Done Since 2018-04-01

I have been working much of the time with my laptop closed and one of my little USB Thinkpad keyboards sitting on top of it. This is both because Cygnus's keyboard seems to be deteriorating (the "f" key, in particular, is unreliable), and because cats. Having a separate keyboard that can be put to one side and leaned against the wall isn't a complete solution to the latter problem (kittens are zoomy), but it helps.

I have been gradually emptying the boxes of CDs and putting them on shelves in the towers. I'm basically done, except that things other than classical and folk/filk/rock/pop haven't been sorted yet, just put in haphazardly. What's left are the CDs that I brought in from Rosie, the ones in drawers in the cabinet under the stereo, and anything still in the pod. The latter category is of unknown size at this point.

Taxes are mostly done at this point, but I need to get off my arse about the remaining bits. Otherwise said arse might get bitten by them.

I need to blog more, and do more programming than simply bug fixes and tweaks. That implies that I should

1. Start a couple of projects. (At least one front-end project, and at least one app.) Expect a planning post soon.
2. Blog about them as I go.

Geeks in my audience will want to know about 1.1.1.1: Cloudflare's fast, privacy-first consumer DNS service. Not only is it significantly faster than any of the others (e.g. Google's 8.8.8.8), it uses encryption if you're set up for it, and doesn't save logs to disk. If none of that makes any sense to you, just go to 1.1.1.1, follow the simple installation instructions, and watch your browser get faster.

Simple explanation for non-geeks: It's not actually making websites transfer data any faster -- what it's doing is reducing the time it takes to find the website in the first place, along with any other scripts, ads, and images it may be trying to load.

Geeks interested in making their websites actually load faster should check out Friday's notes about Cutting the mustard. That's all about responsive design. One of the aforementioned projects will involve a makeover of at least one of my websites.

Things have been stressful lately. We'll get through it, but it's going to be rough for a while. More later, perhaps.

( Notes & links, as usual )