tinkering update

November 21, 2025

Making the site work on mobile devices/vertical viewports was pretty easy, actually. I thought I would be rewriting whole chunks of markup, but as it turns out you can just create CSS rules that apply only once the viewport hits a particular width or aspect ratio. A long time ago I did a short website-building course which taught Bootstrap and it was pure death from what I can remember. A couple of things remain to update, mainly the works page which looks a tad too static and uninteresting.

Related: around that time I also did a course on Java, and then a course on building Android apps (in Java, duh). The only thing it taught me (other than Java and whatever markup Android used at the time) was that I am not a coder. It’s super clear and obvious that you can’t get good at coding in any real meaningful way by doing courses. You need to have some inner drive to create a novel thing or solve a problem in a novel way, and I don’t have that, at least in terms of making things for a mobile phone. I am always bewilderdly impressed when I stumble across a personal website of some talented coder and they have a long list of little projects/gadgets/gizmos they have made for no other reason than they figured those things would be useful. Now that I am on GitHub for this thing right here that you are on, I bogle around and I see people with multiple daily commits (that’s GitHub-speak for “things that I did”) and I think it must be cool to have that drive to endlessly fix/tweak stuff. To even know what needs tweaked or fixed.

Example blog titles from these types of people that I made up:
Bookending a Loom-based CMS for ANIX systems
Why I love the WeQiiVSYS template
Script for instantly adding dynamic tables to a web pages deployed with Renown 5.1

Speaking of esoteric blogs, I’ve done some more webring bogling and stumbled across some good music. Disclaimer: I really like this type of music, which I think is called breakcore, though I’m not sure. I think it’s one of those genres where there is a lot of discourse about what is “real breakcore” and “not real breakcore” and the pureheads are slowly being outnumbered by new fans (like me) who don’t know what they’re talking about. Every track from every artist in this genre sounds basically indistinguishable from any other; the tenets of the whole thing are all very nailed down. I think a lot of electronic music is like this which isn’t a bad thing at all.