Weeknotes 25

I spent part of the bank holiday weekend adding a new section to every post’s byline showing how long it has been since it was published, e.g.

By Paul Mucur, 7 days ago on Sunday 12th April 2020

As every post is a static page generated by Jekyll, these new relative dates are calculated entirely in your browser so they are always up-to-date, regardless of when I last generated the site. As a bonus, they update every minute so it should still be accurate even if you leave a post open for a while.

I was too lazy to come up with my own algorithm for turning lengths of time into words so I decided to port Rails’ time_ago_in_words to JavaScript.

You can view the full, unminified source code on GitHub (or enjoy the minified version).

Since clearing out our planter a few weeks ago, the sight of a rectangle of barren soil with a single, surviving chard plant has not been a cheery one. To improve matters and following Matt’s lead, I planted a clove of garlic in the hope it will grow.

E and I watched Bo Burnham’s “Eighth Grade” and loved it.

The movie doesn’t seem to be that well known despite receiving a lot of critical praise.

As Molly Ringwald put it:

I just saw [Eighth Grade] and thought it was the best film about adolescence I’ve seen in a long time. Maybe ever.

After watching the chefs of Bon Appétit make their favourite coffee, E suggested we buy a coffee grinder.

Asking for recommendations led me to the Wilfa Svart Aroma Coffee Grinder. Seeing Tim Wendelboe’s name in association with Wilfa made the decision easy given that E and I had visited his Espresso Bar in Oslo back in September 2015.

During our visit, E asked whether there were any pastries but was told they served no food as it might detract from the coffee drinking experience. While we disagree about the importance of pastries, I trust his judgement on coffee-making equipment.

We ended up buying the grinder from Square Mile Coffee Roasters along with a bag of beans.

The next day, I received the following email:

Dear Paul,

As you might know, we’ve recently launched our 25% GRINDATHOME discount code on all our grinders. We know, you just missed it, and to make up for it we would like to extend the discount code to your order by refunding the 25% on your recently purchased Wilfa grinder.

In a week of extremely stressful emails, this was an unexpected and very welcome kindness.

To celebrate the arrival of the grinder, I followed Blue Bottle Coffee’s Chemex Brewing Guide and, reader, it was a glorious cup of coffee.

Despite hearing about it on podcasts for a while, I hadn’t found a use for iOS Shortcuts.

When C wakes up unexpectedly in the night, I get up to reassure him and set a timer for 10 minutes to see if he will put himself back to sleep. After struggling to do this in the dark for over a month, I realised this might be the perfect use case.

I created a new shortcut to set a 10 minute timer with a single button press but it is still awkward swiping over to the widget in the Today View.

E and I started watching Alex Garland’s “DEVS” on BBC iPlayer. I’ll join others in highly recommending it.

While the title makes it sound like a comedy in the vein of “The IT Crowd” or “Silicon Valley”, it is a drama more akin to Garland’s previous work: “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation”.

It has been a trying week but as we retired for bed one evening, I accidentally kicked C’s walker. In its cheery voice, it said “keep going!”