Weeknotes #2
Published
This edition really covers the last two weeks.
The highlight of last week was Bytes Conf. It was held on the Thursday evening, with four excellent talks. I was also one of the raffle winners! There were lots of familiar faces attending, so I took the opportunity to catch up with folk. These last few months I’ve not been doing much extracurricular stuff because of the little one.
I redeemed my winning raffle ticket for £50 off a print from The Private Press. I put it towards a beautiful print of the Welbeck Street Car Park (a soon to be demolished brutalist multi-storey car park) by Paul Catherall. I can’t wait to get it framed.
The final two talks of the evening were particularly interesting to me. They were both themed on limitation promoting creativity. The first talk was from a technical perspective, with a focus on CSS and working within the confines of advertisements and of daily challenges. I’ve often found that imposing limitations on myself leads to my most creative work. The latter talk took a historical angle, and covered everything from French protest posters to the Futura typeface. I’ll link the talks once the videos have been uploaded.
Last week I began to design the bookshelves I mentioned in Weeknotes #1. When I was in secondary school I was pretty handy with CAD software, so I decided to try to make the schematic in FreeCAD. Unfortunately it seems my understanding has entirely elapsed. While I could spend some time learning how to use it, for a single piece of furniture it seemed like overkill. I decided to use SVG instead (via Boxy SVG with some manual tweaks). I spoke to a local wood store and they stock sheets of birch plywood and can machine it to shape for me. This week I decided to make two versions of the shelves. One will be for books and the other for CDs and LPs. I’ll take the designs to them next week to see what they think.
Finally, we booked tickets to Japan this weekend. It’ll be the little one’s first time to meet his grandparents, and I can’t wait!