2025-01-28 10:00:00
The week started with a holiday (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day) here and it’s always nice to have a short work week. I “celebrated” by taking it easy and watching the inauguration on television.
🥶 It's REALLY cold here this week! Holy crap! Several days in a row of sub-zero (Fahrenheit!) temps. That's in the neighborhood of 30 degrees below freezing!
🚽 I had a toilet blocked and despite trying everything I could, I finally relented and called a plumber. Ten minutes and $150 later, it was fixed.
My now page automation has been broken for at least a week, as calls to api.omg.lol from AWS are being blocked. Adam fixed it briefly, but it’s broken again. The Trakt integration has always been brittle anyway and as Robb pointed out, an automated page is more about data than about me sharing anything meaningful. So I think maybe I’ll go back to manually journaling my now page for a while.
I learned how to make the SSL certificate for my CDN auto-renew, so I don't have to manually update it every 3 months. What a relief!
I learned how to host a static website using S3 and CloudFront. This is an important first step toward being able to host a static site generated using Eleventy, which I'm in the process of learning how to use. My intention is to publish my dad's QSL card collection this way. (But more about that later.)
I created a new Mastodon account on Social.lol using my @w8mhb username, for my ham radio related content.
{me-pe:emoji=🌞} We made it through the 10 darkest weeks of the year! The days are getting longer and spring is on the way! (source)
“The Race to Lead the Quantum Future: How the Next Computing Revolution Will Transform the Global Economy and Upend National Security” by Charina Chou, James Manyika, and Hartmut Neven (Foreign Affairs)
“Stress Test: Can a Troubled Order Survive a Disruptive Leader?” by Margaret MacMillan (Foreign Affairs)
“Inside Meta’s dehumanizing new speech policies for trans people” by Casey Newton (Platformer)
“Trump’s Real Goal for His Second Term? Chaos.” by Howard W French (Foreign Policy)
“What to Expect When You're Expecting Fascism” by Dave Troy (America 2.0)
“Is the U.S. a patsy? The premise of ‘America First’ is bizarre.” by Fareed Zakaria (The Washington Post)
Finished watching True Detective: Night Country (season 4). This was a show that’s all about the journey. But I suppose most good mysteries are that way.
See you in another week.
2025-01-21 11:24:00
5️⃣ This was my first five-day work week of the year. I’m feeling recharged though, so it was a good, busy (good busy) week.
🚙 On Wednesday I loaded up the car with some tools and painting supplies and headed north to my mother’s house. She’s out of town so I’m doing some painting while she’s away.
🤫 Don’t tell her. It’s a surprise!
❄️ I shoveled the driveway three times while I was up there!
I survived the TikTok blackout of 2025.
“What to Expect When You’re Expecting Fascism” by Dave Troy (America 2.0)
“Trump’s Real Goal for His Second Term? Chaos.” by Howard W French (Foreign Policy) outlines some of the ominous parallels between Donald Trump and Mao Zedong in the days leading up to the Cultural Revolution.
“Inside Meta’s dehumanizing new speech policies for trans people” by Casey Newton (Platformer)
I know this update is a little light, but it was a busy week and I didn’t do much but work and work. Maybe next week will be more interesting. Cheers!
2025-01-18 19:07:00
I’ve been tagged by Alexandra to take part in this challenge. Thanks for asking, Alex!
I first established my presence on the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s. Back then it was just called ”having a web page” but at some point the concept of putting one’s thoughts online became known as “blogging.” I’ve been sporadically posting content in some form or another since those early days.[^lost]
In 2022 I wrote three LinkedIn posts about Amazon SageMaker and that sort of rebooted my blogging activity.
I joined OMG.lol in November 2022 and started using weblog.lol shortly after that. I love its simplicity, although it’s fun to push the limits.
I’ve used Wordpress and Blogger in the past. I tried Micro.blog last year. It’s another nice, simple platform, but it didn’t fill a need for me.
I don’t have a sophisticated workflow. I draft almost everything in Day One. I like it because it’s always with me—on my desktop, my laptop, my phone, and my iPad. I copy and paste content into weblog.lol and do the final polish there.
When I have an idea, and I feel like I have something to say that two or three people might actually be interested in reading. This usually occurs first thing in the morning.
I have a lot of half-baked ideas sitting in my Day One journal. Sometimes it’s because I haven’t had time to fully flesh those ideas out, and sometimes it’s because the idea itself isn’t fully formed and I need time to figure out where I’m going. Occasionally, I sit down and the thoughts just pour out. But that’s not the norm.
I suppose it’d be the series of posts detailing how I make limoncello.
I’ve been using weblog.lol for the past two years and it’s a great platform but it has its limitations and there are some more things I’d like to do that it just wasn’t built for. I’m looking forward to seeing what Adam has in store for Neato. I’m also looking at Eleventy and Netlify as a possible alternative.
Not sure. A lot of folks I follow already have done this. I’m (as usual) a Johnny-come-lately on this. If/when I tag someone else, I’ll update this post.
[^lost]: Most of that content has been lost, but I’ve managed to hang on to a few things. In 2006 I spent two weeks at Wuhan University and wrote a series of posts about the experience. Around the turn of the century I wrote some parody pieces that I called The Monkey Journals and I’ve been occasionally re-posting those here too.
2025-01-18 18:00:00
I’ve been a member of the Omglolverse for about two years. In that time I’ve used all the available services and in some cases been frustrated by their limitations. But working through—and sometimes around—those limitations (the “hacking” bit) is the fun part.
The weblog service is where I do almost everything. I even use it for my profile and now pages, as I’ll explain below. But first, the basics: there are basically two kinds of content on weblog.lol, posts and pages.
Posts are dated entries (articles) that exist at a given point in time. They generally don’t change once posted. I always write at least one post per week, sometimes more.
Pages are static entries that may change over time.
Now I know a lot of people maintain multiple blogs based on different subjects. I prefer a single unified web experience for mihobu.lol that includes my profile, my web sitelets (defaults, uses, subscriptions, etc.) all under one roof and sharing common navigation. So that’s what I’ve tried to build. Here’s how:
Weblog provides a built-in navigation mechanism, which you set up in the weblog configuration file. I don’t use it though because I wanted a “tabbed” style to separate the different sections, each having its own set of subnavigation links. To do this, I had to create a separate template for each section. This complicates maintenance because there’s a lot of duplication across templates. I use custom metadata fields to add inline CSS styles to highlight the current page link in the subnavigation bar.
My now page is powered by an Amazon Web Services Lambda Function, which fetches activity from Goodreads (about the books I’m reading), Trakt (about the TV shows and movies I’m watching), and a paste (about everything else) to generate a markdown summary of what I’ve been up to for the last seven days. I use the now page service to store the content, but I don’t use the service to display it. Instead, I pull the now page content into a static weblog page using the now property.
My profile page exists as a static weblog page. (I don’t use the omg.lol Web Page service for this. My system-wide profile pic and favicon live there though.)
I really like FontAwesome icons, but I don’t use their icon fonts any more. Instead, I download the ones I like and use, and encode them into a CSS file of my own. I use the mask-image CSS property to display them either as list markers or as inline glyphs (as seen here). I don’t know if I really save much in terms of performance by doing things this way. I really just did it to see if I could.
Weblog allows you to create custom properties that expand in markdown and can include arguments. I use this feature to generate nicely formatted image captions. The markdown looks like this (but must be placed in braces):
caption:text=This is a caption.
I set up my post template (in the configuration) to include a default image (another custom property), although I try to create unique post images for all my new posts. These are included in the web page headers as part of the Open Graph meta data. This also has the side effect of rendering nice image cards on Mastodon.
At this time, I’m not using weblog’s landing page and pagination features.
profile.lol As mentioned above, I don’t use this except that the avatar is shown on the directory
now.garden Because I use it to store my now content, my updates do appear in the garden. So that’s nice.
status.lol I occasionally post statuses, which are cross-posted to Mastodon. But I stopped showing these on my now page, because they hang out there forever if I don’t update. (I wish they would just age off and disappear.)
Pastebin Used primarily as a key component in my now page updates as described above, but I keep a few other things out there too.
Charms I haven’t started using these yet. 😄
some.pics I don’t use it as a photo sharing service per se (I use Flickr for that) but I do use it extensively as a content store for my blog.
PURLs I use it mostly to track downloads of things I’ve written.
Email I don’t use mihobu.lol for email. All my email/calendar stuff is on Fastmail, which I recommend highly.
DNS I don’t use omg.lol for DNS. Everything is at porkbun, which I also recommend.
Switchboard Yes I have a lot of stuff in there, which I think might be a whole other post.
Keys I keep my GPG and iMessage keys in there.
Proofs I’ve got a few in there, including this one. FWIW, I also can be found on Keyoxide.
2025-01-15 21:40:00
I started university in autumn 1989. At that time (and until at least the late 1990s) the way we got our grades was that they arrived by post. I remember tearing into those snap-pack mailers to learn my fate. Sometimes it was good news, sometimes not.
Going through my file drawer this morning I found that I still have every single one of those darn things. WHY?! There’s no good reason, of course, except perhaps nostalgia. They just take up space. So I scanned one as a souvenir and I guess I’ll go ahead and shred the rest.
Just as soon as I’m sure I won’t need it again for something. (Just kidding)
Postscript: Student SSNs showed up everywhere. I remember seeing all the Computer Science students’ SSNs in the distributed password file on our Unix systems! At one point a few years ago, I found (for who knows why) a copy of that file on a floppy disk in my basement. I destroyed it of course.
2025-01-14 20:20:00
🛬 The beginning of the week marked the end of our trip to the Dominican Republic. Due to weather delays, we arrived back in Columbus after midnight Tuesday morning. But, we were both very glad not to have been stuck somewhere.[^mco]
📷 I posted a few Punta Cana snapshots over on my photo blog.
🎨 I downloaded CreArt: Painting by Numbers a little while ago. It seems silly to paint by numbers on a phone, but it turns out there are times when that’s exactly what you need. The app allows for a bit of creative license, so every masterpiece is not exactly the same. But who cares? It’s a relaxing way to while away the time when you find yourself with nothing better to do than wait.
📮 I ordered a new scanner and used it to put my QSL card collection. The scanner was very inexpensive and scans both sides simultaneously. I still can’t get over how fast it is!
🕷️ I finished Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Loved it! This is everything that good Science Fiction should be. It also completes what I call my “Spider Trilogy,” three completely unrelated books that happen to involve spiders or spider-like creatures.[^other]
🕯️ For the first time since its initial release, I watched The Believers with Martin Sheen. There are a few problems with this movie but it holds up fairly well. Creepy stuff.
🐻❄️ Speaking of creepy, we’ve been watching season 4 of True Detective (“Night Country”) and it certainly fits the bill. I assume this headed toward some perfectly rational resolution in the end, but at the halfway point this is some of the weirest shit I’ve seen on television in a while.
📒 We also started watching Bookie. Episode 1 was laugh-out-loud funny, but episode 2 fell off quickly. Not sure I’ll hang around for this one.
That’s all from this end, friends. Talk to you soon!
[^mco]: In this case, somewhere was Orlando and we have good friends who live not to far from the airport so it would have been fine.
[^other]: The other two books are Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar and Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
