The Bullet Journal Method

Notes

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The Hilarious World Of Depression

Notes

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Glass Hotel

Notes

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Game of the Year

“Thanks” to the Coronavirus for keeping me in my house, I made it through four of these. Of them, The Last of Us Part II had the best story, Hades is the best video game, in that it is fun and has great mechanics, and art, and sound. Ghost of Tsushima was a fun open world game, but wouldn’t make a Playstation 4 top ten for me. Final Fantasy VII remake likely would make a top ten list, but I’d hesitate to recommend it to people who hadn’t played the original.

Markdown is going on tonight

Let him who hath understanding reckon the markdown of the bear

Cross posting from a next.js blog to micro.blog

I like the idea of micro.blog, and I’ve lazily cross-posted my blog to the site via RSS for a while, but the feed always ended up in the format of [post title] - [link to post], which doesn’t capture the spirt of microblogging.

I reworked the RSS feed in general when updating this site to next.js, but I thought I'd take a stab at getting micro.blog crossposting working too.

Since I couldn’t find much in their documentation on what parameters were used to construct the micro.blog feed from an RSS feed, I found users who were cross posting, looked at their feeds, and then tested out a couple posts to see how they showed up on the timeline.

Notes:

1. It's much easier to use a JSON feed. This is perhaps not surprising since Manton Reece drafted the spec and created micro.blog.
2. Microblogging is strongly against using titles for posts.

I ended up taking the same loop my index page uses (gets every single markdown post, but then returns the latest ten) and running it through this function:

import siteConfig from "../data/config.json";
var md = require("markdown-it")();

const makeJsonFeed = (posts) => {
 const feed = {
   feed_url: siteConfig.jsonURL,
   title: siteConfig.description,
   home_page_url: siteConfig.siteUrl,
   author: {
     url: siteConfig.siteUrl,
     name: siteConfig.author,
   },
 };
 const items = posts.map((post) => {
   return {
     author: {
       url: siteConfig.siteUrl,
       name: siteConfig.author,
     },
     id: `${siteConfig.siteURL}${post.slug}`,
     url: `${siteConfig.siteURL}${post.slug}`,
     date_published: post.frontmatter.date,
     content_html: md.render(post.markdownBody),
   };
 });
 feed.items = items;

 return JSON.stringify(feed);
};

export default makeJsonFeed;

And on the index route, I use it like this:

const jsonFeedObj = makeJsonFeed(postsToUse);
fs.writeFileSync("./public/rss/feed.json", jsonFeedObj);

While I do have titles on most of my posts, they are optional, and I chose to leave them off the JSON feed. If they are added, micro.blog goes back to the [post title] - [link to post] I was trying to get away from!

You can see the result at my micro.blog timeline or in the JSON feed.

Trying two things: updating my old Macbook Pro to Big Sur.

And testing titleless posts for micro.blog RSS integration. Big Sur definitely didn’t work, let’s not go 0 for 2.

Spirographs

We were cleaning out toys this weekend and found a gear drawing set for making spirographs. A family member bought it for my daughter to take on a flight when she was younger, but she was too young to enjoy it at the time. We had more fun with it this week, and finally got around to using these Zebra pens I had.

But, the programmer in me said, “hey, sometimes the gear skips, what if we did it in code”, and made this.

The colors are random, have fun reloading / changing the variables.

Obligatory Simpsons gif:

SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY

Attempts at recording the RC car in slow motion. They’d be better if my kid didn’t get such a kick out of running off with the tripod.

When the all wheel drive kicks in.

I’m gonna send it.

I just like the sound on this one.

⎋ Bongo Cat @ bongo.cat

It's a cat... playing a bongo.