It’s been a little while since my last weeknotes—unfortunately I finally succumbed to the seasonal malaise causing me to miss a step or two. Thankfully I was able to continue to work on my various projects, but things slowed down quite a bit.

In my Internet perusals this week, I enjoyed Mike’s reflections on ‘More, Smaller, Things’, in which he talks about writing shorter, more timely pieces. That is, in part, what I’m trying to do with these revised-format weeknotes, though they often run longer than I might like.

Life

We’re in a new Airbnb again; still based in Cambridgeshire but further away from Cambridge in a place called Wicken. The village itself isn’t much to write home about, but it backs onto The Fens which are absolutely beautiful and we’ve been treated to some wonderful misty mornings and spectacular skies.

The Fens play host to the most amazing sunrises and sunsets

It was sad to leave Horningsea—it’s the place we’ve paused longest in the last year-or-so and the village had a real sense of community that I’ve not experienced in a long while. Still, we ended on a high joining in the tradition of celebrating a local birthday on the Nene Valley Railway.

Sarah started her new job with Galileo this week. She’ll be working on New York time so we’ll still get to spend the mornings together which is a real treat—we’ve already been able to use that time to go on some local walks around Wicken Fen and along Devil’s Dyke.

Little Luggable

The Little Luggable continues to consume much of my time, and the past week has been no exception. A couple of weeks ago I finalised the designs for the custom mechanical keyboard and ordered the PCB. Excitingly, it turned up at the beginning of the week and I spent a few days assembling everything and putting my design through its paces.

The keyboard is now fully functional

Much to my surprise, it seems I got the PCB right first time and I’ve able to write this post almost exclusively on the near-complete device—it’s amazing what a difference it makes to the overall feel to have a nice keyboard and no more trailing wires making everything work. It’s well on its way to becoming my coffee shop computer of choice.

I’ve been enjoying using Left on the Little Luggable

With things near completion, I took some time to flesh out the details on GitHub and post it to Reddit where it had a pretty good reception. As I mention in the readme, I have a few spare PCBs and aluminium parts and I’d love to help people build their own, so please do reach out if you’re interested.

Symbolic

Symbolic now has a cleaner more native-feeling sidebar

Since I’ve not written about it for a while, I feel Symbolic deserves an honourable mention: after a few tweaks, the software is now pretty much ready to go and the latest version is in the hands of my wonderful TestFlight beta users (sign up if you’d like to try it for yourself). Unfortunately, I’m still waiting on my accountants to work through the US-UK tax implications before I can put it on sale in the App Store but I’m still hopeful of a February release.