Journeyman of Some Issue #5
One reason I started this newsletter was to have a list of people interesedt in updates in case I quit social media all together. While I don’t yet have plans to quit Twitter, I was inspired by Anil Dash to basically restart my Twitter following. So I’ve gone from following 3,000 people to following 1 (my late mother who I can’t bear to unfollow). I’ve moved everyone I was previously following to (private) lists, though, so I’m still able to read the same tweets. I’ve created some topical lists for when I want to catch up on what, say, the classicists are tweeting about, or the cosmologists. I’ve also created some priority lists with the people whose tweets I don’t want to miss.
I’ve found that I no longer aimlessly refresh Twitter to see my timeline update. Instead I’m a lot more intensional in my Twitter reading. So far I’d say it’s been a success for me, although about 50 people seemed to unfollow me when I unfollowed them (despite the fact I still read them).
Python tips
There’s an occasional thing on Twitter where someone will say something along the lines of “For every like this gets, I’ll give a fun fact about X” or “a tip on Y”.
Back in December, I tweeted:
For every like this gets, I’ll give a Python 🐍 tip.
I thought I’d maybe have to come up with 10–20 tips. Well, so far that tweet has 208 likes! I haven’t done any for a couple of weeks but I did get the first 50 tips in. At first (when I didn’t think I’d be doing many) I was doing obscure Python tricks but now I’m trying to mix basic stuff with the weird stuff.
Check out the thread above if you want to read some of them. I’ll eventually finished :-)
Christopher Tolkien
Back in 2017, I tweeted
It cannot be overstated how much of an influence Christopher Tolkien’s work has had on my life. Without him, his father’s work wouldn’t have been nearly as much of an influence.
I knew the day would come when Christopher Tolkien would no longer be with us but, when it happened last month, it hit me harder than I thought it would. For those not familiar with him, Christopher Tolkien was J.R.R Tolkien’s youngest son and the person responsible for giving the world the vast amount of work his father never published in his own lifetime. I have more books by Christopher Tolkien than by any other author.
And given the massive influence the Ainulindalë had on my early compositional pursuits, I have to thank Christopher Tolkien for even my composing!
I only wish I’d had the chance to meet him.
To read more about Christoper Tolkien’s life, see this obituary by John Garth (who I have had a chance to meet and hang out with, a few times now)
GitHub sponsorship
Got my third GitHub sponsor supporting my open source and open data work! Still trying to decide if there’s something more I can do for my sponsors, perhaps with different tiers, but for now I’m just grateful for the acknowledgement and support of my work.
There’s more than one way to transliterate it!
Via the Unicode mailing list, I found this list of 207 different ways the surname of the mathematician Chebyshev (or, more precisely, Чебышёв) has been transliterated in the wild:
https://mathreader.livejournal.com/9239.html
207!!
Mic setup
I recently decided I wanted a decent mic setup for doing screencasts and other instructional videos. So I bought the following setup:
- Shure SM7B microphone
- Cloud CL-1 “Cloud Lifter” mic activator
- Focusrite Scarlett Solo pre-amp / audio-interface
- RØDE RSA-1 mic stand
- Sennheiser HD 280 PRO headphones
The Cloud Lifter is particularly interesting. The SM7B is notoriously quiet (something I’d read a lot about researching which mic to get). The Cloud Lifter takes the 48V phantom power from the Focusrite (which the mic itself doesn’t need as it’s a dynamic mic, not a condenser) and uses it to boost the gain. Without the Cloud Lifter I have to have the gain on the Focusrite at full to even get an average signal coming in. But with the CL-1, I have plenty of room to “go to eleven” if I need to.
Recent Book acquisitions
- The Encheiridion of Epictetus and Its Three Christian Adaptations: Transmission and Critical Editions
- Ancient Greek Grammar for the Study of the New Testament
- Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis
- Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction
- Statistics for Linguists: An Introduction Using R
- Liddell and Scott: The History, Methodology, and Languages of the World’s Leading Lexicon of Ancient Greek
- Cognitive Poetics 2nd Edition