Just received my BestFit #111 and #111A manuals in hard copy from Lulu. Couldn't be happier :-)

As usual, the post has all the details :-)

I thought I'd share this neat little trick I've been using to quickly sift through a bunch of random jewels to find the one I need.

Sometimes, you need a cat pic, even in a horology community.

Today is the day. I'm finally "sorta happy enough to pull the trigger" on publishing the book I've been working on for a very long time. It's a technical history book: by a techie, for techies (although I think that between all the code samples, there is plenty of meat for "tech-adjacent" and "tech-interested" people). It tells the story of the Lisp programming language, invented by a genius called John McCarthy in 1958 and today still going strong (to the extent that many people see it as the most powerful programming language in existence).

And this is a time for shameless self promotion, even if you don't plan on buying the book, please repost :-). Self-publishing is self-marketing, so there we go.

If you do buy and read it, please let me know how you liked it!

The book landing page, https://berksoft.ca/gol, has links to all outlets where you can buy the book,

I was reading the latest edition of the AWCI’s Horological Times, which has an article on the latest Rolex escapement. Pretty nifty stuff, and might solve some lever escapement issues.

The article refers “Le Echappement Naturel” by the great Breguet as a starting point, and look at that Wikipedia page - isn’t it awesome what people could build over two-hundred years go, before the industrial revolution took hold?

And also, I wonder. Breguet gave up because manufacturing tolerances weren’t there for this escapement. How would it fare today?

Was reading the latest edition of the AWCI's Horological Times, which has an article on the latest Rolex escapement. Pretty nifty stuff, and might solve some lever escapement issues.

The article refers "Le Echappement Naturel" by the great Breguet as a starting point, and look at that Wikipedia page - isn't it awesome what people could build over two-hundred years go, before the industrial revolution took hold?

And also, I wonder. Breguet gave up because manufacturing tolerances weren't there for this escapement. How would it fare today?

I'm starting this community because of questions on the Fediverse (specifically on Mastodon) on where you could/should create local communities. People offer up complex ideas like setting up personal servers, but this is all you need.

The contents of this community? Whatever you like. Say hi, announce events, share news and gossip, propose meetups.

I've penned a blog post about Common Lisp Packaging, trying to explain how the various bits and pieces work and how they compare to other offerings.

Explicitly saying "trying", because without a lot of feedback, I'm not 100% sure that a) I got all the details completely correct, and b) that it is actually helpful to beginning CL-ers. So lemmy know :-)

A colleague is visiting Switzerland and of course the talk is about watches. Here's my advice on buying a watch:

• If you want to know what time it is by looking at your wrist, buy a quartz watch. I'm a fan of Casio, but anything will do.
• If really want a mechanical watch, care about precision and quality, and want to have the best bang for your buck, buy a Japanese watch. You can't go wrong with a Seiko.
• If you want a reasonable watch and spend as little as possible, Chinese company Seagull got you covered. I own one, it's fine.
• If you want to buy some jewelry that also tells the time, buy Swiss.

I'm writing a technical history book of sorts on Lisp, it's been years in the making and this is the first time I'm looking at something actually book-like (instead of LaTeX source or on-screen PDF ;-)).

For some reason, I spot more errors with hardcopy, so decided that for the final pass before I rope in some volunteer reviewers, I'd print and quickly bind it. Once the reviewers are thumb-up, hopefully just some quick typesetting fixes and then off to publication!

Needless to say, that watch got pre-cleaned right away and all the cleaning fluids safely disposed off :-)

Moving from Reddit, I noticed there's little talk over on Lemmy about what is turning out to be my main hobby. So here's a very broad community, in the hope that all my peers in the hobby will find it :-)