zkbro

🗓️ Weeknote 2025-W7.3

2026-02-18 23:13

Hey, I've been getting a couple of emails, mentions and links from around the small/indie/human web, and I just want to say that means a lot. I started building this site (and a couple of prior prototypes) half because I was in a rut at my previous job and wanted to lean into my geek side I left dormant for a couple of decades to see if there was still an interest there (there absolutely is), and half because I wanted to start unbundling thoughts and expressing myself, something I don't think I do too well in the physical world (though I still don't do it much here either). What I did not expect was to actually feel like I was part of a community. When I read my RSS feed and click through to a familiar site, I have this voice or image of those authors in my head as I read. When you're linking to someone's page it's like your saying "have you seen what old mate down the road just did, check it out! radballz!" Then we all have a yarn via Re: posts or emails or webmentions or whatever. It's pretty unreal. Actually, it's all very real. So thanks for making this web rad. Thanks for dropping in. Thanks for saying hi, no matter how small our interaction.

I rambled a bit on this one. Sorry not sorry.

🩸 My ear unblocked itself, or so I thought, so I was OK to postpone the audiologist appointment to fit around work. It did briefly block again on Monday though so I knew it was still an issue. I finally got in this morning. They got the sucker thingymabob on it, and well, there was a lot of gunk. Nurse was impressed. I picked up some spray they had there for sale. Hopefully that will be enough preventative so I don't have to return every year. Anyway, it's good to not feel a bit lop-sided and half deaf.

🌱 Harvesting zuchs, spuds, greens of all kinds, spring onion, capsicums, chilli, tomato, cucumbers. Eggplant are just about ready for their first pickings. Zucchini fritters and omelettes are a regular thing.

🧹 I mopped the floor. Hadn't done it for a while. It was quick and easy, and the result was great. I do have an ongoing issue around the stovetop though with crumbs and oil splatterings. Might go to the op shop and find something I can use as a kitchen mat.

🏢 Work has looked like this this last week:

🧠 Been thinking a lot about homesteading again lately. I've been enjoying the garden and cooking from the garden. I miss having chooks. I'm also thinking a lot about slow living and frugality and the many urban homesteading projects I could do to work towards these. I have so much fun in the garden, just touching dirt is enough to recharge my batteries. I enjoy brewing my kombucha (I'm finally getting it to taste not like vinegar) and I want to give bread baking another crack.

Subsequently in order to give myself more time there, I am trying to reduce how much I tinker on tech projects that have a loose thread towards some potential future career or small business. The purchase of my second-hand Microserver was half need for personal storage and media server, half a piece of hardware I can learn system administration on for some potential future career or small business. The Microserver and Raspberry Pi tinkerings definitely has helped me get some of the funner work in my current job related to network configurations and self-hosting solutions. And I do enjoy the tinkering and learning. One of the biggest feelings I get is a feeling of freedom. There's not much I can't get my computer hardware to do within my needs. Though I still feel like I've been angling too much brain energy trying towards intertwining my interests and career trajectories. It's time for some seperation.

This does not mean I will stop tinkering. One of my favourite things I'm doing right now is creating my new activities website (more below). This is purely for my own enjoyment. Scaling it back to plain HTML and CSS is giving me a sense of slow living (slow tinkering?). There is no urgency around it. It just relaxes me. The scaling back is also just scaling it back to my skill level. Advanced Zola theming and javascript get a bit tricky for me, especially when they're already done for you and you try and unbundle what's going on. Maybe I will revisit some javascript one day, and like the HTML and CSS, build it from scratch and enjoy that process, but for not for now.

I still have a bunch of things to do with my servers. They are just that little bit extra effort required because I'm not very skilled there. When I revisit those projects I will be scaling back again and taking my time to learn with purpose - whatever that project's objectives may be. But none of these projects will anything like "to gain skills in x to set myself up for future y career".

I will leave that for work professional development projects. I have enough there that will also help me enjoy my current job more (my biggest stressor at the moment is being underqualified). The boss wants to put me through the Integrated Systems Technician certification, and Homey training. Using Homey is just the start of our journey into energy monitoring in our already integrated KNX systems. A perfect single device to get learning on. The IST curriculum covers everything we do. There is further CEDIA certification like network administration which may be a thing I tackle later. Hopefully I get some time AT work to do this though. Some negotiation needs to happen there.

So clear separation between work/career projects and personal tech projects. Less urgency on personal tech projects. That leaves me with more time and energy for those physical gardening and urban homesteading type projects.

💻 As mentioned, the only tech project I've been working on is my activities website. I'm glad I decided to design and structure it without a pre-configured theme. I'm still using the Zola SSG to build the site, but I'm writing all the HTML and CSS with the help of Tera which is built into Zola. Big wins this week was creating a "tags" page and setting up pagination. The Zola documentation isn't great, so it is a slow process, but that is fine... there is no rush for this. There are also some limitations I'm hitting, like the inability to paginate a concatenated set of sections. But I am finding workarounds and happy with how it's turning out.

The next steps are finalising pagination index pages, then creating a script that generates all the markdown files for the 3000+ activities to suite the structure I've come up with.

🛡️ I'm not sure how big a deal it is, but my local IP address was showing in a warning message on my public forgejo landing page. I figured out how I could change it to show localhost instead. Alex Chan's fantastic recent post The bare minimum for syncing Git repos made me wonder why I have forgejo at all. Her setup sounds very achievable. Also, pretty sure I've posted local IPs for my Raspberry Pi previously. Don't think showing a 192.168.x.x address is an issue? But the less the better I guess. I should go back and find those posts.

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I want to end these weeknotes betterer.