2.1 Tiny Potions

Bought the child tiny potion bottles so she can make tiny potions. They’re adorable and imported from china for pennies. So almost certainly environmentally and ethically atrocious. Something to work on.

2.2 Website Fidgy-Widgyness

Added a “Related content” section to Lisa’s notebook. Her site is so much better than this one. ⊕ I mean, contentwise, sure that was obvious, because she is good at writing and I am not. But I mean technically better. This may seem odd because I update them both. I will probably import some of the improvements over at some point. Features her site has that mine does not include:

• Multi tiered taxonomies: There are four indices in use on her site:

  • Series: For things which are part of the same series of things (like “How Not To Think Like Sherlock Holmes” )
  • Refs: Philosophers or Authors who she has mentioned in a post.
  • Tags: Related keywords. This is a bit vague and isn’t used as much.
  • Categories: A secret hidden taxonomy used to tweak related content recommendations.

• The aforementioned related content. This looks at all the other posts and compares it to all the others on the above taxonomies (plus date) and then decides which ones are related. Each taxonomy is weighted, so things in the same series are the most important whereas things written on the same date are the least. That said, Lisa didn’t like it very much, so I removed it. But, figuring it out and getting it working was pretty satisfying. So it was worth doing.

• I fixed most of the Build warnings. The template I started with was created with an older version of Hugo which changed in the meantime. So every time it builds I get some warnings telling me something is deprecated and I should remove it. I’ve done that on hers. I haven’t yet done it here.

• Social Media meta tags. It makes Twitter cards with nice images and does something on facebook that I don’t understand. ⊕ I added Facebook Opengraph metatags. But I don’t use facebook and she doesn’t post links to her site there. Most of them are duplicates of the Twitter tags anyway, so it’s not great hardship to have those added.

• Oh. On preview I realise I had also fixed an issue with bullet points being condensed into too small a space. I had better import that fix before I publish this. (I did.)

• I manually added some links between series posts. I’m pretty sure I can automate this, but I wanted to do it quickly for now. I will look in to automatic linking within series’ later.

2.3 Watermelons

Made a watermelon juice dispenser out of a watermelon.
Then threw it off a bridge.

I’ve looked up a few more “Make a watermelon juice dispenser” videos. I like this one:

Because

• They advise you to trim the base so it can stand up.
  
• They mention that you must strain the watermelon or you’ll clog the tap.
• They add A LOT of rum.

2.4 Dye experiments

The child needed a yellow t-shirt. I did not have a yellow T-shirt, so I made one. This was pretty satisfying. I like to come across a problem and generate a neat solution. It’s even better when it actually works.

2.5 GOLD!

I bought some gold. Why? Very good question.

I have been doing some online science experiments. This is a bit of a spin off from previous experiments where people ask me to look at faces and then watch me get confused. ⊕ I have a damaged brain which means I can’t remember faces. No, not like you can’t. Like, properly sciency can’t. There’s an experiment that they run on me from time to time where I look at faces and have to match them to a lineup. I can do this very well if they’re on screen at the same time, but then they show the face, and then 2 seconds of fuzzy static and then the lineup and all of a sudden I have no clue whatsoever. There is a site which runs similar studies online. So I’ve been doing some of those.

They pay me a very small amount of money and wanted to send it to a company called Revolut so that I could spend it. I noticed in the app they allow all sortd of very strange commodities trading. I thought it would be funny to own a tiny amount of gold, so I bought £1.97 worth of gold.

As of the 31st July it’s worth £2. I have successfully made 3p by speculating on the gold markets. I’m a financial genius!

2.6 Brambles

The island has some bramble bushes which were producing fruit so the child and I harvested them and I made a bramble cobbler. It had a bit too much cinnamon in, but was otherwise delicious. Satisfactory foraging!

Also I saw a weird shiny bug!

2.7 Not actually Pizza

The child saw a pizza that looked like a cake, so we decided to try and make one.

The child cooked me some pepperoni pizza pic.twitter.com/7f6K4tfKcT

— D.F. Rickmann (@DavidRickmann) July 24, 2020

It’s a simple lemon cake with red buttercream icing, grated white chocolate and some fruit roll ups cut into circles.

2.8 A fox gave me a hat

I went for a bike ride and in Isleworth I saw a fox carrying a baseball cap. It saw me wearing a similar hat, and gave me the hat it had. ⊕ This is probably a generous interpretation. It probably just wanted to run away and wasn’t interested enough in the hat to keep holding it whilst running away. My version is more fun though. So now I have a new hat. Or I will once I’ve put it through the washing machine to remove the fox from it.

3.1 Boatwork

Boat building has taken a bit of a back seat for a while. This is partially because I injured my shoulder in an annoying way that has required so far over a year of physio to get it to stop hurting A LOT! but also I just got a bit fed up with it. I want to be able to spend a lot more money on it than I can, and that’s disheartening. I do actually have a bunch of materials that I should turn into boat though, because that would get them out the way and would mean I have more boat. Anyway. This month I added a door to the front cabin. There was a temporary door which I’d built but then I added more floor and and walls to the adjoining corridor and that door was no longer the right size. It was a relatively job of cutting it down to size and reattaching it. But that has been done now. Achievement achieved.

4.1 Writing Score

The goal is to write something everyday. I so far am not doing all that well on that goal, so let’s track it and see if that helps. In fact, this seems like something potentially automatable. Can I write a script to give me this score automatically? And if so can I use that same script to generate a continually updated graph month by month. ⊕ I’m writing this on the 5th of the month, so by the time I remove the draft tag on this post I guess we’ll see if I’ve done this. The answer was very much, no. I have not.

4.2 Exist metrics

Exist.io is a service which tracks and aggregates personal data. It also has an API, so since I can embed R into this blog I can poll that API directly to get key facts about the past month. This hopefully means that I can set up a template (Can I use the blog frontmatter as a variable in an R chunk?) which will automatically add these metrics every month.

Of course, I didn’t. But on the plus side. Now I have a project for August.