Weeknotes 185

Having a real Christmas Tree is like getting pregnant with your second child. You totally forgot how awful it was the last time you did it, but did it again anyway. Stood up by an unreliable tree collector meant fighting with it myself, and boy does chopping up an old Christmas Tree suck.

The Fall have never really been for me. Or so I thought until, via Spotify’s Discover Weekly, I heard Mountain Energei and couldn’t stop listening. The more you listen the more it hypnotises you.

When we moved into this new house we bought a “temporary” bed which we knew we wouldn’t be our forever bed, but would do for now. It was cheap. It is also, as it turns out, made out of cardboard in parts. This led to one of the legs on my side not holding up and slowly disappearing into the “cardboard” headboard. I didn’t expect much from this bed, but I did naively expect it to stay in the usual bed shape for longer than 8 months.

I’ve attempted to shore it up with new metal legs from my mate Jeff. I doubt it will last forever, but hopefully for a few years at least.

Mainstream banks are now catching up with features that challenger banks have had forever. They’re still not always doing it particularly well mind. It’s pretty scary to wake up on a Sunday morning to a notification saying Apple Pay is now available on your Apple Watch when you performed that action days before.

There is a point at which a notification becomes at best useless, and worst damaging. A terrible user experience and surely impacting their customer support teams too.

Our staircase is steep and windy which led me to fall down said staircase. Calm down, it was only 6 steps, but I did land hard and some choice words were used. It’s not all bad news though. When you need an excuse to not go to the gym, sometimes it’s handed to you on a silver platter.

Progress on my keyboard build has stalled because I didn’t have a couple of parts I thought I did – two 12 pin ultra low profile sockets.

When connecting micro-controllers to keyboards (or to any PCB) you can, broadly speaking, choose to solder it directly to the PCB or solder a socket to the PCB and “socket” (push in) the micro-controller into it. This is what I didn’t do last time so when I needed to remove it I ended up damaging several parts. This time were doing things properly.

Acquiring said sockets is another matter entirely. True, this was mainly caused by me being tight, but I’m sorry, I am not paying £36 in postage costs alone to send two tiny pieces of metal and plastic to the UK. Brexit fucking over UK-dwelling keyboard enthusiasts, no doubt. There are other suppliers with less ridiculous postage costs, but still too expensive on principle.

It has taken me considerable effort to try and work out what I needed to buy and from where. The original supplier didn’t specify manufacturer part numbers (fair enough) so that was the first step. Once I had that, and with some help, and over the course of a couple of days, I eventually worked out which parts I needed. Electronic component supplier websites expect that you know what you’re talking about which makes them difficult for the novice (this guy) to use.

Success? Of a kind. Soon it became clear that the cost was comparable to the original supplier unless you bought in bulk in order to qualify for free postage. Anyway, that’s the story of how a man ordered £60 worth of the same part out of sheer stubbornness. Take that “the man”.

I bought a “fabric shaver”; it’ll change your life. Trust.