kate

kate, 5 months ago to random

My niche skill is hand-coding SVG icons, but this afternoon’s project was more ambitious as it’s built almost entirely from Bézier curves. This is a new logo for my website: a letter K based on my signature but in the style of Proza (http://bureauroffa.com/about-proza), the typeface I used on my site. The SVG is 482 bytes in size.

kate, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to random

Attention retro-computing people: I’m giving away my Amiga 1200. It was a Christmas gift from my parents in 1993 and after 30 years it’s still in working order (if a little discoloured). It’s still in its original Desktop Dynamite box with Workbench, Deluxe Paint, Wordworth, and the special Amiga Format issues. It’s been upgraded with a 400MB hard disk.

Edit: Wow, I didn’t think so many people would be interested in this! I’ve now offered it to one of the responders.

kate, 5 months ago to random

Spotify Wrapped, but for my day job:

👩🏻‍💻 You edited 2,697 files this year

✅ You added 53,194 lines of code

❎ You deleted 40,467 lines of code

🐘 The language you used most was PHP

🦀 The language you enjoyed most was Rust

✉️ You sent 479 e-mails

🎟️ You handled 382 support tickets

📅 You attended 81 scheduled meetings

kate, 5 months ago to random

Millions of roast potatoes will be eaten over the next week, but far too many will be soggy, stodgy lumps. Here are my six steps to roast potato perfection: https://coastalvegans.com/2017/12/23/six-steps-to-roast-potato-perfection/

kate, 5 months ago to random

British wind turbines produced a record 21.81GW of power between 9:00am and 9:30am this morning. Over the past 24 hours wind turbines have supplied 61.7% of our electricity needs. Live data can be seen on my site at https://grid.iamkate.com.

kate, 5 months ago to random

In my Rust journey I’m in that awkward phase (I hope it’s just a phase?) where programming in other languages is now hard because they lack Rust’s features, but programming in Rust is still hard because it has Rust’s features

kate, 5 months ago to random

My National Grid: Live site at https://grid.iamkate.com now includes data for Viking Link. This 1.4GW electrical interconnector between Bicker Fen in England and Revsing in Denmark is currently undergoing commissioning and is expected to be fully operational from 29th December.

kate, 5 months ago to random

I’m playing this first-person open-world game called ‘Life’, and it’s so hard it’s almost unplayable. The character classes are really unbalanced, and you don’t even get to choose one: it’s just assigned when you start playing. They introduced some assists to make things easier (if you can find them buried in the menus), but the elite players complained and they’re being patched out again. Accessibility features for those with disabilities are severely lacking. And it only has permadeath mode.

kate, 5 months ago to random

It’s 25 years since I built my first website. I’m not going to write a retrospective as I haven’t kept copies of my old sites, but I will say this: we’ve come a long way since the only way to put text in a rounded box was to create a table with four quarter-circle GIFs in the corner cells. (PNGs, div elements, and CSS were cutting-edge technologies not widely supported at the time.)

kate, 7 months ago to random

The housing crisis and climate crisis come together in this bleak letter in the Woodland Trust magazine:

kate, 8 months ago to random

I wasn’t expecting much from an Apple Arcade farm life simulation with the generic title of Japanese Rural Life Adventure, but it’s utterly charming. If restoring the community centre was your favourite part of Stardew Valley, you’ll love this game. I particularly appreciate the cheerful positivity of your character (“I did a good job!”), the level of detail in the cooking process, and the occasional beautiful or poignant moments.

kate, 8 months ago to random

My National Grid: Live site at https://grid.iamkate.com now automatically updates every five minutes while you leave it open (including updating the pie chart in the favicon while the browser tab is the background)

kate, 9 months ago to random

The police at Torbay Pride refused to do anything about an anti-queer hate preacher, but dragged this person out of the march for holding a sign criticising the Chinese government’s treatment of gay people in Hong Kong:

kate, 9 months ago to random

British politics at the moment:

Conservatives: We’re going to do X!

Labour: We oppose doing X. It harms the most vulnerable in society, damages the economy and the environment, and violates our international treaty obligations.

Conservatives: We have a huge majority, so we’ve done X!

Journalists: Will Labour reverse X if it wins the next election?

Labour: No.

kate, 10 months ago to random

Some days I can really relate to our office shredder:

kate, 10 months ago to random

While doing my hair this morning it struck me that a brush is just a higher-dimensional comb…

…so of course I started speculating on the detangling properties of a hyperbrush and, after some research, I’m now envious of four-dimensional beings who can easily undo any knot made from curved lines

kate, 10 months ago to random

Seems appropriate that Twitter have changed their logo to a close button:

kate, 10 months ago to random

I’m getting serious nostalgia from https://chiptune.app, which includes many Jogeir Liljedahl tracks I listened to in OctaMED on my Amiga 1200 in the 1990s: https://chiptune.app/browse/Modland/coma%27s%20favorite%20Protracker/Jogeir%20Liljedahl/

kate, 10 months ago to random

Oh my god, someone just came up to me at the train station and said “Kate Morley? I use your national grid site every day and I just wanted to say thank you.” I feel like some kind of celebrity!