June 9th, 2025 Daily

Today was a heck of a day. I was supposed to fly out to Barcelona, for an Ink & Switch team retreat.¹

TLDR, my passport was expiring in early August, which is in less than 90 days, which means you can't get into Europe / the Schengen region without a visa.

So that's why my online check-in wasn't working last night, and why I got turned away at the airport this morning at 6:15am.

I scrambled around all morning, and actually… got things sorted, you can read the whole thread on my alt account on Bluesky:

Success! I have a new 10 year Canadian passport! Passport Office aka Service Canada were great. Professional. Efficient. Saved my butt. I can report: renewing a passport in Canada works great! 🇨🇦 🍁

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— Boris (@boris.bringyourown.computer) June 9, 2025 at 3:02 PM

I'm really really happy with the service by the Canadian Passport office. Still beating myself up about not being better about this.

Still: I fly tomorrow on basically the same route, Vancouver -> Montreal -> Barcelona, will land at 8am there and join the rest of the team for breakfast.

Finishing my day feeling pretty wrung out. Rachael had just supported a three day workshop over the weekend, so we went out to dinner at Marcello's on The Drive.

Checked in at Marcello Pizzeria & Ristorante. I have eaten all my meals out today. It was a stressful day. No ragrets.

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— 🤖 Boris (@bmannconsulting.com) June 9, 2025 at 6:19 PM

Tinkering with Steam Deck Desktop Setup messing with the blog / Obsidian settings to relax a bit.

Am I actually going to run Steam Deck Desktop often? Well, it's interesting how I got it up and running with the same handful of tools I use elsewhere.

I did charge up the Daylight Computer to take it with me. Mostly to share with Ink & Switch folks. To use it, I need my second brain on it, and git on Android is … hard. I have been experimenting with Resilio to sync files for people who aren't comfortable with git, and did put it on the Daylight to maybe see if I can use that. Yes, many things are solved by sync engines that work everywhere.

Ink & Switch's Patchwork does local first editing in the browser, so of course it can just come along wherever there is a browser, but it currently doesn't have easy ways to publish. Regardless of the Obsidian tinkering I do, I'd like something more like Patchwork / Groundmist with direct posting to ATProtocol.

Obsidian Jekyll Rambling

Specifically, for Obsidian, checked in the .obsidian folder again, and revamped how I do journals and daily notes. I abused daily notes to make journals originally, then found unique notes.

So, just now I made a new daily template which will make blog posts! Which means I will blog again! Blogs also don't get thrown all over social media, whereas the journal entries are meant to be social media sized and cross post.

Jekyll expects year-month-day-slug filenames, so that's the "date format" you need to put in the Date format config for the Daily notes core Obsidian plugin: YYYY-MM-DD-[daily]

The unique note feature now creates the journal entries, as I do (have in the past?) created multiple in a day. That format works fine as unique file paths: YYYY-MM-DD_HHmm.

I want to append any journal entries to the daily, which would mean finding all the journals that got posted on the same day. Have to look at group_by_exp for jekyll, which is always surprisingly tricky.