Category: 2024 Diary

Started the week in Brisbane, enjoying some time off, helping with some DIY, and eating pizza for the first time in ages.

We had a bit of fun taking a walk around town, finally giving my new camera a bit of a test:

It’s something about the city you don’t get here in the sticks – the density of older architectural (old – ha, this building is only 30) styles in easily walkable distances.

My shoulder didn’t like the drive down and back, however. I’m definitely going to have to get it seen to.

Everything audio has been migrated to new applications, and I’ve switched to my new phone I bought some three months ago. The new system works better than the old one, if I’m honest. The iMazing app works better than iTunes, and the replacement app for Apple Books as an audiobook player, is a better audiobook player experience.

I had my second memory card for the new camera arrive, so now I’m fully loaded with dual 512gb high speed cards.

Podcast consolidation was going well, and then everything went haywire on Wednesday night. As far as I can tell, pressing a couple of wrong keys caused my mac workstation to flip the ownership to on for the shared drive iTunes on my mac mini was using, which caused it to both be unable to write to the drive, and to start mass deleting podcasts.

I was up all night trying to recover from backups, and I’m now rebuilding from a May recovery of my iTunes library.

The task was eventually successful – I was able to recover all my Podcast library, migrate all the files to a new storage location, set up a new podcast downloader, and then set up Hazel workflows to copy files from the podcatcher’s download location, to the final archive.

From there, I have iMazing handling device sync to put files onto the iPhone – it works better than iTunes did.

Wednesday: Job Complete. It’s done, holy cats. I finished updating Surfing The Deathline, both Full Course, and every dose. I updated the copies on the Fastspring store, and the Apple store. It’s all completed.

I’m somewhat shell shocked, because this is what I’ve been trying to get towards for a year now. It’s so rare I get a major project completed, but here we are. Next up, tidying the house in preparation for my mother returning, and possibly bringing Covid risks back into my life. *sigh*

Well my mother had a close scrape after the gas cooktop in the caravan in which she’s travelling exploded just after she’d walked away from it.

Wednesday was my annual neurologist appointment. Things seem stable.

I think I’ve reached the end of edits and corrections for Surfing The Deathline. I’ve settle all the changes to the content and design and layout. Saturday night I started outputting the Dose versions. Sunday, I managed to get all the image outputs sorted for PNG and JPG versions of both the individual  episodes and the full book.

I bought a memory card for my new camera – found a supplier with a 512gb version (the largest) of the fastest rated card which suits the camera, for ~$600, as opposed to ~$800-$1100. Bit of a score.

Urgh. After all the work on rebuilding Surfing The Deathline, I discovered the style for the new thought bubbles wasn’t going to work. I went through several revisions, before coming up with something I sortof liked, as I delved into nocturnality. i had to go back through the book and re-build all the thought boxes to be two objects – the text and the box.

It was penance for a shortcut I’d thought I could take when I first did it, but it made engineering sense to fix the problem. I gained significant flexibility in how I could then modify the styling of the boxes themselves.

Eventually, I managed to figure out a way to get the bubble style I’d originally wanted, so not it’s a matter of nudging things around a bit to get alignments with other page elements correct. Its a satisfying result.

I think I finished the update to Surfing The Deathine this week. Run, after run, after run – edits, re-run, repeat. But, I think it’s done. I have some fine tuning required to get the images sorted, but the content itself is sorted.

As of Thursday, it’s been two weeks since I sent a letter to Hannah B in America. I don’t know if it will ever elicit a response, or if she even lives where it was sent, but you can only try to reach out and see what happens.

MRI Scan on Monday. It was an easy scan – everything went well. Just tipped over the edge of sleep for a second while the scan was running.

Surfing The Deathline edits continue – I found a typos that have been in the book since at least 2006, and probably in two print runs.

I bought a screen protector set for my new camera, which sits in a drybox waiting to be used.

I sent a letter to an old friend, with whom I’ve lost contact – I don’t know if that’s because of me, or them, or neither, or if they’ll even respond. But writing the letter itself was an experience – I’m writing a long blog post about writing with pen and paper, and the joy of slower things.

I’m making more progress on the cleanup of Surfing The Deathline. I honestly think I will finish it next week.

The new camera arrived, but I can’t really play around with it until it’s added to my insurance policy, and the guy responsible for that seems to be on leave.

The filter holder people basically said “you can keep one and return the other, or return both and get a refund”. In the end, the first one was the best out of the two. Best, as in “most salvageable”.

I’ve made more progress on fixing Surfing The Deathline – I figured out that the big problem was due to a mismatch in the appearance of translucency between RGB and CMYK black.

So now it’s just export run, check, fix, export run, repeat.