We saw you from across the bar and we really dig your vibe
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Christopher Phin
@chrisphin@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Uses language suitable for miners rather than minors. Proud xennial. Podcasting, tech, publishing, ebikes, art and design, queer shit. (I did warn you about the language.) 🩷💜💙
1097 Followers
118 Following
50 Posts
Joined August 11, 2018
Website:
Location:
Dundee, Scotland
Pronouns:
he/him or they/them
Ebike channel:
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
Does anyone make, sell or know of a source of NICE Pride flags? Like, not £7.99 nylon things (no shade; I have some), but nice fabric, well sewn and finished, ideally from a queer maker? 🏳️🌈
Today was quietly a good day. I don’t talk much, publicly, about some of the difficulties I’m managing, but some of the hardest parts softened today and I got a glimpse of normalcy. Maybe just for today, but I need to not dismiss that, and will be going to bed, gratefully, in peace.
So much love to all my friends, only one of whom, @jamesthomson@mastodon.social, has the good grace to be on Mastodon.
I do not believe in ‘Mercury in retrograde’ thinking, but all of my close friends are in some kind of crisis rn (and I include myself).
There’s not really a point to this post save to remind you that you deserve love and care regardless of how messy and broken you feel, and that helping others is paradoxically often a great way to help yourself.
Because I sit at the Venn intersection of ‘creative’, ‘mastery of tools and processes’ and ‘low impulse control’, I made up a chauffeur’s cap for when I’m picking up queer friends.
Pride Rides Taxi Co. — “Where the customer always comes first!”
This one’s inspired by my friend @jamesthomson@mastodon.social.
Who’s got two thumbs and a licence to fly in Dundee city council parks?
Ran into some cute pups in the park today, and offered to take some photos. 🌸 (Shared with owners’ permission.)
You know the trope that ‘all Americans think Scots live in castles’?
I was thinking about it the other day as I drove along an otherwise unremarkable suburban street near where I live and there’s just… a castle. I’ve passed it hundreds of times and never really clocked that it’s unusual for there just to be… a castle.
So our kid wants to make a Mothers’ Day podcast. Adorable. But I’m a hundred miles away, so I start to walk my wife through getting set up. The old keyboard is temperamental so: ditch it and use the new one. She’s like: there’s no mouse. Shit, I took that with me. Direct her to the old Mighty Mouse in a drawer with ‘and you’ll need a USB-C adapter’. She manfully finds all this stuff, then sends me this with ‘is this right?’
Reader, it is not right, but it is both understandable and adorable.
Today has been a good day.
Found a photo of my original #AppleWatch :)
Made some cinnamon swirls from a little can of dough this morning. For me at least, ‘freshly-baked meh patisserie’ beats most patisserie, even pretty high-end. I’m an especial fan of supermarket frozen croissants: 10 mins in the air fryer and then, joy.
Found an old Ladybird Book of British Railway Locomotives in a charity shop and nabbed it for a friend’s kid. Scanned in the illustration on the cover so I could also add it to the mailing label, so here, internet, have a pretty thing – as the original scan and a quickly cleaned-up 1-bit version.
Been using this for a while, and it’s nice! I could daily drive it except for:
🤔 No TouchID
😰 No inverted-T arrows
🤯 No Escape??
Could live with the first, the second would be annoying as fuck, the third, what the absolute twat?
My 2019 Intel MacBook Pro (which is in a semi-retired state) has been struggling for a long time, with the fans always running and performance apparently being thermally throttled. “So clean the fans, Phin?” Yes. I couldn’t see any dust at the hinge vents, though; tried blowing in some compressed air, but it made no difference.
Admitted that I’ve lost my P5 Pentalobe screwdriver, bought a new @iFixit@mastodon.social set, and, um, it’s running much better now…
(Should have done this years ago. Don’t be me…)
Some photos from time in my childhood home caring for my parents.
A kinda silly special effect photo, but it has a charm. I was struck by the halo of light created by the guy power-washing his car on the street, and I used Dehaze (along with tweaking Highlights and Shadows) to push the tree almost all the way to silhouette, then added a linear fade to drop the saturation out of the top half of the photo. Although it’s a bit schlocky, I like how a monochrome and a colour photo can kinda coexist in the same shot, without you probably noticing.
*taps mic* Are the straits okay? (No.)
The wild thing about this picture is that there was a sharp shower of pea-sized hail a couple of hours before I took it…
Replying to
Skin sticky with SPF, heart full of joy 🥰
That’s #Pride over for me for today; back to Shame tomorrow!
Picked up this little book from 1902 in a charity shop. It’s a list of multiplication tables for pre-decimalised British currency, which was hard to calculate in your head. So for example, in the close-up we see, 31 × 8 shillings and 6 pence is £13, 3 shillings and sixpence.
Lookup tables like this always interest me. Research the history of ENIAC to see the moment history started to pivot away from the requirement for these to exist and to be manually calculated by ‘computers’ — women, often.
Replying to
@otfrom There are two answers to that question. The first is: it responds incredibly well and quickly to gusts, which, combined with the gimballed camera means footage is usually rock solid, eg, the below, which was shot on a very windy day.
The second is: it’s pretty small, so sustained wind can push it away with a grim determination. Not long after shooting the below I almost lost it in the river, for example; the Clyde, apparently.
A little reminder that WordService from @devontechnologies@mastodon.devontechnologies.com is a really handy little tool for doing a bunch of text manipulation. Just reinstalled as I needed to convert a bunch of dumb quotes to smart. I’m sure smarter people than me could bash out a regex quicker than I could write this post, but I am not that bitch.
Having recently changed my home network, I’ve been dealing with adding devices to a new SSID. Phones and laptops are easy¹, some devices are a little trickier but fine (such as joining a reset device’s network and logging into its internal server), some a little ticker still involving arcane apps, and some, usually HomeKit, I have no idea how I made it work.
And then there’s devices that make me 🙄 such as ‘my hoover’ and ‘a plant pot’…
¹ Also! You can make a QR code of your Wi-Fi for guests!
Replying to
I was mistaken yesterday. The new router doesn’t replace two devices, it replaces three. Yummy.
A little reminder that your iPhone can tell you how much mobile data you’ve used and since when, in Settings ▸ Mobile Service, which can be handy for knowing if your mobile contract is appropriate.
(Me, I’m on about 35GB mobile data a month. That average is definitely on the rise since I switched to a 70GB/month allowance…)
Additionally to this excellent point, I had a moment of clarity when I read someone making that point that the better, more detailed, least ‘Sorcer’s Apprentice’ your prompt is to get an AI to generate code, the closer it is to… code. Like, code is yes, technical, but it’s also just a kind of precise prompt to [instruct a compiler to] trick rocks into thinking. It’s not that dissimilar to a precise-enough AI prompt.
Replying to
@jetlagjen And with things like croissants, the fresher they are the more you get the beautiful flakiness and chewy pull, which just starts to go stale within an hour
Replying to
@isocat Elgato Key Light Air – to balance out natural light from the window for video calls.
Replying to
@otfrom (I also got ATC permission today to fly at the Law but it was windy as hell, so I abandoned that…)
Replying to
@daycoder Yeah! And the specs for mice/keyboards are so robust. I did wonder if it would just work… but it did not.
Replying to
@otfrom Aye! And that old ADB keyboard has a port at either side to allow for exactly that in the same way
For Various Reasons, finally have a VPN. I went with Nord; referral link: https://refer-nordvpn.com/MpPriBVTToR
I keep failing to make #Knotwords a habit, but I always love it when I open it up. The mini puzzles fit nicely into my brain.
Guested on a podcast where I talked about making podcasts, movies, stories and more. Always good to talk to Sean, and perhaps you might like to stick me on while you're doing the dishes one day :)
Youtube: https://youtu.be/MqFPttT3nYU
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/26p7TFeFaTnqubzEZOGBOU?si=BvICkBB5Sbys9E3i1c2UnQ
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-storytelling-chimp-christopher-phin-full-battery/id1847565198?i=1000757675312