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A garden, not a blog

A now block that dates itself, notes of four different kinds in one filterable stream, topic chips that narrow the page, a reading shelf with real progress, and an empty state that explains the gap rather than counting zero.

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Switch the kind selector, tap a topic chip, search for a word, land on an empty combination and take the way out of it.
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Ember with the humanist system sans — warm and unpolished, with no webfont at all.
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Leith, mostly on foot

Field notebook

Notes, links and photographs, kept in public and tidied occasionally. The garden metaphor is a promise that things stay half-grown here on purpose.

Now

What the last month actually contained, as opposed to what was planned.

Building
A tide-table renderer for a sailing club, and the third rewrite of this notebook's index.
Reading
Two books at once, badly: a history of the Ordnance Survey and a field guide to coastal plants.
Location
Leith, and for one week a month, wherever the ferry goes.
Not doing
Taking on consulting work before October. The calendar is the whole system.

Growing now

6 entries shown

  • NotesInterfaces · Writing

    Tide tables are the original API

    A tide table is a published contract with error bars: it tells you what will happen, how confident it is, and when it stops being usable. Most internal documentation tells you none of the three.

  • EssaysCooking · Practice

    Eighteen months of a sourdough starter

    The starter is a small, badly documented system with one operator and no monitoring. It has taught me more about slow feedback loops than any postmortem I have written: the signal arrives twelve hours after the decision.

  • LinksReading · Writing

    On marginalia in library books

    A short piece about what annotations in borrowed books do to the next reader. It argues the marginal note is a conversation with someone you will never meet, which is also the most accurate description of a public notebook.

    Read the piece
  • PhotosPhotography · Walking

    The harbour wall at Newhaven

    The harbour wall at Newhaven

    Low tide, six in the morning, the wall casting a shadow you could measure. Taken on the walk where I decided to stop taking on consulting work in October.

  • NotesInterfaces · Walking

    All maps are wrong about stairs

    Every route planner treats a staircase as an edge with a cost. None of them tell you that the staircase is closed, which is the only fact that mattered on the day.

  • EssaysMusic · Practice

    Learning to listen to a record twice

    The first play is for the arrangement; the second is for the room. Almost nothing I have listened to once has stayed with me, which is an uncomfortable argument for taking notes on everything.

On the go

2
  • Cover of The Ordnance Survey and Modern Ireland

    The Ordnance Survey and Modern Ireland

    F. O'Donovan

    p. 148 of 390

    Chapter four is the one about the dispute over the six-inch scale. It is a thriller.

  • Cover of Coastal Plants of the North Atlantic

    Coastal Plants of the North Atlantic

    M. Eriksen

    p. 44 of 366

Waiting

1
  • Cover of Notes on a Small Island

    Notes on a Small Island

    J. Whitcombe

Finished

1
  • Cover of The Design of Everyday Things

    The Design of Everyday Things

    Don Norman

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