I’ve been very quiet, haven’t I?

Pictured: boxed Star Wars Despecialized DVDs I made for a friend; only Star Wars (IV: A New Hope) was ready for 4th May 2022

I’ve been rather unwell and depressed. Avoiding correspondence with everyone, so as not to drag anyone else down. In a futile attempt to keep the darkness at bay (and procrastinate from my job search), I’ve been quite busy:

Show and tell

I decided, listening to some favourite albums often enough, that it warranted getting them on CD.

• Pavarotti: The Duets - Pavarotti singing duets with popular singers; I’ve been listening to the MP3s I ripped from a Mallorcan library CD since at least 2012
• Barcelona - a classical crossover “opera” made for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics by Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé. Very catchy arias I can’t stop listening to since pirating the album in early 2020
• Kill Bill Vol. 1 OST - strangely calming music from the famous Tarantino kung-fu film

Also got some books I’ve been wanting

• The Story of Roland by James Baldwin, a retelling of the famous knight’s tale I read as a kid from Baldwin Project printouts in Mallorca.
• Satan: A Biography by Henry Ansgar Kelly, a theology book on the nature of evil I started reading from a library copy in Q4 2019 instead of going to the college ball.
• V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David LLoyd, a lucky find in a charity shop. The 1980’s graphic novel about an anarchist pseudo-Guy Fawkes in a totalitarian England.

Meanwhile, I’m still bogged down between reading Old Shakey the Bard, the King James Bible, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, and (I’m embarrased to say) have yet to start Frank Herbert’s Dune, which deluxe copy was kindly loaned me by a friend.

Happenings

Friends of my brother have been visiting and working nearby, so it’s been a welcome chance to travel around the local area and revisit the sites.

I was also employed by another friend to assist in digging out a foundation for a new portico on his pub conversion. In spare moments I’ve been trying to get his kids into Shakespeare.

Star Wars Day

I didn’t get a chance to write about it in time, but for Star Wars Day (May the 4th be with you), I hunted down the rare Despecialized Editions of the Original Star Wars Trilogy and caught insomnia learning and burning Despecialised Star Wars to DVD to watch with my buddy Stephen. (I did accidentally use the English spelling Despecialised in the menu for the Despecialized Star Wars IV: A New Hope. Sorry, Stephen.)

The DVD burning process, and why you might be interested in Despecialized Star Wars, and where to find the ruddy thing, will be the subject of a future article.

Headphones

Another future article, I soldered a 3.5mm headphone jack into some ex-military ear protectors. My parents got a whole lot of them cheap from the car-boot sale years ago, and they have some sort of radiocomms built in. We don’t have a compatible transmitter, but the audio circuits work, and if you solder audio cabling just right, they make for some decent noise-cancelling headphones.

I originally added an audio interface sometime back in 2017, but I didn’t have soldering equipment and the twisted/taped wires rotted and came loose. I’ve now done a more professional job, and they’re quite snazzy. I’ll show them to you soon.

Website bug fixes

You may have noticed that some text has appeared next to buttons on the website, and things have moved around slightly. I have made a pile of improvements to the website theme privately here, and submitted them for inclusion in the official branch here (but the developer doesn’t have time to review or add them, so I need to redo a bunch of stuff 😥).

99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code, fix one bug, patch it all around, -127583001 bugs in the code…

- based off the Programmer’s Drinking Song, and a funny forum signature I saw somewhere

Nevertheless, there are still bugs. I compiled a list in my theme repository, but the main one you’ll notice is if you click on one of the subject tags in the website tag cloud (above), you get sent to a horrid looking code page. I’ve got a fix coming shortly, since a developer helped me troubleshoot.

Trying to add an image gallery

One of the main roadblocks I’m facing is I want to add an image gallery to this site. This is likely to change the way I put photos in all articles, so I’m hesitant to commit too much work (which might break or need redoing later).

I want to use Photoswipe, but I don’t know enough Javascript to configure it manually, so I’m using Hugo Easy Gallery, which theoretically should make implementation easier and reusable on any website theme. I’ve asked for help from people who know more than me, but here’s what the image galleries should look like once done. (As you can see, it’s quite slick, looks a bit like Instagram, but I will own the photos, rather than Mark Zuckerborg)

Making a website for a friend

I took the opportunity to set up a website for Stephen, my aforementioned friend. He runs a gaming podcast called Dragons Not Included, and he wanted a landing page/blog to expand his audience.

It’s still very much a work in progress, but the skeleton I set up while teaching him how to operate the site is here, at dragonsnotincluded.github.io. I’ve been figuring out how to interface it with his podcast host (PodBean), and, after pulling yet another all-nighter, I was visited by a Muse of Fire (Henry V, Prologue) and managed to crack the code as well as (most likely) my sanity:

I made a bunch of shortcodes so now we can embed things like music playlists and podcasts into our websites. Should you want to use them too, they are available at Darth’s Hugo Shortcodes. I’ll be presenting them to him later today, hopefully making up slightly for my untimeliness.

Conclusion

Just a short (😂) update, which will probably end up out of order with other articles that I started writing before this.

Is it any wonder I’m going slightly mad? 🤪

Please pray for me.