frozen octopus

When I got to the end of recording 150 sentences into my iPhone, I was a little hoarse. Also not knowing 100% what I would use my Personal Voice for.

It took a looooooong time for it to finish process because your phone needs to be on a charger and locked.

When it was done I typed a random sentence for it to read as Me and it sounded like me for sure.

My first reaction to hearing it was that it's cool that if I ever have a problem with my voice, I have a backup now.

My second thought was I can have it read all the content I want to do on a possible YouTube channel I am teetering on doing.

Usually we do Osouji (大掃除) at the end of the year but this year we decided to start in on it a couple weeks early. We'll do the actual washing of things the last day or two. Today we got started on the decluttering.

My "system" for this task is running things through two questions:

1. What is it?
2. Where does it live?

When I stuck to that, things got done. When I deviated, distraction set in.

The great flattening is happening. I am moving away from a folder for each context (home, work, drum, etc.) with a text file for each thought. Now there will be one context folder with a text file for each context.

The plan is to start the thought in Drafts, tag it with the context (ex: @drum), and prepend it to the @drums.txt file.

The hope is having a handful of context files will be less temptation to waste time in than a ton of files organizing.

I am experimenting with having the first screen on my phone being Siri suggestions only. Curious to see how much app searching I need to do vs. the app magically being there.

Day Two of it and I'd say it's about 60-70% that the app is there when I need it so far. Tough for Siri to anticipate when I am going to need to add a drum beat into the drum machine app and things like that.

When I first added the three identical widgets, all the apps were the same across them. They suddenly adjusted to have no repeats.

I'm very interested in how this is going to affect which apps I use. Thinking you are a certain type of person and then not having the apps associated with that type of person suggested to you must make you start to self-adjust.

The record label I help out has a ton of releases. There are over 60 of them. I've been trying to get all the metadata correct on all the albums. The year is easy to sort out but the actual day is very tough to find.

My temporary solution was to just use Jan 01 until I find them. I've been noticing as I add what albums I listen to that there are a lot of Jan 01 releases in Apple Music.

Looks like great minds think a like. Jan 01 must be the universal date for "I give up trying to track down the release date".

I want to start playing with the typography inspirations I am finding on 1950s era Jazz album covers. I thought nth-child would come to the rescue for this but looks like you can't get at words or letter with it.

A bit of digging around and I found the javascript for what I need called Lettering.js. It gets you spans on individual words and letter where you need it. It does it in an a11y compliant way as well which rules.

Tried it out for about 20 minutes and it was very fun. Definitely a tool, used with some restraint, I am going to use a bunch in the future.

A quick list of app in my menubar for 2023. I love tiny menubar apps that do one thing well.

• Calendar: Itsycal
• Action buttons: Popclip
• Color picker: DevSwatch
• Clipboard manager: Jumpcut :
• Keyboard shortcuts: BetterTouchTool
• Memo pad: Cheatsheet
• Hard drive ejector: EjectBar
• Window manager: Moom
• Filler text for layouts: LittleIpsum
• Text copier: TextSniper
• Language switcher: Keyboard Switcheroo
• Menubar organizer: Bartender

My drum practice theme for tonight's trip to the rehearsal studio is "if someone's Eighties Casio keyboard malfunctioned, could I play all the drum patterns".

Here is the simplest way I know of to make something, like an image, a link to content in a Drupal view. It's useful for making things like a grid of images that need to link to content.

1. Add a Content: ID field and exclude it from display. Make sure it is on top of the list of fields.
2. Add a Content: Image field.
3. Click on the Content: Image field to edit it.
4. Click Rewrite results and select "Output this field as a custom link”.
5. Set the path to /node/{{ nid }}.

Having a blast messing around with the clamp(), min(), and max() functions this week. They've been out for a while now but these last few days felt like the perfect time to toy around with them.

Brainstorming how to use them in projects. Uses for min() are coming to mind right away. I've been slowly reading about how to use clamp() for responsive typography.

Stoked to start reducing a bunch of redundancy in our CSS stylesheets. Especially with centering content at different screen sizes.

A cool post about how it all works here:  min(), max(), and clamp(): three logical CSS functions to use today

Today me gave the gift of a two hour drum rehearsal session at 10:30pm tomorrow night. We'll see how stoked tomorrow me is tomorrow.

I want to try writing a whole song on drums with no concept of a melody. Then I want to show up to the next rehearsal and see what guitar part gets added to it.

I received a Apple Gift Card from work for Thanksgiving which was a cool surprise. I used it to get four apps I've had my eye on lately. Very fun to mess around with over the long weekend.

1. MusicBox: An app that is basically a listen later list for music. You can tag albums and it has built in Shazam support which are both handy.
2. Stop Motion Studio: An app for making stop motion videos that I am going to use for flyers and videos.
3. When Did I?: A reminder app but in reverse but telling you when you last did something.
4. Logger for Shortcuts: A console type app for debugging Apple Shortcuts. Cool for the really long Rube Goldberg-esque shortcuts I make sometimes.

I met some friends in Asakusa and we went souvenir shopping for them. We kept seeing people walking around with Kumade (lucky rake). After no luck finding where they were sold, I asked someone holding one where they got it. Turns out it was from a temple called Otori about 10 minutes walk from where we were.

We took sort of a back way to get there and found a ton of street food and shichimi stands. They got shichimi to take back friends and we got to the back of the temple.

It was amazing. There were endless stands set up to sell the elaborate rakes. It was like you were in a glittering tunnel of rakes. The din of the people selling was incredible too. Every time they sold a bigger one, they'd do a chant for the buyer.

My friend got one and then they got some beer to celebrate. Totally fun. Then we went out to look at the front and realized there was a line blocks long to get in. We'd skipped maybe two hours wait unintentionally by going in the back way like total amateurs.

For this blog, I am only allowing myself to fix, add, or update one part of the site per day. When I come here I want to mess around in the admin area so much. I need to post a post when I come here not click all the fancy buttons.

Today's update, for the record, was to get the genres in the albums in more of a cloud instead of a list. Yesterday's was to add a recent album list on the album page. Little by little this space is filling up.

Each time I listen to an old record, I try to note an interesting bit of typography on a blank business card. I'm slowly building up a nice deck of design cards to reference in the future.

The plan is to use them in the for vignettes on websites. There are a lot of interesting ideas on those covers that could be done with CSS and CSS variables.

I am up a mountain in an onsen town. That should be enough so why do I feel like I need to type something more deep?

I am up a mountain in an onsen town.

There is something about the arc of going to and coming back from a show that resonates with me.

It isn't just being at the show itself. It is the whole process of thinking about the show, studying up on who is playing, exploring the area around the venue, time tables, talking to people, thinking about future music, and things like that.

Then when you get back there is stuff to put away, things I've gathered to check out later to peruse, choosing wind down music, and things like that.

You change slightly after going out for some music. It's like you are a meteor and something bumps your course slightly. It changes your orbit a bit.

Took advantage of the dollar to yen exchange rate and leveled up my winter coat. A random fashion reset which is rare for me. Enough so that my significant keeps asking me "who are you". Nothing too crazy but it's for sure a departure from previous vibes. Getting used to the length but have a longer one is already better for waiting on a train platform.

Got four meters of green fabric in Nippori's fabric town the other day. A two meter sheet of at a photo shop is like 10000円/$100 or something. I got the four meters for 400円/$4.

Finally got around to doing a green screen chroma key test and it totally worked. Just need to figure out some way to do the lighting better and in a way that is portable. Also, need to get my head around getting the edge on the video being cut out.

I couldn’t resist the temptation to take photos of the fireworks tonight. I am never going to look at them or use them for anything.