Merge branch 'main' of https://github.com/joeacarstairs/personal-website

.zed/settings.json

@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
+// Folder-specific settings
+//
+// For a full list of overridable settings, and general information on folder-specific settings,
+// see the documentation: https://zed.dev/docs/configuring-zed#settings-files
+{
+  "soft_wrap": "editor_width"
+}

package.json

@@ -8,14 +8,14 @@
     "astro": "cd website && astro"
   },
   "dependencies": {
-    "@astrojs/rss": "^4.0.5",
+    "@astrojs/rss": "^4.0.10",
-    "@astrojs/sitemap": "^3.1.2",
+    "@astrojs/sitemap": "^3.2.1",
-    "astro": "^4.11.5",
+    "astro": "^5.1.1",
     "markdown-it": "^14.1.0",
     "typescript": "^5.4.3"
   },
   "devDependencies": {
-    "@astrojs/check": "^0.5.10",
+    "@astrojs/check": "^0.9.4",
     "@types/markdown-it": "^14.1.1"
   }
 }

website/public/css/base.css

@@ -2,6 +2,7 @@
 
 :root {
   --colour-primary-10: #060300;
+  --colour-primary-15: #150800;
   --colour-primary-20: #1f1400;
   --colour-primary-30: #3c2b00;
   --colour-primary-40: #5c4300;
@@ -26,19 +27,22 @@
   --colour-primary-fg: var(--colour-primary-90);
   --colour-primary-fg-accent: var(--colour-primary-80);
   --colour-primary-bg: var(--colour-primary-10);
+  --colour-code-fg: var(--colour-primary-90);
+  --colour-code-bg: var(--colour-primary-15);
   --colour-hyperlink: var(--colour-hyperlink-80);
 
   --font-size-sm: 1rem;
-  --font-size-base: 1.25rem;
+  --font-size-base: 1.125rem;
-  --font-size-md: 1.75rem;
+  --font-size-md: 1.5rem;
-  --font-size-lg: 2.5rem;
+  --font-size-lg: 2rem;
-  --font-size-xl: 3.5rem;
+  --font-size-xl: 3rem;
 
   --spacing-block-xs: 0.5rem;
   --spacing-block-sm: 1.75rem;
   --spacing-block-md: 2.5rem;
   --spacing-block-lg: 3.5rem;
   --spacing-block-xl: 5rem;
+  --spacing-inline-xs: 0.25rem;
   --spacing-inline-sm: 0.5rem;
   --spacing-inline-md: 1.5rem;
   --spacing-inline-lg: 3rem;
@@ -92,9 +96,10 @@ body {
 
 img {
   margin-inline: auto;
+  height: auto;
 }
 
-@media (min-width: 36rem) {
+@media (min-width: 48rem) {
   body {
     display: grid;
     grid-template-columns:
@@ -108,7 +113,7 @@ img {
 
     --body-margin-inline-end: 6rem;
     --grid-margin-inline: 6rem;
-    --grid-total-width: 36rem;
+    --grid-total-width: 48rem;
     --grid-max-content-width: calc(
       var(--grid-total-width)
         - var(--body-margin-inline-start)
@@ -133,12 +138,6 @@ img {
   }
 }
 
-@media (min-width: 48rem) {
-  body {
-    --grid-total-width: 48rem;
-  }
-}
-
 /** Headings */
 
 h1 {
@@ -262,3 +261,28 @@ blockquote :is(i, em) {
 .small-caps {
   font-variant: small-caps;
 }
+
+/** Pre-formatted blocks */
+pre {
+  border: 2px solid var(--colour-primary-fg);
+  border-radius: 2px;
+  background-color: var(--colour-code-bg) !important;
+  margin-block-start: var(--spacing-block-sm);
+  padding-inline: var(--spacing-inline-sm);
+  padding-block: var(--spacing-block-xs);
+}
+
+/** Code blocks */
+code {
+  border: 2px solid var(--colour-primary-fg);
+  border-radius: 2px;
+  padding-inline: var(--spacing-inline-xs);
+  color: var(--colour-code-fg);
+  background-color: var(--colour-code-bg);
+  font-size: var(--font-size-sm);
+}
+pre code {
+  border: none;
+  border-radius: none;
+  padding: none;
+}

website/src/components/BlogFeed.astro

@@ -64,7 +64,7 @@ const canonicalBlogUrl = new URL('blog', Astro.site)
 		<ul>
 			{ posts.filter(matchesYear(year)).sort(sortByPubDateDescending).map(post => (
 				<li class="h-entry">
-					<a class="u-url p-name" href={`/blog/${post.slug}`}>{post.data.title}</a>.
+					<a class="u-url p-name" href={`/blog/${post.id}`}>{post.data.title}</a>.
 					<Fragment set:html={post.data.description} />
 					Added: <FormattedDate date={post.data.pubDate} />
 				</li>

website/src/components/Me.astro

@@ -45,6 +45,7 @@
                 <a href="https://www.facebook.com/joe.carstairs.5" rel="me">Facebook</a>,
                 <a href="https://mastodon.social/@joe_carstairs" rel="me">Mastodon</a>,
                 <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-carstairs-0aa936277" rel="me">LinkedIn</a>,
+                <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/joeacarstairs.bsky.social" rel="me">BlueSky</a>,
                 or <a href="https://github.com/joeacarstairs" rel="me">GitHub</a>.
             </small>
         </p>

website/src/content.config.ts

@@ -1,8 +1,9 @@
+import { glob } from 'astro/loaders';
 import { defineCollection, z } from 'astro:content';
 
 const blog = defineCollection({
-	type: 'content',
+  loader: glob({ pattern: '**/*.(md|mdx|html)', base: './src/content/blog' }),
-	schema: z.object({
+  schema: z.object({
 		title: z.string(),
 		hidden: z.optional(z.boolean()),
 		description: z.string(),

website/src/content/blog/2024/01/29/euhwc_toast_to_the_lasses_2024.md

@@ -91,7 +91,7 @@ She uses what her Maker has endowed her<br>
 with: her recorder skills are off the charts;<br>
 youse think I’m joking, but I wouldn’t doubt her!<br>
 This lass of the land of the Rot-Gold-Schwarz<br>
-will soon depart, though long we might beseech ya<br>
+will soon depart, though long we might beseech you<br>
 to stay. Of course, you’ll break all of our hearts,<br>
 but mine most of all. Any time, Felicia,<br>
 Creag Meagaidh calls, I know routes up the rear<br>

website/src/content/blog/2025/01/19/my_feed_and_reading_list.md

@@ -0,0 +1,193 @@
+---
+title: How I read things on the Internet now (no, of course I don't leave the terminal!)
+description: >-
+  I've been sprucing up how I follow what's happening on the Internet. I can
+  now read all the things I want to read pretty efficiently, and enjoy doing
+  it, which is exciting.
+pubDate: 2025-01-19
+---
+
+## The problem
+
+I like to read things on the Internet sometimes. Or listen to things. Or watch
+things.
+
+Some interesting people write blog posts. Some beautiful people make music. Some
+silly people make comedy sketches. Sometimes my friends are sharing stuff with
+their friends, which means me (WIP on that front: I'll get back to that).
+
+I want to know about it. I want to read interesting things that will educate
+me. I want to hear beautiful music. I want to hear about what my friends are up
+to.
+
+I can't read everything as it comes in, it's too much: I'll need to sift a lot
+of it out quickly. I'll need to sift through it regularly to stay on top of it:
+like, several times a week, if not daily. And sometimes, while I'm doing my
+daily sifting, I'll find something I really want to read, but I haven't got
+time right now: I'll save this for the weekend.
+
+For a while, I've been hosting [CommaFeed][commafeed] on [PikaPods][pikapods].
+This has been OK ([OMG, RSS is cool][rss]), but the interface is just clunky
+enough to make it a chore to use. That means I don't sift through stuff
+regularly, and that means my feed piles hundreds of unread posts high.
+
+It also hasn't been any good for distinguishing between stuff I don't want to
+read *ever*, and stuff I don't want to read *right now* but will get round to
+later. I could in theory use the bookmarking feature built-in to my browser,
+but removing things after I've read them is too clunky, so I don't do it.
+
+## The solution
+
+Every morning, I open my terminal and run [newsboat][newsboat].
+
+![newsboat showing how many unread posts I have at a glance in the opening view](./newsboat.webp)
+
+I know the unread count is pretty fresh, because I've set up a systemd service
+to run newsboat at startup to fetch the feeds.
+
+I press `l` twice to open a post. Then I press `n` to navigate to the next
+unread post until I run out of unread posts.
+
+![newsboat displaying a post](./newsboat-post.webp)
+
+If I encounter something I want to read later, but don't have time right now, I
+press `b`, which runs a home-made bookmarking script. Here it is:
+
+```bash
+### readlater.sh ###
+
+# newsboat passes a few arguments:
+# the first one is the post URL
+url="$1"
+
+# I turn the URL into a suitable filename
+filename=$( \
+  echo $url | \
+  sed "s/.*:\/\///" | \
+  sed "s/\//./g" | \
+  sed "s/\.html\$//g" \
+)
+filename="$filename".html
+
+# If I've already got this in my reading list,
+# I don't add it again
+if [[ -a "$HOME/readlist/unread/$filename" ]]
+then
+  exit 0
+fi
+
+# Otherwise, I download the post with curl
+# and pipe it to a file in my reading list
+# folder, ~/readlist/unread
+curl "$url" > "$HOME/readlist/unread/$filename"
+```
+
+I can also run this script manually and pass it a URL of my choice at any time,
+say, if I find an interesting article while browsing the Web.
+
+When I want to read from my reading list, I run `readnow.sh`, which simply
+opens my reading list folder, `~/readlist/unread`, in my terminal file browser
+of choice: namely, [ranger][ranger].
+
+![ranger showing the contents of my reading list with a preview](./ranger.webp)
+
+Although ranger has a preview, I'll typically open the file up in my terminal
+web browser of choice, which is [w3m][w3m] (plus a couple of custom
+key-bindings). I've configured this to be my preferred web browser in ranger by
+shifting it to the top of the list of HTML browsers in
+`~/.config/ranger/rifle.conf`.
+
+```conf
+### ~/.config/ranger/rifle.conf ###
+
+...
+
+ext x?html?, has w3m,               terminal = w3m "$@"
+ext x?html?, ...
+
+...
+```
+
+Having configured my default web browser in my ranger config, all
+I need to do is press `l`.
+
+![A post displaying in w3m](./w3m.webp)
+
+No ads, no cookie popups, no giant banner images taking 2 seconds to load and
+shifting the content all over the place: just the text I want to read. Isn't it
+beautiful?
+
+Once I'm finished reading the post, I'll press `q` to quit w3m and return to
+ranger. Assuming I don't need to read it again, I'll press `dm` to move the
+post to `~/readlist/read` - my way of marking a post as 'read'.
+
+I've done this by writing a super simple script, `markread.sh`:
+
+```bash
+### markread.sh ###
+
+filename="$(basename $1)"
+
+if [[ -a "$HOME/readlist/unread/$filename" ]]
+then
+  mv "$HOME/readlist/unread/$filename" "$HOME/readlist/read/$filename"
+  echo "Marked $filename as read."
+else
+  echo "I couldn't find a file in ~/readlist/unread with the name: $filename"
+fi
+```
+
+...and hooking it onto the custom keybinding, `dm`, in ranger:
+
+```conf
+### ~/.config/ranger/rc.conf ###
+
+...
+
+# map `dm` to run markread.sh in the shell, providing the active filename
+# as the first and only argument
+map dm shell markread.sh %f
+
+...
+```
+
+## The result
+
+I can now keep up to date, and I enjoy doing it.
+
+I get not everyone likes to live in the terminal. I think the key takeaways
+are:
+
+- Make it really easy to sift through new posts
+- When you sift, sift through every post, and for each one, either read it
+  straight away, or add it to your reading list
+- Sift daily
+- Make it really easy to add things to your reading list
+- Make it really easy to browse, read things, and mark things read in your
+  reading list
+- Set aside time to catch up on your reading list
+- Make the whole thing joyful (both because joy is good, and because you won't
+  do it otherwise)
+
+## Next steps
+
+I still haven't really figured out social media. I'd like to stay up to date
+with what my friends are doing, especially the ones I don't see very often. If
+my friends are posting stuff on the Internet, I'd love to see it.
+
+I still need to know:
+
+- Are my friends posting stuff on the Internet?
+- If so, where?
+- What's the best way of subscribing to their posts - even if they live on
+  different websites and in different formats?
+- What's the best way of sending and receiving comments/replies/reactions?
+
+TBC. Answers on a postcard please.
+
+[commafeed]: https://www.commafeed.com
+[pikapods]: https://www.pikapods.com
+[newsboat]: https://newsboat.org
+[ranger]: https://ranger.github.io
+[rss]: /blog/2024/05/02/no_more_youtube
+[w3m]: https://w3m.sourceforge.net

website/src/content/blog/2025/01/24/science_and_philosophy.md

@@ -0,0 +1,139 @@
+---
+title: Why scientists need philosophers
+description: This is a practice essay, OK? Don't shoot me if it's no good.
+pubDate: 2025-01-24
+---
+
+I've recently been working at a
+[Philosophy of Science MOOC]([phil-sci-coursera]) on Coursera, the online
+courses website. Later on, they set you an exercise to write a short essay
+addressing how philosophy can contribute to science.
+
+So this is my punt. Life is too short to revise or, hell, even research this, so
+don't take any of this as my settled opinion or as my best work. Whatever. With
+that caveat in mind, it might still be entertaining at least, or maybe even
+spark some thoughts.
+
+---
+
+Walk into a particular room in the Science Museum in Kensington, and you will
+find yourself enveloped in a cavern of ironmongery and miscellanea. The shelves
+droop under the weight of bolts, files, screws, bits, grinders, saws,
+protractors, clamps and pins. The inventory scrolls endlessly past you, voices
+reciting the lists of trinkets like an incantation.
+
+This is the workshop of James Watt, meticulously reconstructed from the
+original as it was left in his home in Birmingham after his death. This
+entrancing space invites you to imagine a tireless creative, endlessly
+tinkering away at his next contraption.
+
+And yet for all that - and for all his immense valorisation as the lynchpin of
+Britain's industrial revolution - Watt was reluctant to think of himself as the
+engineer everyone else loved. He aspired to be remembered not as an engineer
+but as a scientist.
+
+To understand why James Watt, one of the most admired engineers who ever lived,
+wished he were famed as a scientist instead, is to understand something
+essential about modern Western thought.
+
+In Watt's lifetime, scientists increasingly became the elite of society. In the
+nineteenth and twentieth century, this trend only gathered pace. We constructed
+our modern public health infrastructure on the advice of pathologists and made
+medicine scientific. We funded scientific expeditions to map the world, even to
+its remotest corners (in part to help us conquer it). We adopted radical new
+economic policies in response to scientific economic theories. We built vast
+infrastructure networks to communicate waves of invisible energy discovered by
+pioneering physicists, and built nuclear plants to generate more of the stuff
+by means of nuclear science. We even designed social programmes on the basis of
+scientific anthropology. By the end of the twentieth century, scientists were
+our prophets, priests and kings. Or so we thought.
+
+In the 1990s, at the so-called 'end of history', it was assumed that there
+would be no more need for social upheaval. Humanity had arrived at the ideal
+system of social organisation. And among other ideologies - secularism,
+libertarianism, democracy - an essential part of the package is that science
+was our ultimate and incontestible way of securing knowledge about the world.
+
+Yet now, that certainty is broken. Religious fundamentalism, whether Christian,
+Muslim, Hindu, or else besides, is politically empowered in many places,
+together with its rejection of science.
+
+At the same time, the myth of science is ever more punctured. The supposedly
+scientific West has increasingly come to appreciate that their scientific
+heritage also includes much we would rather ignore - phrenology, race science,
+systematic blindness to female bodies in medicine.
+
+Meanwhile, scientists themselves are noticing that their holy calling has
+turned out to be rather less holy than they had hoped. They find science
+pulled between the competing demands of truth and tenure. Scientific knowledge
+is locked behind the paywalls of exclusive journals, which even many academics
+struggle to access, never mind the general public.
+
+What then for science in the twenty-first century?
+
+Yet there is another story available. It starts with confessing that the old
+stories got things wrong in important ways. When we put ideology aside, science
+has not been on an uncontested march to universal acceptance since Galileo.
+There has been continual change, continual conflict, continual readjustment of
+our ideas to the changing demands of the age.
+
+In Galileo's day, it may have been a fight to establish that there was much to
+be seen by simply looking. As empirical observation started to prove its worth
+in the early modern period, thinkers wrestled with new problems: how to
+reconcile the evidence of Scripture with the evidence of the senses? How to
+understand how sensation can give us knowledge at all, granted that any
+observer may be vulnerable to illusions, tricks and dreams? And if that's how
+sense data work, what then for our mathematical or logical knowledge, which
+seems to already bind the world even before we start experiencing it?
+
+This centuries-long struggle culminated in the work of Kant, who in his 1786
+magnum opus, the _Critique of Pure Reason_, set out a masterful - if infamously
+obscure - system, which enabled thinkers to understand just how empirical
+knowledge might work.
+
+Yet two generations later, Charles Darwin lit the flame under new controversy
+about the relationship between scientific and religious knowledge. His bizarre
+and wildly imaginative theory of evolution by natural selection challenged the
+Genesis Creation accounts, and this was soon to be followed up with the theory
+of tectonic shift.
+
+Some said that where scientists contradicted the authority of Scripture, the
+word of God must always win. Others said that science alone had the keys to
+knowledge, and if what the Bible said couldn't be proven scientifically, then
+it couldn't be accepted. Some said that science and religion were two
+incommensurable attempts to study the same subject matter, while others said
+that they covered completely separate spheres.
+
+Gradually, all of these views moved to the extremes. Now, most people (though
+not all) agree that science and religion have overlapping spheres, and can
+inform one another, but neither the Book of Nature nor the Book of Scripture
+has the decisive final say.
+
+Now, in our post-Christendom Western context, it's more important than ever to
+understand how science and religion can talk to one another. Religious
+minorities - as all religions now are in the West - are vulnerable to the risk
+of becoming epistemic islands, cut off from the knowledge of the rest of the
+community, unless we can find ways that science can talk across creedal
+differences.
+
+We need, too, for scientifically marginalised communities, such as non-white
+people, whom science has ignored, or worse, to be more tightly integrated into
+science, both so that knowledge might increase, and so that the benefits
+knowledge gives might be fairly shared.
+
+In light of these urgent needs, today's philosophers are considering science
+not just as an epistemic problem, but as a social problem. As philosophers once
+established science as the bedrock of modern knowledge, so philosophers today
+have the task of figuring out how science can glue together our societies.
+
+Science has been at its most dangerous when it hasn't been questioned. At all
+times, as long as we practice science, we need to consider what it means, what
+it means to do science well, how it can generate knowledge, and how it ought to
+be used as a powerful instrument of change.
+
+And perhaps that might justify James Watt in his obsession to be seen as a
+scientist: since we can't get by just with practitioners. We need people who
+can see our practices from the outside and shine a mirror back on us. If we
+want science, then we need philosophers.
+
+[phil-sci-coursera]: https://www.coursera.org/learn/philosophy-physical-sciences

website/src/data/links.ts

@@ -134,6 +134,12 @@ const LINKS: Link[] = [
     description: 'Handy for the next time you develop a CLI or TUI. Also handy as a user: now I know about <a href="https://readline.kablamo.org/emacs.html">readline key bindings</a>, which are everywhere apparently.',
     isoDateAdded: '2024-12-20',
   },
+  {
+    href: 'https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/research-datasets',
+    title: "Bank of England's 'Millenium of Macroeconomic Data'",
+    description: 'There was no long-term price inflation from 1200 (when these data begin) until 1550. WHAT?!',
+    isoDateAdded: '2025-01-23',
+  },
 ];
 
 export default LINKS;

website/src/pages/blog/[...slug].astro

@@ -1,20 +1,20 @@
 ---
-import { type CollectionEntry, getCollection } from 'astro:content';
+import { type CollectionEntry, getCollection, render } from 'astro:content';
 import BlogPost from '../../layouts/BlogPost.astro';
 
 export async function getStaticPaths() {
 	const posts = await getCollection('blog');
 	return posts.map((post) => ({
-		params: { slug: post.slug },
+		params: { slug: post.id },
 		props: post,
 	}));
 }
 type Props = CollectionEntry<'blog'>;
 
 const post = Astro.props;
-const { Content } = await post.render();
+const { Content } = await render(post);
 ---
 
 <BlogPost {...post.data}>
 	<Content />
-</BlogPost>
+</BlogPost>

website/src/pages/blog/rss.xml.ts

@@ -23,9 +23,9 @@ export async function GET(context: APIContext) {
 		site: path.join(site.toString(), 'blog'),
 		trailingSlash: false,
 		items: posts.map((post) => ({
-		  link: `/blog/${post.slug}`,
+		  link: `/blog/${post.id}`,
 			title: post.data.title,
-	    content: mdParser.render(post.body),
+	    content: mdParser.render(post.body ?? ''),
 	    pubDate: post.data.pubDate,
 	    description: post.data.description,
 	    author: 'Joe Carstairs',

website/tsconfig.json

@@ -1,6 +1,11 @@
 {
   "extends": "astro/tsconfigs/strict",
   "compilerOptions": {
-	"strictNullChecks": true
+  	"strictNullChecks": true
-  }
+  },
-}
+  "include": [
+    ".astro/types.d.ts",
+    "**/*"
+  ],
+  "exclude": ["dist"]
+}