Still a Sunned Day, But At Least Stuff Got Done

Argh. I tried my best, I suppose that counts for something.

Readers of the so-called ``desktop version'' of this blog should notice something very different as compared to before. As noted yesterday (wow, was it really just yesterday?!), I updated my personal domain to use the Atkinson Hyperlegible font by the Braille Institute of America.

Then I looked at this blog, and I sighed.

Between the two, I think I write way more here than in my personal domain, mostly because as a blog, we are talking about a more dynamic state of content creation/publication as compared to my personal domain. The whole purpose of the personal domain was to off-load highly static and information dense material, which it serves well. So yes, the update of my personal domain to make use of the Atkinson Hyperlegible font is great and can be considered a good proof-of-concept, but it will definitely benefit all my blogs better.

The first attempt involved me adding some new CSS and modifying the theme's template to use the defined fonts. I immediately ran into two problems.

1. Blogger does not support CORS, so I cannot just use my hosted fonts;
2. The list of fonts that are supported in the theme template are only the selected few from Google Fonts.

Argh.

Mitigating the first problem was easy: I could embed the WOFF2 file as an in-line Base-64 encoded data URI. The WOFF2 files are not terribly large, and after setting up the correct CSS incantations, they were only around 91.6 kB, which isn't that big as far as web-pages go (a quick sample check on this blog's landing page had Chromium reporting a total transfer of 939 kB for 1.9 MB of resources, with a load time of 2.36 s).

Mitigating the second problem wasn't too hard either---I just needed to choose the ``Edit HTML'' option under the theme selection page in Blogger and manually add in the font name to the list of font-families, while tweaking the sizes, increasing the old size of 13 px to 16 px, and scaling all the 18 px ones up to 22 px, as well as setting the blog title's 40 px to 49 px (basically applying the scaling factor of 1613 to all the pixel-count dimensions).

Doing that, and fixing something broken about the pretty-printing script about recursive node ignoring (it was doing the right thing of ignoring children nodes when told to do so, but I had been lazy before and didn't write up the necessary list of HTML5 tags to not skip the recursion on; that laziness led to a whole bunch of janky flags that I finally refactored and tossed out) led to what you can see here in the desktop version.

Notice that I kept on saying ``desktop version''. Because it turns out that there is a hidden set of theme information that Blogger did not expose that handles the mobile layout. Even if I set the mobile layout to be ``custom'', it would still be drawing on the ``simple'' theme and ignore anything that was changed in the main theme's HTML. And any changes that I made to the HTML will immediately revert the mobile setting to using ``simple'', and to get it to look roughly like the Icy variant of this theme by Awesome Inc would require me to manually re-set it in the mobile theme settings.

Since the mobile theme information is hidden, there is no way to adjust it to use Atkinson Hyperlegible, and so it looks... like it has always been since the change of the theme.

So that's it. Now all my blogs are using Atkinson Hyperlegible as the font, like the old days when I switched out ``Trebuchet MS'' for ``Candara''. Unlike the old days where there was no font embedding technology, this time I am almost guaranteed that all modern browsers can actually render what I want, except when it is in mobile mode (argh).

I am happy with how much more readable this is now.

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Psalm 96:1--3:

96 O sing unto the Lord a new song:
    Sing unto the Lord, all the earth.
²   Sing unto the Lord, bless his name;
    Shew forth his salvation from day to day.
³   Declare his glory among the heathen,
    His wonders among all people.

Singing is a part of the worship of God. Psalm 96:1--3 tells us that when we choose a song to worship Him, we need to ensure that:

1. The song declares His glory;
2. The song points to Him; and
3. The song is in the splendour (or beauty) of holiness, that is, to be reverent and set apart from the normal part of the world

That is one of many important things that I have learnt so far in my journey of faith.

Singing as used in worship is now allowed, and with that is my participation in the singing part of the worship service itself. I've always had a tendency to veer towards singing in the female vocal range, mostly because that's what I had been listening to often. But after the first couple of worship sessions that include congregational singing, I think I will stick with the bass range (E₂ to E₄) for two reasons:

1. Much of the congregation seems to sing high, leaving the lows really empty and non-resonant;
2. I have been assured by Chara back in the day that I actually had a low voice.

I also found that I could sing the worship songs that low anyway.

On a whim, I decided to measure just how low I could go. The spectrum analyser said that my lowest non-vocal fry range is about 82 Hz---this is an E₂ with no octave stretching in both A440/A442 12-TET standards. If I have warmed up, I can go as low as 73 Hz, or about 2 semi-tones lower than E₂ with no octave stretching.

I didn't realise just how low I could really go. I mean, I'm used to living with my voice, and never really tried to quantify and record the quantification. Incidentally, I'm not exactly tall (I'm under the average male height of 1.73 m as listed here), and I don't smoke, so knowing that my voice is that low is a surprise. Of course, I'm not at the range of the oktavist yet, though basso profundo does have a ``natural'' low of C₂, which is totally reachable. I'm quite sure I am unable to reach A₁ (or about 55 Hz) in this life time, but who knows? Maybe God would like me to reach that low later in life to better serve Him?

On a different whim, I started from the lowest note I could go and just smoothly glissando up to see how high I could go before I got ``stuck'', i.e. reaching a point where I had no other way of raising the frequency any higher. As I looked at the history of the spectrum analyser, I could almost catch a glimpse of where my vocal registers were switched over due to a small plateau as my [untrained] voice takes some time to move along. I could definitely feel the resonance of the voice shifting as I glissando up more than glimpsing it in the spectrum analyser, mostly because the switch over order of magnitude was at centiseconds (the spectrum analyser ran at around 5 cs per pixel row of output data)---it was a weird feeling.

743.4 Hz is the upper range, which is around F♯₅ in A442 12-TET.

So my comfortable-ish vocal range is around 3 octaves or so (ratio of highest frequency reached to lowest reached ranges from 8.96× to 10.2×, ``one octave'' is a multiplicative factor of 2, so 3+ octaves is about right).

That's good enough for me.

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I did have quite a few failed Jupiter Hell runs, but they weren't worthy of speaking of due to them being failures. I'm in the fifth and final season of The Daria Restoration Project and after that is done, it will be a toss up between Darkwing Duck series, Futurama (again), or something else. I think if I'm going to continue with grinding out more Jupiter Hell runs, I might go with Futurama, but if I just wanted some passive entertainment alone, then I might go with Darkwing Duck.

That's about all for now. It's a long update, but hey, I did quite a few things today. I am planning to head out of the apartment tomorrow just to do something different (probably reading). It does feel like a burger sort of day, though the question is whether to head out to my favourite bar for the beer+burger day (are they still running this on Tue & Thu?) or to head out to Five Guys. The benefits of the former are that I can easily sit there for hours on end and just keep chugging beer while reading, but the latter does satisfy some deep cravings. Eh, more first world problems.

I'll leave those for tomorrow. Till the next update then.