It’s been a couple of nice hobby web site weekends here are Pretty Good Hat PNW. Reading Adam’s great writeup of setting up an IRC server put me in the mood to play around with servers, and with the price of my shared hosting having gone up last year, I thought I’d experiment with setting up some servers at Hetzner.

Well, one good thing led to another, and curling was on TV so I had a lot of good laptop time, and so I’m finishing out this weekend having completely migrated from my prior host after more than ten years there. I learned a bunch about setting up new servers! I can’t say enough good things about Adam’s guide and the encouragement to be found hanging around the omg.lol community.¹

Before cancelling my old service, I made an exhaustive scroll through all the content in that home directory, downloading and archiving a lot. Over the years I’ve had everything from twenty years of web sites², to old versions of my CV, to little R experiments, ruby projects, and other things that kind of scaffolded a lot of my history. It really is true that a good chunk of the story of my life is the story of all the things I’ve done with web sites in that time. It’s a very specific kind of time capsule, those directories full of web projects, jpegs, and datestamps.

misc tools & process notes

• I used Zed for a lot of my migration work. Its remote editing via an ssh connection works beautifully (and in fact is how I’m writing this post).
• Caddy is great! The way it enables automatic certificate installation is so seamless.
• I post with a Drafts action and a cross-platform shortcut for uploading images, both of which hit a little PHP micropub endpoint. It’s really pretty cool that with updates of authentication, I could move my posting tools over to a new host and just … keep using them.
• web sites and servers are cool and fun to play with

Sometimes one does get the urge to change web hosts and screw around with servers for a couple of weekends.

The start of rainy season is a perfect time to discover a leak, yes? Just checking. Deeper into autumn, now, I am also seeing just how many leaves our various trees hold; they hold a lot of leaves! There’s so much raking to do. It’s a brisk, windy and grey morning.

This week’s soup: Potato-forward, topped with roast chicken and chile crisp. Solid.

I didn’t capture a lot for notes, this week. I’m tired, working on focus and calm. I’m dismayed that a campaign run on meanness, anger and fear could win the way it did; I’m furious at the centrist reaction that this just shows how polarized we are as a nation. We’re not polarized when a candidate can demagogue against kids who need gender-affirming care; we’re broken.

gaming

I bounced off of Ashen a few years ago, but picked it up again this week when it re-appeared on Game Pass. I’m terrible at it, still, but am kind of grateful for its vibe of hopeful, slow progress. It’s a very good pastime to recline in a big chair with the Steam Deck.

work

I appreciate this post by Michael Lopp on using Monday to set the tone for the week. I’ve been practicing many of these and think his reminder to consider metrics is really useful. I’m not as good at this in particular – should spend some time on that one.

weekend

I’m hoping today to get out for a good walk and find some photos. We’ll see how that goes.

It was a pretty full week. Work is happening, five days out of seven, at least, and a few of the “things to do before the end of the year” items are starting to feel a little bit tightly compressed into the time we have left in 2024. Signs of autumn are intensifying, too! It’s cooler, rainy and gray; I’m taking my vitamin D.

• 💿 I went to the dentist this week. I had to have an old filling drilled out and replaced. I have much anxiety about dental work, and for the first time brought along my own big headphones. I listened to Nick Cave’s new album, The Wild God. It’s a beautiful, remarkable piece of music, and I utterly zoned into it through the dental work.
• Driving around this week, it felt like my neighborhood, like landmarks are becoming familiar and comfortable. It’s a really nice feeling. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve barely touched the surface in terms of actually checking out shops and destinations, but as I make a mental map of this new town it’s soothing for it to begin to feel familiar in its big and smaller shapes.
• This article about the fish shell by Julia Evans captures so much of what’s great about it. Fish is so smart with completion suggestions and history! Unlike Julia, I’ve tinkered with a bunch of plugins and other configuration, but she makes me wonder if I could strip a bunch of that out and run it more simply.
• I got into a bit more solid routine on the bike this week, combined with hitting all my scheduled strength workouts on time. That feels good! I’m working intentionally against the inertia I often feel when the work day is done, or in the morning before getting to my desk. It has been really tough, the past … several months? … to feel motivated to focus on it. So I’ll take this small couple-week stretch.

media this week

• We’re watching The Big Door Prize (Apple TV+) season 2. This show deserves so much more love and attention. It’s thoughtful, sweet, and funny. I just learned that it didn’t get renewed for a third season, which is a shame.
• I enjoyed Rebel Ridge (Netflix). Pretty good action thriller about civil forfeiture and race, with some truly menacing corrupt cop performances.

🍅 garden haul this week

• A whole bunch of cherry tomatoes!
• Once again, the starlings wrecked the ripening figs before we could get to them.
• We made a cake out of a bunch of the pears we’ve harvested
• Another couple pounds of grapes in the freezer
• Radishes and greens are ready: Lots of kale and spinach in our future

(Don’t call it a weeknote? Maybe it’s a weeknote?)

It’s beginning to feel like autumn and I’m reflecting on passing through a full season here in our new home. I’m excited to see colors change and to feel the mood of the city change to fall and wintertime. This sense of transition is strengthened by school starting for our kiddo – new school, new town – a very big milestone, that one. (Parents, please note the New School Year Drop-Off and Pick-Up Rules.)

Here are a few items:

• RIP, Steve Silberman
• I’m trying out Reeder. I like the change-up in interface. I’m not sure about the “no unread” tracking, though I appreciate the intent and the way it allows for technical simplification.
• I’m kind of restless with my various blogs and web sites. Longing for a little more camaraderie in it all, maybe?
• We watched The Bear season 3 this week; I can’t believe they ended the season that way! I think it made a very successful season feel a lot less satisfying than I would have liked.
• First visits with new dermatologist and new dentist this week, and I got to keep all my weird moles and all my teeth. Parking in this city is something else, though.

I’ve set my sights on making a cappuccino at home that approaches the quality of Anchorhead’s, which has a deep, sweet, flavor. Fortunately I like the practice, because it’s going to take some time.

In other blog news, I’ve swapped in webmention support for links from Mastodon, at least partially. Reposts aren’t quite displayed as I’d like, but likes and replies should be working. I had to remember/rediscover a couple of bits of blog plumbing, which makes me sort of want to revise my whole setup here. BUT. I don’t think I’ll go quite that far.

I’ve learned just enough about go conditionals and comparisons within Hugo templates to revise my lil blog’s “now” page list of “posts on this day” to “posts on and around this day.” Solid.

Inside blogball technical note: using Drafts along with the new, better-integrated photo upload and posting method I put together this weekend is game-changing. I underestimated, in part, how absolutely great it would be to have a cross-platform scratch pad that hooks everything together so well.

There is still a pretty good tape and baling wire aspect of it, but I’m pretty pleased to have put together a nicely-working revision to my photo posting, using a MacOS shortcut to upload photos to my media endpoint and output their destination URLs to a list that I can grab from in Drafts to compose and post. It was nice learning for a Saturday, too.

It’s a quiet and bitter cold first morning of the year for me. I took the dog outside in the zero degrees F dark, and then she went right back to her warm bed. I’m ready for my second cup of coffee while the first tiny bit of dawn is starting to differentiate the one-black sky from the mountain. All in all, it’s much like any early morning this winter, albeit far colder after this week’s snowstorms have moved on. A lot of things in the past week have made it hard to feel reflective on the close out of the past year and start of the next. Here’s hoping for resolution of those uncertainties and a chance at some calm, some restoration, and maybe also some joy in 2022.