I had offered to teach an evening of map reading with the local training ship of the Nautical Training Corps. This had come about after leading them on an evening walk from Woodingdean to Rottingdean windmill during the summer, with them carrying maps, and me explaining what we were seeing along the way, such as a local trig point and tumuli and the windmill itself, on Beacon Hill.

I’ve been using rsync to maintain a copy of a website on an external hard drive, which I bought and just started as is, but there are a few problems that I’ve been looking to correct. Firstly, external USB drives come pre-formatted for Windows, with an NTFS filesystem. This works just fine on Linux, with the drive being mounted with the ntfs3 driver. The nice things about this is that I could, if required, just plug it into a Windows machine and copy files straight off.

With World Book Day nearly upon us, I was pondering ways in which children could be engaged with reading books.

I know how children enjoy trading cards like Pokémon, so could we encourage them along more wholesome lines, that don’t involve rarity and competition, and facilitate a discussion about what books they’ve enjoyed?

In the late 1970s, Digital Equipment Corporation produced a set of manuals for their terminal and printer equipment that I think are unmistakably of their decade, with simple line designs in browns and oranges. I’ve always loved the simplicity of these designs, so during the first pandemic lockdown, I decided to spend some time with Inkscape, recreating the covers, without the scratches, fading and curling edges that my physical manuals had accumulated over the past 40 years.

Over lockdown, I was revisiting some old projects and taking the opportunity to see if they would benefit from a fresh pair of eyes and new learning over the last decade. Manx was one such; a catalogue of old computer manuals that I created 20 years ago and worked on until 2009, at which point some major changes in my life meant I could no longer sustain the effort to maintain what had always been a single person task.

Notes on adding the Codeberg link to my site, built with Hugo. The Ananke theme doesn’t (yet) include Codeberg, so I downloaded the black and white Codeberg logo and placed this in themes/​ananke/​assets/​ananke/​socials/​codeberg.svg. There are two apparent problems with this logo though: Default logo is whiter than other social icons Link says “Codeberg logo” on hover I can fix (2) by removing <title> element from svg. But this doesn’t fix (1).

I was upgrading the images of the VT100 Special Graphics character set used in my online transcripts of the manuals today and I wondered about the VT52 equivalents, which are not shown graphically in any of the manuals that I could find; only the descriptions exist.

I would like to determine exactly when the books with floral covers were produced by the Edinburgh publishers Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier between about 1880 and 1900.

I’ve been acquiring books that were produced by the Edinburgh publishers Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier between about 1880 and 1900. Specifically, I’ve been looking at their floral covers, because something very interesting seems to have happened around about 1890.

I have an old manual that I’d like to convert to PDF. Most of the documents I scan are just black and white. However, this one has a lot of pictures with blue highlights, and table backgrounds in the same blue and I’d like to preserve that limited use of colour without keeping every page in full colour. It strikes me that I should be able to do that by separating layers for each colour used, and overlaying them to make a neat PDF.