Weeknotes #89

In an effort to improve my lighting on video calls, I bought an Elgato Key Light Air and positioned it behind my monitor. The Elgato Control Center software adds an icon to the macOS menu bar, so like Tom, I wrote a shortcut to toggle the light by making HTTP requests to it.

I originally intended to run the shortcut from LaunchBar but in practice, I’ve been toggling the light from a widget on my phone as a sort of Stream Deck.

I revisited the shortcut I wrote to scrape photos from C’s nursery app as it was importing duplicates due to the underlying API only respecting dates and not exact time ranges.

Thankfully, Shortcuts provides a “Generate Hash” action which can generate a MD5, SHA1, SHA256 or SHA512 hash for a given input. I use this to first populate a dictionary with all existing photos’ hashes and then check against this dictionary before importing each new photo.

Thanks to tips mostly from Leo, I’ve been slowly diverging from Tartine’s Country Bread recipe:

• I use rye flour rather than a blend of white and wholemeal both when feeding my starter and making the initial leaven.
• I use coil folds during bulk fermentation.
• I use Simple Sourdough’s preshaping and final shaping technique for batards.
• I bake the dough cold from the fridge in a Challenger bread pan, following their instructions for baking the perfect loaf with one key difference:
• I turn the oven off for 20 minutes after putting the dough in the oven.

For the first time in four years, I released a new version of my Clojure library riveted, adding the ability to parse XML from byte arrays directly. I have almost entirely forgotten how to write code in a purely functional style.

I took yesterday off work as C caught another nasty cold. I’ve watched more YouTube videos for the query “vehicles for toddlers” than can possibly be healthy.