Thursday saw the arrival of my Kindle Scribe, which I pre-ordered on the day it was announced. I've long wanted a bigger Kindle because the smaller ones just aren't that great for reading on, and although my iPad is huge, it's also got a lot of distractions on it, which make it less suitable for reading. The ability to write on it is a bonus, but I'm surprised how effective adding comments using the pen is. It's like adding little Post-Its, which is exactly how I work with paper books.
Big trip to that there London yesterday, when we caught up with a lovely friend over from New York in the Royal Festival Hall bar, then headed to see Stereolab with another lovely friend. There was dancing -- well more shuffling around from me -- and this morning, an inevitable plethora of aches. Kids, if you're under 40, look after your body. Do yoga or something. Don't eat so many pies.
All that means today involved a greasy spoon breakfast -- well, 1pm breakfast -- plus many cups of reviving tea and a sofa.
One other thing today has been winding down my Twitter account. I finally downloaded the 1.4Gb archive of all my content from it, and used the Twitter Archive Parser on it. This does four things:
- It converts tweets to Markdown with embedded images
- It replaces the t.co links with the originals
- It copies all the images into a single folder, useful for importing them elsewhere
- If an image is a low-resolution version, it download the original
Once that was done I used ByeByeTweets to do three more things: - Unfollow everyone I was following
- Remove all the likes I had put on other people's content
- Delete all my tweets
ByeByeTweets costs a few dollars if you want to delete all tweets (it will do a limited amount for free) but I highly recommend it. I ran into a bug uploading my archive, which you need to do if you're deleting all of them, and emailed them. They responded within a couple of hours and had fixed the error.
So that's pretty much it with Twitter and me! You can find me on Mastodon.
Writing
I've written a lot of notes on how to improve a story I've been struggling with, along with an outline of how to move it forward.
Reading and watching
I'm reading Harry Turtledove's Three Miles Down which is, so far, an enjoyably frothy alternate history novel. It's really interesting that I'm starting to look at books like this with a more technical writers eye, spotting elements of foreshadowing and the odd McGuffin.
