Notes

You’re no doubt swimming in nostalgia pieces from (mostly) men of a certain age eulogising the ZX Spectrum, after Clive Sinclair died yesterday. (Side note: Sinclair was a Mensa chair for many years, but he also refused to use the internet).

I could mention that the Spectrum is what I learned to program on – one dimensional arrays, single letter variables only, CLS to start every program, “load dot dot” etc. – but I thought I’d mention the branding, and how much I like that shiny black plastic, the colour around the keys, absurd futuristic SINCLAIR font, helvetica ZX Spectrum and that contrasting rainbow stripe. Got to be ripe for ripping off?

512kb is huge :-)

Still, made me look at my home page again. About 77kb, of which 51kb is fonts. I think you can go down a rabbit hole with this when the basics are already there, but system fonts, webp images etc. etc.

Jessica is right. For example, this exchange would be a lot easier on micro.blog (or Twitter, for that matter) 😃

Another obvious limitation to funelling everything through your site is that they’re not built for actual back and forth conversations. It’s like posting declamations to church doors – which suits a certain style of writing (which I like, incidentally) – and waiting for a messenger to inform you of what’s been said. Like in Shakespeare, the messenger often doesn’t make it.

Also – I’m not sure if I’m addressing Jessica directly, or my general “audience” (if that’s not too grandiose a term for it).

Even The Observer is showing him what to do:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/04/pressure-grows-on-starmer-to-back-tax-on-rich-to-pay-for-social-care

Sometimes you get a Saturday where you can do pretty much what you want. For me that would be cycle in the morning, sleep for two hours then write something/anything in the afternoon.

I can’t think of many organisations I’d rather not give my phone number to more than Twitter, but they’ve decided to force 2FA on me whenever I login to the website. One more reason to get rid of it completely.

I will probably ditch it, but Avenir Next set in bold and italic makes for a grand title font (you won’t see it on non-Apple devices).

Added a section on narrow screens such as mobiles to my article about measure (or line width). TLDR: don’t sacrifice a readable font size for a 10-15 word measure.

I’ve added a wide image option to the website. Here’s some art that uses it (you’ll only notice a difference on wider screens):