t — to put it simply — the 50th birthday I would have imagined only a
few weeks ago. I’ve had Happy Birthday sung to me on a WhatsApp voice recording,
lots of lovely messages and phone calls from friends and family, and I’ve had
the fun of finishing sewing this chunk of riotous colour: a Granville shirt by
Sewaholic.
I have been a DEVONthink user for a long time. I’m not sure exactly when I
started using it, but my records suggest that it was at least as far back
as 2006. For many years, it held all my documents, notes, links, manuals,
receipts and other random snippets. However, at some point, I needed to sync at
least some of my databases between computers and to my phone for mobile use. The
early iterations of syncing were a bit clunky and eventually I threw in the
towel and looked around for something else. I told myself that I didn’t need all
the bells and whistles of DEVONthink, and that anything into which I could throw
my documents and which would sync them quickly and reliably would do the job.
For a while, I used KeepIt (formerly, Together) which is a great and easy to use
application, but (for whatever reason) I didn’t add items to it very often, and
was increasingly finding myself in a situation where I couldn’t remember where I
had put that snippet of information I needed. To cut a long story short, I’m
back with DEVONthink Pro 3, and couldn’t be happier about it.
Emacs is really the gift that keeps giving. It has now been about 4 months since
I started using org-mode to manage all my todos, and it has been working
terrifically well for me. Despite having lots of different projects to juggle at
the moment, I continue to feel more or less on top of things — or at least, I
know how much stuff I haven’t been able to get to yet! The best thing about
Emacs and org-mode is that you can expand and develop your system as your
needs change. You don’t need to set up a complex system at the start, nor do you
need to make the whole system complex if only one part of it needs extra
structure. It’s all very flexible. I’ve made a couple of tweaks recently, and
also started adapting my system of keeping notes which I thought might be
interesting for other Emacs users and the Emacs-curious.
