Amish Barn


> The only thing where you need a big group of people to do something is when you’re building an Amish barn.
>
> -- <cite>[George Lois](https://www.fastcodesign.com/90167996/ad-legend-george-lois-magazine-covers-are-trash-today)</cite>


Build and Deploy a Website in Under Five Minutes and Fifty-Five Seconds


At first glance, five minutes and fifty-five seconds seems like a pretty arbitraty unit of time to measure something by. Does it read better as 1 “Bohemain Rhapsody”?

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fJ9rUzIMcZQ" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I had a goal to show off how to create and deploy a website as fast as possible -- and after a few tries, I couldn't do it under five minutes. But six minutes... plenty of time! Especially when you've got a sweet Brian May guitar solo to give you a little boost 4 minutes in.

I demoed these steps at a weekly work meeting, but everyone in the room had about the same background as me, so for you, random Internet stranger, some assumptions:

## Assumptions (If you really want to get this done in under six minutes):

- You have a github (or bitbucket account), git installed on your computer, and know basic git commands.
- You have node and npm installed and a general idea of how npm works.

If these assumptions don’t apply to you, you’ll need to budget some more time. If you’re just getting started with git or npm, you might need the entirety of _Live at Wembley '86_. If you’re brand new to development, consider loading up the entire Queen discography.

Now that you’ve got a reasonable time bound for this, let’s get to it.

## Create a Website

We’re going to use [Gatsby](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/) for this. Gatsby is a React based static site generator. There’s some comprehensive [getting started instructions](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/) here, but here’s the TL;DR version.

`npm install --global gatsby-cli`

from your favorite command line, pick a folder and then:

```
gatsby new gatsby-site
cd gatsby-site
gatsby develop
```

and once it’s done loading, like magic you’ve got a website at [localhost:8000](localhost:8000).

## Set up Git

Create a new repo at your git host of choice (bitbucket or github). Either of them will give you instructions for pushing up new code, basically:

```
git init
git remote add origin [your-origin-here]
git push origin master
```

- but follow their instructions if you’re unfamiliar with git. You can refresh the repository to verify the code is there.

## Deploy it Using Netlify

I cannot speak more highly of [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/), but if you’re doing this at “Bohemian Rhapsody” speed for now I’ll just say that Netlify makes Gatsby deploys crazy easy. Sign up for an account, ideally using the login for your git host (github, bitbucket, etc). Once you’re in you’ll see a dashboard with a big “New site from Git” button. Click that then:

- Pick your git host.
- Pick your repo.
- There’s a third step to set it up, but Netlify already knows it’s a Gatsby site so everything is set up for you.
- Hit deploy and... that’s it, you’re done. Within seconds Netlify should have a semi-randomly generated URL for your website.

## Why This is Awesome

The charade of creating a site and deploying it in under six minutes aside, this is awesome for a few reasons:

- We never actually _built_ the site. Running `gatsby develop` spins up a hot-reloading development environment, but Netlify actually did the build step for you. There are other services that will do this, but there’s usually a few more hoops involved to get it working.
- Netlify will let you change the randomly generated URL to a domain you own for free. They do one-click installs of HTTPS too.

Once you’ve done this once, you can spin up and deploy static sites to your heart’s content. And these sites are only quasi static, Gatsby is based on the idea of the (JAMstack)[https://jamstack.org/] - JavaScript, APIs, and markup. You can even feed Gatsby content from live sources hosted elsewhere, like a WordPress site or [Butter CMS](https://buttercms.com/) - basically anything with an API endpoint. Even Netlify is only quasi-static - they have features like [form handling](https://www.netlify.com/docs/form-handling/) to deal with most of the tasks you might have needed server side code for in the past.

That’s it. Hopefully you followed along and got a website up and running. If not, at least you got to enjoy some Queen.

<iframe src="https://giphy.com/embed/cAfaWIcWr7qus" width="480" height="264" frameBorder="0" class="giphy-embed" allowFullScreen></iframe><p><a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/cAfaWIcWr7qus">via GIPHY</a></p>


Dude You Got a Dell


About a year ago I was ready for a new computer.

I had money set aside to buy one, and was just waiting for the release of the new Macbook Pros. And then they released it... and I didn't get one. I had a number of older Macbook Pros that I 💖, and when I had them you couldn’t convince me to ever use a Windows laptop instead. But in the years that passed since the last owning a MBP, a few things happened on the Windows side:

- Windows 10 released, and while I have issues with it, it’s the best release of Windows so far.
- I’m more OS agnostic than I used to be. I use a Windows PC for development at work, and there are no apps that I have a strong preference[^1] for that exist only on MacOS.

...and a few things happened on the Mac side. The last MBP I had was a 2012 model and it was great for the following reasons:

- It had an SD card reader! That was amazing at the time, and made importing photos off of my DSLR so much easier.
- It had an ethernet port.
- I had an Nvidia GPU in it, which made you believe Apple actually cared about gaming.
- You could upgrade it. It came with 4GB of RAM and a 250 GB spinny-disk and left my possession with 8GB and a sweet SSD.
- I bought it from Microcenter for under $1000. Actually, well under at $899, brand new.

So Apple decided to get rid of all of the things I liked, and focus on things I didn't care that much about, like making the computer incredibly light and adding a useless touchbar, while increasing the price.

So instead of a Macbook, I am now the “proud” owner of a refurbished Dell Inspiron 7577.

![Dude you're getting a Dell](//images.ctfassets.net/o5rm2cuzwbxj/4FGFGGqOTeKUeGoyEaASw4/3c6d80ec783b820f1f046475d5c7f5b5/dell-dude.jpg)

Pros:

- It has a GTX1060 (MaxQ) GPU in it. It can play Overwatch at 60 FPS on high settings without breaking a sweat. Attempting to do that on a Macbook Pro would have required setting large piles of money on fire on something like an external Thunderbolt GPU box and dual booting Windows.
- It has an SD card reader! And an ethernet port! And an HDMI port! And a Thunderbolt port so I can attach a dock and get an entire second set of all of those ports!
- It has one screw that keeps the bottom on, and if you take it off, you can upgrade / replace whatever you want in there.
- I picked up a refurbished[^2] model and it cost about 50% less than a similar refurbished Macbook Pro would have cost.

Cons:

- The screen isn't great. I’ll conceed that Apple’s retina screens are pretty amazing.
- It weighs about 3 times what a MBP would weigh, but again, I didn't need it to be super portable.
- I’ve never used a Windows laptop trackpad that was half as nice to use as a Mac’s, although I will say that this one is better, and has multitouch support.

It’s worth noting here that I have an iPad Pro that I’m pretty enamoured with, and it was a driver for not needing a laptop running MacOS. 95% of what I used MacOS for exists on iOS, and the iPad is lighter, cheaper, and (in some cases) faster than a MacOS running laptop. If the two OSs ever merged, I’d consider getting a Mac laptop again, but until then I’m happy with Mac apps running on an Arm processor and everything running on a much cheaper Intel box.

<hr />

<span id="fn-1"><a href="#fnref-1">1</a></span> I will admit that there's no good Windows replacement for Tweetbot, and not being able to use Sketch is _annoying_, but I am equally annoyed that they won't support Windows. And my favorite writing app, iA Writer, has [a kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/reichenstein/a-focused-writing-app-for-windows) for a Windows version!

<span id="fn-2"><a href="#fnref-2">2</a></span> I try to buy refurbished computers and electronics whenever possible. Best case, they're just a computer someone returned, worst case they failed in some way and then got fixed, but that just means someone else took the early part of the [bathtub curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve) for you. Also, some times you get unexpected free upgrades.


Letting your brain turn to the consistency of canned cranberry sauce.

Weeknotes for the week ending November 28, 2021


Since we did the family Thanksgiving last weekend, the last four days have been nothing but relaxation for us. The six-year old watched TV until her brain melted, my wife read books or did research until her brain melted, and I just kind of chilled until my already melted brain reshaped. Or something. Maybe it’s still a little gooey.

### The end of spooky season…
I picked up the _[RESIDENT EVIL 2](https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP0102-CUSA09193_00-BH2R000000000001/)_  remake around Halloween. I finally beat it this weekend. I’m not usually a fan of  games that you have to play through twice to completely enjoy but I went through both the Claire and Leon runs and I'm glad I did. I played the original game on the N64 and never beat it, so this might set a record for the longest time to finish a game.

I also said [last week](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2021/11/weeknotes-for-the-week-ending-november-21-2021) that I would start reading again, and I did. I finished _[Mexican Gothic](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780525620808)_, which was a well done little bit of horror. I think pretty early on it became obvious where the plot was going so I sped through the later half of the book but I'd still recommend it [^1].

### …start of snowy season
Put up the tree. Immediately the cats starting losing their minds.

![Maggie under the Christmas tree](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/cat-christmas.jpeg)

We also watched [The Shop Around the Corner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shop_Around_the_Corner) which is the lesser known of the Jimmy Stewart Christmas movies. Arguably the better of the two.

## Remapping my life
Every year around Christmas / New Years I look at the systems I used for my personal life the year before and reevaluate things. This year I wanted to get a head start on it, mainly because in past years if I start something at the beginning of the New Year and then find out three months in it’s not working I think “well I’ve already got three months” in or “well there’s only nine months left?” or some such silly ideas.

Today I sat down and organized Things, Bear, and iCloud to all be in line. Essentially I borrowed the structure from Things (Areas with Projects in them) and used that in Bear and iCloud. So now at the top level of iCloud there’s the areas, and inside of that there are folders that correspond to a project or context for that area. Same with Bear, there’s top level tags for the areas, and second level tags for the projects / context.

Some notes on the process:
- MacOS allows you to add comments to files and folders and show them in Finder. Between that and tags I can’t think of a reason to add an external app on top of this to organize files.
- There’s a folder in Finder labeled something along the lines of “IDFK what any of this is”. I’ll get to it… eventually. The point is there is only _one_ folder named that now, not multiple.
- The remnants of the early days of doing iCloud storage means that the `/` folder of iCloud is a disaster to organize, so I created this structure inside of `/documents` instead, and the top level can be whatever apps want to make of it.
- Bear has been the hardest to get through, because for a bit I thought I could just map connected ideas by hashtags, so there were way too many top level hashtags. So now it’s either remove the hashtag, or delete the note, or find a better one.

I did find this in one of my Bear notes, from _[Think Again](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781984878106)_:

> As Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio told me, “If you don’t look back at yourself and think, ‘Wow, how stupid was I a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the last year.”

So I guess I learned something in the last year?

## COVID time
I might have more thoughts on this later[^2], but for now I’m just here to point out that with us entering COVID round three…

![Street Fighter round three start screen](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/gifs/round3-fight.gif)

…we’re looking at two years of whatever we’ve been calling the last two years, and should probably stop talking about “the new normal” or “the way things were” and start living like things are as they are. I suppose it’s a human way of thinking to say “now is _bad_ but the future will be different and better!” but… I dunno, it’s probably not!

[^1]: In case you’re thinking “Joe that doesn’t seem nearly lazy enough for a lazy long weekend” I also made it to the final boss of _[Metroid Dread](https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/metroid-dread-switch/)_, figured out how the loop works in _[Deathloop](https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/deathloop/)_ and started a [second book](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062060624). This isn’t quite pre-kid levels of lazy but now that she’s old enough to be lazy herself it’s getting closer.
[^2]: Is having thoughts on days that aren’t Sunday part of why I reorganized all my projects/notes/files? Stay tuned!

Weeknotes for the week ending November 21, 2021


### Thanksgiving
We did Thanksgiving this weekend with my parents. I’m a big fan of doing holiday gatherings _not_ on holidays, whenever possible, because traveling and planning is so much easier. Some menu notes from this year:
- I [spatchcocked the turkey](https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-spatchcock-cook-turkey-thanksgiving-fast-easy-way-spatchcocked), coated it in mayonnaise and [bird herbs](https://www.generalstorepr.com/product/bird-herbs/317595) and cooked at 450° for about 80 minutes (it was a 12.something pound bird). Came out fantastic. Only tough part is [going full _Predator_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjWVWLTAHaU) and pulling the backbone out.
- If you’re going to make sweet potato casserole and attempt to cook it with the turkey at 450°, _do not_ put it under the turkey pan unless you want the marshmallows to immediately caramelize.
- I made the [easy self-rising biscuits](https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/easy-self-rising-biscuits-recipe) with [King Arthur Self Rising Flour](https://shop.kingarthurbaking.com/items/unbleached-self-rising-flour). Easy, like it says, came out great.
- Homemade cranberry sauce is the big winner (for me). I did it this year with 1/4 cup of red wine we had open and orange zest.
- Stuffing and gravy we’ve outsourced to store bought. Both take too long to make for the end result (and you won’t have any drippings cooking the turkey the way I did).
- [Maple-Honey Pecan Pie](https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1022734-maple-honey-pecan-pie?smid=yt-nytfood&smtyp=cur?ftag=MSF0951a18) for dessert. A++++, would eat again.

I don’t have any pictures because this isn’t Instagram. I made the food, I ate the food.

### Speaker of the House
I ordered new speakers / tried out switching around the ones we had. I picked up the two base, not ad-revenue-driven “smart speakers” on the market, the Apple Homepod Mini and the Ikea Symfonisk shelfspeaker. Both are around $100. They’re both… ok. They work for what I wanted them for, the Homepod (mini) is in an office, and the Symfonisk is in the basement literally being used as a shelf. If I didn’t also want a shelf I think a stereo pair of dumb speakers would have blown it away. I also tried the mini as the output for the TV (haha - no!), and tried the Homepod in place of the lower-end soundbar we have. I think a stereo pair of Homepods would sound great. I’d think a stereo pair up front and stereo minis as satellites should work really great. I expect that will be a thing Apple sells and supports just before the heat-death of the universe.

### etc
- [Why SOLID principles are still the foundation for modern software architecture](https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/11/01/why-solid-principles-are-still-the-foundation-for-modern-software-architecture/). I liked this article from one of the Stack Overflow emails this week. Good examples of SOLID were always from class based languages, which made it hard to get in my head which had (until recently) only had working knowledge of languages that didn’t have classical inheritance at all.
- [The secret of the macOS Monterey network quality tool](https://danpetrov.xyz/macos/2021/11/14/analysing-network-quality-macos.html) never hit [fast.com](https://fast.com) again!
- I haven’t [finished a book](https://www.builtwith.coffee/books) since early September. Maybe because I tend to read for a few hours on weekend mornings when I am reading a lot, and those hours have been replaced with mountain biking. Or I got stuck on a boring book and found myself overly distracted reading digital ones. Either way, I got some more dead-tree books today. Winter is coming, and all.

Weeknotes for the week ending November 14, 2021

<span role="image" aria-label="Falling Leaves">🍂🍂🍂</span>

![Lorelei riding her bike at the school.](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/leaf-kid-bike.jpeg)
![A bird’s nest with broken eggs on top of a pile of leaves.](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/leaf-seasons.jpeg)
![A mountain bike in the woods next to a beat up couch.](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/leaf-bike.jpeg)

### etc
- Our not quite five-year-old LCD TV has been acting up lately, sometimes turning two solid colors and then shutting down, sometimes not wanting to turn on, sometimes not wanting to turn off. Like any piece of modern technology, debugging the issue is a combination of:
	- Check every physical input, output, and also the software settings on the inputs and outputs.
	- Check the software settings on the TV itself.
	- Reset all of the above.
	- If it’s still failing you can narrow it down to a hardware issue. The TV has a mainboard, a T-Con board, and a power controller. Try to figure out, based on what’s failing, which of these is most likely. Given the set of symptoms I’ve seen, they all seem equally likely.
	- Do some mental math on whether or not the cost of parts + time is < a new TV, factoring in that the new TV will have 5 years of technology improvements.
	- Now do the last equation but factor in that the new TV will also have 5 years of additional software related issues.
	- Give up, go outside.

Weeknotes for the week ending November 7, 2021


Not a lot of updates this week. It was a super busy one at work, so that was my main focus. When things get busy my journaling falls off first, then scraps of notes, _then_ photos, and I’ve got like two photos from this week so I guess that means something.

### Daylight Savings
The Solar Dial is my “weekend” watch face for my Apple Watch. It’s set to show the temperature, when the Sun is going to set, and if it’s going to rain - and also the date because I have never, in my life, had any fucking idea what day it is. Today it gets a bit more fun by lining up on both sides.

![The Solar Dial on my Apple Watch on Daylight Savings](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/symmetry.jpeg).

Unfortunately for the next months it will slowly descend into a tiny sliver of sunlight. I should put on my bucket list taking it to a location with 24 hours of sunlight.

### etc
- [Some new BMWs won't have touchscreens thanks to chip shortage](https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/5/22765709/bmw-chip-shortage-touchscreen-car-suv-manufacturing). Finally some good news from the chip shortage. I never thought touchscreens would catch on in cars. I get it, it’s cheaper to make a UI with no physical constraints, but of all places to add more distractions. I’d like to believe that the lack of chips will lead designers to think — does this need a screen? Does this need a chip to manage controls? Can it be done physically? I know the more likely outcome is another World War to control supply, or countries colonizing planets for materials à la _The Expanse_, but as someone who is primarily a UI developer, maybe I should be happy for the job security. The robots will fight the wars, right?

Weeknotes for the week ending October 31, 2021


Writing this while manning the trick-or-treat duties. Not a lot of kids so far this year[^3], which is surprising. Last year we had a decent turnout even with COVID and it being below freezing.

![Our house, decorated for Halloween](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/halloween-door.jpeg)

### Y, the First Book
I started re-reading _Y: The Last Man_. We’ve been watching [the TV series](https://press.hulu.com/shows/y-the-last-man/) on Hulu, but I’d forgotten the exact plot beats of the comic. _Y_ was the first comic I got into when I got _back_ into comics as an adult, and I’m enjoying how the TV series is going deeper into some character’s backstories, being _more_ subtle about others[^1], and splitting other characters into multiple characters (and going deeper into the backstories of both!). I’m glad it’s getting the treatment it deserves.

### Elfa on the shelf
I ripped down a bunch of builder’s favorite Closetmaid shelves in our house this week, and replaced them with Elfa shelving. They aren’t cheap, but I do like that you can set the entire thing up with 6 screws in a headrail, and then make infinite[^2] layers of shelves in-between. The only complaint is that every piece has a sticker on it, and about 84% of the installation time is peeling stickers and getting rid of packaging.

### etc
Lorelei is back home with a pile of candy. Small turnout this year so… I think I’m gonna help myself to <s>one</s> <s>two</s> a few of these candies we bought to hand out.

Oh and if you’re curious, my Halloween candy power rankings:

1. Butterfinger. They are way too sweet and I would never eat one outside of Halloween but that once a year sensation of jamming them all up in your gums is _chef’s kiss_.
2. Kit Kat. Also not a candy I enjoy outside of Halloween, but I appreciate that they’ve optimized for sharing.
3. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups/Bats/Vampires/Mummies/whatever. I’m old enough that I find Reese’s peanut butter horrifyingly sweet, but again, once a year, gimme gimme.
4. All of the sour / fruit flavored stuff.
5. Everything else. Not because any of them are bad, but because we live in such a land of plenty that anything that isn’t immediately consumed has to quickly fight with Thanksgiving pies and then Christmas candies and then on a day in the deepest, darkest part of February you’ll find a leftover Snickers in the cupboard and eat it and it will bring you no joy, only despair in the knowledge that time marches ever onward, and even the sweetest treats can be reduced to a stale, tasteless lump of its former glory.

Happy Halloween!


[^1]: No spoilers, but the comic starts off by throwing a bunch of theories at the reader as to why all the men died, and the TV series is very much keeping one of them a secret!
[^2]: Or like, 8, max. It’s still a clever system.
[^3]: By the time I finished writing this we were at about 20 trick-or-treaters, closer to average for this house.

I’m just glad I’m not the oldest person at this show yet.

Weeknotes for the week ending October 24, 2021


### Get in the pit
![Days N Daze at the Middle East in Cambridge](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/days-n-daze.jpeg)

Went to a concert for the first time since COVID. The show was [Crazy & The Brains](https://crazyandthebrains.net) (first punk band I’ve seen use a xylophone), [Bridge City Sinners](https://www.bridgecitysinners.com), better explained in their own words:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_tCvb39Lt7k" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

And [Days N Daze](https://daysndaze.net), short one member, but made up for with some mouth trumpet and backup from the previous bands.

Two notes:
- I think this was the biggest crowd I’ve been around since the last show I saw at the Middle East, in January of 2020. Go big or go home, I guess.
- I adore that no one in Cambridge cares about other people _at all_. It’s already pretty on-brand for New Englanders to ignore other people, but when a person in a skull mask, leather jacket with studs, and a kilt can walk around with no one saying anything, that’s perfect.

And shoutout to Dan for getting the tickets and convincing me to leave the house. We both acknowledged it’s a lot harder these days.

### Professional
An iPhone 13 Pro showed up this week. I wasn’t planning on upgrading my XR (it was fine), but the AT&T trade-in for a decent amount of money only to be mind-controlled by them for the rest of your life[^1] was hard to pass up. Also, the number of cameras. My XR was definitely lacking in [Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades](https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-1819584036) energy.

So far that camera has been great for taking pictures of my child who finds the most adorable faces to make.

![Lorelei smooshing her face](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/smoosh-face.jpeg) 

### etc
Just posting this for posterity, so some day my kid can find this and know that I was good at video games (some times, when other people are bad).
<div style="padding:75% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/638454126?h=c6695513d2&amp;badge=0&amp;autopause=0&amp;player_id=0&amp;app_id=58479" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" title="fortnite-endgame.mov"></iframe></div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script>

[^1]: I was just pushed an update (over 5G, of course), that informed me this is not true.

Even Zecora knows to wear a mask!


![Zecora from My Little Ponies saying she needs to wear a mask to prevent infection](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/my-little-pony.jpeg)

From [My Little Pony - Friends Forever #21](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/my-little-pony.jpeg) from… October of 2015. Also worth noting when the find the cure, no one (not even Applejack) makes a fuss about how they can’t be forced to take it.

Which reminded me we watched [Six Degrees of Separation](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108149/) last week, and there’s a scene where Will Smith’s character talks about how his father (who he pretends is Sidney Poitier) is going to make a movie version of _Cats_.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TImaL1TzlFk" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

History repeating, and what not.

They finally remade my 2013 Macbook Pro


The very first blog post on this blog is about [why I decided to get a Dell instead of a new Macbook Pro](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2018/02/dude-you-got-a-dell). I’m glad to see the new M1 Pro/Max fixes everything. I already bought an M1 Air but someday this touchbar/butterfly workbox will get replaced with one of these, so there’s that to look foward to.

Also, that Dell I went with was fine. I ended up getting rid of it because I don’t game on PC any more. You’d still be better off with any Dell with a dedicated GPU than a Mac for gaming, even if it will pull down 400 watts of power to run.

You can have the things you want a long time from now, and the things you don't want now.

Weeknotes for the week ending October 17, 2021


Let’s start with a riddle:<br />
Q: What do a couch and a baby have in common?<br />
A: If you want one now, you have to wait 10 months.

### The Jordan’s HyperMegaSuperstore
We purchased an Ikea sectional when we moved into this house not many years ago. It was fine, it filled the space we wanted to fill, but lately it’s become spine-tinglingly uncomfortable[^1]. We went to the Jordan’s superstore which is… definitely not one of my favorite places on Earth, but the combo of nice weather / COVID / and the fact that every scrap of furniture upholstery is sitting in a cargo ship currently lost in the middle of the Pacific meant there was hardly any one there. We ordered some new couches and a chair and they’ll be in our house (<span role="image" aria-label="fingers crossed">🤞</span>) before I die.

Since it was pretty empty, we took Lorelei to do the [crazy indoor ropes course thing](https://www.beanstalkatjordans.com) they have there. The excitement of it was enough to get her into the harness and up to the first level, but after a few crossings I got two big thumbs down while she held on to one of the landing posts.

![Lorelei running across the ropes course](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/ropes-course.jpeg)

After that she came down and did the _much closer to Earth_ version a few thousand times.

### Oktoberfest
The team got together in Woostah on Monday. This is the third time I’ve seen them IRL since starting at Chewy. The entire team has joined during the COVID <s>lockdown</s> <s>year</s> era.

![A bunch of dudes sitting on a porch.](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/sausage-fest.jpeg)

### Getting into the Spirt of the Season
Growing up we had a few people in the neighborhood I trick-or-treated in who would take things too seriously. Like, put on a hockey mask then hide in a leaf pile with an actual chainsaw seriously. So, I’ve always been a fan of more sedate Halloween decorating. A few pumpkins, maybe some sugar skulls, a couple of leaves I failed to rake blown about. Lorelei had a specific request for spider webs this year. Sure, why not. I had to go to Home Depot anyway, so I brought her along, thinking they always have a seasonal display with some decorating stuff in it. Well, apparently the “season” appropriate for October 15th is Christmas. But! It’s 2021, and “thanks” to COVID there are hundreds of empty retail stores out there for [Spirit](https://www.spirithalloween.com) to sink its creepy claws into. So we found one of those, which, amazingly I don’t think I’ve ever been in. They had an entire rack full of decorative spider webs. The store had probably the most people I’ve seen in a retail establishment since the beginning of the the COVID <s>lockdown</s> <s>year</s> era. We passed on the 7+ foot animatronic [Baphomet](https://www.spirithalloween.com/product/decorations/animatronics/7-6-ft-baphomet-animatronic-decorations/pc/1005/c/0/sc/1011/222779.uts) but man for $300 that puts the animatronics in some local theme parks to shame.

### etc
- [Johnny Decimal](https://johnnydecimal.com). I like the idea of it, I’ve been getting better about keeping folder structures the same in any given context, e.g. Things has areas and projects under it, my notes app has the same areas and same projects, the folders under iCloud have the same areas, etc. I like the idea of adding numbers in, if only to remind you that you need an upper limit on how many things you can keep in your head.

[^1]: Or, I’m getting old. Or it’s both. 

Welcome to ~spooky~ puzzle season. A release at work, the trouble with manuals, and moving notes around.

Weeknotes for the week ending October 10, 2021


### Ship it!
![Screenshot of the new design on Chewy.com's Connect with a Vet feature, which I worked on.](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/cwav.png)

Big release at work this week; it all went well, and our application is much more accessible now, so it feels pretty good! Remember if you ever need an on demand video or text consultation with a veterinarian, [Connect With a Vet](https://www.chewy.com/app/content/connect-with-a-vet)!

### RTFM (if it exists)
Three only slightly related thoughts, that mean something to me because I used to write technical instruction manuals for a living.
1. I installed a blower fan in our gas fireplace this weekend. The description online said it was “pre-wired” and all you had to do was plug it in, but the comments said no, there was more. Some research showed there are three main ways gas fireplace wiring is found: a junction box with cables in it, a junction specifically wired for gas fireplaces (we had this, more later), or just a normal power outlet. The “pre-wired” bit made sense for the normally wired power outlet, but the junction box in our fireplace had a fan outlet which didn’t have power unless two leads were getting a signal from a thermocouple, so the fan only has power when the fireplace is hot. But again, this unit was “pre-wired” so the thermocouple controlled the unit _assuming it had power_. Anyway, the diagrams included were not helpful, the comments online were not helpful, in the end after pulling some wires apart and realizing that was dumb, I also realized the outlet under our fireplace also had a plug labeled “REM/AUX” which has... always on power. So all I had to do was plug it into that.
2. For a while I’ve thought it would be nice to associate notes with workouts that are recorded by my watch and saved in Apple Fitness. I’ve had some hacky solutions like sharing the work out to my notes app and adding content there, but I realized this weekend that [HealthFit](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/healthfit/id1202650514) the app that I’ve been using _for years_ to sync my Apple workout bike rides to Strava... has a notes field.
3. I got a physical copy of [Metroid Dread](https://metroid.nintendo.com)[^1] this week. Whenever I open a physical game I expect there to be something inside, but there was nothing but the game. Instead someone had to design and code the first (at least) 30 minutes of the game explaining things to the player, instead of just giving them those details in a book along with the game. I’ve played literally every Metroid, I’m just here to shoot blobby aliens and turn into a ball, let me at it!

### etc
- I said last week it’s spooky season, it’s actually puzzle season. Finished two this week.

<div class="two-up">
<img src="https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/frida.jpeg" alt="Frida Kahlo puzzle completed."><img src="https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/mystery.jpeg" alt="Mystic Maze puzzle competed.">
</div>

[Frida from eeboo](https://eeboo.com/collections/puzzles/products/viva-la-vida-1000-piece-puzzle) and [The Mystic Maze from Magic Puzzle Company](https://magicpuzzlecompany.com).

- I’m trying out [Craft](https://www.craft.do) as a replacement for Bear (at home). I do love Bear but I also have a ton of notes that could use lightweight table markup, or rollups, or just putting two things side-by-side, or a quick preview of a PDF... the list goes on. Bear was a replacement for Notion for me, after Notion got too annoying to use offline. Craft borrows (or, steals) a lot from Notion, but it’s a Mac Catalyst app and it works offline, and you can even BYOS (bring your own storage) and save your content in iCloud instead of their cloud[^2].

[^1]: I don’t invest in cryptocurrency but I _do_ invest in physical copies of Nintendo games. I think I’ve picked the right horse, assuming the course is a few million miles long.
[^2]: It’s worth noting since I’m comparing the two that Bear already uses iCloud. It’s also worth noting that Craft has an entire [support page](https://support.craft.do/hc/en-us/articles/360019706978-iCloud-Troubleshooting-for-External-Storage) on dealing with iCloud because while it’s stable and secure, there’s also a good reason almost every other app has rolled their own cloud storage solution.



Weeknotes for the week ending October 3, 2021


It’s October. The wife and I had Friday off, and thought maybe we’d get lunch in Salem. We didn’t really think October 1st, a full 30 days away from Halloween would be an issue, but people take October being spooky season seriously. Instead we ate lunch in town, which is another town that used to be part of Danvers, which is where the “Salem” Witch Trials took place, but don’t tell the tourists that.

### A Leaf on the Wind, and The Good Lord Bird.
Before attempting lunch on Friday I went out for a bike ride. One of my favorite things when mountain biking is unintentionally sneaking up on wildlife, slipping through the trees quickly and quietly enough that they don’t notice you until you’re close, and then they jump and run off. Happened with a few deer, but the treat was a Pileated woodpecker jumping off a tree and flying in front of me for a few hundred feet.

![Deer in the woods. Seems hungry.](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/deer.jpeg)
_Find the deer. Someday I’ll have a phone with a telephoto lens._

Related, an article I read this week about the [Ivory-billed woodpecker being declared extinct](https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/22700280/extinct-animals-birds-biodiversity-loss). As a kid I had a t-shirt that was treated so that when it was cool the silhouettes of dozens of animals were on it, and when it got hot, they disappeared. This wasn’t even a commentary on global warming, it was just — hey, stop tearing down the places these animals live. But, they’re probably all gone now.

> By some estimates, populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish have declined by almost 70 percent on average since 1970. It’s the reason you tend to see fewer bugs on your windshield when driving cross-country and hear less birdsong when hiking through the forest. 

Also how many animals died to make a t-shirt treated with some heat sensitive chemical. I am not a biozoologist but I want to say the Earth having almost 70% fewer types of things living on it is bad.

### Everything is crap

> There’s just so much crap being offered for sale or rent today — so much that we’re expected to spend money on and like even though it’s incompetently or carelessly made.

From [Snake and Ladders](https://blog.ayjay.org/criterion/) by way of [Rhoneisms](https://www.patrickrhone.net/10797-2/). We’ve been looking at furniture lately and:

1. You can’t even get it because [supply chains are fucked](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/supply-chain-issues/).
2. It’s nearly impossible to distinguish crap from not-crap. Furniture brands are spun up out of the ether to repackage the same item at different price tiers, and with so many of the stores going all online, the details of the quality of the fabric, stitching, construction, are passed off to the reviews of previous buyers, who may or may not be real.

I take back that _everything_ is crap, but the [paradox of choice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice) only serves to make me think that, by default, something is crap unless proven otherwise.

### etc
If you follow me on RSS (or, simply look at the post below this one), you might have seen some odd things pop up. For a while I’ve wanted to be able to post to here “like Twitter”, i.e. from my phone and as easily as possible. The entire site is driven from Markdown files in Git, so I hooked up a [Netlify function](https://functions.netlify.com) to take in a JSON POST body and send the picture to an S3 bucket and the content to Github as a new commit on `main`, and an iOS Shortcut to export a photo from Photos and allow me to append some text to it. And it works! Mostly! I don’t delete my mistakes, so if you click on “permalink” on the post below it, uh, goes nowhere. Once it goes somewhere I’ll write up some details on how it works.

General complaints about software updates and specific excitement about snake updates.

Weeknotes for the week ending September 26, 2021

### iOS 15
I upgraded all of my iDevices to iOS15 (or… whatever their equivalents are called. tvOS/HomeOS _something-point-oh_). A few quick notes:
- **The hassle of micro-services, in your own home!:** I had a home automation that was set to turn the lights on at 7:30am. When I set it up, it worked! Later, it stopped working. The lights would turn on at 10:30am. Clearly a timezone issue, but from what? Not my phone, the Hue app and hub seemed to think it was in the same location as us. I checked the HomePod, also EST, updated it and it started working at 7:30am again. Until this week, when it went back to 10:30am. I finally figured out that the Apple TV was set to its original Cupertino time zone (why, though?) and depending on some magical cloud logic the Homepod and Apple TV would switch off being the “home hub”.
- **Don’t remind me:** I used to run the iOS betas on my iPad. I used to use Apple Notes and Reminders. That is, until one iOS update required redoing the Reminders database, and the Reminders app was out of sync between my devices until a new version of iOS and MacOS were released. That was years ago, and yet that remains a problem today. You added tags to your reminders and made a smart list? Neat, you can see them on your Mac in a few months. Maybe, assuming MacOS releases on time. It’s worth it to use 3rd party replacements for both of those apps because you’ll at least get major updates across platforms all at once. It is insane to me that Apple still ties minor software updates to major OS releases. I will acknowledge that they gave us Safari 15 early, but the system browser being tied to the operating system was a bad idea 20 years ago so let’s not be too impressed.

Beyond those gripes, there’s a ton of low level quality of life improvements. The new maps font is nice. Widgets on the iPad are great (although I wonder why it took an extra release to get them), and the redesigned multitasking UI makes it much more usable. The UI team working on the Weather app is amazing.

### Hitchin’ a ride

![2014 Subaru Forester with the bumper removed for a hitch install.](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/exhausting.jpeg)

I put a trailer hitch on our Forester on Saturday. I wanted a hitch mount rack for the [new bike](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2021/09/weeknotes-for-the-week-ending-september-05-2021) - it’s way too long and heavy for me to easily get on and off the roof rack, but that necessitated having a hitch to put the hitch rack on first. I decided to do it myself because sometimes I enjoy working on cars, and I found a [version of the install that](https://www.subaruforester.org/threads/no-drill-curt-hitch-install.374929/) that involved no drilling, only wrenching. Some thoughts:

- I used to work on cars a lot. I used to be under my first car (a Subaru WRX) all the time, to the point where almost nothing on that car was original. I used to throw it up on jack stands, hip check the car to make sure it wouldn’t fall off, then dive under it. I would never, ever consider that these days. Somewhere between that car and this car I had cars where I did work on them because it was “cheaper” and messed things up (in occasionally catastrophic ways). These days I stick to easy bolt-on or rewire improvements.
- If you’re not someone who works on cars: modern cars are a frame and 40,000 plastic clips holding the body on and that’s it. I had my daughter come out and help put the bumper back on, at first she thought I had broken something (not a bad guess), then she assumed it was much too heavy for her to pick up, then she picked it up and noticed that it was “wobbling all over!”. I let her slap it into the clips along the edges and use a socket wrench to put in the two (!) bolts that hold it on.
- I ended up getting a [rockymounts MonoRail Solo](https://rockymounts.com/products/monorail-solo.html). Like everything bike related there were a ton of options and most of them weren’t in stock. I like this one because it only holds one bike. For some reason bike rack designers think everyone rides with friends and they drive to the trails together.

### Stop, don’t shop
- I’ve given up on Stop and Shop. I go there because it’s close, and during the pandemic they had lots of self checkout lanes so you could get in and out pretty quick. But now they’ve done something to the self checkout lanes that basically goes like this:

	1. Ring item.
	2. Open bag to put place item in.
	3. Place item in bag.
	4. Error that there is an unscanned item in the bagging area.

It’s… it’s the bag. Why would I put something in the bagging area and not put it in a bag? I don’t know what shit update they pushed recently that made this start happening but the only solution is to either pile everything into the 2’x1’ bagging area and bag it at the end, or get someone to wave their card at the machine every time you add a new bag.

And before you’re like “well it’s Stop and Shop, what do you expect” let me tell you the developers who made that change and the ones who write car automation software differ only in ambition, not intelligence.

### etc
- Alice Bartlett (whose weeknotes inspired these ones) had this [wonderful description of a particular website this week](https://alicebartlett.co.uk/blog/weaknotes-160):

> At some point I’m going to write something about how being a Tech Director for 6 months has gone. It’s gone well so maybe I should just leave it at that and save the rest of the psychopath’s playground (LinkedIn).

- We’ve had a little snake hanging out in our backyard. Lorelei and I went out this evening to see if we could find it. We didn’t, instead we found… baby snakes! 

![Baby snake](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/baby-snek.jpeg)

If only I’d made a styleguide for the site instead of throwing everything together as I thought of it.

A fresh coat of paint


With Safari 15 supporting browser chrome colors, I thought I’d throw a fresh coat of paint on the site. I made dark mode work again as well, although I think there are some pieces missing. If only I’d made a styleguide for the site instead of throwing everything together as I thought of it.

This week, summed up in two short scenes with my daughter.

Weeknotes for the week ending September 19, 2021


This week, summed up in two short scenes with my daughter.

### Reading is fundamental
_Scene: Local restaurant, on the outdoor patio. A rare family dinner outside the house because the grandparents were visiting before they set off on a cross-country train ride._

<span role=“image” aria-label=“Me”>👨</span>: What do you want to eat here?<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Daughter”>👧</span>: Hot dog!<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Me”>👨</span>: Are hot dogs on the menu?<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Daughter”>👧</span>: I dunno?<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Me”>👨</span>: Read the menu and see if you can find hot dogs.<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Daughter”>👧</span>: I can’t read!<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Me”>👨</span>: Yes you can, look at the menu and pick out something.<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Daughter”>👧</span>: Pizza! Ice cream! Waffles!<br />

_Later, outside after dusk. My father and daughter are talking about stars in the sky._

<span role=“image” aria-label=“Daughter”>👧</span>: Can I see your phone, I want to know what star that is.<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Me”>👨</span>: _Opens [Sky Guide](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sky-guide/id576588894), hands over phone._<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Daughter”>👧</span>: Oh, it’s Jupiter.<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Me”>👨</span>: How do you know?<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Daughter”>👧</span>: _Points at screen._ Ju-pi-ter. It says Jupiter.<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Me”>👨</span>: _Picks up daughter by shoulders, turns her 45 degrees._<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Me”>👨</span>: What about that one over there?<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Daughter”>👧</span>: Venus!<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Me”>👨</span>: So you... can read?<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Daughter”>👧</span>: Noooooooooooooooo

### <span role=“image” aria-label=“shark”>🦈</span>

_Scene: at [Stage Fort Park](https://essexheritage.org/attractions/stage-fort-park-gloucester-visitor-center), down on the “boardwalk” looking at the ocean._

<span role=“image” aria-label=“Daughter”>👧</span>: Look, a shark!<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Me”>👨</span>: I don’t think there are sharks here.<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Daughter”>👧</span>: It’s right there!<br />
<span role=“image” aria-label=“Me”>👨</span>: It’s probably just a ro… oh it is a shark.<br />
![Sandshark in the water near Stage Fort Park in Gloucester](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/shark.jpeg)

### etc
- I’ve used [Magnet](https://magnet.crowdcafe.com) for window management on MacOS for a long time, but it turns out there’s a free option called [Rectangle](https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle) that works just as well, and you can install it via [Homebrew](https://brew.sh), which is extra great because I have zero interest in using Mac App store apps on my work Mac.
- I went too long before getting my coffee this morning (we picked up breakfast on the car ride over to aforementioned shark park), and the coffee was weak compared to what I make at home. Took a while to recover. Maybe I should have gotten `onlyfunctionalwith.coffee` instead.

Blarg. That’s my high level recap of the week. Nothing bad happened, just a lot of blarg. I think it’s a bit of recovering from the whiplash of going from “school is about to start” to “September is almost half over”.

Weeknotes for the week ending September 12, 2021


Blarg. That’s my high level recap of the week. Nothing bad happened, just a lot of blarg. I think it’s a bit of recovering from the whiplash of going from “school is about to start” to “September is almost half over”.

### First grade
So far the reports from Lorelei about First grade have been more about her friends and what she does during the day than her Kindergarten reports, which were mostly about what they had for lunch and how she didn’t get lost at any point during the day. It’s nice that we’ve gone from like, hardened Mafia crime boss who won’t say a thing to low level goon looking to maybe give us enough to let them go.

### Take the skinheads gaming
Recently I’ve had a semi-regular “gaming night”, and I was thinking the other day it’s a continuation of “semi-active, semi-social nights” I’ve had in the past. For a long time I was in a bowling league (one in Connecticut, one in Boston), and after / concurrently with that I played in a co-ed softball league. There’s a lot of similarity, you want something that requires some (but not too much) skill, has a few breaks to catch up with the people you’re playing with, and (this part might be crucial) isn’t impeded if you chose to drink alcohol the entire time you’re doing it.

Every once in a while I think “I miss playing softball”, but tonight I took Lorelei to a local park and was watching a game being played on a nearby field, and saw someone slap a line-drive at the second baseman off a carbon fiber bat and I immediately went to “oh no I don’t miss that”. Bowling, on the other hand, I occasionally look at what it would take to open my own lane.

### HEY MAN NICE BIKE
![Tallboy at Gordon College](https://built-with-coffee.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2021/gordon-bike.jpeg)

Took the bike out this weekend and on the way back someone felt the need to yell, “HEY MAN NICE BIKE” at me from his truck. This is not the first time this has happened, and I don’t understand why! That said, two hours in the woods was a pretty good way to beat the blargs.


### etc
- Finished [The Girls' Guide To Hunting And Fishing](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780140293241). Also added a “Recommended” tab to my [books](/books) page if you want to separate the wheat from the chaff.
- I hit play on [Spark Up! by Ball Park Music](https://music.apple.com/us/album/spark-up/1502463960?i=1502463964) while writing this and Apple Music started a pretty good playlist for me.

Weeknotes for the week ending September 5, 2021

### First day of first grade
![Lorelei wearing her first grade crown.](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/first-grade.jpeg)

Started another school year. We’re doing in person this year, and Lorelei (and we) are much happier about that. The town didn’t have open arguments about mask usage, and the kids don’t seem to mind wearing them, and most of the parents seem reasonable around here, outside of some S-tier dumb-assess who showed up to the meet-and-greet day wearing AR-15 apparel[^1]. 

If you think of everything in seasons, this Fall feels more optimistic than last Fall. Less “this isn’t what I wanted” and more “this isn’t what I expected” which is par for the course of life.

### NBD (new bike day)
![My new 2021 Santa Cruz Tallboy.](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/nbd.jpeg)
_Last time it’ll ever be clean._

I’ve been biking nearly as long as I’ve been walking, and mountain biking only a bit less than that, but for the last few years I’ve been without a mountain bike. The last one I had was a Santa Cruz Nickel frame that I had slapped hand me down parts on, which was a nice enough bike, but it went into storage for a while and when it came out I realized a lot of those parts needed to be replaced, and if I was going to do that, wouldn’t it make more sense to buy something newer with bigger wheels? Sure. So I sold it, and then put off finding its replacement thinking, well, there’s house projects that need funding, and how often do I really have time with a kid, and all other excuses. I finally decided to look at getting a new bike in 2020 but… they all quickly disappeared. This Summer I finally said I’m going to find _something_ and kept tabs open at all the local shops and online, and found this 2021 Tallboy on [evo](https://www.evo.com) that’s likely a hold over shipment from last years orders. I’ve been out on two rides, and it’s a lot like the Nickel but with bigger wheels, so in the end I got what I wanted. I will add, mountain biking has gotten harder in the last 4 or 5 years that I’ve been away from it. Like, the mountains [^2] got bigger, or all the rain this year really washed out a lot more roots. It’s definitely not me being older or more out of shape.

### etc
Finished [A Children’s Bible](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781324005032) by Lydia Millet. Years of Catholic schooling has left me a fan of ominous, religious literary fiction. This book mixes a few themes: the failings of the generations who came before us, global warming and the changing climate, the separation (or lack thereof) between religion and science. It doesn’t pull them altogether in one driving plot action, but neither does the Bible, so I think that’s the point.

I mentioned [last week](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2021/08/weeknotes-for-the-week-ending-august-29-2021) I re-did my [reading list page](https://www.builtwith.coffee/books) to pull from the Notion API. I just realized that while it works wonderfully on localhost, the images don’t actually show up here. Something to add to the todo list.

[^1]: One had a particularly dumb slogan on it, so I [looked it up](https://www.lionsnotsheep.com) and… yeah. Let me tell you I never feel like a FREE person until I put on my $35 sloganized t-shirt. I’m sure they do some great advertising on Facebook. 
[^2]: “Mountain biking” in seacoast Southern New England is a bit of a funny term. “Small hill filled with tree root biking” would be the better term.

Weeknotes for the week ending August 29, 2021


Small update this week, as I spent most of the day on the Mass Pike. I forgot it’s “move in” weekend for the local colleges.

### 10 years
The main update for the week, Friday was Andrea and I’s tenth anniversary. We went out for dinner. We had (have had) grand plans to travel for… close to two years now, but having little interest in travel in never-ending pandemic times and with our town popping up a strong supply of new restaurants, we instead sent the kid down to the grandparents for the week and just enjoyed free time in our own town for the week.

![](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/a-and-j.jpeg)

_Babies on our wedding day_.

![](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/10-years-later.jpeg)

_Ten years later_.

Andrea is pretty great, and we’ll definitely give this _at least_ another ten years. We recorded an episode for her podcast this morning about our relationship. She might not run it because I mumble too much, but she might! Her accepting that I don’t quite meet her high standards has really helped keep this ship afloat ❤️.

### School supplies
School starts this week. As a kid I remember being dragged to the store to pick out new binders, folders, etc, but since Lorelei was at the Grandparents Andrea and I went to pick everything up. That might not _sound_ exciting but we both geeked out over pens and now have probably more than we’ll ever need, but, pens! Including some of these adorable [G2 Minis](https://www.pilotpen.us/brands/g2/g2-mini/?product=1504).

### Notion API
I spent a bit of time this week mucking about with the [Notion API Beta](https://developers.notion.com). I’ve used Notion on and off for a long time, it does a lot of things really well, and it for other things (writing, quick notes), it’s a bit annoying. But I’ve always wanted a quicker way to update my want to read / [read book list](/books). So far I find the API pretty good for dealing with databases — I migrated my “reading” list to it. It’s not ready for prime time for written content like using Notion as a blog CMS, but I think it might be there soon.

### Before the coffee gets cold
Finished [Before the coffee gets cold](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781335430991) this week. The local library recommended it on [Libby](https://www.overdrive.com/apps/libby/) under a magical realism category. It’s an interesting narrative device, there’s a cafe where in one seat you can go back in time (but there’s a list of rules, centrally if you want to meet someone else they have to also have been to the cafe, and you can’t change the future or past). There’s four related stories, they’re all a bit Hallmark-y, and I read it while drinking a lot of iced coffee so maybe it was the wrong season to read about coffee going cold, doesn’t get a recommended from me.



Weeknotes for the week ending August 22, 2021

A minor change this week, I’m going from bullet points to headers. This week was either chill, or I forgot to write down a bunch of stuff.

### Hurricane more like Hurrican’te
Lorelei was supposed to spend the week with her grandparents, but since they live in Connecticut <s>hurricane</s> tropical storm Henri threw a wrench in the works. It looks like this might all blow over (pun intended) and she’ll get down there later this week.

### Arts Fest Beverly
We either missed (or intentionally ignored) the arts fest in town in 2020, but since we weren’t shuttling the child off to another state on Saturday, we took a walk into town to check it out. We didn’t pick up any art this year, [unlike the last time we went in 2019](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2019/06/arts-fest-beverly), but we did get books at the [local book store](https://www.copperdogbooks.com) and jewelry. On the way back we stopped at [Backbeat Brewing Company](https://www.backbeatbrewing.com) which, even though it’s less than half a mile from our house, we hadn’t been to yet. Decent food, impressively good drinks, outdoor patio, A+++ would recommend. Highlight of this year was that we can all walk to town and back now.

### Bunny cupcakes
Lorelei watches this show called [Bread Barbershop](https://www.netflix.com/title/81288010). It’s weird, but this morning the episode she was watching the “barber” made kitty and bunny cupcakes, and rather than the plot being more of, “here’s how you do this as a barber” it was like, a real recipe. I realize that sounds odd if you’ve never seen the show, but stay with me. Lorelei asked if _we_ could do that, and I said yeah, sure, maybe. I had to go to the store anyway. This is what we came up with:
![Cupcakes decorated as bunnies](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/bunny-cakes.jpeg)

Carrot cake cupcakes, obviously. They’re bunnies.

### Fortnite vs. my free time
I played Fortnite this week for the first time years, and it’s fun. I didn’t get it at first, but I played solo games and got it. And then I realized that the Battle Pass for this season has a dance that’s a ska dance, with a matching ska song about aliens, which feels waaaaaaay more targeted at my generation than who I assumed played Fortnite, so I had to pick it up (pick it up, pick it up… you get it), and then set out to win a few rounds, skanking on the graves of my defeated enemies.

### Bonus: Balancing things on a cat
![Maggie with a flower on her head](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/maggie-balance.jpeg)

I’ve had a lot of cats in my life, but Maggie is the best one I’ve ever had for putting up with people putting things on her head.


Weeknotes for the week ending August 15, 2021

- We had a writer in residence this week, so while my wife was off doing [cool and fun things](https://www.copperdogbooks.com/event/virtual-event-jodie-slaughter) I was going full Dad with my daughter, enjoying a couple of pints of ice cream and crushing levels in a [new video game](https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/moving-out-switch/)[^1]. I consider this slightly more appropriate than what my dad used to do with me when my mom was out, which was watching 80s action movies on HBO.
- One night the ice cream was accompanied by crying. When I asked Lorelei why she was upset (seemingly out of nowhere) she said she was sad because if she got older, eventually she would die. It took a bit of back and forth to tease out that these ideas had maybe come from a TV show she likes (_Last Kids on Earth_), but I pointed out that I was much older than her, and still alive, so it was at least not a thing to worry about at the present moment. Certainly it could wait until the ice cream was finished.
- Related, I started reading [_Four Thousand Weeks (Time Management for Mortals)_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780374159122). The 4,000 weeks comes from the average life expectancy in weeks. Rather than calling this post “Weeknotes for the week ending August 15, 2001” I could title it “Week 2038 (out of, hopefully, at least 4000)”. If you want the TL;CRAWB[^2] Burkeman’s [last Health & wellbeing column in the Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/sep/04/oliver-burkemans-last-column-the-eight-secrets-to-a-fairly-fulfilled-life#comments) covers the highlights.
- I finished [_Rainbow In the Dark_](https://www.builtwith.coffee/books/2021/rainbow-in-the-dark), Ronnie James Dio’s autobiography. It’s good, but a bit niche. I didn’t get into Dio my first go round with metal; I think someone convinced me _Heaven and Hell_ wasn’t a “real” Sabbath album (in hindsight, fuck them). It was the [Killswitch Engage cover of _Holy Diver_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR7dG_m3MsI) that made me go look up everything he ever did. 🤘🤘🤘 out of five.
- Our kitchen project is entirely done. I got to put the new vent hood through its paces tonight (grits and collard greens). For someone who cooks multiple times per day, the hood and the huge workspace-style sink are the things I like best. It looks good, but oh baby those functional upgrades.
- Spent a lot of time in the yard this weekend. Saturday I got a good outside nap in, today we went out for a walk early. We spotted a praying mantis in the yard.
![Praying mantis](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/mantis.jpeg)

It seemed annoyed by us. We also walked to the beach. There’s a new rule here, if I have to carry home a pocket of seashells, they have to be used for _something_.
![Seashell art](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/she-glues-seashells-from-the-seashore.jpeg)

[^1]: A very cool thing about _Moving Out_ is that you can can adjust a bunch of properties that affect the game difficulty. So we found a setting where we both feel like we’re playing the game but it’s still a little challenging for each of us.
[^2]: Too long; can’t read a whole book.

How do they know the load limit on bridges?

Weeknotes for the week ending August 8, 2021

> Released code at work this week which was a huge refactor that had (🤞) no noticeable changes to the existing application. 
- I said that [last week](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2021/08/weeknotes-for-the-week-ending-august-1-2021) then learned, well, there were noticeable changes for the end user, mainly in that the old code gracefully handled 500 errors that should not have been thrown in the first place. It drove good conversation around how to do things better in the future (and an investigation into where/why those 500s even exist), but it was a week where being a developer felt a bit like this:

![A Calvin and Hobbes comic strip where Calvin’s dad explains to Calvin that they figure out the load limit of bridges by driving larger trucks over until the bridge breaks](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/calvin-bridges.gif)
- I made muffins yesterday morning. That’s the whole story. It was [this recipe](https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/classic-deviled-eggs-recipe-1911032) if you want a much longer story. And if you want recipes without long stories, I recommend [Paprika](https://www.paprikaapp.com). Over the years it’s becoming the app with the longest runtime on my devices.
- I’ve been reading [_Bullshit Jobs_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs). It’s unlikely I’ll finish it before the library demands its digital copy back, but it’s putting words to how I felt about my career as a Quality Assurance Specialist in Biotech. That role, which I fell into by by way of being a technical writer who understood how to file the appropriate paperwork appropriately, falls into the “box tickers” category, or, people who “who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not”. I could not better describe how I felt about filing regulatory paperwork that would never be read again. I acknowledge that the long trail of filed paperwork proves useful when something goes awry, and there are plenty of examples where regulatory compliance gets us amazing and reliable results, like the COVID vaccine. But that wasn’t a thing I saw in my day to day work, which is the sentiment the book attempts to put a more scientific eye to.
- There’s one quote in the book that jumped out at me:
> I managed to maneuver my way into a desk with its back to the wall, so I could spend as much time as possible surfing the internet or teaching myself computer programming.

It stood out because I did the same thing at my last biotech job. We had a week where my team was in-between offices, and rather than our usual dedicated bullpen space, we all had to squeeze into a conference room. Which sounds awful, but I’d get in early and grab the head of the conference room table. That seat, with a wall behind me, was the only time I’d ever had a space “to myself” at that job, and I spent the entire week running JavaScript files in Firefox to learn how the `canvas` element works.

Weeknotes for the week ending August 1, 2021

- I took Monday off and the week flew by. Also, it’s August?
- Released code at work this week which was a huge refactor that had (🤞) no noticeable changes to the existing application. Another to add to the list of “big red diff refactors” I’ve done. I think I enjoy doing them, but much less than adding features that users get to use, so if I could instead figure out a way to, Terminator style, go back and prevent devs from thinking they need to immensely overcomplicate a handful of asynchronous API calls before building the project that I eventually work on, that would be even better.
- Got two rides in this week. One where I had a vague idea of where I wanted to go, went a few miles off course, absolutely abused my poor Masi cross bike, ended up with a flat and had to walk the last mile and a half. Hard to say if it was the rock gardens, riding over a thicket of thorny bushes, or missing an enormous pothole on a dirt road and ramming the back rim of it so hard I almost went over the bars that caused the flat but I appreciate that the tube held out until almost the end. Not the first time I’ve ended a ride walking [^1], but it’s a uniquely dispiriting experience pushing a broken bicycle and while other bicyclists pass you by.
![Masi bicycle in the woods](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/masi.jpeg)
- Second ride was a much calmer ride with my daughter which was measured in “would you rather” questions per mile [^2]. Must be a thing the kids are into at Summer camp this week.
![Lorelei by the gate house at Bradley Palmer state park](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/lorelei-bp.jpeg)
- The tilers came to tile our kitchen this week, it looks great, but I learned that while you might buy _x_ number of boxes of tile, if they’re from different batches, they might not look as similar as you would think. A few last minute shuffles of where the tile would go took care of it. Agile home improvement, I’ve been calling it.
- The weather this weekend is unbelievable. We had touch up painting to do yesterday and opened all the windows and doors to let the breeze air everything out. Our extremely indoor cats have no interest in leaving the house but they do appreciate the smells and extra clear bird chirps.
![Maggie relaxing in the sunlight.](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/relax-cat.jpeg)
- I updated this blog’s version of [react-markdown](https://github.com/remarkjs/react-markdown) and cleaned up how it was implemented, the main effect of which is now I can use [^3] footnotes! 

[^1]:Nor the worst: I once rode too far for the shape I was in, and my right quad stopped working. I had a fully functional bike but couldn’t physically pedal it any further, and was a few miles and about a thousand feet of elevation away from my car.
[^2]: Hundreds, easily.
[^3]: Abuse, really.

Weeknotes for the week ending July 25, 2021


- I set up a suite of tests on a project I’m working on at work that uses [Cypress component tests](https://www.cypress.io/blog/2021/04/06/cypress-component-testing-react/). This might be the most perfect testing solution for me. I like Cypress for e2e tests, and the component tests allow you to use the syntax but mount slices of your application for testing. Not only does it mesh nicely with e2e tests, it makes testing pieces of your application visually without having to invoke the entire application on a dev server a piece of cake.
- Finished [The Light Fantastic](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062225689) by Terry Pratchett. Not my favorite Discworld novel but we got it from a library book sale for a few pennies.
- Our kitchen has a sink again! It’s big and wonderful and I never want to see a double basin sink again.
- We took up a trip to Vermont for the weekend to see my parents who, intentionally or not, live up there in the Summer. Long trip up in the dark, but we had beautiful weather all day Saturday so I’m glad we didn’t wait until Saturday morning to make the drive.
- We took a “hike” at [Sentinel Rock State Park](https://fpr.vermont.gov/sentinel-rock-state-park). It’s maybe a half mile through a field from the parking lot, but it was a good distance on a lazy-day.
![Trail at Sentinel Rock State Park](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/sentinel-rock.jpeg)
![Old foundation at Sentinel Rock State Park](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/sentinel-rock-foundation.jpeg)
- My daughter spent a lot of the morning and early afternoon catching (and releasing) bugs. It’s absolutely crazy how many fewer bugs there are up there then there used to be. My dad remarked how when we drove up in the 80s and 90s, the car would be covered in dead bugs. Now? I think I hit two.
![Moth on a sock](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/sock-moth.jpeg)
- It’s our 10th wedding anniversary (soon) so we wanted to stop by the place we were married.
![Me and Andrea in front of the Newark Union Church](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/10-years.jpeg)
- As I said, beautiful weather on Saturday…
![A nice view from the house in Newark, Vermont](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/newark-day-1.jpeg)
And then much less beautiful on Sunday.
![The view from the house in Newark, Vermont on a rainy day](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/newark-day-2.jpeg)
Which is fitting, I think, since we had a beautiful day on our wedding, and then the remnants of Hurricane Irene blew in the next day and it was windy and gross.
- I planned ahead more than usual for the drive and we stopped at better restaurants on the trip up and back. [The Common Man](https://www.thecman.com/common-man-windham/) on the way up, and [Dos Amigos](https://www.dosamigosburritos.com) on the way back, with a stop at [NH Doughnut Co.](https://www.nhdoughnutco.com) for some post ride treats.
- Traveling with an unvaccinated kid is more stressful than it  needs to be because you have no idea who actually has or hasn’t gotten vaccinated. Leaving Vermont we passed some clown show setting up that was demonstrating for keeping the government out of their veins or whatever bird brain idea they had.
- I had a little project waiting for me when I got back. The wired mouse had been driving me crazy, so I ordered a new wireless one and figured while I was there, why not color match the mouse to the keys on my keyboard.
![](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/keeb-before.jpeg)
![](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/keeb-after.jpeg)


Weeknotes for the week ending July 18, 2021


- 🌧🌧🌧🌧☀️☀️🌧
- This week was busy, with the general things that makes life busy, plus two social gatherings, which is an increase of 200% from the… entire year before. I said I would take it easy this weekend but it’s _real_ hard to be at home and not do house projects. Now it’s 7:30 on Sunday and I’m ready to relax — right after I do this… and those other things I was thinking of doing….
- Lorelei started (what we’ve been calling) school camp this week. Since she’s adamant about not wanting to learn how to read, and a mostly remote year didn’t help that, she’s spending the mornings doing “Summer school” activities then going to “fun” camp. The change seemed to affect her absolutely not at all, which is the best we could have asked for.
- Another child note, she likes to knock on our bedroom door in the morning, peek in, then walk away. It’s a subtle “I’m hungry and I might not be able to prepare the food I want today”, but it’s also a decent alarm clock so I don’t mind it. For a long time, when the door cracked open my brain tried to pattern match “child or cat”. The other day was the first time it went for “child or small burglar”. She’s still on the short side for her age but she’s doing a good job of catching up this Summer.

## Album a day
I’ve stopped, for now. Might switch over to one finding one song to appreciate every day. For now, please enjoy this song, which has been stuck in my head all week, thanks to the aforementioned child of mine. I listened to a lot of Michael Bolton as a kid, we took long cars rides every weekend in the Summer, and _Time, Love & Tenderness_ was one of the very, very few tapes we had. We later picked up a second tape, the 1991 classic… Brian Adam’s _Waking up the Neighbors_. Joke Michael Bolton songs couldn’t have a target any better than this elder Millennial.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OH6IBef79HA" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>


Wherein I get mad at computers and retreat to my yard.

Weeknotes for the week ending July 11, 2021


- I spent too many hours dealing with an issue where a previous employer off by one’d my social security number. Double check it! Also, I wonder who this person who is me shifted once is.
- Safari will be the death of me. Our app at work was using IndexedDB to store state, and I saw this in my timeline: 
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Ran into a spectacularly awful Safari bug in the latest Safari (14.1.1 on macOS and iOS 14.6).<br><br>Opening an IndexedDB database fails 100% of the time on the first try. 😩<br><br>If you refresh, it starts working.<br><br>Bug report: <a href="https://t.co/I61x27obtv">https://t.co/I61x27obtv</a><br><br>cc <a href="https://twitter.com/webkit?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@webkit</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/chris_dumez?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@chris_dumez</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/Apple?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Apple</a></p>&mdash; Feross (@feross) <a href="https://twitter.com/feross/status/1404568122158313474?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 14, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

But, ok, that’s fine, we were refactoring the app and saving less state in browser storage, and we were going to use localStorage instead because cross-tab communication is easier but haha fuck me right?

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">😬 localStorage is broken in Safari 14.1.<br><br>Tabs end up with seperate localStorage for reading, but the same localStorage for writing. This will likely result in data loss for users. (h/t <a href="https://twitter.com/forresto?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@forresto</a>)<a href="https://t.co/5Ljxl4vvbH">https://t.co/5Ljxl4vvbH</a></p>&mdash; Jake Archibald (@jaffathecake) <a href="https://twitter.com/jaffathecake/status/1389493762129375232?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 4, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

I use Safari on a day to day basis because it is fast, but also because there’s no better way to find out what dumb things are broken in Safari that will break your app than seeing it broken in someone else’s app. Oh and forget Google Lighthouse, you want to know if an app is good just open it in Safari and see if you get the “this page is consuming significant energy” warning.
- Being generally mad at computers due to the above I’ve gone back to taking notes on paper again. I have a stack of index cards on my desk and I write what ever pops up and deal with it later. I have nice [Zebra highlighters](https://www.zebrapen.com/mildliner/) to go over the notes at the end of the day and flag things that are important.
- Our [backyard patio project](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2021/06/weeknotes-for-the-week-ending-june-20) left us with a stack of extra cobblestones and a pile of extra pea gravel, so I dug up some more of the yard and made a nice border around our garden bed.
![Pea gravel and cobblestone border around our garden bed.](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/garden-bed.jpeg)

This used up exactly all of the material, and the grass there is now pleasingly geometric so we’re done with that part of the yard.
- I was drinking coffee on the back porch this morning and the air had an intense low-tide smell. I know it’s like 1% salt and 99% dead plants and animals but I love it. I took out the bike and rode down to beach, and it was one of those days where when you get to the road that runs along the beach you can feel the air change, it was colder and denser (and… the smell!).
- I dream of car-free Sundays in town. If you get out before 10 in the morning there isn’t a tremendous amount of traffic but being able to roll down any street without having to check for cars would be 💯.

🦅🇺🇸🎆. Or not, we’re just bumming around the house. If we’re lucky we’ll see some fireworks from the back deck.

Weeknotes for the week ending July 4, 2021


- 🦅🇺🇸🎆. Or not, we’re just bumming around the house. If we’re lucky we’ll see some fireworks from the back deck.
- Our new kitchen cabinets went in this week. There’s so much room now! The finishing touches (sink, hood, counters, tile) are still a few weeks out so it’s exciting but mostly non-functional.
![My daughter wondering where our old island went to.](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/island.jpeg)
_My daughter checking out the new island, I guess wondering where the old one went to._
- We had some electrical work done in the kitchen as well, and it occurred to me how the piece of paper taped to the inside of our circuit breaker panel is like code comments, most of them are wrong and you can’t trust what they say, but they might help you narrow down what you’re looking for a tiny bit.
- I also learned that electrical code now requires you to have [AFCI circuit breakers](https://www.afcisafety.org/afci/what-is-afci/) which are good because arc faults are _bad_ but I also learned that some household appliances inherently generate arcs (brushed motors, mostly) and those can trip the circuit breaker. Which is why using the “brush roller” feature on our vacuum cleaner would trip a few of the outlets in our house, but not others, but now the entire downstairs is on AFCI breakers so it trips anywhere if we use that feature.
- We watched [The Queen’s Gambit](https://www.netflix.com/title/80234304) this week. I guess everyone else watched it last year? It was really visually interesting, you can play a fun game of “find the chess boards in the set / costume design” while you watch. I enjoyed chess as the narrative frame for a coming of age story, although in my wife’s words, “all I understand is that if you take drugs you can play chess”.

## Album a day
Getting a little lazy with this. On the plus side, though, I realized the other day that the 3.5mm jack on my monitor is a line-out, not a line-in, so listening while at my desk got a lot easier. Why did I ever think it was a line-in?

- July 4: [‎Butterfly 3000 by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard](https://music.apple.com/us/album/butterfly-3000/1569279719)
- July 3: [‎On A Friday Evening (Live) by Bill Evans Trio](https://music.apple.com/us/album/on-a-friday-evening-live/1571413349)
- July 2: [‎Home Video by Lucy Dacus](https://music.apple.com/us/album/home-video/1559506368)
- July 1: [‎Below by Beartooth](https://music.apple.com/us/album/below/1555808295)
- June 30: [‎Swimming by Maple Glider](https://music.apple.com/us/album/swimming/1558456316?i=1558456318)
- June 29: [‎Date Night: Chromeo Live! by Chromeo](https://music.apple.com/us/album/date-night-chromeo-live/1566230235)

Weeknotes for the week ending June 27, 2021


- Packed up the entire kitchen this weekend. We’re getting some work done to the cabinets, new counters, other things. We’ve lived in three houses and in each wanted to do kitchen work to make it more how we’d want it instead of how we bought it: we DYI’d it in our first house and it was an improvement but didn’t really solve any of the fundamental problems of that kitchen (galley kitchen, 80 year old cabinets), we never even started in our second house (having a newborn was enough), this time we’ll finally have the kitchen we made decisions on, instead of someone else.
- Complicating the packing process was the fact that my daughter stayed home sick on Friday, and gave whatever she had to me. Between remote school and remote work we spent 2020 germ free, so far 2021 has been more of a normal year.
- Went to make an update to [my wife’s website](https://shelflovepodcast.com) this weekend on my M1 Macbook Air. Turns out however I left it last time was entirely incompatible with running the site on an ARM computer, and fixing that problem is... not easy. `npm update` should solve a problem like this, but some packages waited until major versions to ship a fix for ARM which then brought other changes. It was too much for what I knew was a simple update.
- In work notes, I’m pulling apart a Redux-Saga implementation in favor of just using the React Context API. It’s a moderately complex application, I went about it by removing the brain, essentially, pointing all of the Redux state to a Context store and replacing all of the actions with functions. I’m getting to the end of it and wrote some Cypress tests to go along with it. It’s been fun painting myself into many of the same corners that already existed in the logic, going “oh, that’s how that happened”, and then figuring out how to get out. 
- Finished [Deacon King Kong](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780735216723) by James McBride. I read [The Good Lord Bird](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781594632785) two years ago, I really enjoy his writing, lots of individuals who are odd in their own ways that get mashed together by the plot.

## Album a day
As always, I get lazy about listening to new things when I’m doing house projects. There’s always music on, it's just not often anything new.

- June 25: [‎The Golden Casket by Modest Mouse](https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-golden-casket/1565510000)
- June 24: [‎Devil Is Fine by Zeal & Ardor](https://music.apple.com/us/album/devil-is-fine/1170171234)
- June 23; [‎Mammoth WVH by Mammoth WVH](https://music.apple.com/us/album/mammoth-wvh/1551117636)
- June 22: [‎The Golden Hour by Dave Koz & Cory Wong](https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-golden-hour/1563492883)
- June 21: [‎EAT (NXT Soundtrack) - EP by Poppy](https://music.apple.com/us/album/eat-nxt-soundtrack-ep/1569831419)

Weeknotes for the week ending June 20, 2021


- It’s finished:
![Full photo of the patio in our backyard at night.](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/patio-far.jpeg)
![Close up photo of the patio in our backyard at night.](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/patio-close.jpeg)

Well, “finished”. We still need ~1.5 yards of top soil to make a flower bed, and the light “poles” are a “temporary” solution of zip-tying 2x2s to the chain link fence. As with every time we do a yard project I overestimated how much pea gravel we‘d need, so I‘m trying to figure out a place for what‘s left in the driveway before ordering more stuff to... have dumped on the driveway.

- Woke up this morning and when my daughter came down she said “Happy Father’s day” followed by “... do you like salad?”. Me: “uh, sure?”

![My Dad loves to eat... "salad"](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/salad-days.jpeg)

She came up with the same answer for her Mom on Mother’s Day. We eat a side salad with dinner a lot in this household, but I don’t think either of us have ever been like “oh yum yum salad my favorite”.

- The above was made during the last week of Kindergarten. Now comes Summer camp. Summer camp days run longer than school days (yay) but means driving there for dropoff and pickup instead of walking (boo).
- That’s it, I think? After finishing up the patio I spent most of my free time just hanging out on it. We did have mojitos with garden mint last night (on the patio, of course).

## Album a day

- June 19: [‎Life In The City by Turkuaz](https://music.apple.com/us/album/life-in-the-city/1427701366)
- June 18: [‎Miracle by Francis Lung](https://music.apple.com/us/album/miracle/1551218458)
- June 17: [‎Interludes for the Dead (feat. Neal Casal) by Circles Around The Sun](https://music.apple.com/us/album/interludes-for-the-dead-feat-neal-casal/1059916243)
- June 16: [‎The Night They Came Home (Live) by Mr. Bungle](https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-night-they-came-home-live/1560019387)
- June 15: [‎Skullcrusher - EP by Skullcrusher](https://music.apple.com/us/album/skullcrusher-ep/1507013986)
- June 14: [‎LIKE NIRVANA by Cub Sport](https://music.apple.com/us/album/like-nirvana/1498573424)

A little bit of everything, but only some of the time.

Weeknotes for the week ending June 13, 2021


- Watching more TV than usual around here. Went through the entire first season of [Sweet Tooth](https://www.netflix.com/title/81221380), and now I have to go back and read the comics. I remember the end of the world events being more vague in the comics, they’ve added detail to the TV series but I’m not sure the details make logical sense. Still, I adored the comics, and the first season does a pretty delightful job of bringing it to life (Bobby is…much cuter). Also watched [Bo Burnham: Inside](https://www.netflix.com/title/81289483), also good. If you want to be convinced to watch it, just watch _Welcome to the Internet_ here:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/k1BneeJTDcU" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>


- Read [Nothing To See Here](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062913463). It’s about raising kids who spontaneously combust, which, if you’re a parent, you can immediately recognize is really just all kids. The book included this article at the end, which resonated with me: [I Was Worried My Anxiety Would Prevent Me From Being a Good Father. My Sons Changed That](https://time.com/5712486/parenting-with-anxiety/)
- Finished [Ori and the Will of the Wisps](https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/ori-and-the-will-of-the-wisps-switch/). Great game, one of the few games out there where your character’s movements make you feel super powerful (Spiderman on the PS4 is another one that comes to mind). I wish the Switch Pro controller had a headphone jack because _Ori_ has beautiful music but I had it on low volume since I was playing after the kid was asleep.
- More yard work. This was the end of last weekend:
![My backyard with some of it dug out.](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/backyard_so_far.jpeg)
This is where we are after this weekend:
![My backyard with a cobblestone border and paver stones](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/backyard-weekend-2.jpeg)
It’s so close! And by close I mean many tons of pea gravel away from close!

## Album a day
I took a break for vacation last week, and apparently forgot to update the last week of May… but now I’m back. [The full list remains here](https://www.builtwith.coffee/album-a-day).
- June 13: [Early Songs & Rarities by The Record Company](https://music.apple.com/us/album/early-songs-rarities/1504326889)
- June 12: [‎Wakin On a Pretty Daze by Kurt Vile](https://music.apple.com/us/album/wakin-on-a-pretty-daze/598989281)
- June 11: [‎No Gods No Masters by Garbage](https://music.apple.com/us/album/no-gods-no-masters/1556301766)
- June 10: [‎Song of the Lark and Other Far Memories by Angel Olsen](https://music.apple.com/us/album/song-of-the-lark-and-other-far-memories/1558244877)
- June 9: [‎Locked Down - Live from Brighton Electric by Juanita Stein](https://music.apple.com/us/album/locked-down-live-from-brighton-electric/1564499406)
- June 8: [‎Jubilee by Japanese Breakfast](https://music.apple.com/us/album/jubilee/1553364590)
- June 7:  [‎Blue Weekend by Wolf Alice](https://music.apple.com/us/album/blue-weekend-apple-music-edition/1569497531)


Vacation all I ever wanted, vacation, had to get away.

Weeknotes for the week ending June 6, 2021


- Our vacation didn’t quite go as planned, we ended up back and home after the long weekend, but still took the week off. Instead of going to one beach we went to a different, closer beach. Lessons were learned, let’s leave it at that.
- Speaking of the beach, my daughter is now at the age where other kids just show up and they start making plans / coming up with games on the fly, so while we were at the beach a gang of children started building a pit of “eww-goo”, their name for sand + water, and then one of the children went to get more water but noticed a dead (what appeared to be an) eel on the way, and felt the need to pick it up and drape it over their arms and parade it around the beach.
- Finished [The 7 1/2 Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781492670124). Recommended if you’re a fan of [Dark](https://www.netflix.com/title/80100172) or [Knives Out](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8946378/) or [Inception](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1) (or maybe even [Shutter Island](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1130884/)). There was one part of the plot I didn’t think was explored enough but it’s a definite page turner.
- Read [One Man’s Amazing Journey to the Center of the Bowling Ball](https://www.wired.com/story/one-mans-amazing-journey-to-the-center-of-the-bowling-ball/). I miss bowling. 
- As a New Englander my instinct when taking a break from one type of work is to do a different type of work, so I finally started doing something about our backyard situation. It started as:

![](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/backyard_start.jpeg)

... and now it looks like:

![](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/backyard_so_far.jpeg)

and all of the materials have been sourced, cobblestones ([from here](http://dilisiobros.com)) for edging and pea gravel ([from here](https://www.northeastnursery.com)) for the inside. We debated pea gravel or something else since we moved here, but then our neighbors did pea gravel and it looked really nice so we went for it.
- Sourcing yard material is always wild. If anyone wants to make a claim about video games being fantasy they should point at _Minecraft_. This is like a 20 cube patio in _Minecraft_ and literally 5+ tons of rocks IRL.
- Ideally the patio phase of the project will be done by the end of next weekend, but the weather this week is peak high temps for this area and more grass pollen than my face can handle. Really hoping a cold front moves in mid week and... all the grass dies?







Notes for the week ending May 30, 2021. Got older, read a book, did some work.

Weeknotes for the week ending May 30, 2021

- It’s my birthday. And we’re on vacation. And it’s like 50 degrees and raining. I still put May as the second best weather in New England (the end of September / beginning of October being the best) but it’s still New England weather.
- But we’re renting a house and who doesn’t love digging through the random mugs at the rental house for the best one (I didn’t pick this, but I appreciate the choice).
![A coffee mug that says "I Dig Gardening"](/assets/2021/05/mug.jpg)
- We released a new feature at work yesterday, you can now [talk to a veterinarian on the weekends](https://www.chewy.com/app/content/connect-with-a-vet). After a year of doing work on an application that had nearly zero users I appreciate working on something that I can see people using.
- I finished [Can’t Even](https://www.builtwith.coffee/books/2021/cant-even). I’m a millennial who usually can Can Even--maybe because I’m now an elder/geriatric/ancient millennial, but the book raises a lot of good points, like the switch from pensions to 401ks producing an endlessly growing economic engine that splits society into essentially people who are in debt and people who make money off of money. I have mixed feelings about unions and the death of said unions. My first job out of college I was a contractor working alongside union members and a lot of the stories of "the good old days" were just... white guys taking advantage of the fact that they were white guys. I’m not sure it was that different than in tech today, where white guys hire other white guys for good paying jobs. I still think the book does a good job of hitting the "Greatest Hits" of what’s wrong with our generation.

## Album a Day
- May 29: [Ashlyn by Ashe](https://music.apple.com/us/album/ashlyn/1561072490)
- May 28: [Long Lost by Lord Huron](https://music.apple.com/us/album/long-lost/1557584746)
- May 27: [So When You Gonna... by Dream Wife](https://music.apple.com/us/album/so-when-you-gonna/1500099184)
- May 26 [‎Driving Music - EP by Mallrat](https://music.apple.com/us/album/driving-music-ep/1475226062)
- May 25: [The Main Thing by Real Estate](https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-main-thing/1491472845)
- May 24: [New Age Norms 2 by Cold War Kids](https://music.apple.com/us/album/new-age-norms-2/1515248736)


What happened this week, May 27 - May 23, 2021.

Weeknotes for the week ending May 23, 2021

* Finished [Think Again](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781984878106). If you want the TL;DR version, watch this:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cJMwBwFj5nQ" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

* Kiddo turned 6. I feel like she turned 5 a few months ago? What happened to this last year. That said, my parents came up to visit this weekend because, unlike last year, they can. Big hit among the presents across all of the age ranges was [Ribbon Ninja](https://www.fatbraintoys.com/toy_companies/fat_brain_toy_co/ribbon_ninja.cfm).
* My father was up before anyone else this morning. In fact he was up early enough to discover that the bird feeder in the backyard isn’t getting cleaned out by squirrels, but by a raccoon. Later a hawk started eating from it. I think fencing in our backyard inadvertently turned it into a low-key nature preserve.
* I might not be good at video games any more. I picked up [Returnal](https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP9000-PPSA01284_00-RETURNALGAME0001) on release day, I just beat the first boss this week, and proceeded to get absolutely destroyed in the second level. I just don’t think I can. I also picked up [Cadence of Hyrule](https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/cadence-of-hyrule-crypt-of-the-necrodancer-featuring-the-legend-of-zelda-switch/) and also could not, so I finally settled on [Ori and the Will of the Wisps](https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/ori-and-the-will-of-the-wisps-switch/) which is beautiful and seems beat-able. Ori and the Blind Forest is one of my favorite games of all time and so far it looks like WotW matches it. Also picked up [New Pokémon Snap](https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/new-pokemon-snap-switch/) but that was for the aformentioned now six year old.

### Album a Day

- May 23: [‎Recover by The Naked and Famous ](https://music.apple.com/us/album/recover/1497578986)
- May 22: [‎Pop War by Imperial State Electric ](https://music.apple.com/us/album/pop-war/500770942)
- May 21: [‎A Better Dystopia by Monster Magnet ](https://music.apple.com/us/album/a-better-dystopia/1556335582)
- May 20: [‎Daddy’s Home by St. Vincent ](https://music.apple.com/us/album/daddys-home/1552955481)
- May 19: [‎Lucifer I by LUCIFER ](https://music.apple.com/us/album/lucifer-i/991849411)
- May 18: [‎Van Weezer by Weezer ](https://music.apple.com/us/album/van-weezer/1479227321)
* May 17: [‎Came Down Different by Pardoner](https://music.apple.com/us/album/came-down-different/1551045959)

What happened this week, May 11 - May 16, 2021.

Weeknotes for the week ending May 16, 2021

* First meal from our garden: cucumber and watermelon salad with mint. That might sound impressive, but the only ingredient from the garden was the mint.
* Got a decent bike ride in. One thing from this time last year that I _do_ miss was the reduction in traffic, but I can understand why everyone wanted to be out on a near eighty-degree day in May.

![](/assets/2021/05/img_4796.jpeg)

_Being able to ride to the ocean is a thing I will never stop appreciating._

* I’m pretty much back to living my life how I was pre-pandemic, I think, except for wearing a mask indoors. I [went into Boston](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2021/05/meatspace), ran errands this weekend, went to the mall, which, was hard to get me in to _ever_.
* Been messing around with [Groovebox](https://ampifymusic.com/groovebox/) and [Blocs Wave](https://ampifymusic.com/blocswave/) by Ampify Music, I really love the way they’ve designed these apps, they’re the only music creation apps that I could quickly come to terms with. Hope to have something tangible from it soon.
* I’m back to logging my day in [Bear](https://bear.app). It’s nice to just have it open wherever and throw things I think of or what I’m doing in it. Sometimes I even talk to it on my watch.

### Album a Day

* May 16: [‎How To: Friend, Love, Freefall by Rainbow Kitten Surprise](https://music.apple.com/us/album/how-to-friend-love-freefall/1332144279)
* May 15: [‎Detritus by Sarah Neufeld](https://music.apple.com/us/album/detritus/1550688375)
* May 14: [‎Delta Kream by The Black Keys](https://music.apple.com/us/album/delta-kream/1562742266)
* May 13: [‎Build A Problem by dodie](https://music.apple.com/us/album/build-a-problem/1535123610)
* May 12: [‎Sideways to New Italy by Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever](https://music.apple.com/us/album/sideways-to-new-italy/1501410858)
* May 11: [‎How Blue Can You Get by Gary Moore](https://music.apple.com/us/album/how-blue-can-you-get/1552729594)

Meatspace

![343 Congress Street in Boston](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/343-congress.jpeg)
I went to the office yesterday, and then went out with people I only knew through video chat for food at a restaurant. Wild times.

[Massachusetts reported zero COVID-19 deaths yesterday too](https://www.wwlp.com/news/health/coronavirus-local-impact/massachusetts-covid-19-dashboard-no-new-deaths-472-new-cases/). I’m not one to jump to “it's all over” now, and as of right now my next visit to the office is scheduled for 2022, but I will take some joy in things moving in the right direction instead of only the wrong one.


An Album Some Days


It was getting a little noisy around here, so I made some changes. [An Album a Day](https://www.builtwith.coffee/album-a-day) posts won’t show up individually on the home page or in the RSS feed any more, I’d rather do more of a weekly recap post. Also I switched the [blog feed](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog/1) to have titles and (if they exist) descriptions with a read more link, not the full post. I was looking for something I wrote the other day and had a hard time finding it which is not great!

String Cleaning

After [fixing up my old Squier Stratocaster](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2020/08/the-20-year-history-of-a-partscaster) last Summer, it became my go to guitar when I sat down to play over my _other_ Strat, a 2000 Lone Star. I started to wonder why, since the Lone Star is (or should be) the nicer of the two. I sat down and looked it over and tried to figure out what was wrong, and this is what I came up with. Note that “at some point below” could have been any point in the last 20 years:
1. At some point I’d lost the spring in the tremolo, which caused it to either flop around or stay locked into position.
2. At some point I’d switched it to higher gauge strings, or messed with the action and it was annoyingly high.
3. At some point I’d wanted to have it push more from the guitar itself, the pickups were screwed up close to the strings.
4. It hadn’t been cleaned in a while, or lubricated. If you touched the tremolo the G-string would make sound like a train derailing. 

Aside: when I bought this guitar I was debating between it and an Ibanez Jem. Looking back at the advertising for it, I wonder what part of it I found appealing. 🤔

![Lone Star Stratocaster ad from around 1996](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/lone_star_ad.jpg)

I pulled the strings, cleaned and lubricated everything, installed locking tuners and a spring for the tremolo, and dropped the pickups down to lower than they were when I got it. I don’t love the Texas Special pickup in the neck but I do oddly love it in the middle, and I’m too lazy to muck around with changing just the neck pickup out.

![Picture of the back of the headstock of the guitar with locking tuners](https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/coffee-cake/images/2021/strat_headstock.jpeg)
_Locking tuners. Why didn’t I do this years ago._

Of course, if you really want to test tuning stability, you give your guitar to your five year old and let her do her best Hendrix impersonation.
<div style="padding:75% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/544039533?badge=0&amp;autopause=0&amp;player_id=0&amp;app_id=58479" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" title="IMG_4772.mov"></iframe></div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script>

Remnants of the past from my parent's attic.

Throwback Thursday

Picked up some more boxes of “stuff”  from my parents house while visiting for Easter. Among the piles, CDs for web browsers for both the Dreamcast and Playstation 2. Funny to think that 20 years ago “going online” was still a thing you had to do on a console, instead of the constant state of modern consoles.

![The CD cases for the Dreamcast and Playstation 2 web browser applications](/assets/2021/04/internet_on_cd.jpeg)

And among a box of floppy disks, one of my early forays into web development! I dumped [this entire floppy here](https://www.builtwith.coffee/floppy/). It says the site was generated by [Arachnophilia](https://arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/index.html) which amazingly still sort of exists. My email address `@earthdome.com` definitely does not!

![A floppy disk with the Tazmanian Devil on it, with a label over his face which reads "web pages"](/assets/2021/04/taz.jpeg)

Thoughts on work schedules, pre and post pandemic, and how much you can expect from a 🧠.

Working Conditions


<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Three days in the office, two days at home is the ideal combo in my mind, and every time I write about remote work I come across more evidence that lots of people want something roughly similar, but so much of the talk is about all-or-nothing scenarios that most people will hate <a href="https://t.co/eRmii4NJ5Z">https://t.co/eRmii4NJ5Z</a></p>&mdash; Amanda Mull (@amandamull) <a href="https://twitter.com/amandamull/status/1377627762224214029?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 1, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

I’ve always been an office employee, and over time I’ve seen almost every combination of working schedules. My ranked list:

1. 2 days in office, 3 days at home.
2. 3 days in office, 2 days at home.
3. 5 days at home.
4. 4 days in office, 1 day at home.
5. 4 days, 10 hours, all in office.
6. 5 days, 8 hours, all in office.

This order has a few caveats: I have almost always had a “long” commute (it’s likely average by American standards but it’s long _to me_). 1-3 are pretty arbitrarily arranged and mostly based on the jobs I had those schedules at and how often other people were in the office. If 4x10 became 4x8 it would probably immediately jump to the #1 spot — there’s no substitute for an entire day back to yourself, but 10 hours of knowledge work is too much to expect from a brain on any given day.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I&#39;ve been running a personal experiment on this lately.<br><br>I bought a chess timer and start it when I sit down at my desk in the morning. I toggle timers for breaks (scheduled or necessary). I stop counting time when I&#39;m too fried to go on for the day.<br><br>~5 hr work ~1 hr not on avg <a href="https://t.co/ir5vmnObzD">pic.twitter.com/ir5vmnObzD</a></p>&mdash; madalyn (@madalynrose) <a href="https://twitter.com/madalynrose/status/1379996152985219073?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 8, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

4x8 versus 4x10 and the pandemic schedules which tended to drift into “never in the office but always available” brings up a lot of other questions about availability of time versus actionable time. There were [dedicated marketing campaigns](https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/microsoft-reboots-war-on-sleep-a90da0396fb5) for 24/7 office work pre-pandemic, and I don’t think anything has gotten better in that regard.

![Microsoft’s trash work from the toilet ideas](https://miro.medium.com/max/2296/1*DpgSIJiDdSTV0N9SKBGsIg.png)

One of the most important lessons I learned in my working career was from my first job. I was a contractor but I worked with a bunch of [IAM](https://www.goiam.org) machinists, and at shift change, down to the exact minute, they’d be pushing the doors open and running for their cars. Granted, they couldn’t take their work home — some of them worked with tools the size of small house, but that mentality of “the work day is done” has stuck with me. 

I don’t follow the Red Sox nearly as closely as I used to, but I at least knew today was opening day.  Or, was supposed to be, I saw it was cancelled. The last time I was at Fenway for opening day was 2009, and the weather was about the same, low 40s and rain / something that looks like snow but lands as rain. It was the middle of three events at Fenway that were each so miserably cold that I gave up on going for at least five years.

Opening Day

I don’t follow the Red Sox nearly as closely as I used to, but I at least knew today was opening day.  Or, was supposed to be, I saw it was cancelled. The last time I was at Fenway for opening day was 2009, and the weather was about the same, low 40s and rain / something that looks like snow but lands as rain. It was the middle of three events at Fenway that were each so miserably cold that I gave up on going for at least five years.

![Fenway Park on Opening Day, 2009](/assets/2021/04/opening-day.JPG)

In a completely unrelated mental thread I referenced [Adium](https://adium.im) today, and remembered that for a long time I had the [Red Sox Adium duck](https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=1052) in my dock, which made me wistful for a bunch of things, but maybe more non-square dock icons than anything.

![The Adium duck icon dressed as a Red Sox player](/assets/2021/04/red_sox_duck_dock_icons_5701052_img_1237.jpg)

Last March, there were no planes. The sky was silent and empty. It occurred to me that in a lot of places, the sky is always like that. But here, it was immediately noticeable that the planes were gone.

Marking the Pandemic by Plane

We live under a common flight path for planes landing at Logan Airport in Boston. We’re close enough that we get airborne advertising — you can read the names on the bottom of the planes. The sounds trailing the planes converges as it passes over our house. I’ve flown over my house and seen it from the plane. It’s as normal to look up and see a jumbo jet as it is a seagull.

Last March, there were no planes. The sky was silent and empty. It occurred to me that in a lot of places, the sky is always like that. But here, it was immediately noticeable that the planes were gone.

Today was unusually warm for March, and we ate dinner outside. Planes flew over the entire time. As much as I missed a silent sky, hearing the planes again made it feel like things were closer to normal.

Electricity

One year of working from home, or whatever this last year was.

One Year

A year ago was my last day in the office. It was also my first day in that particular office — we were moving out of a WeWork into a new space and I needed to get my stuff out before everything shut down.

The new place had (has?) a decent view. You can see from here that the city was already emptying out at this point.

![](/assets/2021/03/a154197428db955c5908fa5bb0586172.jpeg)

I was also in the city because my parents were in town, and I met them for dinner. The restaurant only had us and one other table. The train I took home was almost empty.

I looked back at some notes from March of last year. I was very wrong about how long this would last, but almost everyone was. For a few days it seemed like maybe a planned April vacation was still on the table. Some notes that stood out:

> It’s the weekend, which I’m guessing is going to feel a lot like every other day of the week for a few weeks.

This was definitely true. During the Summer I was also at least partially expected to be available for work so it really never felt like there was a weekend. The situation is better now: with my daughter having classes the weekends mean something to her again, and I occasionally flip the whole concept and do something like make pancakes for breakfast on a Tuesday. It’s not like anyone is rushing around in the morning, so why not.

> Talked to my mom, they seem ok. She said there’s a 30 day ban on all visitors to nursing homes, which she’s pretty upset about. I think worst worst worst case something happens to my Grandmother now and there’s no funeral.

This one came partially true, unfortunately. We did have a funeral, it was a beautiful day in June so we could have it outside, but only five of us could attend. It was also the last time I’d see my parents in 2020, although they’re now half vaccinated, so hopefully that streak will be over soon.

The 30 day ban was, in hindsight, closing the gate after the horse had bolted. After 98 years of living that's a shit way to go, but we are certainly not the only family in the country with this same story.

> We made cookies and Lorelei filled up a notebook I’m already running out of ideas.

This was the third day in. I came up with lots more ideas, luckily.

> I’m tired of this shit.

32 days in.

Things, honestly, got better. You say “wow, we’re actually pretty fortunate” enough times and it starts to stick in your brain. Some highlights I found:

* We went to two zoos we’d never been to before, once for animals, once for Christmas lights.
* I made the local news when I, unintentionally, was one of the first people back in a dentist’s office for a regular cleaning.
* Went to a [bunch of parks](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2020/10/coolidge-reservation) I hadn’t been to before, including [some by the ocean](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2020/12/waikiki).
* [Fixed up an old guitar](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2020/08/the-20-year-history-of-a-partscaster).
* [Made a website for my wife’s podcast](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2020/05/shelf-love-podcast).
* [Played](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2020/11/testing-some-things-might-delete-later) with [toys](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2020/12/instax).
* [Made the home office nicer](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2020/12/monoprice-35-ultrawide).
* [Beat a lot of video games](https://www.builtwith.coffee/blog-posts/2020/11/game-of-the-year).
* … and had plenty of time to do little things. Today was a beautiful day, and I thought we should go outside, so I found a pair of socks for my daughter, then went and put one sock each on each of our sleeping cat’s heads, and told her I had an adventure ahead of her to go find them.

I’ve had an idea floating around for a while: MDX is great, but I hate all of the steps around configuring / building React components with it. If I’m writing Markdown, HTML is valid in Markdown, and Web Components are valid HTML, so why not just stick Web Components in Markdown and call it a day?

Stencil, Markdown, and web components in Markdown

I’ve had an idea floating around for a while: [MDX](https://mdxjs.com) is great, but I hate all of the steps around configuring / building React components with it. If I’m writing Markdown, HTML is valid in Markdown, and Web Components are valid HTML, so why not just stick Web Components in Markdown and call it a day?

That was the idea, anyway, I just never got around to trying it. I still don’t quite grok the actual [Web Components spec](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components), but I have used [Stencil](https://stenciljs.com), and figured with some free time today I’d give it a shot. This is the result: [Web Components in Markdown](https://fervent-noyce-fc1b19.netlify.app). It works! Of course it does. Probably the biggest difference between it and MDX (besides, React, obviously), is that Web Components in HTML can only accept string values, so in this example rather than passing an array of image sources, I passed a comma separated list, e.g:

```
<picture-gallery images="https://source.unsplash.com/lvh5L46VWuA/600x600, https://source.unsplash.com/TjbedCFPQdc/600x600, https://source.unsplash.com/caM2RdHVAoc/600x600"></picture-gallery>
```

One other nice thing here is you can stick fallback HTML into the `<picture-gallery>` part, and you get fallback content. If the JS loads, yay, a gallery. If not, whatever. I made an example of that here:

<p class="codepen" data-height="452" data-theme-id="light" data-default-tab="js,result" data-user="jjmartucci" data-slug-hash="ExNQVdZ" style="height: 452px; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; border: 2px solid; margin: 1em 0; padding: 1em;" data-pen-title="Progressive enhancement with Web Components">
  <span>See the Pen <a href="https://codepen.io/jjmartucci/pen/ExNQVdZ">
  Progressive enhancement with Web Components</a> by Joseph Martucci (<a href="https://codepen.io/jjmartucci">@jjmartucci</a>)
  on <a href="https://codepen.io">CodePen</a>.</span>
</p>
<script async src="https://cpwebassets.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>

You can see [the code behind the site on Github](https://github.com/jjmartucci/stencil-markdown), it’s slap-dash but it is functional.

Some notes on moving an existing Git repository into a Rush monorepo structure.

Rush - ing a repo

Some notes on moving an existing Git repository into a [Rush monorepo structure](https://rushjs.io):
- The last monorepo setup I did was with Lerna. I much prefer the documentation and incredibly verbose configuration files of Rush. Lerna certainly has it’s place in specific setups but not the one I was trying to set up.
- One point that wasn’t clear: if you have an existing repo you want to add rush to, you have to initialize it with `rush init --overwrite-existing`. Minor point but the error message from just running `rush init` didn’t make it clear that I should, and the documentation is a little vague on what `--overwrite-existing` is going to do (and it sounds worse than it is).
- I used their suggestion of creating a package structure two levels deep. In this case `/apps/[appname]` and `/tools/[toolname]`. We’ll likely add a `/libraries` down the line, and migrate some more apps over.

Seems like a decent tool, so far. The requirements here are low, I’m not trying to create an omni-repo of all of our back and front-end projects, just colocating some already related pieces of code in a happy way, and setting up a future state so more projects can become more closely related in the future.

Why I switched the content editor on this site from Netlify CMS to Forestry.io.

From Netlify CMS to Forestry

I’ve used [Netlify CMS](https://www.netlifycms.org) on and off on this site (and previous iterations of it) and while I think it’s a really great idea, the execution of the application is incredibly lacking, for a few reason:

- The documentation is… not good. It’s ok, and I’m always hesitant to complain about documentation too much given how often I’ve dealt with software that included absolutely zero public documentation, but if I have to dig through Github issues to find answers to configuration problems that’s not a project I would be quick to recommend.

- Running the admin panel locally is annoyingly hard. This has been fixed in later releases but still feels clunky.

- You have to configure all of your fields in a YAML file, then commit them, then go make changes to the content. If you’re like me and you just move code and content independently this creates a lot of mismatched fields and inconsistency. That’s a me thing, but I don’t think it’s uncommon if you’re working with all of your content in Markdown files.

- Sorting never seemed to work, and all of my files were ordered somewhat randomly when I opened the CMS.

- Folders, in content and in the media library, didn’t really work either. I like to store my posts by `year/month/title.md` to cut down on how many I have to look at at once, and Netlify CMS just makes them one big list.

To be clear, the **very good idea** behind Netlify CMS is that it is a light UI wrapper around your Markdown files, and it requires zero installation. You put a script tag on a static page and it does the rest. There’s no database, no deployment steps, you can directly edit the YAML front matter and Markdown content of your files and commit the changes to Git, at which point if you have a static site and Netlify hooked up, everything deploys and your site is updated.  For a while there wasn’t a lot of good options in this market, but now there’s a few, so I started looking at alternatives this weekend. Among the interesting options:

- [Typemill - A CMS for Micro Publishing | Typemill](https://typemill.net)

- [Pico - A stupidly simple, blazing fast, flat file CMS.](http://picocms.org)

- [Grav - A Modern Flat-File CMS | Grav CMS](https://getgrav.org)

But all of those started with “download” or “get started by installing”. Then I found [Forestry.io](https://forestry.io), which runs the UI on their servers (headless, the kids call it), but against your Github content. Getting started was similar to setting up a site on Netlify, you connect your Github account, pick the repo, pick the default branch. After that you give forestry some config settings (which it saves in a `.forestry` folder in the repo) and your content, assuming you already have some, sort of magically appears. You can then configure your media library (which, annoyingly, also doesn’t use folders but at least saves correctly to folders if you configure it to), and you can use existing content to build out a reusable front matter structure. I picked one of my “album a day” posts and forestry did (most of) this for me:

![](/assets/2021/02/forestry-front-matter.png)

(I added the Draft field after, since the post I picked didn’t have that in the front matter already).

forestry also has a bundle of other options I don’t yet need but I’ve needed on past projects that are nice:

- It can run a preview version of the site so you can see changes in real time.

- Webhooks.

- User roles (once you go to a paid tier).

In general I recommend it, and editors like this are easy to recommend because they require almost no setup, and if you change your mind, you just go back to whatever other Markdown editing process you were using.

CDNs Aren’t as Useful as They Used to Be


When I was learning to be a web developer it was beaten into my head that if you were building a site and loading 3rd party scripts on it (e.g. jQuery, Bootstrap), you should load them from a CDN because if a user on your site had been to another site that used jQuery (likely) and they used the same version of jQuery (somewhat likely), and that other site also used the same CDN for jQuery (i.e. `https://code.jquery.com/`, which was pretty likely given we didn’t have as many widely available CDNs back then), then the browser would pull the version of jQuery you were requesting from the cache instead of downloading it again. Everyone wins! Except the first site to request jQuery that a user hit with an empty cache.

I’d gone on assuming that was functionally true but I needed it less and less as the sites I built started using npm packages and bundling everything at build time instead of requesting resources at run time. I thought it was true somewhat recently, when I decided we could load Google fonts from Google instead of bundling them because “if the user has it in the cache…”. But [today I learned it’s not true at all](https://www.stefanjudis.com/notes/say-goodbye-to-resource-caching-across-sites-and-domains/):

> If your sites request the global jQuery, modules from unpkg.com, font files from Google fonts or GA's (Google Analytics) analytics.js, users will redownload the resources no matter if they downloaded and cached them for other sites already.

> What does this change mean for you? If your sites live on modern hosting that provides a CDN and supports HTTP/2, you can drop the third-parties and should ship all resources yourself. Relying on a third-party provides little value in 2020.

 In fact it hasn’t been true in Safari for a long time (since 2013), but as of October 2020 it doesn’t work in Chrome either. It maybe never _really_ worked like we dreamed it did, [comments on Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894135) imply actual cache hits were very low. I chose to believe there was a golden age of a long lived minor version of jQuery that got heavily pulled from cache hits, but maybe I chose to believe that just so this little nugget in my brain wasn’t useless all along.

My Favorite Apple Watch App

An Album A Day


I think creating a new, active habit, one that requires time and attention, that you intend to do every day, is basically impossible. It requires either dropping an existing habit, or finding the kind of free time you only get after committing a crime, at which point the habits and hobbies you are allowed decrease considerably.

A new _passive_ habit, that I’m game for. I’ve found myself in a rut musically lately, listening to the same songs and playlists on repeat way too often. To change that, I’m going to start a list of albums to listen to that are new to me, and listen to one a day. Since I make web-things and can’t not make a web-thing for something like this, I made a [calendar for you to follow along at home](/album-a-day). There’s no reviews or ratings or anything like that, just new music for my ears.


New about page


I’ve been lazy about putting a new about page on this site, because I wanted to make it look better than the plain text wall I had in the last design. I decided since I’m sitting at my home desk _almost always_ these days, I’d make an interactive version for you to play along with.

So check it out, [a new about page](/about). It’s SVGs, HTML, CSS, and 3 teeny tiny JPEGs. The bigger your monitor, the more you can see. If you figure out how to get yourself on one of the screens, let me know.


Fuck Donald Trump


Days after, or even the day of the 2017 inauguration, I was in North Station and someone was singing just the chorus of “FDT” over and over.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WkZ5e94QnWk" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

That’s been in my head _a lot_ for the last four years. I’m not sure it will ever leave, but maybe the mental play count drops a bit after today.

I’m still a tiny bit optimistic that four years of fuckery has engaged a lot of people in the Democratic process who weren’t before. I’m very, very, slightly hopeful that people finding channels outside of main stream media eventually swings towards hearing unheard voices, not amplifying the loudest and worst. If I can be glad for one little thing today, it’s seeing the President wearing a mask, because this never needed to be as difficult as it is.


Who uses Safari


I’ve saved this screenshot for the next time I need to have a debate about dropping older browser support. It’s from [My PlayStation](https://my.playstation.com), and the browser is Safari (desktop and mobile!). Literally no way to view your account on an iOS device without downloading the app. Some light Google-ing says there’s over 100 million people with Playstation accounts so it’s unlikely I’m the only person annoyed by this.

![a modal on the Sony website notifying the user that their current browser is temporarily not supported](/assets/images/2021/01/sony-safari.png)


Finding is better than folding


I was reading [this thread on Reddit about how to structure your React files](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/kv403v/react_how_do_you_structure_your_components/). In the past I would have said something like:

```
components/
	layout/
		component_name
	data/
		component_name
	other_domain/
		component_name
	...
```

and used an `index.js` in every folder for the root React component. These days I’m much more inclined to do:

```
components/
	component_name
```

because I find both deeply nested folders and files with the same name annoying. I also think it’s ideal if you can quickly move through files with linked structures (F12 in VS Code if you’re using Typescript) or search for files using the [Command Palette](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/userinterface#_command-palette) rather than trying to guess from `/` down where a file might be.


Hawk, guy


Our backyard is a tiny stretch of trees before a river, but there are a lot of trees. If you asked me how many, I couldn’t guess, if you asked me what kinds I’d say “tree kinds”, but if you ask me to look at the back window and spot a bird through the hundreds of thousands of branches my brain will pick them out in an instant every time. Just don’t ask me what kind of bird.

This feathery friend keeps showing up in our backyard, on the same branch every time. Or, feathery foe, to at least some of the other animals nearby, although I wouldn’t know it, he usually hangs out for an hour then flies away.

Photo is tightly cropped from a 200mm DSLR lens. Every time I see him I tell everyone else in the house, but it’s cold and they give up before finding him. 

![a hawk in a tree in our backyard](/assets/images/2021/01/hawk.jpg)


What’s a new year anyway


I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions. I think that is, in part, because I’ve lived in New England my entire life. Why start something in January - the month of short days, cold weather, general malaise, and then hope it sticks through February, the month I will always argue does not need to exist.

I set a goal for 2020, which was to go to a concert every month of the year. I made it to February (the worst month) and the concert, which was at the end of the month, was covered with an air of “should there be this many people in a building?”. Any plans for March were immediately scrapped. I tried to get tickets for an outdoor concert in the late Summer but the venue was so limited it sold out immediately. What’s the importance of January 1st, if I want to try this again? There’s no “new year” where I could do this until vaccines are widely available, and concert venues are open again. That might be later this year, that might be 2022. The calendar has no bearing on it.

This year, there are no goals based on the calendar, but things to think about a season before for the season after. In Spring I want to plant a tree and put a garden bed in the back yard, and mulch over a dead zone of grass between our driveway and the sidewalk. I thought about that last Spring, but everyone else stuck with nowhere to go but their front yard and back yard did too. So that’s my New Year’s “resolution”, of sorts — spend January thinking about a tree for March.


instax


Got the kid an [instax mini 11](https://instax.com/mini11/en/) for Christmas. It’s an instant camera that develops on 1.8’’ x 2.4’’ film. Some initial notes:

- Will the camera survive a 5 year old? Probably. It’s a sturdy feeling plastic construction, if anything is going to go it’s the lens cover.
- Operation is two buttons: 1 pushes the lens out and turns the camera on, one takes pictures. The flash is always on and it does some behind-the-scenes exposure correction.
- It has a “selfie” mode, which also works for close up pictures. It extends the lens barrel slightly. They stuck a tiny, tiny mirror on the lens so you can see yourself while using it, which is genius.
- Having used digital cameras for so long, you forget that film has to be optimized for indoor or outdoor. We went to the beach on a sunny day and everything was expectedly washed out.
- The kid absolutely does not care about the quality, it’s all about getting the prints out. I got this for her because she was previously using her Nintendo 2DS to take pictures, which has the world’s worst camera sensor, and every indoor picture is just some indecipherable shade of brownish-gray. This is a huge step up, even when she jerks the camera around mid-capture.
  ![](/assets/images/2020/instax-prints.jpeg)
- The shutter button is a little bit sensitive, as you can see by the picture in the bottom right, which is mostly my hand as I handed the camera over to her.


You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em....

Hilda


👨: “Hey, do you want to watch this show Hilda? I’ve read good things about it.”

👧: “NO. I HATE IT. I WANT TO WATCH DRAGON RIDERS”

_months pass_

👧: “…her name is Hilda, and there’s trolls, this is the best show, I’m going to watch it forever.”

👨: ![Kenny Rogers singing "the Gambler"](https://media.giphy.com/media/llCtQhhXcuCmxhsB2y/giphy.gif)


Waikiki Beach


Hawaii is one of the places we’re allowed unrestricted travel to right now, but this is a closer, possibly ironically named Waikiki Beach.

![Waikiki beach in Salem, Massachusetts](/assets/images/2020/waikiki.jpg)


Happy Little Clouds


...that get sad. Some [Procreate](https://procreate.art/) doodlin’ on a Winter weekend.

<video autoplay loop muted playsinline src="/assets/images/2020/cloud.mp4"></video>


The Tools I Use


In the past I’ve kept lists of apps to install for new Macs/PCs/iOS devices, but usually on scraps of paper. I figured this might be useful to someone else, or my future self, so now I just [have them on a page on this site](/tools-i-use).


I picked up a (deep inhale) [Monoprice 35in Zero-G Curved Ultra-Wide Gaming Monitor] during the CyberblackFriMonTurkeyWeek sales.

Monoprice 35in Zero-G Curved Ultra-Wide Gaming Monitor


![ultrawide Monoprice monitor](/assets/images/2020/ultrawide.jpeg)
_please ignore the messy cables_

I picked up a (deep inhale) [Monoprice 35in Zero-G Curved Ultra-Wide Gaming Monitor](https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=38035) during the CyberblackFriMonTurkeyWeek sales. I’d been debating a new monitor for... a long time. I had a 24ʺ Dell 16:10 WUXGA monitor that was “good enough” — I had 27ʺ QHD monitors at work but they didn’t feel noticeably better, and I didn’t like the idea of scaling (or paying for) a 4k monitor.

At 3440x1440, this monitor is ~1.7 times wider and a bit taller with no bezels in between. Feels like a good compromise. As someone who works in a code editor with 5 primary colors the colors are fine, and the viewing angles are good enough for the curve, assuming you don’t try to hang from the ceiling to look at it, or peek from another room. I set it up using the [calibration guidelines from this Tom’s Hardware article](https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/monoprice-zero-g-35-inch) and then ran through the [MacOS expert display calibration](https://osxdaily.com/2015/10/14/access-expert-mode-screen-color-calibrator-mac-os-x/) to make a color profile that [you can download here](/assets/files/V3L6W_Expert_Calibrated.icc).


Game of the Year


<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Here are your six nominees for Game of the Year at <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/TheGameAwards?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#TheGameAwards</a> <a href="https://t.co/ikRltsnBrm">pic.twitter.com/ikRltsnBrm</a></p>&mdash; Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) <a href="https://twitter.com/geoffkeighley/status/1329109716891357184?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 18, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

“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

![](https://res.cloudinary.com/draguncjj/image/upload/v1605706882/post-images/six-six-six-bear_yf2emw.png)


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


I like the idea of [micro.blog](https://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](https://nextjs.org), 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](https://jsonfeed.org). This is perhaps not surprising since [Manton Reece](https://manton.org) drafted the spec and created micro.blog.
2. [Microblogging is strongly against using titles for posts](https://www.manton.org/2014/09/15/defining-a-microblog.html).

 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:
 
 ```js
 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:

```js
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](https://micro.blog/jjmartucci) or in the [JSON feed](https://www.builtwith.coffee/rss/feed.json).


Trying two things: updating my old Macbook Pro to Big Sur.
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/draguncjj/image/upload/v1605227967/micro-posts/image_sqlhii.png)

And testing titleless posts for [micro.blog](https://micro.blog) RSS integration. Big Sur definitely didn’t work, let’s not go 0 for 2.


Did you know that there's a direct correlation between the decline of Spirograph and the rise in gang activity? Think about it.

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](https://www.zebrapen.com/product/sarasa-clip-gel-retractable/?source=brand) I had.

![Spirographs](https://res.cloudinary.com/draguncjj/image/upload/v1605121938/post-images/gear-drawings.jpg)

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

<iframe height="486" style="width: 100%;" scrolling="no" title="JS Spirographs" src="https://codepen.io/jjmartucci/embed/RwRqqmP?height=486&theme-id=light&default-tab=result" frameborder="no" loading="lazy" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true">
  See the Pen <a href='https://codepen.io/jjmartucci/pen/RwRqqmP'>JS Spirographs</a> by Joseph Martucci
  (<a href='https://codepen.io/jjmartucci'>@jjmartucci</a>) on <a href='https://codepen.io'>CodePen</a>.
</iframe>

<script async src="https://static.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>

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

Obligatory Simpsons gif:
<img src="/assets/gifs/spirographs.gif" />


The simple joys of recording RC cars in slow motion.

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.

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/475659021" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I’m gonna send it.

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/475657466" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I just like the sound on this one.

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/468772369" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen></iframe>


Turning a jack-o'-lantern into a bird feeder.

Pumpkin Leftovers


![Turning a jack-o-lantern into a bird feeder](/assets/images/pumpkin-leftovers.jpg)


I've been using the MacOS/iOS/iPadOS/WatchOS app Day One for two years now. And I know it's been two years, because Day One has a feature where it shows you what happened “on this day” in previous years, and yesterday was the first day it had an entry from two years ago.

Day One (two, three, seven-hundred and thirty...)


I've gone back and forth on where to journal things for a while, but I've been using the MacOS/iOS/iPadOS/WatchOS app [Day One](https://dayoneapp.com) for two years now. And I know it's been two years, because Day One has a feature where it shows you what happened “on this day” in previous years, and yesterday was the first day it had an entry from two years ago. And no, the entry wasn't “the end of 2020 is going to be terrible!”, it was about a job interview, which became theme in 2019.

I'm not going to say Day One is the perfect app, and I generally don't like apps with recurring fees, but it does a few things really well:

- You can see your posts on a map. If you usually write on your phone, or take pictures on your phone, it will infer the coordinates from that. You can then search for posts by location, or just zoom around all the places you've been.

![](/assets/images/day-one-map.png)

- You can record sound from your Apple Watch. Sometimes if I'm just out in the woods/by the beach/listening to my kid sing a made up song, I'll turn it on.
- The aforementioned “on this day”, which has been wild in 2020, looking back at times when we did exotic things like “travel” and “see family members”.
- You can split the journals up by theme, but also view them all in aggregate, so I have one that’s just for food, one for rides/hikes.
- You can turn on end to end encryption on everything.

It has some silly features, like prompts. Some are interesting, others are like this:

![](/assets/images/day-one-prompt.png)

I’ve never considered [printing it](https://help.dayoneapp.com/en/articles/769055-book-printing), a service they offer. I back it up, you can export the whole thing to HTML. Should I print it? Maybe. I’ll make a note today and see how I feel in two years.


Not pictured: the team of horses tied by a London Bus ad.

Adventure Princesses

CDs were better than this


Me: “Hey Siri, play Disney Radio”

Siri: “Now playing Radio Disney, presented by iHeartRadio”

🎵 _weird tween pop starts playing_ 🎵

---

Me: “Hey Siri, play Disney songs…”

Siri: “Now playing Disney Radio”

🎵 _mix of Disney soundtracks with extreme bias towards Mulan starts playing_ 🎵


I was trying to keep up with what I read in the last week on Friday mornings, but it turns out Friday mornings are crazy. Sunday mornings, not so much.

Reading List Oct 4th - 11th


I was trying to keep up with what I read in the last week on Friday mornings, but it turns out Friday mornings are crazy. Sunday mornings, not so much.

First up, some light reading about the Pandemic.

[Will the Pandemic Socially Stunt My Kid?](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/parenting/coronavirus-masks-kids-socialization.html?surface=home-living-vi&fellback=false&req_id=140345519&algo=identity&imp_id=655824045&action=click&module=Smarter%20Living&pgtype=Homepage)

> The short answer is: The majority of neurotypical kids will be able to socialize just fine, even if we’re still wearing masks in a year.

[This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/)

> Even in an overdispersed pandemic, it’s not pointless to do forward tracing to be able to warn and test people, if there are extra resources and testing capacity. But it doesn’t make sense to do forward tracing while not devoting enough resources to backward tracing and finding clusters, which cause so much damage.

Related: [‘What are we so afraid of?’](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/10/coronavirus-denier-sick-spreader/?arc404=true)

---

I read a lot of stories about Eddie Van Halen, who passed away this week. As a guitarist, I think the appeal of Van Halen was that he was one of a very, very small number of guitarists who could make a rhythm part as interesting as a lead. Hendrix was the other guitarist who could do that.

[Eddie Van Halen’s Otherworldly Sounds](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/eddie-van-halens-otherworldly-sounds)

> But by the late nineties, bands like Van Halen—who mostly eschewed profundity in favor of uncomplicated pleasure —were being supplanted by the more [brooding](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nco_kh8xJDs) [and](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySzrJ4GRF7s) [introspective](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbgtVFlyCQ) rock music emerging from Seattle. Grunge was a pointed rebuttal to hedonism and excess. The eradication of joy was collateral damage.

---

[Where Did My Ambition Go?](https://gen.medium.com/where-did-my-ambition-go-c800ab4ad01d)

> After the economy collapsed in 2008, we were told to get off the path entirely, to think outside the box but still inside the system. Ambition was no longer limited by traditional power structures. Don’t let yourself be defined by the role you have in someone else’s company—create a _new_ role at your _own_ company. Social media allowed us to carve out our own identities online, and quickly we all became managers of our own “brand.” We had to monetize our brands. We started to hear the adjective “entrepreneurial” all the time to describe what our aims should be, even those of us who just wanted to create, who cared very little about managing the business side of creating.

---

[Welcome to Your Bland New World](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-09-07/welcome-to-your-bland-new-world-of-consumer-capitalism)

> Of these values, the environment is the hardest circle to square, since even the greenest blands are hell-bent on growth. If the best thing an individual can do for the planet is have fewer children, then surely the genuinely eco-entrepreneur might wonder whether the world really needs a Wi-Fi controlled smart oven ( [June](https://juneoven.com/) ), or a Bluetooth-enabled coffee mug ( [Ember](https://ember.com/) ).


I have always really liked Digital Ocean's guides/documentation/shark loading animations, so thought I'd see what their new App Platform was about.

Testing out Statamic on the Digital Ocean App Platform

Statamic on Digital Ocean App Platform


Digital Ocean released their [App Platform](https://www.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/) the other day. It's similar to Heroku, which has been around for forever, but I never really got along with how Heroku works and have always really liked Digital Ocean's guides/documentation/shark loading animations, so thought I'd see what it's about.

I decided to try [this site](/blog-posts/2020/09/builtwith-coffee-3-0/) but as a full-fledged Statamic site, not the statically generated version you're looking at currently, hosted on Netlify. It was pretty easy, Digital Ocean has a [sample repo for Laravel](https://github.com/digitalocean/sample-laravel), but if you point it at a Statamic repo in Github you get all of the same settings. After that it was just adding some environmental variables, and letting it deploy.

Am I going to use it? Probably not. It was a neat test case, but the leap from this to what Netlify provides, where all of the content for the site is cached neatly on CDNs somewhere, is more than I feel like figuring out right now. A more likely step would be to deploy just the control panel to a Digital Ocean box, then let [Statamic’s Git integration](https://statamic.dev/git-integration) kick off a Netlify build and deploy.

Here’s the important parts of the [App Spec file](https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/app-platform/references/app-specification-reference/) I ended up with, if anyone else ended up here trying to figure out how to get this working, with secrets obviously obscured:

```
name: bwc-statamic
region: nyc
services:
- build_command: “php please stache:clear \nphp please static:clear”
  environment_slug: php
  envs:
  - key: STATAMIC_LICENSE_KEY
    scope: RUN_AND_BUILD_TIME
    value: 1234
  - key: APP_URL
    scope: RUN_AND_BUILD_TIME
    value: your-app-address-here
  - key: APP_KEY
    scope: RUN_AND_BUILD_TIME
    value: 1234
  http_port: 8080
  routes:
  - path: /
  run_command: heroku-php-apache2 public/
```


The kiddo and I set out for a hike yesterday. We planned on going to Ravenswood Park, but when we got there the parking lot was full. A sign outside said “if the lot is full, come back some other time”. On the way we had passed another parking lot in the woods with a sign that I didn’t get a chance to read as we drove by, but I figured, “it’s a trail, it’ll get us in the woods either way”.

Coolidge Reservation


The kiddo and I set out for a hike yesterday. We planned on going to [Ravenswood Park](https://thetrustees.org/place/ravenswood-park/), but when we got there the parking lot was full. A sign outside said “if the lot is full, come back some other time”. On the way we had passed another parking lot in the woods with a sign that I didn’t get a chance to read as we drove by, but I figured, “it’s a trail, it’ll get us in the woods either way”.

So we drove down the road and pulled in. The parking lot sign read [Coolidge Reservation](https://thetrustees.org/place/coolidge-reservation/). We found a trailhead and walked in, but picked the one that didn’t have a map, so I looked one up on my phone. Seemed like the trails were short and the other end was a big field by the ocean. Ended up being just the right amount of hiking for a 5 year old, about 2 miles with a little hill that looked out over the ocean, a huge field to run through, and nice rocky Atlantic Ocean cliffs.

![](/assets/images/27AECD59-108B-424E-A0B1-405726C08F4F_1_105_c.jpeg)
_Bungalow Hill, towering a whole 110 feet over the ocean below_

![](/assets/images/IMG_4088.jpeg)
_this slightly angry face was brought about by me insisting she could not climb down the rocks to get closer to the water_


Traveling across America, they were astonished at how deeply violence is embedded in our culture, how it has _become_ the culture, what’s left of local color. We are a grisly nation.

Book Notes


Updating some book entries with interesting quotes from them. Probably my favorite this year:

> Traveling across America, they were astonished at how deeply violence is embedded in our culture, how it has _become_ the culture, what’s left of local color. We are a grisly nation.

My favorite book so far this year has been [How to Do Nothing](/books/how-to-do-nothing). I captured some things from there, but I recommend reading the whole thing, if you can.

[My Year of Meats](/books/my-year-of-meats)
[How to Do Nothing](/books/how-to-do-nothing)
[Smarter Faster Better](/books/smarter-faster-better)
[Big Magic](/books/big-magic)
[The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up](/books/the-life-changing-magic-of-tidying-up)


It's 2020 and I'm stuck in my house watching Democracy fall apart, why not rebuild my website again, and why not go full on "old man yells at clouds" while I'm at it.

builtwith.coffee 3.0


It's 2020 and I'm stuck in my house watching Democracy fall apart, why not rebuild my website again, and why not go full on "old man yells at clouds" while I'm at it.

If you've been here before you'll notice that the layout has changed, but behind the scenes so has the entire stack the builds the site. This site was originally:

- Gatsby 1.something
- Contentful CMS hosting the content.

I wanted my writing saved locally and wanted it searchable, so I replaced Contentful with [Netlify CMS](https://www.netlifycms.org/). Netlify CMS was... underwhelming. It was an interface that made sorting/creating Markdown easier, but I wasn't excited to use it. Adding to that:

- graphql, for a personal site, is dumb. I apologize if I ever told anyone it was a good idea. I am filled with deep regret. Is it great for stitching together various APIs? Yes! Do I want to deal with it to make CMS content show up? No never.
- Gatsby decided to go for VC funding and turn from questionable to terrible. Look at the rest of the JavaScript stack it's 98% React based (yay, Facebook, great).

That's me being grumpy about things, which, in 2020, I think I'm allowed to do. Wanting a change, the 3.0 version of this site is:

- [Statamic 3.0](https://statamic.com/)
- [Statamic SSG](https://github.com/statamic/ssg)
- Still [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/). It's going to be a while before I want to deploy a database for a personal site again.

I started as a developer hacking on PHP sites, so maybe this isn't a huge change. Statamic 3 [released very recently](https://statamic.com/blog/statamic-3-launch-announcement) and part of the release notes was this:

![](/assets/images/Screen-Shot-2020-09-28-at-9.18.09-PM.png)

Which got me thinking. I'd used Statamic in the past and was familiar with how it stored content, it's all flat-file Markdown files, so that covered what I was trying to do with Netlify CMS before.

The outstanding question was, how hard would it be to move over what I had, and would I prefer the Statamic site. Given that you're reading this... on the Statamic site, you can figure out how that ended up.

## Notes

- I wrote approximately 3 lines of JavaScript and two lines of PHP to build this site. 98% of the code is antlers templates (HTML and CSS).
- The way statamic handles variable scope is beautiful. I recently did hair-tearing work on a .NET app trying to pass values to the layout.
- I switched the whole (admittedly small) site in ~three days. Maybe four. Who can really keep track of days.
- I've been using headless / roll your own CMSs for so long that I forgot that ones that are focused around content come out of the box with a lot of the features you need. I went to make a Date field to set to the post date, but while I was setting that up I noticed this in the collection configuration panel:
  ![](/assets/images/Screen-Shot-2020-09-27-at-9.13.26-AM.png)
- The "push button, make website" experience was slightly worse than a JavaScript project, but way better than the last time I used PHP. Adding to the project (like setting up the SSG) was easier than anything I've done recently on the JavaScript side. There were some odd errors, like:

![](/assets/Screen-Shot-2020-09-24-at-9.07.08-PM.png)
I never figured that one out. [Laravel Valet](https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/valet) was another prickly point, it installed but missed at least one service, which required reading through Stack Overflow for a while.

- The content field/layout/creation experience:
  ![](/assets/gifs/giphy.gif)

And that gif shows up in the Preview tab in the Markdown editor!

In summary, I'm pretty happy with it.


2020 might get worse before it gets better, and no, no one on the Internet has any idea what to do about that.

It's Not The Internet It's You


I read [It's Not The Internet It's You](https://gr36.com/not-the-internet-its-you/) this morning (in a chain of RSS reader → [here](https://www.patrickrhone.net/8189-2/) → there). It touches on a lot of points I’ve been thinking about around Twitter and other social media, but it felt particularly relevant today, the 19th anniversary of 9/11. I’ve often thought about what that day would have been like it Twitter/Facebook had been around then.

I have one point of comparison, I learned about the Boston Marathon Bombing on Twitter. My wife was working in Boston at the time (although outside the city that day), so it obviously had immediate relevance. I checked Twitter nearly constantly in the days that followed, as though there was secret information there that the local news didn’t have. It certainly pretended it did, there was the whole [Reddit junior detective squad shitshow](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2r3d54/what_happened_with_reddit_and_the_boston_marathon/), and a bunch of Internet sleuths playing CSI-Boston with the video/photos that they could get their hands on. There was at least one day between the bombing and the shootout with the Tsarnaevs where my wife went into the office, and the official line from places in Boston was “we are investigating it, and we are keeping an eye out”, while Twitter/Reddit was convinced it was a trap to lure more people back into the city for a second attack. Very healthy for the brain.

The pattern repeats itself over the years. Something happens (2016 election, this Coronavirus thing you may have heard of) and you go looking for an explanation for “why”.

> Manipulation by platform developers only goes so far towards hacking your brain. What I quickly realised was that I had a choice to do these things or not, it was internally that I was so susceptible to the triggers used.

But there is no answer. The Internet is the checkout line at the grocery store, at best there's a poorly written recipe book, at worst it's the _National Enquirer_ and its ilk. There isn‘t a call to action here, but there is an acceptance that 2020 might get worse before it gets better, and no, no one on the Internet has any idea what to do about that.


New Art for the Office


![](/assets/images/img_3909.jpg)

I feel like, between the two of them, they sum up my feelings these days quite well. From [False Knees](https://falseknees.com/383.html)


A Picture of Change for a World of Constant Motion


I’m always jealous of the developers who get to build the interactive / scrolling features for the New York Times. I read [A Picture of Change for a World in Constant Motion][1] this morning while drinking coffee. I found it calming. I learned that Mount Fuji appears in [The Great Wave off Kanagawa][2], a picture I’ve seen a million times.

While I was reading it my daughter was bouncing around the back porch taking pictures on her Nintendo 2DS. She figured out yesterday that it had a camera, and today she’s explaining to me that you can take pictures, “with A, or L, or R!” and showing me how to go back and look at all the pictures you’ve taken. It’s fun to give a kid a camera, because you realize how they look at things. It’s doorknobs, the cats, every place her name appears in the house, close ups of textures and fabrics, a paparazzi style shot of the FedEx guy dropping off a package. Everything is close and immediate. We were at the park the other day, and there was a bird sitting on a rock off in the river, and I spent minutes getting her to see it. She was looking, but kept getting distracted by things closer to her, other birds, flowers, the shoreline. Eventually she saw the bird, and then it became “let’s go see the bird”, let’s get as close to it as we can. We got closer, but the bird flew away. We started looking at the seashells by her feet instead.

[1]:	https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=797YR&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Finteractive%2F2020%2F08%2F07%2Farts%2Fdesign%2Fhokusai-fuji.html
[2]:	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa

The 20 year history of a Partscaster


## The 90s

Back in the mid-90s, after finishing middle school, my parents agreed to get me a guitar. I’d been in band, but I was playing the flute and I didn’t enjoy it. They probably didn’t consider, at the time, that I would try to teach myself by playing “Iron Man” through an 8’’ Fender solid-state amplifier.

The guitar I ended up getting was a black Fender Stratocaster, Squire series. It’s an interesting product of globalization, there's a [detailed history here](https://spinditty.com/instruments-gear/The-Fender-Squier-Series-Stratocaster-Not-A-Typical-Squier), the TL;DR version being: while Squier was known as the cheap version of Fender in the 80s (and it is again, today), the Fender Squire series was American made parts, assembled in Mexico, with Asian electronics.

## The 2000s

It was a good guitar for my bad guitar playing, but after a few years I got a nicer Fender Lonestar Stratocaster and the Squire series sat in its case most of the time. I spent a lot of afternoons in Guitar Center back then, and I saw a Tom DeLonge Stratocaster, a one humbucker and a volume knob guitar, and thought the Squire would be a great base to recreate that with.

![](/assets/images/image.png)
_A Tom DeLonge Strat. I think I liked the colors and the CBS style headstock more than anything else_

I picked a Seymour Duncan JB for the pickup, got a single humbucker pickguard and wired it up. It worked fine, but the JB is known for having a lot of high end tones, and at the time I didn’t have a great setup to make the sound pleasant, so I thought I should wire the volume knob to a push/pull volume/tone knob so I had the option to roll the tone back and have a little less high end. Some combination of either bad pots, or bad soldering skills left with with a JB humbucker with about 2’’ of wire coming out of it, and a guitar that didn’t work.

## The 2010s

I put the project aside — for about 15 years. Time passes, and one day the guitar comes back with me after a trip to my parents. It sat, in pieces, for a few more years.

## The 2020s

I’ve been trying to either fix or get rid of things in our house, and I decided to do something with it. Fortunately for me and my soldering iron, solderless solutions have become abundant since I last tried this. [Mad Hatter Guitar Products](https://madhatterguitarproducts.com) sells a few, more oriented towards mix and match solutions or guitars without pick guards. I ended up getting one from [Obsidian Wire](https://obsidianwire.com), who sells all in one solutions wired up with a lot of common wiring mods, e.g. their humbucker, single, single model runs the humbucker through a 500k pot, where most Strats that were single / single / single before had 250k controls. Trust me, this means as much (or little) to you as it means to me.

In redoing the look of the guitar, I harnessed my inner 15 year old and drew inspiration from the car we recently bought. It’s a black Volkswagen GTI with the usual red GTI accents, so I thought, sure, black guitar, black pickups, red trim black pickguard. A quick search found the Fender Noir Stratocaster to prove that this wasn’t the worst looking thing I could make.

[![](/assets/images/fender_noir.jpg)]()
_Fender Noir Strat. Granted, it has a matte black finish…_

[Warmoth](https://www.warmoth.com) sells the three-ply black/red/black pickguards. I got one with some black control knobs and wired it up with the existing neck and middle single coil. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 20+ year old bottom of the budget-bin pickups don’t sound great. They sound better than I expected, in as much as one can expect from wire around magnets, but I figured at this point I was all in on this project, so I picked up two [DiMarzio Area 67](https://www.dimarzio.com/pickups/hum-canceling-strat/area-67) pickups for the neck and middle spots.

![](/assets/images/partscaster_open.jpg)
_When you’re bad at soldering you end up in a lot of questionable situations_

So now it’s all bolted together, and it looks like this:

![](/assets/images/partscaster_done.png)

It plays and sounds pretty good. At some point in the past I had screwed the bridge down and put five springs on it, so it’s nearly a hardtail. It could probably use some nicer tuners and a black input jack to match the Noir, but the pickguard and the parts bolted to it cost about three times what the guitar cost, so I think it can wait another 20 years or so.

### But what does it sound like

Another thing I'm trying to get better at is recording my guitar. I finally have a decent input device and I know what at least three of the buttons in Garageband do. These are all prime examples of the internal tempo of someone who has played alone most of their lives.

[Original neck pickup](/assets/audio/neck-pickup.mp3).

<audio controls>
    <source src="/assets/audio/neck-pickup.wav" type="audio/wav">
    <source src="/assets/audio/neck-pickup.mp3" type="audio/mp3"> 
    <source src="/assets/audio/neck-pickup.m4a" type="audio/mp4">
        Your browser does not support the
    <code>audio</code> element.
</audio>

Area 67, [the new neck pick up](/assets//audio/area-67-neck.mp3). Wee bit clearer.

<audio controls>
<source src="/assets/audio/area-67-neck.wav" type="audio/wav">
<source src="/assets/audio/area-67-neck.mp3" type="audio/mp3">
<source src="/assets/audio/area-67-neck.m4a" type="audio/mp4">
Your browser does not support the
<code>audio</code> element.
</audio>

Area 67, [neck and mid](/assets//audio/quack-area-67.mp3).

<audio controls>
<source src="/assets/audio/quack-area-67.wav" type="audio/wav">
<source src="/assets/audio/quack-area-67.mp3" type="audio/mp3">
<source src="/assets/audio/quack-area-67.m4a" type="audio/mp4">
Your browser does not support the
<code>audio</code> element.
</audio>


HomeRun


I’ve been slowly “smartening” our current home. It started with some Ecobee 3 thermostats (the ones not yet haunted by Alexa), then a HomePod, and more recently some Hue bulbs. I bought the bulbs for our master bathroom thinking it would be nice to have lights that adapted to the time of day; very bright during daylight hours and dim and warm when the sun has set. What I didn’t realize is that the bulbs have a boot up time, so if you turn them off with a conventional switch, when you turn them on they won’t immediately set themselves to whatever time-based settings you have them on. I moved them all to the office, where I can now turn on the overhead light and desk light at the same time. It’s… an ok trick.

There’s two things I don’t love about these smart devices, beyond the fact that you’re best off with wifi connected buttons to operate them:

1. The interfaces of the native apps and the interface of Apple Home have a lot of overlap, but also a lot of inconsistencies.
2. I don’t want to carry my phone around my home - I have an Apple Watch, I want it to control everything.

The best solution I’ve found so far is [the HomeRun app](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/homerun-for-homekit/id1367842592). You can assign it HomeKit scenes with custom icons, and run them off of the watch. They usually work, and it’s better organized than the Watch’s Home app that shows a grab bag of scenes at the top followed by every little device you own. At the very least I can now walk into the office at night, without my phone, and turn the lights on.


Note ↔ Note, thinking outside the folder


I’ve used a bunch of note taking apps over the years (Evernote, OneNote, Apple Notes, [Goodnotes](https://www.goodnotes.com), [Notion](https://www.notion.so), [Bear](****)) and I’ve almost always used them similarly to how you’d use a file system: folders for organization, notes as files. I’m always a little curious about new note apps and how they organize things. I was using Notion for a while, and got along well with using it’s concept of relational databases to make connections between notes. If you create notes in a database in Notion, you can make it look like Google Keep, you can make it correlate notes to a calendar (ala [Agenda](https://www.agenda.com), another app I’ve tried, if only for a few minutes), or you can organize them in columns Trello style and use your notes as todos. It’s all the same set of notes, just with different views of the database. There’s a somewhat clunky way to associate one note with another, or one tag with another, and only if you’re using a database of notes (i.e, not just a “page” style note), but once you have that you can organize your notes in almost any fashion you can think of. A relational database + a nice UI is really just a primitive app building platform in the tradition of Access on top of Excel.

The main issue I had with Notion is that it’s slow — it’s really a wrapper around a web app, even in native form. On top of that, it doesn’t play nicely with built-in MacOS features. One small example, if you copy a link to a [Things](https://culturedcode.com/things/) project into Notion, clicking on the link… does nothing. It doesn’t know what to do with callback urls.

So I’ve drifted from a combination of Notion and Bear, where Notion was project level and Bear was for quick capture, to Bear and Things, where Bear is project level and Things is quick capture. Everything is faster and it works across all my computers, my iPad, phone, and watch.

Bear uses tags as organization, which means you can refer to a note in multiple directions. It doesn’t live in a given folder, it lives where ever it is relevant. That said, the tags end up being used mostly as folders, it’s just you might have the same file in multiple folders.

An interesting idea I’ve seen floating around the web is associating all notes with links between notes, and using backlinks and graph views to understand where notes connect. Bear has supported “live links” or wiki style links for a bit now, you can have `Note A` and reference it in `Note B` with `[[Note A]]`. If you rename A, the link updates, and you never have to think about where `Note A` is. If you want to find all of the references to `Note A`, you can search for `[[Note A]]`, and you can use Bear’s x-callback-url API to save that search at the top of `Note A`, so you can click on the link and find all of the notes referencing that note.

Some newer apps like [Roam Research ](https://roamresearch.com) and [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md)[^1] make backlinks the main focus. You might start the day with a log, and then just tag other notes as you record what you’ve done, like:

    ```
    - Did [[HIIT workout A]] for 30 minutes
    - Met [[Cool McPerson]] for lunch at [[Local Establishment]]
    - Read article about [[Rust]] at [article](link)
    ```

then in the note `HIIT workout A` you can see all of the times you logged that note. Graph view is just these associations, but rather than buried in text, in a nice visual format. Bear can’t do this, but it’s not exactly magic to make a chart of associations, and Bear has the API to support it. There’s a [python script that will generate a Graphviz view of your notes for you on Github](https://github.com/rberenguel/bear-note-graph). It includes a handy `—anonymize` option so I can even show you what my Bear notes look like, graphically:

![](/assets/images/bear_graph.png)
Is it useful? I dunno. I’ve recently started daily logging with backlinks in my notes at work, and it’s proving helpful being able to click into longer running projects and see all of the times I associated it with a Jira issue, a person, a meeting, etc. The idea is that you can, with pretty low effort, record every thought in your head as it comes, then look at the graph and see what the core areas you’re thinking about are, and what areas can probably be pruned.

[^1]. Obsidian is interesting to me, and I’ve started using it at work instead of Bear. It’s a little clunky at the moment (it’s in a beta) and it’s clearly an Electron app, but it works off plain text files on a local file system, which is surprisingly hard to find. [Ia Writer](https://ia.net/writer) works that way, but doesn’t support backlinks.


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