Dook's Journal
2023-02-28
Spent the first week of this month completing my portfolio for college entry, but in-between made some big improvements to the site. I simplified the inline links style to be far more visible than they were before, which also led to my stand-alone font for links becoming unnecessary. Getting rid of it has made my home page even smaller now, to just over 30kb.
After that, I began to work on a new iPod theme called Themify. I made it mostly to showcase some features of Rockbox I found that would let users fully customise the UI’s colourscheme. The beta was shared on my Ko-Fi here, and some people have shown support which has been really nice. At the same time, I’ve been working on a commission I received to port a previous Rockbox theme of mine to a touch-screen device which has been a lot of fun.
This month I also started learning a few different programming languages including Uxntal, Python and bits of GTK for making a desktop app. I started learning Uxntal after getting an idea for a virtual pet synthesizer in a dream, so far compudanzas’ uxn book has been extremely useful and makes uxn appear quite inviting, even as a relative beginner with programming. On the other hand GTK has been a nightmare to figure out, but I seem to make progress in big leaps at once. It’s been quite enjoyable working on apps and software that I want or need.
Hopefully by the end of March I should have an update with a bunch of finished projects!
2023-01-31
Happy new year! I’ve decided this year to use my short journal as a more detailed monthly record. This month was largely focused on my college application. I’m attempting to return to college in September, switching institutions as I do so to be closer to home. This requires a whole new application, portfolio etc which I spent most of this month handling. In my off time I put a decent amount of work into my website, solidifying parts of the website that have been disjointed up until now. I also started a Linux Wiki of various cheatsheets I’ve written over the past year. These were received quite well, and I hope this knowledge will help others learn too. Lastly, this month I was shortlisted and exhibited in The Photographer’s Gallery’s Small File Photo Festival. I’m very proud of this exhibition, combining two of my interests: Photography and Image Compression. I’m hoping this year I’ll be able to move about more and take photos again.
2022-11-25
What a wild month! I started the month updating a finishing off my adwaitapod theme for rockbox. I also spent the past 3 weeks learning to program in C, building up to the Rebble Hackathon last weekend where I put together my watchface design, Time Twist Pop and released it! It was incredibly frustrating at times, since I really have very little experience programming. However, by the end of the weekend I was getting into the zone and pumping out some really good stuff and was having a blast! Really looking forward to making more with C in the future!
2022-10-09
It’s a crazy couple of months for me, but I finally found some time to tend to the website. First thing I did was get to finalising it’s design, the way it had been before was overly garish and pretty difficult to look at on some pages, the new style is far better in this regard. I also took the time to go absolutely overboard on optimising every possible thing I could, making each pretty tiny for what it is, I made a writeup on everything I did here.
I also managed to find a new home on mastodon during this time at Lurk! It’s a great community. A few new projects have been started as well; an accessible version of my ipod them after some user feedback, as well as a book for other people looking into making their own themes. Currently everything I’m doing is building up for my portfolio to switch colleges with next year, so I’m gonna be busy for the the next few months!
2022-08-03
My productivity has been hampered the past few weeks by illness, but I’ve slowly started to get back into my projects by improving my website. Shaved off a few hundred Mbs with favicon and other image optimisations, which I’m really happy with. I’ve also started to look for a new home server on Mastodon, my current server is shutting down for a 2 month rebuild and restart so I took it as a signal to finally find somewhere better. This time I want to find a place less general, that matches my interests as well as political beliefs etc.
2022-07-12
Without even realising it, I went on a bit of an internet detox this weekend. My phone’s gone almost 50 hours on a single charge, which is pretty good. I spent most of the weekend between working on some new design projects and watching the wildlife in our garden. It’s really become a sanctuary for so many different kinds of species, I even found a threatened leaf-cutter bee building a nest which was amazing to watch. I’m somewhat reluctant to return to social media yet, I think I’ll keep riding this wave for a while longer.
2022-07-07
Had some really hot weather today, spent most of the day in and out between the garden and my laptop. Started work designing a typeface for pebble watches based on their icon style. Looking to convert it into a watchface soon.
2022-07-06
I’ve gotten interested this week in propagating seeds from wildflowers in our garden. There’s a beautiful pink poppy with massive seed pods, as well as a bunch of bluebells that I’d love to spread to other places. I was considering drying and saving the seed, following this guide from realseeds, however I don’t think there’s much reason to in this situation.
2022-07-05
Felt inspired to create a short form journal for the site after seeing some people on Mastodon doing the same. Excited to write more in it, hopefully this will also encourage me to update the site more! :3
