Weeknotes  

Monday 16 Jan - Sunday 22 Jan 2023

A frozen mid-january week as an unordered list:

• Bought new Pentel ‘Sign’ pens

  I love these for sketching flows and rough wireframes on paper.

  

• Released V2 of GOVUK Figma Figma Flow Diagrams

  I released an updated version of my Figma flow diagramming resource - It is now possible to add labels to items in your flow as well as choose from some more GOVUK page patterns.

• Took Ted for a yet another muddy walk

• Agreed to present to designers at MadeTech

  Jon Roobottom a fellow designer from MadeTech got in touch and asked if I’d present a short session about creating flow diagrams using the Figma. Looking forward to that this coming Thursday 26th.

• Bought some new Air Jordans

  I caved to my Nike trainer (sneaker) addiction and bought some lovely Nike Air Jordan 1’s.

  

• Learned how to rewire Coax cables with F-Connectors

  We are currently rearranging our living room a little and so we needed to move some devices, including the TV and Sky Q set-top box.

  So I’ve ended up turning into a cable nerd for the week.

  I love the internet and YouTube for this. I’m no-longer afraid to tackle small to medium DIY or home improvement jobs because there is usually a good tutorial online. Saving me money.

  At minimum it was roughly £120 for somebody else to cut a Sky Coax cable, move it to a new place and then rewire the connectors.

  

  So I did it myself. A bit of time and £18 sunk means I can now rewire coax cable if I needed and I have the tools to do it.

  • I watched this Youtube Coax cable tutorial
  • I bought this Coaxial Cable Compression Tool Kit with Crimp Tool only to find it was too big for Sky ‘shotgun’ style Coax cable so
  • I bought these 4mm F Flug Connectors instead.

  I managed to move the cable and rewire the connects successfully on the first try. Phew!

• Read “Do you need another map? Probably not”

  In September last year, Vicky Houghton-Price spoke at the SD in Gov conference. From the title I was to sad to miss it. Thankfully it has been written up.

• Watched a video about Dell’s up-coming 6K Display

  The Dell UltraSharp 32 6K Monitor - U3224KB could be a much cheaper alternative to the Apple Pro Display XDR

• Bought a Playstation 5

  I impulse bought a Sony Playstation 5 console! I’ve not played games for years but I felt like maybe I should because it might reduce my after-hours working habit and possibly be a good way to switch off from the world for a while.

• Discovered the ‘Better Internet Dashboard’

  A nice little site for showing geographic data related to roadworks and permissions requested by ISPs and Internet infrastructure companies. This is helpful to see if Fibre internet work has started in my area.

  Incidentally they have written a great post The Mapping Infrastructure of the Better Internet Dashboard for data and map people.

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  Thanks for reading. See you next week.