Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Category: Technology (Page 1 of 2)

A New Name for an Old Concept

March 11, 2025 /

I’ve been meaning to write about this for some time, but always seemed to get distracted with other topics until now.

Several years ago when I was first coming to grips with the note taking application Obsidian, which I’ve written about previously, I came across the term transclusion in the documentation. That had me scratching my head until I read further and discovered it’s a way to reference another document from the current document, and have the contents of the referenced document displayed.

A light bulb went off in my head and took me back several decades to my programming days. It’s the same as the COBOL INCLUDE statement.

A colleague once remarked that every industry renames concepts on a semi-regular basis. He’d built a good career around training and consulting on the impact of those name changes. Files, records, and fields becoming tables, rows , and columns – that sort of thing.

While I was checking some things for this post, I learned the Obsidian help now talks about how to embed a file. Transclusion isn’t mentioned, which I think makes it easier for the non-technical user.

Still, it’s interesting to see that sometimes, even the new names get replaced.

A Quick Update

February 17, 2025 /

Just a few sentences this week as I have a lot happening that I’ll share more about over the next few weeks.

The paperback author copies of Ceres to Vesta arrived yesterday and I saw I’d misaligned the title a little. I’m surprised Amazon didn’t flag it as a potential issue, but ultimately the responsibility is mine, so back to InDesign and fix it. That’s one of the great things about publishing independently, I can fix problems like this in a day or so.

And talking of InDesign is a good reminder that a couple of weeks ago I mentioned how I was struggling with the layout for a paperback cover. A little bit of time, and some judicious use of search engines and I came up with the answer. You start with a three page spread at 8.5″ x 5.5″ page size, then use the Page Tool to resize that second page until it matches the spine width you want.

I’ll try it in the next week or so with the next short story collection – Where Infinity Begins – and let you know how it works out.

First Deliveries

February 3, 2025 /

The first of the short story collections I mentioned last week is now available on the top retailers. The book is titled Ceres to Vesta and contains five stories about the asteroid belt.

I came close to missing this weekend because I changed my cover design tool mid-week. For the past few years I’ve been using Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher for my covers. When I was designing the cover for Ceres to Vesta I wanted a sans serif science fiction like font. The Affinity products didn’t have a font that looked right, so I did some searches and found what I was looking for. The font family wasn’t free and I was okay with that until I saw the price of a commercial license, and the fairly low usage count that went with it.

Before I clicked the buy button on the font family, I recalled a comment someone made a year or so ago that you get a commercial license for all the fonts available for Adobe InDesign. So I flipped open a new browser tab and did some research on the Adobe site. The annual license for InDesign was only slightly more than the license for the font family and also gives me access to the thirty-thousand fonts in Adobe Fonts, so it ended up being an easy decision.

I then spent nearly two days working out how to do some basic tasks in InDesign that generally took ten minutes in Affinity. After some heavy use of the Google search engine, I had the color, layout, and spacing the way I wanted.

The eBook covers were easy. The paperback cover not so much. InDesign doesn’t like the Amazon cover templates – or if it does I haven’t worked it out yet. I’m on the ground floor of knowledge when it comes to InDesign, but I’m glad I made the switch, and if I reach my publishing goals for 2025 then by definition my InDesign skills will improve.

First Thoughts on 2025

December 2, 2024 /

Here in the US, the Thanksgiving Holiday is behind us, and Black Friday is gone. All the stores and television channels are now in full Christmas mode. I even received an email over the weekend urging me to buy my Valentines gift now before it’s too late!

I’ve already begun building the 2025 version of the various spreadsheets I use to track finances, investments, and writing. As I’ve done that, naturally my thoughts have turned to the coming year. I’ll leave a review of 2024 until later this month when I’ll have a better idea of how 2024 really turns out.

Some of the 2025 thoughts are very unformed at the moment – like what books to write. I can say the next Jacob and Miriam story and the next books in the Serpent Trilogy, but that’s trying to force my creative voice and as I learned in November, that doesn’t work so well.

Some of the business related goals are easier. The web site where you’re reading this blog, for example hasn’t been updated in over a year, which begs a decision. Spend the time updating the web site, or bite the bullet and move everything to Shopify? My gut feel at the moment is to move everything to Shopify because there I can also manage a mailing list.

Outside of writing, I found a neat investment charting package that looks to do most of what I want for a semi-automated trading system. More on that as I learn more about the software. And let’s not forget the honey-do list :). We’ve been in our current house for nearly seven years and there are a lot of paint jobs coming due.

One blessing is that I don’t have to search for a new contract this year. Leaving that aside, it’s still a long list, and whichever way I look at it, 2025 is shaping up to be a busy year.

Come on Microsoft

October 21, 2024 /

Over the past few months I’ve been using Microsoft Outlook on the Mac as my main email program for a project I’m working.

It took a while for me to re-familiarize myself with the program as I’ve mainly used Apple Mail for the past few years. It’s worked well for me but I haven’t had to worry too much about calendars and scheduling meetings.

This project changed all that and there I was neck deep back in Outlook, scheduling meetings and making updates.

One thing I noticed. When I updated a meeting invitation to add a new person, or remove someone, every attendee got a meeting update. That wasn’t how I remembered it. There used to be a question asking if you wanted to update all or just changed attendees.

I assumed with Office 365 an the new user interface there was a setting I was missing, and once I found that setting, the question would reappear.

Except I couldn’t find the setting, and my meeting attendees started to grumble about all the emails.

I asked one of my colleagues about it. We went back and forth and scratched our heads, and she asked someone else and we had an answer. That feature doesn’t exist on the Mac version of Outlook, but you get it on the Web version.

What!

I felt like I’d stepped back to the 1990’s.

On one level I kinda get it. As a developer, do I want to work on thirty year old email software or the cool code they’re writing at SpaceX to capture and reuse launch boosters?

I’ve experienced similar situations in the past, and I know it’s a challenge to ask a developer to work on legacy code, but a feature miss like this that’s so disruptive across multiple organizations, is disappointing.

One Small Step

October 14, 2024 /

This past Sunday, I happened to catch a headline that SpaceX were planning to launch the fifth test flight for Starship.

When I saw the headline, it was about halfway through the launch window, so I flipped over the the SpaceX site to see what was happening. It was the first time I’d seen the real time video feed of re-entry using Starlink terminals on the capsule, and it was impressive. There was imagery all the way from re-entry to splashdown, even through the traditional “communications blackout”

Even more impressive was the capture of the Super Heavy booster. I missed seeing it real time, but watched the re-play several times as the booster plummeted down, the rockets fired and it drifted down and was snared by the chopstick arms on the gantry.

There were so many things that could have gone wrong on this initial attempt, but the capture was executed perfectly.

Each test flight is one small step to achieve the ultimate goal of using Starship to send people to the Moon and Mars, and bring them back.

I am of an age now where my participation in such a mission is a non-starter, but I sure hope I’m around to see it happen.

Another Upgrade

July 16, 2024 /

This past weekend, I finally finished the read through and edit of my latest novel and began putting the changes into the Scrivener project.

My normal workflow once a story is finished, is to run it through Pro-Writing Aid to catch grammar, punctuation, and spelling issues. Then I print out and do the read through mentioned above.

I use Pro-Writing Aid as a desktop app, and when I opened it there was the message – upgrade available. So I upgraded. The desktop app is still there but in addition, I now have ProWriting Aid Everywhere.

I left Everywhere alone for a week or two because my guess was this upgrade required a learning curve. And boy was I right.

Being able to pull up ProWriting Aid without leaving my Scrivener document was a huge plus. Potentially, it lets me combine two steps into one – make the edits, check with ProWriting Aid. Done!

Except not exactly.

The integration works well in Word and Obsidian. Not so well in Scrivener. The first thing I noticed was all the spellings I added to the ProWriting Aid dictionary were gone and there didn’t seem to be a way to recreate them. Perhaps not much of an issue when writing a contemporary story, but a real pain with all those Babylonian names and places.

I finally found the dictionary in my online profile and added the words, but I used to be able to do that directly from within the app.

I can absolutely see the advantages of having ProWriting Aid available without having to leave the application you’re writing with. It’s just going to get longer to get used to, and understand the nuances, than I thought.

Tentative Steps into AI

May 20, 2024 /

A few weeks ago I mentioned starting a new project and the first night nerves associated with that experience.

The nerves have mostly settled down now, but spiked a little when I had a new application make its appearance on my desktop this week. Microsoft Co-Pilot!

To say there’s a huge amount of noise around AI, and how it will impact our lives in all areas is likely an equally huge understatement. I am not anti-AI, I just haven’t prioritized the time to really dive in and understand the implications.

I’m the type of person who learns best by doing something rather than reading about it, so I tend to prioritize time when I have something specific for that application. I didn’t think I’d reached that point with AI until I had to review several meeting recordings relevant to the projects I’m working on.

Each meeting was about an hour long and it promised to take me nearly two days to go through all of them. And then a colleague suggested using Co-Pilot. It took a while to work out how to use the interface, and request a summary of the first meeting.

There was a slight delay – maybe ten seconds – before a window popped up with a half-page of text that not only outlined the discussion, but also highlighted the action items. I listened to the first meeting all the way through and didn’t find anything Co-Pilot had missed. After that, it took less than an hour to get summaries of the other meetings.

I’m still not sure about AI and fiction writing, but I am very sure that if an application of AI saves me nearly two days of listening to meetings I didn’t attend, then sign me up for more!

A Geek Moment

April 15, 2024 /

It has been many years since I wrote software code for a living, and maybe ten since I last dabbled.

The dabbling was building a database of stock and futures prices using Groovy and the lightweight H2 database. I had a fairly robust application and a good block of historical data when I ran into a couple of problems. The goal of the database was to calculate the relative strength of a stock or future against its peers, as described by Tom Dorsey in his book Point and Figure Charting. At that time, I couldn’t find a Groovy or Java application that allowed me to calculate the results I needed – bad planning on my part as I couldn’t get my head round how to write the code. The second problem was that H2 changed their database structure and for the life of me I couldn’t work out how to migrate.

As a result, the project just sat there with nothing happening. I’m still collecting the raw price data, but right now it sits in flat files on my hard drives and backups.

About three years ago, I dusted off my coding gloves and used Python to manipulate some health care data for a project I was working on. Now Python as I suspect most reading this know, is incredibly powerful and has a host of open source libraries available to the developer. One of those libraries matplotlib has a whole set of finance utilities. I looked at the library, and put my notes aside but the thought of it never really left my mind.

This past week, I pulled out the old Groovy scripts and looked at migrating them to Python. I rethought exactly what I had been looking to do that first time and scaled back a lot of the calculations that weren’t really necessary. The refactoring ended up being much easier than I expected. And fast. Over 200,000 rows into a SQLITE database in about five seconds!

I also found some interesting and illuminating thoughts in Jeremy Du Plessis’s book The Definitive Guide to Point and Figure. I still need to think through the calculation routines based on his writing, but I may not need matplotlib after all!

iPad Revisited

April 8, 2024 /

It’s nearly two years since I wrote about my iPad purchase in the Brave New World post (May 2022 – Richard Freeborn).

In that post I talked about the keyboard, and how, without email I was able to be quite productive. I am still using the iPad for writing, usually with Scrivener because that’s where my fiction lives these days, but there are a few differences.

About six months ago, I bought a Macally bluetooth keyboard. It’s a full size keyboard with a separate numeric keypad. I hadn’t realized how much I missed that numeric keypad until I had it back again. Another feature of the Macally keyboard is the ability to connect up to three devices and switch between them seamlessly, with just a quick hoy-key combination.

It was very easy to connect the keyboard to the iPad, and much as I still liked the Magic keyboard, being able to sit and type with the correct posture was wonderful. It’s on these occasions that I make use of the separate iPad mouse, which to be honest doesn’t get much other use.

What I haven’t managed yet on the iPad is a heavy editing session where I have two or three or more chapters open in panes on the screen so I can make updates and corrections – like putting consistency into hair or eye color. that’s pretty easy to do on the Mac Mini with a 20+ inch monitor. Not so easy on the iPad where you don’t have the ability to pop out and rearrange documents. To be fair, when I get into those big editing sessions, there’s usually a pile of papers strewn across the desk as well!

Overall though, I’m still very pleased with using the iPad as a dedicated writing device for places away from my office. And I’ve still avoided configuring email!

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