👍 Liked: Life Stack by Aaron Parecki

Made some minor style/format updates to better present some microformat data and be less confusing for webmentions.

At some point this will become something other than a blog about blogging, one presumes.

👍 Liked: one million mentions

Just testing sending likes via webmention.

One million webmentions is a pretty great milestone for the indie/homebrew website community. Thanks and congrats to all the folks who build and support the tools and infrastructure to enable this.

Over three years ago I spent a long weekend building my very own, basic but functional webmentions implementation. When I switched the site to Hugo from my homegrown pile of static-blog-building scripts last year, I put rebuilding webmention support way, way on the back burner, and never got back around to it.

I really wasn’t fully geared up to make that system work with Hugo, so today with this writeup from Daniel Goldsmith I used the webmention endpoint from Pelle Wessman, to rebuild all of that functionality in a couple of hours!¹

👍!

It should now be easy to post comments here via any system that will send webmentions, such as one’s own indieblog site, as well as via replies to entries that are syndicated to my micro.blog feed. This is cool!

I’ve been using micro.blog now for a couple of weeks and finding that I really enjoy the way it provides a hub for both short status updates as well as pointers to longer writing. While not at all a direct analogue, It’s filling some of the feed created by the shutdown of Minimal Reader, which I had used for several years.

It’s full of people doing their own things. All this energy reminds me a lot of the early days of app.net as well as the time when tilde.club was really on fire: Tons of bubbling excitement over writing things, building things, sharing things, and meeting people with a common bent toward all those.¹

There’s a distinct indieweb feel, right down to the bones of Micro.blog architecture meant to enable things like webmentions. This is very cool, so today I dusted off the parts of my brain that remember, vaguely, how those things work and tuned up my little piece of the indieweb, again.

As some others around the place are noting, I’m not quite to leaving Twitter yet, either. But I’m enthused by a platform that has a solid code of conduct and provides a lot of connective architecture for making new networks.

All this new connectivity is inspiring in a number of ways, so I’ll be trying to write more frequently² as well as share bits and pieces of other things I’m working on.

Hi. I’m trying microblogging, I guess. This should be syndicated over to my joint at micro.blog.

It’s an interesting experience to pass through most of a season in a new place — in this case, a temporary and somewhat unsettled place. We have been out of our house for two months, due first to a Christmas-time trip north, and, since New Year’s Eve, due to remodeling making it virtually impossible to live in our house.

After returning to town and expecting to find the house habitable, we spent one surprising and very, very bad New Year’s Eve paying an absolutely exorbitant rate for the last motel room in town: A filthy and despairing place where we woke early and left as soon as possible, settling finally in the place where I woke today. Since the first of January, we have lived in a small but clean room at a long-term stay hotel, two adults, a kindergartner, and a year-old dog in a one-room space with a tiny kitchenette.

We are ready to go home again, and as of today, it looks like home is ready for us, or just about. To be clear, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be completed, but the final milestones will mostly wait on the completion of our new countertops, which could be a few more weeks. So at this point, mot of the very dirty (so dirty) and disruptivve work is complete, so — back home we go! We won’t have a kitchen sink or dishwasher or stove for a while, still, but we will get by. I will have my fast internet, and my coffee machine, once again.

We figured out how to go about our lives more or less normally — gym, work, school, etc — albeit with a lot more driving and a lot more dog time. The pup has gone just about everywhere with one of us, and we are lucky enough to be able to work from home, so we have traded off spending work days with the dog in order to keep her from barking too much at the hotel. When we run errands or go out together, she goes, too.

We are all looking forward to having a little more private space once again. For one thing, this living arrangement has been very bad for work-life balance. We have both had way too many 5am conference calls, or early starts just to recover some time that we know would be claimed later by driving across town, dog walks, kindergertner time; all the things that can fit more seamlessly into life at “home” but that take more time when fit into the constraints of living somewhere else. That said, being in close proximity for so long is a good motivator to develop some discipline and focus: I can’t just go to the other room to read for a while, so I have to put on my headphones¹ and get it done right there, right then. So life goes on, and there’s a lesson in that for us.

We found a few new routines, too: After picking up my son from school on cold afternoons, we often made cocoa for him and took iPads and laptops down to the hotel lobby, where he could sit by the fire with cocoa and Minecraft, and I could have a beer — Goose Island IPA, $2 all the time may be the best thing about this place — and catch up with work or play of my own.

In January we had our tenth greatest snowfall on record, and while we didn’t need to shovel out at the hotel (aside from clearing the cars), I had to make several slow cross-town trips to keep the house clear so that the crews could get to the place and work. From deep winter, we have gradually turned toward spring: the days have grown longer, light coming up to the sky earlier while I sit at Starbucks with a coffee some early morning. On Jan 1, we woke up to a few inches of snow; and today woke up to a skiff. That feels like a nice bookend, like we didn’t pass entirely out of winter in this liminal place, despite the feeling that spring is getting close.

We didn’t expect to spend our winter like this, but so it goes. I have been at times frustrated, exhausted, demoralized at the combination of living conditions, obstacles at work, and things just not being the way I like them to be.² Yet each day I am one day older, whether I am in the place I want to be or not. I have tried to be very aware that it is my privelege to be able to chose how to live each of those days.

Looks like we will complete the move-back-in process in another day or so. It’s going to feel so good to make coffee in my own house (albeit in a bathroom, because we don’t yet have a) a sink or b) working electrical outlets in the kitchen).

A little over a year ago, in a fit of pique over the thought of re-learning how to program my obtuse thermostat when its batteries died (again), I replaced my thermostat with an Ecobee 3. It’s great, for all the reasons people say.¹

That’s not what this post is about, though. The Ecobee web site offers a timeline that shows furnace activity, which I like to check out. But I don’t love logging in to Ecobee site and clicking through three screens to get, so I spent several hours learning how to use the Ecobee API to download the same data and plot it for myself.

In the above plot, the red/orange line is the inside temperature, and red is where the furnace is burning. The horizontal grey lines indicate the temperature set by the thermostat, and the blue line is the outdoor temperature. This is basically equivalent to the way ecobee presents this data in their control panel, with the exception that they just show a horizontal bar above the entire plot to show when the furnace is burning or fan is on. I prefer to have that integrated so I don’t have to scan up and down to track furnace time against temperature. And of course, I don’t have to log in and click through to get to my picture, because it’s sitting on my web server and refreshed every fifteen minutes (which is the data refresh interval from ecobee).

Usually you can see a normal cycle of warming up in the morning, then fluctuating around the set range as the outside temperature increases during the day, until cooling to a low temp threshold all night long. Here you can see where I inadvertently set the “away for now” setting and forgot to disable it, so the temp hovered right at 62ºF for a day, repeatedly warming and cooling around that range until I realized what was happening and switched it back to normal mode.

I think it’s all pretty cool.

You can do a ton more with the ecobee API, including set the temperature. I may play with that in the future: I’d like to have a quick command to, say, boost the temp by just two degrees for half an hour. Having quick access to a shortcut that would do that for me would be pretty cool.

I think that with this post I have deployed the Hugo site to production.

RSS feed is redirected to the new file, so subscribers will see some duplicate/repeat entries, I think.