It’s evidently been a while. I think I procrastinated a lot on weeknotes because I felt like I had nothing to say. Realised I practice a lot of unnecessary self-censorship. In the past few weeks I’ve started helping someone out with filing a claim with the Small Claims Tribunal (I’m basically someone’s Computer Guy because he doesn’t have access to a laptop and also is not fluent in English), and also finally updated my review of classes I took for a graduate certificate after much procrastinating (bit of a running theme)....

In 2023, I spent 6 weeks leading a section of about 14 people hailing from China, Brazil, Germany, India, Japan (and more countries!) as part of Code in Place, and got to experience the joy of seeing people write their first for-loops :) We met for an hour a week on Zoom, but my personal estimate for how much time I spent on Code in Place including preparation + writing weekly recaps was about 4-5 hours a week (including class time)....

Double bill this time, because I’ve been kind of tardy. Week 17 I took a silversmithing class with my university flatmate and got to interact with flux and solder in a non-electronics-related setting :) It was very calming to just focus on: annealing the metal marking out where to cut it sawing it and filing to ensure a smooth join actually joining it by applying flux, and then solder to the joint shaping it into a rounder shape by hammering it on the mandrel grinding the ring down to create a wavy shape polishing it (done!...

Spent a lot of the week marinating (I prefer this term over “ruminating”). I think I’m still adjusting to freedom - so much time gets taken up by the work week that its sudden absence creates a vacuum of sorts. I realise that I’m used to taking work given to me by third parties very seriously, but am suddenly at a loss when it comes to my own goals and projects… guess I’m actually not used to prioritising my own interests and taking myself seriously....

This week, I made a ring using a baby tooth I found while unpacking from moving. I kept most of my baby teeth in a ziploc bag (not sure why I did that, but I was pretty weird even as a kid). Google says people have 20 baby teeth, and I have 18 still with me, so that’s a pretty good yield. Molars are good for rings because they’ve got quite a flat base and a rectangular shape....

This marks the first week of being temporarily free-range. I haven’t figured out the right term for it yet. I joked about this a bit 2 weeks ago, but “temporarily free-range” is my top contender for now. I’m avoiding calling it a sabbatical because it reminds me too much of tenured faculty, and “microdosing retirement” sounds a bit too laid back. What matters (and what’s kind of scary) about this time is that nobody can tell me what to do....

I’ve been thinking about documentation a lot lately because of my experience of helping South Asian workers navigate Singpass (Singapore’s digital identity service).1 Singpass interfaces and documentation support the 4 official languages – Malay, Chinese, Tamil and English – which makes navigating Singpass a challenging task for people who don’t speak any of these languages. I started my own page of quick links to speed up my own process of connecting workers to the right e-service (for account registration, password resets) etc, but realised that I could probably make a bigger impact if I:...

Inspired by The Zen of Python✨ Machine-readable is better than PDF. Avoid jargon. Documentation is not separate from your product - it is part of it. Good docs help people to help themselves. Multilingual support matters. Some links: Why GOV.UK content should be published in HTML and not PDF Accessibility for Content This is a living document, so please feel free to make a pull request if you want to add on something or just make your own!...

The strange thing about cameras is that brands keep calling the same thing by different names. Why can’t we just have a unique identifier for each thing that exists? It’s like how the Canon EOS 750D is also called the Rebel T6i (see Wikipedia). The Konica TZ-635 is no different - It appears to be called the Konica Zoom FR 635 too (like in this Youtube video by Meracasee or this random ebay listing)....

TL;DR: These two cameras are the same. If you can’t find manuals for the Fuji, use this Samsung one: https://cameramanuals.org/samsung/samsung_af-slim-zoom-e-s.pdf (Credits to Michael Butkus Jr, who’s been archiving camera manuals since 1997 with https://butkus.org/chinon/index.html) What ever happened? I had thrifted some cameras, and was unable to find any manuals for the Fuji Zoom Cardia Super 115 I got. It has a ton of modes like Fuzzy, Portrait, and something that looked like a self-timer and interval shooting....