CCCB: Larque on the Wing

Like everybody, I’ve got a bookcase of unread books, but perhaps weirdly, mine is organised along a simple principle: Older books sink towards the bottom. That is, as I read books, I compact the rest and move them towards the bottom left.

It’s a sedimental journey.

The last couple of years I’ve read very few books, and have instead been reading comics and comics and comics, and I’m totally burned out on that. So what better way to get back into reading books again than to take a whack at those books that I’ve been avoiding reading most of my life?

That’s the selection. I think the oldest ones here have been with me since the late 80s, probably… and somehow I’ve never gotten around to reading them because other books have seemed more urgent.

Oh god. One of them’s fucking Ulysses, and now I have to read it…

But to entice me to make headway here, I’m also going to teach myself how to bake cakes and cookies. One cake, one book. Cake, Cookies, Crumpets and Books: CCCB.

Let’s aim for… one per week? And I can read other books in-between while finishing off the cake.

I started with this banana mocha cream cake, which looks very scrumptious in the pictures at least…

Do I have all the ingredients? Yes!

I ate too much of the dough. I’m allowed!

Bake baby bake.

So shiny.

For the book I chose Larque on the Wing by Nancy Springer, which I’ve always pronounced in my head “Laroque” when I’ve decided not to read it, several times per month, the last 24 years.

It’s a very witty, and strangely unclassifiable book. It’s not quite a fantasy, but it’s not quite a non-genre book either. It reads more like a magic realism book? But it’s marketed as a a fantasy book.

Just read these three opening pages:

But how does it pair with the cake?

Hm, it came out dryer than on the picture on that blog… but it’s been in the fridge, so I should probably let it sit on the table a few hours to get back to room temperature.

But it’s really more like a banana bread with a chocolate covering than a cake, really, which isn’t quite what I wanted. But it’s a pretty good banana bread, anyway.

And it pairs well with the sinister whimsy of the Nancy Springer book. Which is very good, indeed. I never know where it’s going.

One thing I find upon returning to books after this hiatus is that I’ve aquired some bad reading habits, probably from spending too much time reading blogs: My eyes have started skipping past text I think I know what’s going to say. They slip into skimming mode for short periods of time. And that doesn’t work with this book at all, because just about any sentence here doesn’t go the way you think they’re going to go.

It’s published by Avon Books, and this is what they usually publish:

So it’s somewhat out of their normal remit, but I seem to remember them also publishing weirder stuff like this. It’s got a very exciting plot, with the most horrifying monster of all time as the main antagonist: A mother who can change reality by just refusing to see whatever is in front of her eyes. But it’s also a somewhat frustrating read, because for most of the book, things don’t much develop as repeat themselves, so reading it feels like we’re stuck in molasses. Which may be Springer’s point, but…

But you can’t fault the fabulously climactic confrontation at the end, wart hog and all.

Useful Consumer Review

The backlight to the monitor in the hallway half died, and the monitor was more than ten years old, so getting a replacement seemed more prudent than trying to get it fixed.

I wanted a kinda small monitor for the table. The main use cases is me scanning record sleeves and paying bills (because this is the only computer I have with a numeric keyboard), so it’s not like a need a huge one. The rest of the time it’s showing the cover of whatever album I’m playing in the stereo…

But then I happened on to the Eizo EV2730Q monitor: It’s square! I mean, as in having a 1:1 width/height factor! 1920×1920! How cromulent! Album covers are square, too, so that’d perhaps look totally cool in the hallway?

Behold!

It is, indeed, square. It kinda visually looks like it’s taller than it’s wide, but I’ve measured it, and it’s not.

So what’s it like?

Well, it’s… a monitor.

I was briefly excited when I learned that it had a USB hub built-in, because I thought I could use it to charge gadgets and get rid of an external USB hub, but it’s a fucking non-powered hub. How lame is that? If I connect my keyboard and something power-draining to the hub at the same time, my keyboard goes AWOL. So its utility is severely limited, and since I have to have an external powered hub, anyway, there’s no point in using it at all.

They could have spent a couple of dollars more and made it powered, but they didn’t, the cheapskates.

I was also briefly excited when I read the manual and saw that it had speakers built-in. Not that I’d use those to play music or anything, but it’s occasionally useful if I were to check something out on Youtube. The monitor has a 3.5mm jack input, but I thought that surely it would also have audio input over either DisplayPort or over the USB input, but nope. It doesn’t have any other audio input than that 3.5mm jack. At least no audio device pops up in Linux when I plug in the DisplayPort cable, but surely this is the Year of Linux on the Desktop, so it has to be the monitor’s fault.

I don’t want to pull another cable from the closet where the computer is over to the monitor, so I guess I won’t be using that speaker, either.

So after those brief oh-so-exciting periods were over… what’s the picture quality like?

It’s fine, but the black levels aren’t very black. I’m spoiled by having an OLED TV, where black is black, but it’s a disappointment that you can’t get things blacker than you see in the picture there. I even went into all the menus to tweak, and you can make the black levels even more grey, but you can’t make it go darker.

So I guess it’s fine? But there’s nothing exciting about it.

Except the form factor, which is pretty neat. It’s hip to be square again.

Cropping Images in Emacs

I woke up in the middle of the night and started thinking about cropping images in Emacs, as one does. I started wondering how Emacs processed mouse events, and that turns out to be very easy: You just use `read-event’ inside a `track-mouse’ form, and you get all the events and coordinates, offset from the window or the image under point, which is just perfect for my use case here.

 

So after work today, I started typing, and there it is.

Now, cropping an image in Emacs is one thing, but the other is… what do you do with the result? I mean, just displaying the cropped image is nice, but pretty useless. I mean, you can save it, I guess, and that would make sense from an `image-mode’ context. But more generally useful would be from a document composition mode, so I just stuck it into the package for editing WordPress posts.

Behold!

Cropping Images in Emacs

I think it may make sense to factor this out into its own little package so that it can be used elsewhere, but I don’t really have the time at the moment, so I guess it’ll have to wait…

The code is up on Microsoft Github as usual.

August 1943: Hi Diddle Diddle


















This is a B movie, I guess? Cheap and cheerful. It’s got a convoluted and silly plot that putters away in a very pleasing manner. Much intrigue and running around.

It’s not exactly a cinematic masterpiece, but it’s really funny. It’s just an almost-perfect bundle of silliness, and everything works out like it’s supposed to.

The newlyweds even get some private time at the end due to a helpful maid.

Hi Diddle Diddle. Andrew L. Stone. 1943.

Popular movies in August 1943 according to IMDB:

PosterVotesRatingMovie
75587.5Heaven Can Wait
28947.5Watch on the Rhine
4707.3Holy Matrimony
2796.9Hi Diddle Diddle
39656.9The Seventh Victim
6926.8The Man in Grey
9586.7The Fallen Sparrow
8706.6Destroyer
7386.6A Lady Takes a Chance
46516.5Phantom of the Opera

This blog post is part of the Decade series.