Derek Peden

Happy. Very Happy

There is something really special about a cocktail bar with a guy on the piano (even on a Sunday afternoon)

All my recent notifications are from Micro.blog. What an amazing community. Thank you @manton

I have 3 blogs I want to write:

1. My industry/career blog which I write and host at Wordpress.com
2. A microblog, hosted by Micro.blog
3. A new blog. An extended blog of long form writing and… who knows. This post could almost be published there - it’s long enough!

But the platform for the 3. still eludes me. It’s currently on Tumblr ¹but that’s not great.

I want to be able to write and edit in Markdown, but I’m not prepared to put up the £240 a year (over $250 USD) for the Business plan needed to enable Markdown plug-ins on Wordpress.com.

Wordpress.org might be an option but I’m still looking at domain and hosting fees for what is currently an experiment.

Tumblr handles Markdown and as I said is my current choice. But editing longer form text on iOS is woeful and well let’s face it, it’s Tumblr so it’s in a sea of other bad, lurid and childish content.

So at this point I’m strongly considering using the excellent MarsEdit to migrate my Tumblr content to a new Wordpress.com site and work with the lack of live Markdown support.

But of course, I’m open to other suggestions…

Since the re-awakening of my tumblr blog, I been enjoying the discussion on this evening on running a blog. But honestly, I’m out of my depth.

Beyond Micro.blog, what’s the best low cost “service” for a larger blogs? (For mere mortal muggles). I’ve tried wordpress and tumblr, but frustrated with both.

Millennial’s having Macdonald. I’ll stick with a salad.

Just waisted 20mins on HTML image formatting. It may actually be faster for me to write the 1000 words in future.

Manual edit of HTML on Ground Coffee

Microsoft Excel for macOS:

Application Not Responding

The most frequently seen UI element.

Tumblr, sleeping since 2014

Opted to start a Tumblr blog for the longer content, not in keeping with a micro blog.

Only when opening 1password I found the credentials for the Tumblr blog I created in 2014.

Total number of posts: 0

Clearly “Ground Coffee” been an worthwhile exercise back in the day.

When does a micro blog post become a all grown up blog post?

Call to my wife when driving home:

Me: “That’s me on the way to the vets for the dog’s medicines”

Wife: “Oh thanks. Can you get a chicken?”

Me: “Eh…” (mind racing to the Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch) “not from the vets, no…”

It’s not just Comic Sans which is comically bad.

Every time I receive a word document with Times New Roman I feel nauseous.

Times New Roman was the typeface of my college years, but now looks incredibly dated. But it’s not a form of PTST. It’s simply unpleasant to look at, far less actually read.

Finally ruled out NYC as a holiday destination only to be hit by a mail shot from a NYC hotel: a GIF of 🚕 🏙🗽🚧🎭.

But still prefer the beach.

Trialling MarsEdit with both Wordpress blog and Micro.blog…

Following my earlier post on re-visiting the Psion 5, I’ve just wasted I don’t know how long looking at compact flash adapters on Amazon and eBay. Including SD adapters with a compact flash interface, so you fit a SD card inside the CF adaptor.

However this still wouldn’t be practical as the SD card doesn’t fit fully inside the CF adaptor, so I’d be using the 8Mb (yes not 8Gb, but 8Mb) on the Psion and transferring data to the SD card… Assuming the CF adaptor works when inserted in the Psion.

It’s a shame. I’ve a lot of affection for the Psion 5, even if I haven’t used it in years I’m reluctant to sell it. But perhaps I should sell it to someone who’s prepared to jump through all these hoops to use it.

Malt

Poured a drop of Jura Origin. I’d not usually go straight to a malt, but it’s been a hard week.

The new range from Jura is out now, so it’ll be interesting to see the difference.

Looking into repurposing my Psion 5 and found this relatively recent article from 2015 on The Verge:

That monochrome screen, however, is the Psion Series 5’s big weakness — it’s really, really bad. Bad compared to a computer. Bad compared to a graphing calculator. Bad compared to the light-up alarm clock I had when I was 10. It’s both low-contrast and glossy, nearly unreadable under anything but artificial ambient light, unless you turn on a green backlight that I’m guessing eats battery fairly quickly. I’d seen this in old reviews of the Series 5, but it’s still impressively awful.

I have to agree. But at the time I can remember a discussion with colleagues about the screen vs battery life, and why would a pocketable device every need a colour screen? Seems hysterical now.

Despite the screen, the keyboard is still the best mechanical keyboard I’ve ever used in a device of this size. And the keyboard mechanism is quite simply gorgeous.

However my current conundrum isn’t just what to use if for, but how to use it? The proprietary file format (EPOC/32) was frustrating at the time, and even more so nearly 20 years later.

The best I can imagine is a single purpose device, writing in markdown EPOC/32 Word and exporting text to ASCII text, saved on compact flash which I can then import to my Mac.

Seems like a lot of work. Especially since I’ve written this entire post on the colour screen of my iPhone.

I don’t care that National Puppy Day was yesterday, I still love this photo of Minnie from 2015.

Next time I travel for work I should make more of an effort to see more than,

• Airport
• Train
• Meeting room
• Train
• Airport

I was in Paris recently and the only thing I saw of central Paris was underground stations.

Short return flight home. Flight out this morning was 16hrs ago, so it’ll be great to be home.

Almost every iOS homescreen I’ve seen has the Bear app. I’ve previously not continued with Bear as it’s not a true Markdown editor or compatible with my 1000+ plain text notes. “But if you can’t beat em…”