Hilda

One side-effect of having a young daughter is that you get to see things that would otherwise be out of your normal world view.

We’ve both been enamoured lately with the Hilda graphic novels. These are a bunch of books about a girl, Hilda, who lives in a semi-Scandinavian world where fairy tale like creatures are a normal part of life.

Even though it features some apparently scary characters (and some drama), everything is softly off beat, kindly, and is drawn with muted browns and oranges.

The stories involve tiny invisible elves that require signed contracts before you can see them, to talking ravens, and the ever-present trolls and woffs (shown above).

There’s a Netflix TV series that perfectly matches the books.

Recommended for any young children. Or even adults that want a break in a gentle fantasy world.

The Electric State

This is a lovely fan animation for Simon Stålenhag’s The Electric State, including music composed by Simon himself:

Apparently there’s a film adaptation in production, as well as an Amazon TV series for Tales from the Loop, his books set in Sweden.

I look forward to watching them all.

Canon Selphy and Ubiquiti Unifi

I recently got a Canon Selphy photo printer. It’s a book-sized printer that outputs 6×4″ photo prints using a dye sublimation process. As I don’t print much this is ideal as there’s no ink to dry out, it uses little space, and the prints are comparable to ones I can get from general online photo printing places.

This all seems great but I had great difficulty getting it to work over Wifi on my Ubiquiti network, particularly using AirPrint.

After a lot of head scratching I came across some old forum posts that mentioned UAPSD (unscheduled automatic power save delivery). I don’t really know what that means, but sure enough there is a setting in the Wireless Networks section of Unifi and enabling this fixed all printer problems.

Beat Saber

This is my current go-to VR game, and is a lot of fun to play. It’s a lightsabre music mashup thing.

It can be particularly satisfying at times, and feels like you’re getting a good bit of exercise too. Meanwhile in the real world you’re just flailing your arms around like you’re being attacked by a bee.

The need for whitespace

I’m a big fan of vertical whitespace, and find it strange that more fuss is made of tabs vs spaces (which doesn’t really affect readability) than vertical spacing (which does).

Here’s a simple code example, randomly picked:

$max_width  = intval( get_option( 'thumbnail_size_w' ) );
$max_height = intval( get_option( 'thumbnail_size_h' ) );
// last chance thumbnail size defaults
if ( ! $max_width && ! $max_height ) {
  $max_width  = 128;
  $max_height = 96;
}

Compared to:

$max_width  = intval( get_option( 'thumbnail_size_w' ) );
$max_height = intval( get_option( 'thumbnail_size_h' ) );

// last chance thumbnail size defaults
if ( ! $max_width && ! $max_height ) {
  $max_width  = 128;
  $max_height = 96;
}

That single extra line makes such a difference when scanning code. Imagine trying to read a book with no paragraphs.