Quick-Posts
Ohhhh this is a sexy overly complicated workflow. I like where this is going.
Notes for 2024-11-03
Exploring a new note taking workflow. I think I can make it work with helix and marksman on my laptop, syncing to my Android via a shared folder using something like Tailscale or Syncthing.
I could continue to use Obsidian on my phone.
I could also replace my website Quick-Posts for this format. However, I probably want private notes. Hmm getting into that ol blog vs microblog vs notes dilemma again.
Notes for 2024-11-04
[11:08] My fridge sounds like a blender sometimes.
[11:09] Using :pipe echo [$(date +'%H:%M')] in helix inserts the time into my note.
[11:15] Mapped it to CTRL-t. Brill.
[12:32] As part of my offboarding, I am wrapping up a project on offboarding.
[14:10] Lunch walk felt like it aided my recovery from yesterday's long-run.
[16:19] Trying zellij.
Notes for 2024-11-05 (from Obsidian)
[03:58] Bloody cough keeping me up. What gives?
[16:17] Sniffs and coughs got worse through the day. Called a meeting short and came home. Testing for Covid.
[16:39] Negative, but feel like crap.
Notes for 2024-11-06
[09:26] Since I got Covid in April, my immune system has been shot. Went home sick again yesterday, and taking the day off today. Before Covid I hadn't been sick for about 4 years. In the last 6 months I've probably been hit about 5 times.
[09:28] Writing this in zellij full-screen mode is a delight.
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Took dad to the Cardrona Distillery where he has a shared whiskey barrel with a few of his rugby mates (majority of which are All Blacks from the 70's). The distillery is over the hill for me, over the ocean for him, so was pretty rad to visit while he was here. It is a 200L American Barrel shared between 20 mates (now sadly 18 as a couple have passed on). It is 8 years old, they get tasters every few years, coming back next year for a 50 year rugby tour anniversary!! and plan on getting it bottled on year 10.
The distillery no longer does private casks as they are expanding their own stock, however they gave a heads up there is a new distillery at Cromwell (also nearby), Scapegrace, which does it. I have started asking some friends if they want to chip in.
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Mike Grindle on finding flow:
..you have to spend a good while writing nonsense before the gears of creativity start spinning and get you to the “good stuff.”
There's hope for me yet.
Stoked I can watch movies like Dragged Across Concrete and Brawl in Cell Block 99 with dad while he's here. He gets just a kick out of them as I do.
Finding yet more places where people are blogging. I'm going deeeeep. Here I'm using the gemplex search engine in the amfora client to search for "blogging" related gemlogs over the Gemini protocol. amfora allows me to subscribe to feeds and bookmark pages so I can view it all in one terminal application. It's all keyboard operation, can tab through links and media, opening externally if needed. Groovy.
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A couple of birds have been getting jiggy on the fence outside my window the last couple days. It's quick and frisky. About four 5 second breaks with a beak shine and fluffing of the feathers between 3 second balancing acts and displays of love. Both seem pretty content flying off together over neighbouring backyards once the business is done. Ahh, Spring.
Thinking about GTD again. Some big changes happening and I need to start capturing, organising and actioning tasks so I continue to perform. I'll start with some mindsweeping tomorrow for work offboarding tasks. I'll use Nirvana as it's the most familiar tool I have.
My new job will have a specific app we use for task allocation (forgotten the name) so I may not need anything more for work operations, but I am being put through out of hours study so I will set up Nirvana to keep me on track and to dump notes, to-reads, references etc. as I will be learning a tonne of new stuff. Likely a bunch of project ideas are going to pop up too so I want to capture those quickly.
Was keen for a sci-fi book so picked up Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future from the library.
Mowed the lawn.
Ran 11k around Lake Hayes.
Roast veg and chorizo for dinner.
Happy with that evening. Raining now. I'll sleep well.
Finished the Flexbox module. The project was to create a website landing page using flexboxes. It's not fit for mobile devices (that wasn't the goal), and its quite messy, but I'm definitely improving. Here's what I made. On to javascript next.
Funky Cthulhu carrot day.
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I think I'm getting comfortable with Linux. I'm now preferring to open up Ubuntu instead of Windows on my dual-boot laptop, and I'm having more success installing the utilities I want to use on Linux than Windows. When I load Windows the fan goes nuts with all the bloat. Dead silence on Linux. I just need to figure out how I'm going to escape from OneDrive, then I think I'll be done.
I signed up for a local Yahtzee running challenge for the month of September in a spur of the moment burst of enthusiasm, and now it's at a close. Results are below. I joined the group going for 300 points because I wasn't going to get over to Wanaka for the morning and evening social runs (not because I'm not social, more because it's an 1hr 15 each way at stupid o'clock).
Well, I scored a measley 92.5 out of a possible 300. Of course I did! I know more than anyone that I'm not going to commit to something like this. As awesome as the little challenges are, I am just not the kind of runner to play by someone else's rules. I barely play by my own rules - changing plans mid-run is often a thing. Anyway, I got a few half marathons done and almost 15,000m of vert. I have been prioritising sleep so the early morning and evening runs just weren't going to happen. The peaks were over the Wanaka side again and I don't particularly like to drive to runs unless they're really something I'm stinging for.
Anyway, a few lessons (ahem reminders) learned.
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Don't get this out my front door every day.
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Did my first ever Pull Request on a public GitHub repository to get myself into the The 512KB Club. Think I did it right.
Thanks Chris @ Uncountable Thoughts for the heads up my site (landing page anyway) currently sits at 54.08KB. Size is the Bytes Total value from Cloudfare Radar URL Scanner.
Thinking about my blog vs quick-posts setup, titles and slugs. Hmm.
It's now almost 2.30pm and it's been raining consistently from about 1.30am (yeah sadly I was awake then, though I did get back to sleep after a while). It's a nice rain, bouncing off the tin roof. Glad I got my run in yesterday. Was planning on rest today anyway.
Just finished the ToP HTML module. I made a really basic recipes website, which in itself is uninteresting, but it was all the little pieces I've picked up so far that are filling a bunch of gaps in my knowledge, like:
- Git commit messages best practices
- Creating SSH keys and linking them to services
- TAB-completion in the command line and other basic commands
- VS Code and the built-in terminal
It'll likely get a bit trickier as I get into CSS, Flexbox and Javascript, but I'm glad I've found this resource. I'll have a break from it for the rest of today.
I'm also cutting back on coffee, limiting myself to 1 a day. Hoping that improves my sleep.
I'm going to try and post more of these "quick-posts". Just blurt things out. My setup is not entirely frictionless though - I have to be at one of my laptops to send things into the interwebs, and manually build the site every time, push to Neocities, and add-commit-push to GitHub. So, my fleeting "blurts" are kind of lost in the complex process.
Anyway I'm still learning, structuring MY site how I want it, exploring avenues, learning more about web development. I have soooo many ideas. My method at the moment is to build the structure and slowly process improve to remove the friction.
And I know there's Bear and Pika and micro.blog, which are great, but I want to get into the weeds a bit. I guess understand how those tools were built. Actually yeah, if I could build something like Bear, Pika or micro.blog, in my own style that friends and family could use, that would be freakin awesome. This is my journey.
Well, that went somewhere. These "blurts" really work.
Learning about Git as part of The Odin Project's Foundations Course. For practice I am using a GitHub repository for remote storage of this website, and accessing it on both my older Acer laptop (running Linux Mint) and my newer Dell laptop (dual-boot setup with Ubuntu and Windows). I am also using Visual Studio Code on my Dell, and trying out the in-built terminal window. The Odin Project recommends both GitHub and VS Code for undertaking their course, which I will use for the duration, but may look at alternatives down the track. For the moment I am loving this setup. It is clean and fast, and I can update my website on two devices now.
I've installed Zola SSG and Neocities CLI on this Dell too as they are still my means for building and hosting the site.
Update website:
$ zola build
$ cd public
$ neo push .
Push content to GitHub:
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "New post: 202409240800.md"
$ git push
Ran up Wye Creek today just past the bushline. Forgot how fun this track is, steep and rooty under the beech tree canopy before opening up into the valley. I might head back tomorrow and scramble the hills a bit further up.
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Got out for another trot again today, up to Ben Lomond saddle, and back along the ridge via the paragliding launchpad. Sky was doing some cool things. After a feed I visited my neglected allotment, which needs some weeding (I miss my stirrup-hoe I left in Aus), but the garlic is coming along nicely.
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Decided to ignore the fact there's snow everywhere. I need my running fix, and I don't particularly like the flats. Went Miner's trail > Peter's Way > New Chum Gully track out at Arrowtown. Wasn't too bad in the end. Bit of muddy snow melt to begin with, slow going up the tops getting knee deep in snow, but not overly cold (overpants helped). Visibility was good. Given it's a Tuesday had the place to myself. Tried out a Deluxe Cheese Burger at the Fergbutcher aftwards. Oh. My. God. I was audibly satisfied. Check out their full menu. Deadly after a run.
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Just watched Strange Darling (2023). Amazing movie! If you're into flicks like Blue Ruin and Fargo I highly recommend. Don't read anything about it. Wiki has spoilers. Just watch.
A bit of late winter excitement. Got snappy around the river loop.
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After listening to Ariadne on the GTD podcast, I'm giving Nirvana HQ a go again for task management. I've been in limbo for a while, and although taskwarrior is awesome, trying to remember the commands is distracting me from quickly jotting down my tasks. I was one of the lucky ones and paid a once-off lifetime subscription when it existed.
It's been really wet here. I had a really fun run in the rain yesterday. Got crazy muddy. We had a dump of snow too.
Some randoms...
Just finished a 35 minute 8pm run. Bit of lightning and thunder which was cool. We don't get that much here. Bucketing down now. In two days I've ticked off a couple things in the Yahtzee challenge - Half marathon, two runs in a day, start run after 8pm, one hour run. I really liked that night run in the burbs and rain. I wore a jacket, but was soaked inside with sweat. Should not have worn the jacket.
Decided I will split my RSS feeds up into categories now I am posting more frequently.
I wonder if there is an RSS reader that can filter and columnize like Phanpy can with Mastodon.
This made me smile.
I ate some yoghurt, honey, almonds and cacao for desert while I typed this. Yum.
Fixing my "blog" CLI command so I can choose post type, and start the prompt from any location. Little improvements. It looks like I've got Zola installed on /usr/bin/ whilst Neocities is installed on /usr/local/bin/. A little confused about the best practices here, and how it affects future bash scripts. Also, not sure the best place for the scripts. I cp to /usr/local/bin/ and add an alias to ~/.bashrc, but I had issues with one script that called a utility in /usr/bin/ so I moved my script to /usr/bin/ and it worked. Anyway, I will do some reading on this stuff before I make a huge mess of it.
Crashed at 7PM last night. Woke briefly to the neighbours pulling in the bins at 8.30PM then woke again at 6AM. My head is so exhausted right now. Work is painful, weekends are short, therapy is snail-paced. Shit.
Lots of rain over the next few days to get us into Spring. The garden will appreciate that.
Nice trot today along the lake, drinking from a creek before heading up some little known DH MTB trails, down some others. It was windy so didn't spend much time above the tree line but was nice under the canopy with all the whooshing of the trees. Beaut sunny day.
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Going 100% light mode this week on all devices and apps, work and personal. Usually have a mish mash but I need more light right now.
I got tired of using MS To Do for my task management at work. I gave it a real go, but its just failing in so many ways. Found out I could install Obsidian so I'm trying it out as a task manager for the first time. Keeping it simple with just the Tasks plugin. After setting up some hotkeys I'm finding it's working really well.
Playing around with containers.
Just as my motivation for a run kicks in it starts to snow. I need to get out so I'll just layer up and crack on.
Oops looks like I need to configure how it looks on the mobile. Stretching and shrinking and stuff. Get the atom feed working too. Will throw the link up when I get a chance if anyone wants to follow along with this utter mess.
I actually can't believe I got this working.
Now all I have to do is type in "blog" and start writing. test test.
$ blog
Enter blog title: blogging from the command line
Enter slug name: cli
Write (Ctrl+D to finish):
Now all I have to do is type in "blog" and start writing. test test.
Bleh. Web design is hard! Going around in circles but getting there. Working on flexing, CSS and the Tera template engine. This isn't the finished product, but a simple design to get me familiar with some bits and pieces.
Not entirely sure how I'll style the website just yet. Needs dark/light options at least. There's some out of the box themes I could use but that's boring...
This is my first blog post. I've written and published this web page entirely from the command line. Amazeballs.