🗓️ Weeknote 2025-W04

2025-01-26 12:02

Some random front-of-mind pieces from my week.

Started filling this out during the week as it is becoming a bit of a beast. I tend to include some sections that are worthy of their own page - eg. Tools, Daily Notes, and now Reading Across the Web.. but I like capturing them here so as to not create copious amounts of posts. I do have pages half designed for this - Tools, Quick-Posts and Links so I'll look at embedding them a bit better. Anyway, this style of weeknote works for me, hope you find something enjoyable here.

🏃 Ran 46.2km / 1,592 m profile - Just two runs this week, one which covered most of it was a keyswap on the Routeburn track, always a nice day out.

🌱 Harvesting good sized beets and carrots. Got a gifted beefsteak tomato plant that is turning red and looking delicious. Greens are covering my salads and sandwiches. Garlic is curing and stinking out my garage.

🩸 Health - Pretty good, though I need to get to bed earlier. I think I was noticeably grouchy some days because I was tired. We had some testing jobs at work which got to all our nerves, but I don't think I helped the cause. I also want to reflect on 2024 at some point before the impact lessens. It was a tough year for me which has set me in a new life direction, and possibly the biggest mental paradigm shifts I've had so it's definitely worth jotting down.

🏢 Work

• Learning there is a sweet spot in timing when to be on site to do certain stages of our cable running and wiring. We are juggling between insulation and gyprock installation, painters, exterior wall cladding, you name it. Early in the week we needed access to the walls and high ceiling via the scaffolding as soon as it was installed. When we got there the scaffolding was there, but so was the wall cladding! so we couldn't access inside the walls (where our cables needed to run). Plan B ensued.. a short run to a nearby open wall, using pull-wires to link behind walls. Pain in the butt as it makes more work for us and the gyprockers to patch up our cuts.

• The process improvement advisor in me is cringing a little at all the forgotten tools or materials back at the workshop. Now I've got my own van I'm loading extra gear which is otherwise sitting absolutely useless in the workshop.. nailguns, circular saws, extra drillbits, connectors, flushboxes yada yada. Being MacGyver because we don't have the right shit on hand can be taxing, especially around pre-wiring which is already physically demanding.

• Slowly getting my head around the different cables needed for different devices based on their data/power/integration requirements.

• Enjoyed wiring up sirens, smoke detectors and passive infrared (PIR) sensors, learning about our double end-of-line (EOL) system setup.

• Colleague mentioned a need for a wiki on all the work we do. We're passing a lot of information to each other in forms of labelled photos, links to product specs, technical installation documents, and word of mouth best practices. I mentioned I know of some many potential options for creating our wiki. Looks like I have a fun project coming up.

💻 Tinkering

• Named my laptop "laptop"

• Switched to light-mode

• Playing around with other ways of creating web spaces. One such is a simple journal hosted on GitHub. I'm also testing running web servers off my Android phone, via termux and either hugo SSG and web server or Appache2 web server.

• Finished setting up helix as my Python IDE which uses a Python LSP Server in a pipx virtual environment. I think it does everything I need. This article helped me get there.

💻 Website

• Improved the styling of the collapsible section below under Daily Notes (and any other part of my website if I choose to use it). I stole code from Sacha Chua's blog, a fantastic blog in itself.

💻 Tools

• todo.txt-cli - I've been going back-to-basics with todo lists lately, namely creating a @DOING list in my Monday daily notes each week (in Obsidian, synced to my laptop) to keep track of shit to do right now. This is ok, but I like a quick capture and sort by priority, completion, project or context, which is why I have used Nirvana HQ in the past, but starting anew I am finding Nirvana too feature-rich for my needs, and not available in the terminal. Enter todo.txt-cli. This is possibly the most amazingly simple (yet still feature-rich) todo approach and tool I have come across, and I absolutely love it. I feel like it is made for me. It is based on the plain-text single-file todo.txt approach. Each line is your todo item, structured in a way that it is sortable and searchable with any basic text editor or simple tools like todo.txt-cli - This one in particular has some really nice colour scheme (customisable) and built in commands for basic list functionality. I'm using the alias 't' to run the tool, so I just have to type t add "(A) This is a task +project-name @home" to add a task with A priority, tagged project-name with context @home.

• markor - And behold, markor is an Android text editor that supports the todo.txt approach. I have synced (via syncthing) the folder that contains my todo.txt file between my laptop and Android, and re-mapped markor to point to it, so anything I edit on my phone, shows up on my laptop, and vice-verca. Now I have 2 beautifully simple tools with style on my two devices where I can manage my single-file todo list (actually two, the cli tool splits done tasks into a second file, done.txt, when you complete a task or run t report).

• peek - GUI screen recorder. I couldn't manage to install or get to work terminalizer or byzanz, but to be honest the GUI makes life easier. This was a recording I did of publishing a blog post.

📺 Watched

• Small Things Like These (2024) - Beautifully shot film based on the book of the same name about the Irish Magdalene Institutions and one man's slowly growing involvement with one, and his inner conflicts with society norms in ways to approach it. Really a great film.

🎧 Listening to...

• George FM Queenstown - A local radio station I usually have on in the van while driving between jobs. A lot of electronic dance type music. I like it when they play a set from an artist. You might find our localised ads and presenters with kiwi accents hilarious. You got a favourite local station? Let me know. I'll publish a list if you send them in. It's great these are mostly all online now (I set up my phone with the links in case my own library isn't cutting it at home).

🕸️ Currently reading across the web

• Having Multiple Sites* is Cool via Jack Baty
• Choosing a Name for Your Computer
• Git Your Freedom Back: A Beginner's Guide to SourceHut
• prose.sh (a blog platform for hackers) discovery feed | rss via Jason
• Files Going Local First
• BBS PETSCII, 1986-1993 (WIP) via Michał
• I HAVE TO DO WHAT TO CLIMB UP THE CORPORATE LADDER?
• Offgrid internet-in-a-box project part one|part two|part three
• Fixing my monitor's power button
• Add mundane non-password info to your password manager