
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](/assets/images/2018/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.


Dude You Got a Dell


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:

```shell
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:

```shell
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>


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


> 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>


Amish Barn


This is my first attempt at updating this site from my iPad. "Wait, how hard is that," you might wonder. "Just log in to your CMS and write something and hit publish."

Sure, that _would_ be easy. So maybe I should clarify: this is my first update to this site from my iPad, and this site is completely serverless. The magic here is simply:

- [Working Copy](https://workingcopyapp.com).
- [Gatsby](https://www.gatsbyjs.org).
- and [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com).

Working Copy is a pretty amazing iOS app which lets you pull down, modify, and push git repos. It has a decent editor built in, so I wrote this post (in markdown) in the app. It's also possible to use Working Copy as a file source in iOS's Files app, so you can create a markdown file and then open it in your editor of choice. If you don't have one for iOS, I'm a big fan of [iA Writer](https://ia.net/writer).

After that, you commit the new file and push it. Netlify is setup to look for any changes on the `master` branch, it runs a Gatsby build script that compiles all the markdown content into blog posts and violà, the site is updated.

## Downsides

There's still no way to preview this site on my iPad. Someday, maybe, we'll live in a world where iOS and MacOS overlap enough that you can do actual development on an iPad - what a crazy idea that you could build iOS application in iOS, right?

Until then, I'm just happy to have a very convenient way to update and publish my site from my iPad.


I’m Posting this from my iPad


> She decided to dye her hair.
>
> A silly thing to do, if you’re a universal idea, like Death or Spring or Music or Peace. But Suzie had learned something interesting about people: They knew the wisdom of simply being busy sometimes.
>
> Chop wood; carry water. Do the dishes. Sweep the garage. Milk the cows.
>
> Dye your hair.
>
> -- <cite>[“Reincarnation Blues” by Michael Poore](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33571217-reincarnation-blues)</cite>


Chop wood; carry water. Do the dishes. Sweep the garage. Milk the cows.


![A sloth relaxing](/assets/images/2018/sloth.jpg)

This sloth’s relaxation game is my new life goal. Spotted at [Southwick’s Zoo](http://southwickszoo.com/).


Sunday Slothsday


If you're reading this, huzzah, it worked!

I made a few changes to this site, namely:

- It went from Gatsby 1.0 to Gatsby 2.0.
- It went from pulling content from markdown files saved in the git repo to pulling content from [Contentful](https://www.contentful.com/) and [Pocket](https://getpocket.com/a/queue/).

## Why is this better?

A few things:

1. Contentful can issue a webhook when I publish content, and [Netlify can listen to it](https://www.contentful.com/blog/2018/05/09/building-portfolio-website-contentful-nextjs-netlify/), so I don't have to push code to Netlify to kick off a content build. That separates the code from the content nicely.
2. I find a lot of links I want to keep track of _and_ share, but I'm terrible at following through on it. Saving those links in markdown files didn't make it any easier, but I already use Pocket. Now the flow is: save a site to Pocket, read and archive it, tag it with `bwc`, and [Gatsby will add it to the site's graphql](https://github.com/conradj/gatsby-source-pocket)and I can merge it with the content I've created on the home page.
3. The content here isn't particularly complex schema-wise, but I am a UI developer so I'm very aware of how a few seconds here and there messing with formatting and structure can, over time, become super frustrating. Moving the markdown metadata into nicely formatted Contentful fields makes the process of creating a new post much more enjoyable.

## What's left?

1. I'd like to find a way to connect the Pocket archive task to a webhook so that _also_ does a Netlify deploy, but it's a low priority.
2. Getting the site working offline as a progressive web app. 😁


The Great Gatsby - Upgrade


Every morning, on the way to the office, I walk by a dog park. It's in a nice part of the city, so it's a lot of _fancy_ dogs with hypoallergenic hair and such, although I doubt the dogs know that. What I always enjoy about the dog park is how excited the dogs are. Excited to chase a ball, excited to sniff other dogs, excited to roll in the grass. You never see a dog walk after a ball, even old dogs will run their slow wobbly-kneed run after a thrown ball.

It's not just dogs, I see my daughter do it as well. If she sees a friend on the way into daycare she runs all the way to the daycare door. If we say she can watch TV, she runs to the couch, tell her she can have a cookie she runs to the table and waits for it. She could walk and arrive concurrently with the cookie, but that thought never crosses her mind.

You rarely see adults run out of sheer joy. The dog owners usually stand around, many looking more interested in the prospect of being able to leave the park than being at the park. The parents at daycare don't run along with their kids, and I assume they, like I, do not run to work if we meet a co-worker on the way there. You see someone running in something other than obvious jogging attire and you wonder what they're late for, or if they're really moving, what they're running from.

I haven't started running out of excitement. I do some days stop and watch the dogs do it.


Unbridled Enthusiasm


Let me start this by saying: I like cemeteries. I find the quiet relaxing, I like wandering around looking for unique headstones, and I make a game out of trying to find the oldest grave in the park. I especially love the colonial-era headstones you can find in New England, with their hand-hewn skulls that are either dopey or terrifying or reverent or some mix of all three.

I was also raised by a father who thought that the maybe-true story of Eskimos putting the elderly out on ice floes when they became a burden was a good idea. So, reading a book with a section about the dead being fed to vultures was kind of right up my alley.

I learned some surprising things while reading this book. I always thought a funeral pyre was a neat idea, like a dramatic cremation, but it turns out they're not great for the environment. I would have assumed a dead body in the wild would be gone overnight, but it turns out unless you have the right kind of animals around, it's unlikely something is going to show up and eat your body. I learned that, in general, it's actually kind of hard to get rid of a body, especially the bones, and it's mostly regulations and price gouging that requires you to take something that is already hard to break down and wrap it in a bunch of metal and wood and cement enclosures that are even harder or impossible to break down.

More than anything, the book reminded me that death in the United States is an inglorious thing, and there's really not much you can do about it. The options for alternative burials are incredibly limited, and the system is setup in a way that means end-of-life for most people involves dying in an uncaring hospital environment and picking a pre-packaged plan from a funeral home, with the nice plan giving you two hours to grieve and please make sure the photos we're going to display on the TV in the lobby are formatted correctly. Or as the book puts it:

> In our Western culture, where are we held in our grief? Perhaps religious spaces, churches, temples - for those who have faith. But for everyone else, the most vulnerable time in our lives is a gauntlet of awkward obstacles.

I am not religious, so I understand this. If I was, and I could pick a religion that I thought would respect my death in the way I want it to be respected I'd go with the religion of the ancient Egyptians and be buried in a rock pyramid with my cats. Since that's probably out of the question, cremation seems like a fine backup plan, but after reading about the [Bolivian Ñatitas](http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/to-live-and-die-and-live-again-in-bolivia-the-fiesta-de-las-natitas), I kinda want someone to keep my skull around too. Doesn't even have to be a family member, a future web-worker can make me a crown of USB cables and I'll help them decide which JavaScript datetime library to use, or something.

Anyway, I recommend this book. It's a quick read, it's mid-October, you can finish it before Halloween, when Americans dress up as ghosts and ghouls and pretend that death is terrifying, and most of the rest of the world throws a party to celebrate the part of life that is death.


Book Thoughts: From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty


![Post from Reddit about electronic voting machinges failing](/assets/images/2018/81103EFB-D1F7-49DA-8430-E5B1488B9EF0.jpeg)

From a [Reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/9rmqzp/texans_say_voting_machines_are_flipping/) on Texas voting machines. This is a pretty egregious failure on the part of some UI developer somewhere, but it does speak to an often overlooked part of UI development: if a user can see an interface, they're going to try to interact with it, and it's your job to make sure that they can. If you don't have a good understand of what interactive means (or what can block it), Phillip Walton's recent post, ["Idle Until Urgent"](https://philipwalton.com/articles/idle-until-urgent/) is a good read.


In case you worried UI development wasn’t important


A [great article](https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/16/17980424/shop-local-jeremiah-moss 'the problem with shop local') on the problem with the idea of "shop local" saving small businesses, and an [old school styled blog ](https://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/)to go along with it.

It paints a picture that lines up with what I've observed, that major city centers will eventually all look the same because only "big retail" can exist there, and smaller cities will take up the unique stores that big cities once had. If you want to save big cities, it might be time to switch all of the "keep CITY NAME HERE weird" slogans to "the rent is too damn high".


Shop Local


![A creepy window decoration we made for Halloween.](/assets/images/2018/2D45DB2F-C1A4-43FF-95DB-CD131BF4D81C.jpeg)

I always set out to make Halloween decorations that are creepy-cute, like something from Tim Burton, but end up with things that are disturbing-cute, like a bunch of clown dolls in an attic.



I always knew my grandfather fought in France in World War II, but the details were fuzzy. As a kid I’d ask dumb questions like, “did you ever shoot anyone,” and he’d reply with, “I shot at them, they shot at me, who knows where the bullets went,” before shooing me off. In High School I was given an “Interview a World War II veteran” assignment for an American History class, so I asked him some more formalized questions, but he couldn’t quite remember the names of places he had been to, or when exactly things had happened. At the time I wondered how it would be possible to forget something like fighting in World War II, but he was there as twenty year-old in 1944, this was maybe in 1998, he was trying to recall fifty-four year-old memories of things he probably didn’t want to remember.

I asked again, every few years, about what he remembered. At some point we got him a computer, and installed Google Earth, and he would mouse around France trying to figure out where he was. He would do some searches for the places he had been, but his misspellings of mispronounced locations in France didn’t return much. At some point he remembered (or saw on a map) that he had been in Metz, and we figured out that the fort he fought at was called Driant, not Durant or Verant, as he usually pronounced it. In 2009 I sat down and asked him a few more questions and actually recorded it.

My grandfather passed away two years ago, but I listen to the recording every so often, and search around for any more details. Coincidentally, someone added a Wikipedia page about the battle in 2009, not long after I had talked to him: Battle of Fort Driant. The initial entry refers to it as a “minor skirmish” in the larger Metz conflict. This year I finally got around to transcribing some of our conversation so it was saved somewhere other than my iCloud Voice Notes. A lot of it is sort of - as he remembers it, not in a clear chronological order. Or it was pieces of conversations that I knew I had with him in the past the he was interjecting. But there’s one part of the story that was always clear in his mind:

“...the fort was big. When we left the fort, two o’clock in the afternoon, they come down with a British (unsure of the word used here) they called it. See we only had a piece of the fort, we only had a little piece. And they put that in the tunnel, and they blew it. And the blew into the hole, because it was plugged. So they blew it out. So they sit there with machine guns firing at us, and they sit there with a machine gun firing at them, down the tunnel. You know, back and forth? And you know the back of the damn machine guns sit like there, and they had ten satchel charges here (1), they weighed 18 pounds a piece. TNT. And a bullet, or a uh, they don’t know whether it was a bullet, or... the door was right here, whether they put a hand grenade in. They blew up. And you know I was gonna go into the door, cause we were all retreating then, because they tell us, “everybody on that side of the fort get the Hell out”, because they were afraid the Germans was gonna break through. So we were all crawling through, and when that blast - the five guys in front of me they had faces like hamburger. The two guys in front, medic said they wouldn’t live, but the two guys in front, the lash above the eye was even gone, and the other guys they had their lashes but the meat was like the powder of the satchel charges, they were in the flame in other words. And the five machine gunners that were sitting there by the hole they were gone. I got blown across the room there, helmet fell off. Stunk! I mean the smoke, couldn’t even breathe. I got my handkercheif out, put it over my nose, then I could breathe, because it saved the big punches from coming in. Then we got out of there. When we got over to the next part, there was a tunnel that went into another opening. And that’s where we, we were so tired then we were just sitting and snoring so loud you’d wake yourself up. Because the last two or three days we didn’t get much sleep. And after that, they took us out.

We went up with a hundred and forty-nine, went over with a hundred and forty-nine, and we came back with forty-nine.“

1 - I believe he was pointing across the room while saying this, indicating the machine gun wasn’t far away from the charges.

At some point in the recording you can hear my Grandmother chime in with, "I'm glad you didn't have to go to war Joey". Me too, Grandma.


Veteran’s Day


> Accessibility is hard. But it is no harder than security, performance, usability, internationalization, or quality code. And frankly, we don’t put up with software companies (even open source ones) saying “whoops, well you know, security is hard, so it fell by the wayside, sorry”.
> -- <cite>[Anne Gibson](https://theinterconnected.net/kirabug/putting-my-money-where-my-mouth-is/)</cite>

Yes. And that's a great list of bullet points for anyone starting a new project. Define what accessibility, security, performance, usability, internationalization, and quality code mean for your project when you start - not halfway through, or at the end.



![Our cats, Maggie and Jake, under the Christmas tree.](/assets/images/2018/defending-the-presents.jpeg)
I think our cats might be half chicken. They've never tried taking the tree down - they're content to just roost under it.

Merry Christmas, everyone.


Defending the presents


My most used apps, on a day to day basis, are:

1. Visual Studio Code
2. Slack
3. Notion

Just in case anyone wonders where I stand on the Electron debate.



If you're a web developer working on a website running tracking or analytics scripts of any type, you absolutely need to make sure it works for users blocking third-party scripts. This is just the latest example, from [fabric.com](https://www.fabric.com/), but I've seen this happen many times: a completely blank screen when Ghostery is blocking scripts.

![the fabric.com website in a broken state because ghostery blocked tracking scripts](/assets/images/2018/broke.JPG)

In this particular case the site threw the error:

    Uncaught TypeError: window.cmRecRequest is not a function

I personally run Chrome with [Ghostery](https://www.ghostery.com/) in "shut it all down mode", or set to block everything. The issue is always the same: a piece of code that fires a call to a tracking script (usually set as a global variable), that doesn't check that the variable exists before making the call. It's not often you find it on page load, but turn Ghostery blocking on and watch how many call-to-action buttons on marketing sites stop working.

Even less extreme ad-blocking can cause some unwanted behavior. This is from [css-tricks](https://css-tricks.com/) on Firefox running [uBlock Origin](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/).
![also-broken](/assets/images/2018/also-broken.JPG)

I don't need any help managing my projects, but it still took me a bit to parse what exactly was going on with this sentence, until I viewed it in another browser and found out it was uBlock hiding text that was a [doubleclick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick) link.

The ad blocking wars are only going to get worse going forward, especially now that Apple is blocking ads at an operating system level, while Google and Microsoft are trying to prevent ad blocking at that same level, and the browsers and lining up on opposite sides of the same battle, with Safari and Firefox helping users block ads and trackers out of the box, and Edge and Chrome have a business interest in delivering ads and tracking their users.


Don't Let Ad Blockers Break Your Website


I spent a little time over the holidays playing around with [Stencil](https://stenciljs.com/), a JS compiler for web components. I wanted to look at it because we've been comparing component libraries at work, and we were finding a surprising number of them that were going all-in on web components, usually generated by Stencil. Some quick notes about it in general, and comparing it against React, our current JavaScript library of choice:

- Stencil reminds me a lot of the joys of jQuery plugins, where deciding between creating an element and passing in children or creating an element and passing in attributes is just a flip of the coin kinda choice. That's not to say React is better - see the arguments for or against higher-order components - but at least in React everything is in React, unlike web components where your children / attributes are in HTML and the handling is in JavaScript.
- I hate carousels. I wanted to try to recreate a carousel that's on our current [public site](https://www.eftours.com/) - it kind of magically appears when the viewport gets small enough and is just a glorified overflow slider. I feel like I've built variations of carousels a thousand times now, so there's a certain appeal in building a web component and _never ever doing it again_.
- HTML doesn't understand TypeScript. I use TypeScript on all my React projects, and having attribute completion is 💯so going back to "just" HTML made me a little sad. It also made me realize how long it's been since I've written anything in an `.html` file that wasn't just `<div id="app"></div>`.
- ... but it is just HTML + JS so it works anywhere.
- ... but Stencil is a compiler that requires a build step, so you haven't quite gotten away from build steps in your front-end development process, but you're closer for every project that uses the Stencil-generated components.
- I would have killed for this setup 3 or 4 years ago. TypeScript? Sane JavaScript templating? Not having to transport the same stupid widget between HTML, Angular, and React projects? It would have been amazing. Now that I do everything in React it's less exciting.

Overall I was impressed by Stencil. The documentation could be better, but they make it pretty easy to fire up a project and figure it out, and TypeScript + JSX is by far my favorite combination for JavaScript templating. Some of the decisions are close to React but not quite the same, like having props and state but not state update batching, or at least not that I could find. Digging through the shadow DOM in the Chrome inspector is painful compared to using React dev tools, especially if you're using child elements, which exist in some sort of alternate reality that allows you to interact with them like normal DOM elements. I built the carousel as a web component that accepts any children because that's how I would do it in React, but dealing with children beyond using the web component `<slot>` tag required some Stack Overflow searches and some solutions that I'm still not sure I grok.

If there was ever a chance we were moving away from doing everything in React I'd jump to web components in a second, but when we _are_ building everything in React, adding in another compiler feels like it's overcomplicating our development tooling. But maybe I'll regret saying that when we switch to Vue and have to build another carousel.

I put the [demo up on GitHub](https://github.com/jjmartucci/stencil-demo), it's probably broken in IE. I hate carousels.


Stenciling


2019 marks twenty years since I first pushed a website to the internet, yet today I was trying to set up a project and I got caught on something very... silly. I was testing a webpack configuration for a React library so it would run in Internet Explorer 11, but I couldn't get the application code to execute when running the development server. I dug through the code and searched for anything I could think of to narrow down if it was the fault of webpack, the dev server, my application code, or the polyfills I had added for IE11 support. After a (too long) search, it came down to this:

`<script src="main.js" />`

This is not the first time I've made this mistake, and in case it's not immediately clear to you, dear reader, [script tags cannot be self-closing](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69913/why-dont-self-closing-script-tags-work). Every time this has tripped me up it's been a particularly baffling error because a self-closing script tag will appear to load - the script will show up in the network tab of the dev tools, and all the code will be there, it just won't execute anything.

Since first learning web development, I've done the very basic task of adding a script tag a lot of different ways:

- In some PHP function that tied into a CMS's loading hooks.
- In .NET MVC ScriptBundles.
- `document.createElement("script");` then assigning the script source.
- Not at all, letting the magic of something like Gatsby or webpack add the script tag for me.

On top of that, my mental context for when or when not to close tags comes from a mix of knowing HTML, XHTML, and currently working with React - there's some conflicting ideas of what must, should, and should not be self-closing going on in my head.

The project works now - and supports IE11! - and however many years from now, when I forget that a script tag can't be self-closing, I'll at least have this blog post to look back on. Or, all of the browsers will have started supporting a self-closing script tag, or I'll have moved on to yet another abstraction around loading the script tag that removes the brackets and I'll have forgotten how HTML works entirely.


Twenty years and I still can't add a script tag right


I finished "Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport last weekend. I assumed, from the title, the book would just be this:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Delete your account. <a href="https://t.co/Oa92sncRQY">https://t.co/Oa92sncRQY</a></p>&mdash; Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) <a href="https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/740973710593654784?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 9, 2016</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

repeated for 300 or so pages. It wasn't! The 2016 election and Twitter comes up at least a few times, but the book is more about forming good habits to replace digital distractions. My favorite quote from the book:

> You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types or rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia.

The book resonates with my belief that the value of the internet is fundamentally found in two things:

- As a repository of nearly infinite amounts of information.
- As a channel for nearly infinite pathways of human to human communication.

As an example: I play guitar, I'm interested in building my own guitar. There are many thousands of videos on YouTube on how to do this, reviews of every single piece I might be considering, and more forums than I can even find with detailed instructions and helpful tips from other people on how to build almost any combination of guitar. This was nonexistent when I was a kid - if you wanted this level of information you were lucky if a book existed, otherwise you had to find someone who knew how to build guitars, maybe at the local music store, if you happened to have one and someone working there knew something about guitars.

The Internet supports these activities, but most of the attention economy (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc) is driven by users being distracted by other things. Facebook might help you organize real-life events, but wouldn't it be great if you also paid attention to these people you never see in real-life? Twitter might be a great place to follow your favorite author, but wouldn't it be great if you also saw some retweets about a political argument from a friend of a friend? YouTube might be a great place to watch instructional videos, but hey also have you considered that 9/11 might have been perpetrated by the US government and here's a 3-hour long video about that from OffTheGridLifeAmerica you might be interested in. Accepting these platforms as they would like you to accept them (i.e., in a way that makes them money) can only be done in a way that is inherently detrimental to your free time and quality of life.

My main takeaways from the book:

1. Delete / block anything digital that doesn't improve your real-life experience. Going back to the guitar example above, if a digital experience makes you want to play guitar more, great! If you spend all your time on Instagram looking at guitars, stop it. The rule of thumb here seems to be if you want to spend less time on the digital activity and more time on the IRL activity it fosters, it's probably ok.

2. Assume every addition to your life is a net negative unless proven otherwise. This isn't a "digital minimalism" philosophy, it's just a minimalism philosophy. It's seemingly a trend, or else Netflix wouldn't have produced that Marie Kondo show, right?

3. Build or create something every week. I liked this idea. I started blocking out my time better in 2019, and keeping track of things like "exercise 3 days a week", but the things I keep track of don't completely fill up my free time. Doing something with your hands is usually completely analog - unless of course it's building a guitar while watching videos on how to do it. But at the very least it's not _passively_ digital, which is the point.

4. Own your shit. Or, phrased more politely, [own your turf](http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/37863874092). I dream of a day I can go online once or twice a week, hit an RSS aggregator and catch up on the activities of all of the people I care about. That was nearly a reality in the early days of the web, but the social media giants would prefer to own your content and make it hard to access unless the reader is also inside their bubble. To that end, I deleted the links on this site to other places (LinkedIn, Mastodon... not Github, that's actually useful, and not really social media) - if you found me here, what more of me would you wish to find.

In conclusion I give the book ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (out of 5), not on Goodreads or any other platform, just here. Also, true to form, I read the print version, and we got it from the library so we could work on real world minimalism too.


Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport


![](/assets/images/2019/be_happy_m.jpg)

alt: don't worry, bee happy.

I'm super jealous of that scooter. Best thing I had at that age was a tricycle that weighed 80 pounds with pedals that would crack your shins in half if you went downhill.


Don't worry, bee happy


Found on a [Hacker News thread about PHP in 2019](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19917655).

![php](/assets/images/2018/php.PNG)

I don't write any PHP these days, but the sentiment of a single file that combines HTML, JavaScript, and database queries to quickly knock out simple projects resonates - that's the exact setup I have for the [Gatsby](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/) powered files that generate this site. There's no `<?`s any more though, it's GraphQL queries and JSX that covers both the JS and the HTML.

I can't see ever going back to PHP - I'd prefer Python and I know more C# than it at this point - but I'll never complain about it being a quick and (sometimes) dirty language.


HTML, code, and databases


I watched the ["Any Given Saturday Afternoon"](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9822624/) episode (S3:E7) of _Documentary Now!_ on Netflix this weekend. _Documentary Now!_ is a great show to begin with but this one really killed me because I bowled in a league for many years, and it's a nearly one-to-one spoof of [_A League of Ordinary Gentleman_](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430289/) which every bowling nerd watched when it came out. Spoof might not even be the right word, the source material is as ridiculous as the _Documentary Now!_ version, with the exception of way more Alf references. I think. Honestly if the Alf stuff was in the original and I just forgot I wouldn't be supris

If you watched "Any Given Saturday Afternoon" and weren't familiar with who Tim Robinson and Michael C. Hall were portraying you'd miss out on most of the humor. _A League of Ordinary Gentleman_ is worth watching, but if you're short on time Tim Robinson's character, Rick Kenmore, is an almost unaltered portrayl of Pete Weber, and you can understand Pete Weber from this amazing, 26 second long YouTube video entitled "PETE WEBER GOD DAMMIT I DID IT WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE".

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/gKQOXYB2cd8" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>


Any Given Saturday Afternoon


![Art we picked up at the Beverly Arts Fest](/assets/images/2018/arts-fest.jpeg)

Our haul from Arts Fest Beverly this year. We definitely have a style we like, specifically down to how many legs a fox should have in the air.

1. Fox with grapes by [Maura OConnor](http://www.mauraoconnorillustration.com/).
2. Bear by [Hastings Studio](http://www.hastings-studio.com/).
3. Fox with butterflies by [Kim Ferreira](http://kim-ferreira.com/).
4. Little Mermaid by [Brian Gubicza](http://goobeetsa.com/)


Arts Fest Beverly, 2019


There's a running – joke? commentary? zen koan? – in the Linux community about the "Year of the Linux Desktop", meaning the year where people finally start using Linux instead of Windows. You can find an [endless number of hot takes](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=year+of+the+linux+desktop&t=ffab&atb=v102-1&ia=web) on the web about whether it has happened, is happening, will happen, will _never_ happen, has happened but by way of the Android operating system... you get the idea.

Recently I've seen a similar theme on how now is _finally_ the time for people to take control of their content on the web – the "Year of Publishing Your Own Content". There's strong takes like ["Can we all please stop using Medium now?"](https://www.webdistortion.com/2019/05/16/can-we-all-please-stop-using-medium-now/) and more nuanced takes on ["Own Your Content"](https://ownyourcontent.wordpress.com/). There's always [Manton Reece's slightly opinionated thoughts](https://manton.org/) on the subject or [Eugen Rochko's Mastodon feed](https://mastodon.social/@Gargron). We're even into the part of the cycle where people start to show demos of how they [moved off of Medium to another platform](https://joshkerr.com/how-to-move-your-blog-from-medium-to-wordpress/) and [how to do it in gif form](https://github.com/mathieudutour/medium-to-own-blog), analogous to the "how to delete Windows and install Linux" articles from the last turn of the millennium.

The points raised are all valid. The main hosting platforms are each their own brand of awful – Twitter (full of character-limited hate crimes), Tumblr (censorship), Medium (adwalled), and Facebook/Instagram (still run by Mark "I don't know why they trust me" Zuckerberg). What these treatises ignore is that publishing your own content isn't easy, and monetizing what you own is ten times harder than that. There might be more and more articles popping up now about how to move away from Medium, but go back two years and you'd many of the same people arguing for moving to Medium – it was the hot new platform and had all of the eyeballs. Everything that gets popular on the web will eventually get hit with the "nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded" line, but if you want to be seen, you need to be where it's crowded, and it you want to make money you need to be where it's incredibly, unbearably crowded.

![Medium Take Over](/assets/images/2018/medium.JPG)
_posting on Medium seemed like a great idea before all of the content got stuck behind this pop-up._

I have some bias in the "should you self publish" argument as you're reading this on a domain I own, but I also realize I have the technical and financial means to do so. Also, I'm not trying to sell you anything, and I don't particularly care if you even show up. This quote from [Khoi Vinh on "Own Your Content"](https://ownyourcontent.wordpress.com/2019/05/14/khoi-vinh-on-how-his-blog-amplified-his-work-and-career/) resonated with me:

> ...I’m not suggesting that what I do has any superior worth at all, but what I will say is that the difference between content that lives on a centralized blogging platform and what I do on a site that I own and operate myself—where I don’t answer to anyone else but me—is that what my writing on [Subtraction.com](http://subtraction.com/) has a high tolerance for ambiguity. It’s generally about design and technology, but sometimes it’s about some random subject matter, some non sequitur, some personal passion. It’s a place for writing and thinking, and ambiguity is okay there, even an essential part of it. That’s actually increasingly rare in our digital world now, and I personally value that a lot.

My advice? Post whatever you want wherever you want, but keep everything backed up as plain text. Be skeptical of any system that makes that difficult, and avoid entirely any one that encourages people to be awful. If all else fails, consider selling chapbooks at the closest highway rest area, that's _real_ self publishing.


2019 - the Year of Publishing Your Own Content


When you think, "oh, I have an idea for something I can code," and you Google it and there's a [blog post explaining exactly how to do it in the language and environment you were going to do it in](https://maryknize.com/blog/gatsby-image-annotations-using-exif-data/):

![this-is-amazing](/assets/images/2018/this-is-amazing.gif)


This is Amazing!


![C631F6ED-36F3-4B4C-B7D4-1BE4EA5B0A92](/assets/images/2018/C631F6ED-36F3-4B4C-B7D4-1BE4EA5B0A92.jpg)

Definitely my favorite thing in the library, finding random things used as bookmarks. Notecards with lists on them are a common one, but this is another level. Who is this person? Why did they make this list? Why did they read this book!


The best part of the library is the random bookmarks


I took my daughter to see _Spirited Away_ at the local theatre today, part of the [Studio Ghibli Fest 2019](https://www.ghiblifest.com/) , reshowing the films on big(ish) screens. Some thoughts:

- The dad in the movie is peak dad. When they’re driving down the dirt road at the beginning of the film and Chihiro says they’re lost, he responds with “Don’t worry, I’ve got four-wheel drive.” and proceeded to floor it. Again near the beginning, when the parents are eating all of the food, and Chihiro warns them that they’ll have to pay, he replies with, “Don’t worry, you’ve got Dad here. I’ve got credit cards and cash. “ The dad is emblematic of the themes that carry through the movie, that technology doesn’t solve problems and money isn’t the answer to everything, but they nailed that in all of three lines from him.

- That said, the dad’s Audi _is_ pretty nice. Those late 90s A4s were a classic style.
  ![x70bbhvlnrhiivsi5v0t](/assets/images/2018/x70bbhvlnrhiivsi5v0t.png)

- My daughter was terrified of the parents turning into pigs. It is scary in a “this is just too weird” kind of way, and the close up of the pig parents is intentionally horrifying, but I didn’t expect her to react so strongly to it. What I realized as the movie went on is that Chihiro doesn’t get a break for a _long_ time. Until she washes the river spirt (which is, in itself, creepy) she’s dealing with weird monsters, terrifying heights, and the emotional drama of having watched her parents turn into pigs and being forced into indentured servitude. Compare that to something like the _The Lion King_, where Simba watches his dad die and 20 minutes later he’s singing “hakuna matata”.

My daughter, I think because Halloween is coming up, started listing the things she isn’t afraid of the other day, which went something like “not ghosts, not goblins, not alligators but I am afraid of crocodiles a little bit” and I guess she can add her parents turning into pigs on there with the Nile crocodiles now.

![iu copy](/assets/images/2018/iu_copy.png)

- On a similar point, my daughter was really nervous that No Face was going to eat Chihiro. She certainly never thought the abominable snowmonster in _Frozen_ was going to eat Anna, and the difference highlights the tension that runs through the film - you’re never really sure what Chihiro’s fate is going to be.

The only other movie we got to see this year for the Ghibli Fest was _My Neighbor Totoro_. It was definitely the better pick to see with a 4 year old, but even in that one there’s an extended scene where everyone thinks Mei has drowned, and while Totoro is fuzzy he’s far from _warm_ and fuzzy. We missed _Kiki’s Delivery Service_ but I’d like to watch it with her at some point, I recall it being the most Americanized of them, but who knows what parts I’ve forgotten that she’ll find strange.


Spirited Away - Studio Ghibli Fest 2019


This was a [great bug](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/07/careful-with-that-iphone-or-you-might-end-up-in-kazakhstan/) from my iPhone 3G that just keeps on giving every time I open Photos.

![Screen Shot of photos on my iPhone showing me in Kyrgyzstan.](/assets/images/2018/Screen_Shot_2019-10-08_at_7.43.38_PM.png)

We were joking at work the other day about how dealing with timezones will only be worse once space travel is common, but imagine getting someone results for the closest pizza place on the wrong planet. Also, I couldn't find what you call geotagging on Mars (maybe still geotagging since geo usually relates to lower-case earth not Earth), but fortunately there's [a microformat spec proposal](http://microformats.org/wiki/geo-extension-strawman) for it already.


That time I went to Kyrgyzstan


This week is my last week as a software developer at Education First. I’m off to something new, but before going I wanted to take a look back at my first EF trip. I went on two trips while working at EF (Spain first, then [Ireland and the United Kingdom](https://www.builtwith.coffee/posts/2019/april/capitals-of-the-british-isles/)), but my very first one was as a customer, back in high school, when my Latin class went to Italy on a tour now called [Bell’Italia](https://www.eftours.com/educational-tour/beautiful-italy).

When I went looking for some sort of evidence of that trip to Italy, I realized all of the pictures I took had never made it to any form of modern computing storage — they were still saved on some floppy disks back at my parent’s house. The timing was fortunate though, my parents were coming up for Thanksgiving anyway, all I needed to do was order a USB disk reader off of Amazon.

**Technical aside:** The floppy disks are from Mystic Color Lab, where we got all of our film processed, circa 1999 (take that, Y2K!). The pictures were processed then scanned, and saved at a _mind-blowing_ 600×400 resolution. If I remember correctly that was close to what you got from a low end digital camera at the time, and it probably gave them some overhead to always fit 1 roll of film on 1 floppy disk. I think our computer at the time had a 800x600 display so I’m sure they looked great on it. Impressively, all of the 20 year old disks could be read without issue, but sadly no one seems to know where the printed copies of these photos are, so 600×400 might be the best I’m ever going to have of these. Also worth mentioning, two years later I had a digital camera that took pictures at 1280×960 and Mystic Color Lab was out of business.

Of course I’m not in any of these pictures, so there’s no proof that I really went except for me having these random pictures of Italy, but I assure you I did. It was maybe the most memorable experience from high school, even before finding these photos I knew what was on all of them, and it was one of the primary motivations for wanting to work at EF. I’m sad to go, but I’m excited about what’s next, and I’m betting that they’ll pop back up in my life when my daughter is old enough to travel.

_kids playing soccer in an alley in Venice, which is peak Italy as I remember it_

![](/assets/images/2019/0F3AA697-702C-41BC-8C27-DB1585671F79.jpeg)

_Michelangelo’s workshop in Florence_

![](/assets/images/2019/75900236-26E0-40C4-81C7-1C5C4DBDED9F.jpeg)

_light from the center hole in the Pantheon_

![](/assets/images/2019/3AB72ACF-39C9-400E-B23F-A1CFAD5CA8DF.jpeg)

_Spanish Steps in Rome_

![](/assets/images/2019/8F8B7F57-B335-479B-A962-30FFAA00F6AF.jpeg)

_Florence from the Duomo_

![](/assets/images/2019/D46EB544-A869-405D-96E8-941251F4AB92.jpeg)

_Venice from St. Mark’s campanile_

![](/assets/images/2019/7160C475-C6AA-4240-AD6B-822CEDA049F7.jpeg)

_the picture every Latin student has to take, from Pompeii_

![](/assets/images/2019/AD5E7B89-88BB-41F7-ACC4-943EE04851B4.jpeg)

_St. Mark’s square_

![](/assets/images/2019/20C77B12-4340-4040-8A61-E67B6C56DD0A.jpeg)

_the countryside around, if I remember correctly, Assisi_

![](/assets/images/2019/57D890FE-1C97-4963-81AC-159B8674EF8E.jpeg)


Floppy Memories


I set a goal to read 40 books in 2019. I didn’t hit it.

I did come a lot closer than I thought I would though, ending up at 30 books, with two in progress as I write this, one of which I _might_ finish by the end of the year. Some notes on what helped me read way more this year than the year before:

1. I set a goal.
2. I kept track of everything in Notion. I created a kanban board, and whenever I find something that looks interesting, it goes in the “want to read” column. This makes finding something to read at the library, or when I’m just looking to pick up something new much easier.
3. I generally read a non-fiction and fiction book at the same time. Not concurrently, but I might be reading the fiction book on the weekends and non-fiction on the train.
4. The bulk of my reading came from weekends when I woke up, made coffee, picked up a book and started reading with no distractions in between. Having physical books (when possible) and forgetting internet connected devices existed made that even easier.

## Started and didn’t finish

1. [You Are a Badass at Making Money: Master the Mindset of Wealth by Jen Sincero](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30900534-you-are-a-badass-at-making-money) This book is terrible.
2. [Michael Chabon’s the Escapist: Pulse-Pounding Thrills by Michael Chabon](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37490848-michael-chabon-s-the-escapist?from_search=true&qid=kulKI0n6zc&rank=6). I liked the idea of this, the “found” tales of a fake historical comic book superhero, but couldn’t get in to any of the actual stories.
3. [Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42283862-cult-of-the-dead-cow?from_search=true&qid=Msiux8aRi2&rank=1). Back cover made it seem interesting….
4. [Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23453112-modern-romance). This was one in a huge stack of books that went to the beach house this Summer. Read a bunch of the others, just never got around to finishing this.

## Started and will probably finish someday

1. [Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12543.Bird_by_Bird?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=vBfMYo9Qw3&rank=2). I feel like 100% of the point of this book is in the title, but maybe I’ll revisit some day and be proven wrong.
2. [Rubik by Elizabeth Tan](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33846181-rubik). I only got a few pages in (library due dates!) but I have it still in the “try again” column in the kanban board I track my reading on.
3. [Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6570502-switch?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=OI0uKpZo3f&rank=2). Just found some other non-fiction books that were more interesting and kept throwing this one in the backlog.

Alright, let’s move on to the books I actually read.

## Read but wouldn’t recommend

This is, fortunately, a relatively short list.

1. [Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living by Elizabeth Willard Thames](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35068719-meet-the-frugalwoods?from_search=true&qid=t4YAOrLXXD&rank=1). I think the critical responses to this book (read any comment on Goodreads) are a bit overblown, but it’s fundamentally pitched as being about living a frugal lifestyle when it’s really about making choices that matter to you with your money. Framed differently, I still wouldn’t recommend it, but I’d feel less like I wasted my time reading it.

## Graphic Novels

I’m not sure these need to be separated out, but these ones all have pictures with the words.

1. [Saga, Vol. 9 by Brian K. Vaughan](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29237221-saga-vol-9?from_search=true&qid=kACrvJN1A5&rank=1). I ❤️ everything Brian K. Vaughan does.
2. [The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29936927-the-best-we-could-do?from_search=true&qid=EAo47SgvV9&rank=1).
3. [oh no by Alex Norris](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36374393-oh-no?from_search=true&qid=3YasZCCsyY&rank=2). This book is 1 joke for 100 pages but I loved it all 100 times.

## Read but I suggest you just read the Wikipedia entry instead

All of these are perfectly good books, but they’re a lot of words around a main point that’s maybe a five paragraph essay.

1. [The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6667514-the-checklist-manifesto?from_search=true&qid=lNmDRpAi62&rank=1). Checklists = good.
2. [The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10639.The_Paradox_of_Choice?from_search=true&qid=Fq6pWekfTP&rank=1). Choice = hard.
3. [Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/313605.Getting_to_Yes?from_search=true&qid=9bph5fBP7v&rank=1). Most of this is obvious but definitely read the Wikipedia on [BANTA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiated_agreement).

## Read, career related

There’s a few books in this category that I started but have not finished nor given up on ([Code Complete by Steve McConnell](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4845.Code_Complete?from_search=true&qid=xy87qSGXZz&rank=1) being the big one), a lot of work related books I read in very short sessions when I’m looking for something specifically relevant to what I’m doing.

1. [Inclusive Front-End Design Patterns by Heydon Pickering](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/10/inclusive-design-patterns/).

## Read and enjoyed, non-fiction

1. [Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25744928-deep-work?from_search=true&qid=9omgwYWQ55&rank=1)
2. [Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40672036-digital-minimalism?from_search=true&qid=b9LUFagzzM&rank=1). I definitely didn’t need to read both, but my wife had them both on hold at the library at different times so why not. If you were going to read one, I’d go with Deep Work.
3. [It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy by D. Michael Abrashoff](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/183392.It_s_Your_Ship?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=8shM5KEUNE&rank=1). I’m usually not crazy about military related stories, but Abrashoff writes well and even if you’re not interested in the managerial aspects there’s some interesting anecdotes about how people learn and succeed in the jobs they’re given.
4. [10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works by Dan Harris](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18505796-10-happier).
5. [It’s Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness by Sylvia Boorstein](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/306575.It_s_Easier_Than_You_Think?from_search=true&qid=nLzXKuX6OY&rank=3). Two books primarily about meditation. 10% Happier was close to the “just read the Wikipedia” article section but it feels weird to put books about meditation in the “instant gratification” bucket.
6. [How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42086897-how-to?from_search=true&qid=aMR33XTFmx&rank=1). Long format XKCD.
7. [Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13547180-brain-on-fire?from_search=true&qid=yVYqT6WK25&rank=1). I found this book utterly fascinating. As someone who has a higher than normal amount of health related anxiety, the idea that your whole body and mind can fall apart and you can come back from it is… literally mind-blowing.
8. [The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40873920-the-lost-city-of-the-monkey-god?from_search=true&qid=BXZWy7XNrq&rank=1). This book is interesting because it’s really three stories with a central thread, and they’re all quite interesting. If you’re primarily interested in the titular city, you will probably leave disappointed, if you just go with it there's a lot to learn about artifact smuggling, the end of civilizations, and global warming and the spread of infectious diseases.
9. [Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18290401-show-your-work?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=cHuaGmvOdZ&rank=1)
10. [Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18290401-show-your-work?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=cHuaGmvOdZ&rank=1). Austin Kleon does something right, and the short, fun format means these might reappear in the 2020 list.

## Read and enjoyed, fiction

1. [Seveneves by Neal Stephenson](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22816087-seveneves?from_search=true&qid=4TaLHnoXjH&rank=1). Good book, but I think if the moon was crashing into the Earth you could survive inside the library bound edition of it.
2. [The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7235533-the-way-of-kings?from_search=true&qid=otvrnaX4Ht&rank=1). Another “let me get my lectern” monster. I read it digitally. While both of these have lots of words, Sanderson is the better world builder. I don’t know if this series will ever actually be finished, but I’m currently reading [Words of Radiance](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17332218-words-of-radiance?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ZISooEeEKc&rank=1) so I’m excited to see how far it goes.
3. [The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35215524-the-monk-of-mokha?from_search=true&qid=He7flMNYND&rank=1). Maybe not a surprising read on a site called builtwith.coffee. A super interesting look at the roots of coffee and starting a business in a war torn country.
4. [The Parade by Dave Eggers](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40819224-the-parade?from_search=true&qid=Yl2Xd3Sh70&rank=1). I read this book in one sitting, it had a nervous tension that made me want to keep going to find out what was going to happen next.
5. [The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34497.The_Color_of_Magic?from_search=true&qid=m7GxG3rxvw&rank=1). Not my favorite of the Discworld series, but I’m working my way through them. I may have made a mistake by reading them in “best” order.
6. [Vicious (Villains, #1) by V.E. Schwab](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40874032-vicious?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=Ai7TLrtDme&rank=2). Fun, quick read, can see myself going back to read the next book in the series in 2020.
7. [Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37903770-norse-mythology?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=QrCmSGIdMx&rank=1). I read this right after finishing _God of War_ and I was mostly impressed at how much the game stayed true to the source material.

## Read and Loved

1. [Neuromancer](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6088007-neuromancer?from_search=true&qid=VeI23X5xSz&rank=1)
2. [Count Zero](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22200.Count_Zero?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=LapGZdDbI4&rank=1)
3. [Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/154091.Mona_Lisa_Overdrive?from_search=true&qid=aXWlwTLtIg&rank=1). Read them all back to back. I got hooked on Gibson’s writing style a quarter way through Neuromancer and couldn’t stop.
4. [The Good Lord Bird by James McBride](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16171272-the-good-lord-bird). A slave boy, inadvertently freed by John Brown, travels with him dressed as a girl and bestowed the name Onion. Things only get stranger from there, but this book is an amazing take on “the truth is stranger than fiction”, it’s the real events that surround Brown’s life that seem insane, while Onion just tries to make it by, swept up in Brown’s storm.
5. [Circe by Madeline Miller](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35959740-circe?from_search=true&qid=TwEphH1IbG&rank=1). The idea of taking someone most people know as a minor character in the Odyssey and turning them into the main character is brilliant, and the writing in this book is beautiful, turning the Greek “tragedy of a god as metaphor” into something entirely human.


No pizza for me


There’s a bookmark folder in Safari across all of my devices titled “HTML/CSS”. I don’t use bookmarks that much, but I did when I was first getting interested in web development. I’ve gone back to Safari on all of my devices lately, mostly to use handoff and have consistent sharing options, and I thought it was time to take a look at those bookmarks and see what was worth keeping.

- [Your Web, documented. · WebPlatform.org](https://webplatform.github.io)

> *Notice:* The WebPlatform project, supported by various stewards between 2012 and 2015, has been _discontinued_. This site is now available on [github](https://github.com/webplatform/webplatform.github.io/) . New documentation can be found at [MDN Web Docs](https://developer.mozilla.org/) .

- [Scout - Compass and Sass without all the hassle](http://scout-app.io/classic/)
- [Masonry](https://masonry.desandro.com). From when everyone wanted to look like Pinterest.
- [Color wheel, a color palette generator | Adobe Color](https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/?base=2&rule=Custom&selected=4&name=My%20Kuler%20Theme&mode=rgb&rgbvalues=0.47,0.4690932647762046,0.4398482663987609,0,0.7585404211883997,1,0.7745063984599851,1,0.7549295905743687,0.9098039215686274,0.4235294117647059,0.4,0.9970995168599046,1,0.938760610344562&swatchOrder=1,0,2,4,3?base=2&rule=Custom&selected=4&name=My%20Kuler%20Theme&mode=rgb&rgbvalues=0.47,0.4690932647762046,0.4398482663987609,0,0.7585404211883997,1,0.7745063984599851,1,0.7549295905743687,0.9098039215686274,0.4235294117647059,0.4,0.9970995168599046,1,0.938760610344562&swatchOrder=1,0,2,4,3). It was definitely called Adobe Kuler when I bookmarked it.
- http://www.danshort.com/HTMLentities/index.php?w=greek 403’d
- [Grid](http://adamkaplan.me/grid/)

> Grid is a great learning tool but no longer supported.

- [How Big Is Space – Interactive version](http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc.com/future/bespoke/20140304-how-big-is-space-interactive/index.html). Seems to load a background image but the page no longer appears functional.
- [Foundation for Emails 2 Docs](https://foundation.zurb.com/emails/docs/)
- [Conditional Media Query Mixins | CSS-Tricks](http://css-tricks.com/conditional-media-query-mixins/)
- [Home - Pencil Project](http://pencil.evolus.vn). I not only never used this, I don't even remember it.

> _Oct 19, 2019_ Pencil 3.1.0 is released

- [Sketch App Sources - Free design resources and plugins - Icons, UI Kits, Wireframes, iOS, Android Templates for Sketch](https://www.sketchappsources.com). I've never used Sketch in anything but read-only mode.
- [8 Essential Design Tools for Front-end Web Developers](https://codecondo.com/8-essential-design-tools-for-front-end-web-developers/). Oh yes, so essential.
- [Web Platform Daily](http://www.webplatformdaily.org). Now [Web Platform News](https://webplatform.news/issues/2019-11-05) I guess.
- [Alerts · Bootstrap](https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.4/components/alerts/). No one wants to make their own alerts, right?
- [Fontello - icon fonts generator](http://fontello.com). Icon fonts, a simpler time. No wait, they were a PITA to make.
- [Ceaser - CSS Easing Animation Tool - Matthew Lein](https://matthewlein.com/tools/ceaser). This is still a good tool!
- [Hover Effect Ideas | Set 1](https://tympanus.net/Development/HoverEffectIdeas/). I was really into these for a long time.
- [Beautiful Free Images & Pictures | Unsplash](https://unsplash.com). I think when I bookmarked Unsplash I assumed it was going to be a great resource until they got hosed by bandwidth fees but boy was I wrong there.
- [Beautiful web type — the best typefaces from the Google web fonts directory](http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/). I don’t think this has been updated with newer fonts but these are nice examples.
- [Using UnCSS and grunt-uncss with WordPress – Liam Gladdy](https://gladdy.uk/blog/2014/04/13/using-uncss-and-grunt-uncss-with-wordpress/). This is so specific and I don’t remember using any of it.
- [Alan Trotter dot com, for all your Alan Trotter needs](https://alantrotter.com). Dunno why I bookmarked it but I do like it!
  http://christopheviau.com/d3list/. Still haven’t used D3 for anything.
- [CSS Shapes Editor - Chrome Web Store](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/css-shapes-editor/nenndldnbcncjmeacmnondmkkfedmgmp). Still haven’t used CSS shapes for anything.
- https://heydonworks.com/practical_aria_examples/#hamburger 404’d.


Bookmark memory lane


1,2,3.

![](/assets/images/2020/1024px-RCA_Indian_Head_Test_Pattern.svg.png)
Some site updates:

1. Moved everything out of Contentful and Pocket to being pulled from local Markdown files. I've started moving everything I read/write to local file systems, whenver possible, so it made sense to move this too.
2. Some new colors, and some font tweaks. It was too white and I much prefer [Lato](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lato) over [Barlow](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Barlow?query=barlow) and felt the site could use some serifs in the titles.

I probably broke some stuff too, so if you see something, say something.


Testing, testing


(Elvis Costello + Thin Lizzy) \* 11

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eus13KPy47E" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>


DEAD LORD - Distance Over Time


Plenty of maps mess up New England states because they're small and the states are small, but to have so much room and end up here... I dunno. This does at least depict (sort of) my long standing opinion that the nub should be part of New York and Long Island should be part of Connecticut.

![](/assets/images/2020/map.jpg)


Kernektikut


1. [Modern CSS Solutions](https://moderncss.dev)

![](/assets/images/2020/iu.jpg)
CSS continues to improve, and browser support for modern solutions continues to grow, so all the ways you used to do things _might_ have better versions today.

2. [JavaScript’s ecosystem is uniquely paranoid](https://listed.to/@crabmusket/14061/javascript-s-ecosystem-is-uniquely-paranoid)

> Three factors have caused a widespread cultural paranoia among JavaScript developers. This has been inculcated over years. These factors are: JavaScript's weak dynamic type system; the diversity of runtimes JavaScript targets; and the fact of deploying software on the web.

3. [Why does writing matter in remote work?](http://www.timcasasola.com/blog/writing)

> “But what if the problem is juicy and we can’t solve it through an asynchronous discussion?”
>
> My response to this is to still default to an asynchronous discussion because asynchronous discussion makes it clear when it needs a meeting. Many people aren’t agreeing. The Slack thread is 148 messages deep and no one made a decision. These signals mean that the discussion needs to be a meeting.

4. [Notion-Powered Websites](https://css-tricks.com/notion-powered-websites/)

   I find what people are trying to do here with Notion super interesting. Notion can create a URL for any page you make, but it’s styled like Notion styles it, and it gets metatags as Notion decides it should. So people are using undocumented Notion APIs to build their own sites using Notion data, or cloud functions to take public Notion pages and build a site from that.

   Notion has promised to release an official API “soon” but I think what’s driving people to jump the gun is that it’s UI is astronomically easier to use than almost any headless CMS out there I can think of, both in terms of constructing the information architecture and editing content. Technically there are a lot of differences, e.g. if you used Notion as a real time content source I think you’d be very sad, but I can at least hope that the UI and ease of adding content structures is something other CMS solutions adopt.


Reading List May 15, 2020


Things I read over the last week. At first glance this week might appear to have a theme of “everything is broken!” but I prefer to read it as “look at all these things we can do better!”.

[Second-guessing the modern web](https://macwright.org/2020/05/10/spa-fatigue.html)

> But the cultural tides are _strong_. Building a company on Django in 2020 seems like the equivalent of driving a PT Cruiser and blasting Faith Hill’s “Breathe” on a CD while your friends are listening to The Weeknd in their Teslas. Swimming against this current isn’t easy, and not in a trendy contrarian way.

[Low-Challenge, High-Skill Tasks in Terrible Times](https://daverupert.com/2020/04/low-challenge-high-skill-tasks-in-terrible-times/)

> For the last month I’ve found myself subconsciously jumping on “easier” tickets where I feel a high level of expertise (CSS tasks, layouts, prototypes) and I’ve struggled to get through tickets that have a high learning curve or cognitive load. Those deep work tasks are hard to sustain when reality, in the form of kids or breaking news, comes crashing through my door. That’s where the broader concept of Flow is helping me. If I understand the psychology correctly, lowering the challenge level raises my relative level of skill and that gives me a sense of control in an otherwise uncontrollable world. I’m able to move fast and not break things.

[A Static Future](https://joshwcomeau.com/gatsby/a-static-future/)

A thorough (and well illustrated) explanation of how static site builders like Gatsby work.

[Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle iPhone photos](https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/20/21262302/ap-test-fail-iphone-photos-glitch-email-college-board-jpeg-heic)

One of my favorite books is [To Engineer Is Human](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/130247/to-engineer-is-human-by-henry-petroski/) by Henry Petroski, particularly the stories of uncaught or seemingly minor issues that went unconsidered that resulted in catastrophic failures. I don’t think there’s a software engineering equivalent (if there is, let me know!), so I have to find them in news articles like this.

Chris Coyier had a [somewhat related tweet](https://twitter.com/chriscoyier/status/1263238587144736768?s=20) this week. You’d think operating systems and software would fundamentally get image formats and text formatting correct, but it’s been an ever-repeating problem since computers had screens.

[Your Day Care Probably Won’t Survive the Coronavirus](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/opinion/child-day-care-coronavirus.html)

> While nearly every other developed nation supports child care as a public good, the United States treats child care providers as private enterprises — more like gyms than K-12 schools.
> ...
> The child care sector, like your favorite fitness enterprise, is propped up mostly by private dollars paid into the system.

There’s a whole _Greatest Hits_ album worth of things that parents in the US get screwed on compared to other countries, but the #1 best seller is the fact that child care between the ages of 0 and close to 6, basically _one third_ of the time the child is under your care, is on the individual structurally and financially. I have a lot of other thoughts on this but they mostly involve 🤬 so I’ll stop here for today.


Reading List May 22, 2020


I split my mornings between reading a book or combing through my RSS feeds. This week skewed more heavily towards reading a book ([How to Do Nothing](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781612197494)), but I did find a few things that avoided my “read later” list.

[Daring Fireball: ‘What Time Is It in London?’](https://daringfireball.net/2020/05/what_time_is_it_in_london)

> So every other service that tries to answer “What time is it in London?” gets it right. Only Siri gets it wrong.

[If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs](http://tttthis.com/blog/if-i-could-bring-one-thing-back-to-the-internet-it-would-be-blogs?ref=thismodernweb.com)

[Opinion | What if We All Vacationed at Home Again? - The New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-travel-summer-vacation.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage)

> At the end of last year, [an Ipsos Mori poll](https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/what-worries-world-june-2019) found that 79 percent of British people believe that their country is “on the wrong track” — a sentiment echoed [in countries around the world](https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/majority-across-25-countries-say-their-country-wrong-track) . Much of this can be attributed to the attenuation of opportunity that followed the financial crisis of 2008-09. But some of it stems from a lost sense of belonging and the gulf that has emerged between those who still cling to the liberal dream of heterogeneity and those hankering for a more parochial past.

> The fact that so many of us now spend our moments of maximum happiness overseas has surely played a role in deepening this fault line. And many of the pleasurable experiences of social intermingling that might once have offered a counterbalance, like a day out at the seaside, have been sacrificed to consumer choice.

[Please Print (A Journaling Rant)](https://www.patrickrhone.net/please-print-a-journalling-rant/)

[netlifycms](https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/intro/)

I moved the content side of this site to markdown, but wanted an easier way to update content than making markdown files, commiting and pushing them, so I added Netlify CMS to the site. It's a little rough around the edges still, but for what I was trying to do it hits 100% of the features.

[increment](https://increment.com)

I have a soft-spot for magazines, when I was re-learning how to program I had two days a week where I would kill some time in the day flipping through the coding related magazines at Microcenter. This issue is all about frontend development so its extra relevant to me but the past issues look pretty good too.


Reading List, May 29, 2020


Late last year my wife started a new podcast called [Shelf Love](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shelf-love-a-romance-novel-book-club/id1480593827).

I built her a website. It was not good. It worked, but brought us both great shame.

![](/assets/gifs/mulan-dishonor.gif)

To be fair, at the time there wasn’t a lot of content, and most of what she needed/wanted from it was theoretical. But, time has passed, and now there’s 38 episodes with many more to come, a blog, and a newsletter.

Beyond a visual refresh, the back-end of the site was changed from pulling episode content from [Storyblok](https://www.storyblok.com) to pulling it directly from [Simplecast](https://simplecast.com) which means content isn’t living in two places. Storyblok is still in play for page content and blog posts. It’s also still a [GatsbyJS](https://www.gatsbyjs.org) site distributed through [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com).

Anywho, [go check it out](https://shelflovepodcast.com).

![](/assets/images/2020/shelf-love-logo.jpg)


Shelf Love Podcast


My first Macbook was also my first laptop with a camera in it, so I asked a somewhat dumb question when I was buying it, which was, "can the camera take pictures?". I think what I was asking was essentially what the app Photo Booth is, but the sales person at the Apple store, for some reason, thought I wanted a camera to make stop motion videos. They said they weren't sure if it could, but that would be cool. I agreed. I never tried but I can imagine it would have been _not cool_, since the camera on those plasticBooks were about .1 megapixels and shoved in the top of the lid making for some awkward angles.

Jump forward 14ish years and the little pocket computer I take everywhere has both a camera good enough to use for stop motion videos and the processing power to edit them. We've been rebuilding my childhood Lego collection lately, so I used some minifigs as actors. The wizard's... hat... was from an earlier video.

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/416785588" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I later tried to get the child to help me make a stop-motion video her mother might appreciate on a certain day that's upcoming, but she didn't seem to impressed by moving picture technology. I stitched these together using [Stop Motion Studio](https://www.cateater.com/) which is straight up amazing at the cost of free.


Stop Motion


I guess I haven't spent enough time living in the git documentation to notice this before, but a Stack Overflow answer for something I was trying to do with `git diff` used the term “porcelain” function to describe `diff` versus `diff-index`, which led to _another_ [Stack Overflow answer](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6976473/what-does-the-term-porcelain-mean-in-git) to what the concept of a porcelain function was, the origin of which appears to be from [this email conversation in the git project](http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/archives/git/0504/0881.html)

> If you don't want it, I won't do it. Still makes sense to separate the
> plumbing from the porcelain, though.

It’s interesting to me that software prefers plumbing metaphors to electrical ones (switches from the circuits, in this case), but I guess what travels through the plumbing is critical to the metaphor.


TIL: porcelain versus plumbing


Some inspiration for the next time you think making a dropdown menu accessible is hard.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">A few things I want to point out about our audio related accessibility options in The Last of Us Part 2. THREAD 1/7</p>&mdash; Robert Krekel (@robkrekel) <a href="https://twitter.com/robkrekel/status/1267534713230508032?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 1, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>


A11Y in the Last of Us Part 2


I worked for a number of years as a low-budget technical writer, producing documentation and technical diagrams at a few different companies. I say low-budget because these were manufacturing companies, not software companies, and the documentation was more “we need to keep this on file” than “we need this to function”. My go to tool for diagrams was Visio, and by the end of my stint as a technical writer I could do 3D diagrams in it that would put Autocad to shame, but lining up boxes for 2D diagrams was always a chore.

Fast forward many years, today I needed to draw a diagram for a new architecture, and I was going to default to pen and paper (or, iPad and Pencil) as I usually do, but I vaguely recalled there being an app out there that did sketchy-style diagrams. Some googling found it, but it didn't have a drag and drop GUI, it uses [graphvis](https://graphviz.org), which it turns out is the best thing ever. Why spend minutes moving arrows around when you can just `a -> b` it!

<div><a href='//sketchviz.com/@jjmartucci/89d18bc4f700e592667461623579df47'><img src='https://sketchviz.com/@jjmartucci/89d18bc4f700e592667461623579df47/5a61a8b15efcc3bb8933aa3b2fed04820baf07db.sketchy.png' style='max-width: 100%;'></a><br/><span style='font-size: 80%;color:#555;'>Hosted on <a href='//sketchviz.com/' style='color:#555;'>Sketchviz</a></span></div>


TIL: graphvis


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.


HomeRun


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/2020/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.


Note ↔ Note, thinking outside the folder


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

A Picture of Change for a World of Constant Motion


## 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/2020/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/2020/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/2020/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/2020/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>


The 20 year history of a Partscaster


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)


Book Notes


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/2020/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/2020/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/images/2020/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/its-beautiful.gif)

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

In summary, I'm pretty happy with it.


builtwith.coffee 3.0


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.


It's Not The Internet It's You


![](/assets/images/2020/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)


New Art for the Office


![](/assets/images/2020/princesses.jpeg)


Adventure Princesses


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_ 🎵


CDs were better than this


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/2020/27AECD59-108B-424E-A0B1-405726C08F4F_1_105_c.jpeg)
_Bungalow Hill, towering a whole 110 feet over the ocean below_

![](/assets/images/2020/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_


Coolidge Reservation


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/2020/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/2020/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.


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


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/) ).


Reading List Oct 4th - 11th


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/
```


Statamic on Digital Ocean App Platform


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).

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


<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.


Game of the Year


Trying two things: updating my old Macbook Pro to Big Sur.
![](/assets/images/2020/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.



![Turning a jack-o-lantern into a bird feeder](/assets/images/2020/pumpkin-leftovers.jpg)


Pumpkin Leftovers


Let him who hath understanding reckon the markdown of the bear

![A screenshot of the MacOS Application Bear showing 666 notes.](/assets/images/2020/six-six-six-bear_yf2emw.png)


Markdown is going on tonight


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](/assets/images/2020/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" />


Spirographs


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>


SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY


...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>


Happy Little Clouds


👨: “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)


Hilda


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.


instax


![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).


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


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).


The Tools I Use


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)


Waikiki Beach


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.


What’s a new year anyway


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.


New about page


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.


Finding is better than folding


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.


Fuck Donald Trump


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/hawk.jpg)


Hawk, guy


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/sony-safari.png)


Who uses Safari


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.

CDNs Aren’t as Useful as They Used to Be

My Favorite Apple Watch App

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/images/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.

From Netlify CMS to Forestry

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.

Rush - ing a repo

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:

```html
<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.

Stencil, Markdown, and web components in Markdown

Electricity

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.

Marking the Pandemic by Plane

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/images/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.

One Year

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/images/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/images/2021/04/red_sox_duck_dock_icons_5701052_img_1237.jpg)

Opening Day

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/images/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/images/2021/04/taz.jpeg)

Throwback Thursday


<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. 

Working Conditions


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!

An Album Some Days

![343 Congress Street in Boston](/assets/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.


Meatspace

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](/assets/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](/assets/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>

String Cleaning

* 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/images/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)

Weeknotes for the week ending May 16, 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)

Weeknotes for the week ending May 23, 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/images/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)


Weeknotes for the week ending May 30, 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.](/assets/images/2021//backyard_so_far.jpeg)
This is where we are after this weekend:
![My backyard with a cobblestone border and paver stones](/assets/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)


Weeknotes for the week ending June 13, 2021


- It’s finished:
![Full photo of the patio in our backyard at night.](/assets/images/2021//patio-far.jpeg)
![Close up photo of the patio in our backyard at night.](/assets/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"](/assets/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)

Weeknotes for the week ending June 20, 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 27, 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:

![](/assets/images/2021//backyard_start.jpeg)

... and now it looks like:

![](/assets/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?







Weeknotes for the week ending June 6, 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.](/assets/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 💯.

Weeknotes for the week ending July 11, 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.

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Weeknotes for the week ending July 18, 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](/assets/images/2021//sentinel-rock.jpeg)
![Old foundation at Sentinel Rock State Park](/assets/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](/assets/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](/assets/images/2021//10-years.jpeg)
- As I said, beautiful weather on Saturday…
![A nice view from the house in Newark, Vermont](/assets/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](/assets/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.
![](/assets/images/2021//keeb-before.jpeg)
![](/assets/images/2021//keeb-after.jpeg)


built with coffee ☕

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