Daily Journal 📓 December 2020

• I’ve been sick with a horrendous flu since Christmas Day. TLDR, it was “just” a bad flu. collapsed:: true
  • I called the BC public health line at 811 on the 3rd evening of being sick, the nurse recommended that I get a COVID test. The next morning (yesterday) I went to the drive through at VCC and got tested with the saline mouth gargle. They didn’t test Rachael because she didn’t have symptoms. This was shortly after 9am.
  • By 9:30pm, I got an SMS notice that my test was negative. What a relief.
  • I did a log of my interactions, working backwards:
    • Fri, Dec 25th: went for a walk and realized feeling very weak. Made it home and then badly sick from the afternoon onwards.
    • Thurs, Dec 24th: cooking all morning, parental hand off of food
    • Wed, Dec 23rd: comic book and cookie hand off with Su, Evo to Granville Island to Propeller Design. Standing in line outside Rio Friendly Meats for 1hr+
    • Tues, Dec 22nd: office breakfast and then lunch, with Brooke, Katie, and Rachael
    • Mon, Dec 21st: Lyft to Revolver, see Roland, go for walk in rain with Riad, tea & whiskey at Miku to warm up, Tom Lee Music to pickup Arturia KeyStep, cab to office, Evo home
    • Sun, Dec 20th: bike to do masked pick up at Cadeaux Bakery, drop off at the office
    • Sat, Dec 19th:
    • Fri, Dec 18th: home office, biked to do a masked cookie pickup and wheat beer handover
    • Thurs, Dec 17th: home office, Fission Demo Day
    • Wed, Dec 16th: Fission office with Brooke
  • Brooke and our shared office space is part of my bubble. On the 21st, obviously I had lots of interactions with different people, but all were wearing masks and/or 6ft away.
  • Of note: I got really chilled and wet out in the rain on the 21st. Then, on the 23rd, I again got really cold waiting in line outside Rio. And, in general, coming off a bunch of work and “relaxing”, so I guess my system hit the wall and collapsed.
• So Christmas is traditionally “tinkering with my blog” time. I’ve got things running OK on Micro.blog for https://blog.bmannconsulting.com. The embed on the home page here works fine.
  • I’m doing updating of notes here only when I’ve got free time on a weekend or an evening at a full computer desktop. It takes 2.5 minutes to generate the site, which really sucks.
  • The other deficiency is that I can’t really provide a feed of updated notes. I could go and add dates to all the notes and then have a modified date as well, but really that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
  • And this Journal is looking an awful lot like a blog, which I decided I didn’t want a feed for, because it really is just me writing for myself.
  • I’m still on again / off again with Roam Research. I use it for my private notes and simple TODOs and it’s been fine.
  • Anyway, this is all working for now, and I’ve been enjoying actually blogging, with things like Bandcamp Fridays.
• via @agentofuser, Neuron is a Haskell based Zettelkasten / Second Brain implementation.
• via @rosano, the people behind Ghost are putting together Open Subscription Platforms:

  • A shared movement for independent subscription data. With everyone getting into subscriptions, it’s never been more important to be in control of your customer data.

  • And in the footer:

  • An open standards working group committed to data portability for independent subscription platforms This is mainly about data exports, not platform risk — so no discussion about open source here. I thought Ghost and Substack were pretty rivalrous, but Substack is listed right there as well.

  • Medium, Patreon, and ConvertKit get specifically called out as closed platforms.

title: Dec 19, 2020 date: 2020-12-19 category: Journal

• Microblog Sidebar

  Got the Micro.blog sidebar installed on the front page. Yeah, my username is boris, even though Boris Jabes has the boris.micro.blog blog name :)

  Hmm. Not really usable. It doesn’t include permalinks to the entries. Going to embed it on the Micro.blog page as an example, along with requests for what I’d like to see.

• PostHog

  Also installed PostHog which I’m going to use for Fission but just testing it in the header of this blog now :)

  Forked the FOSS repo (none of their proprietary enterprise code in it), so that I could edit the README so that the Deploy To Heroku could deploy the FOSS version.

• Bandcamp Request for Design Change

  I’ve been using Bandcamp more. Whenever I’m using it on the web, I get tripped up on how small / hidden wishlisting an album / track is.

  Look at this screenshot:

  

  Rather than that little heart that says Wishlist / In Wishlist, I always hit the big heart at the top of the page…which takes me to my favourites, and doesn’t heart the page at all.

  My brain has been conditioned by Instagram and other systems that I can double-click on the big image and/or somewhere top right of the page to “heart” a page.

  So: hide that heart at the top that is actually “my favourites” and stick it under my avatar or otherwise more than 1 click away on an album page.

  Make it so that I can “heart” by double clicking the album art! Clicking to get a big album view

  …sure, give me a magnifying glass icon to embiggen it. Or, give me an “invite to heart” on that embiggened album image. Let me look at this album…oh yeah…favourite, wait, I need to cancel at top left, and then navigate alllll the way back to that tiny Wishlist under the album and click again. Wait what, there is ALSO a “view” link here once it is “In Wishlist”? And that pops open my wishlist in a new window?

  Have another giant heart top left? next to album name? or somewhere else that gives me a nice big target.

  Come on Bandcamp! Make hearts better!

  BTW, this particular screenshot page is a recommendation from @bgins, Drum ‘n’ Space, by Elaine Walker / ZIA.

• MIDI Keyboard

  The same @bgins from above makes Moon Forge, an app with Fission webnative integrated, that connects to music keyboard synths with WebMIDI.

  He recommends the Arturia KeyStep.

  I found it on local Vancouver music store Tom Lee Music. Purchased!

  Maybe I do music now?

• OK, so I am continuing working on this from Dec 5th, 2020
• I thought I’d actually install Hugo and get it working locally before I attempt to upload it into Micro.blog. brew install hugo and you’re done, which is great.
• Looking at hugo --help showed me that Hugo has a Jekyll import function.
• Since I had those social posts that I eventually want to get into Mb, this ended up perfect. I ran hugo import jekyl PATH-TO-JEKYLL . to transform those posts into Hugo compatible files.
• I forked the marfa theme and put it into the Hugo folder. Error about a missing custom_footer.html file. Pretty sure this is part of the default Mb themes, so I just created an empty one in partials, and the site built and served locally! Very fast compared to my Jekyll experience: 568 ms for 569 pages and 220 static files!
• Micro.blog has a help page about custom themes. Looks like the Blank theme needs to get merged in for files like custom_footer.html to exist.
• Looks like custom footer was the only one missing. I’ll keep track of edits to it on the Marfa Theme notes page.
• Looking at Mb plugins. Found BigfootJS again via the Mb plugin for Bigfoot. Probably better for me to use on this site rather than the super custom margin / side notes.
• Enabled the OpenGraph plugin so I get social previews.
• Added a Blog category to the navigation, for all the actual blog posts with titles, rather than just short social ones.

title: Dec 5, 2020 date: 2020-12-05 category: Journal

Instacart Near and Far

We’re talking to Rachael’s family back in Ontario, and looking at supporting her mom and helping out so that R’s sister Kathy doesn’t have to do everything. We’re doing a test grocery delivery using Instacart to see if that works for them.

The large stores all have their own delivery, but all of the systems are terrible.

Instacart is slightly better in that it is has one mediocre interface across all the different stores.

I decided to try out an order here in Vancouver, and got delivery from T&T Supermarket, a large Asian grocery store. So, cutting noodles for dinner!

Blog Shuffling

I tried once more to import social posts from my blog into Micro.blog. Didn’t error or anything, so I emailed support.

At some point, my previous support request about getting my archive and photos pages working ended up getting fixed. Now I’m flipping around between themes again, and seeing about customizing something.

I decided to go ahead and swap the domain over from microblog to just blog, and updated the colophon. Whatever happens with the old social posts being automatically imported, I can just sit down with Mars Edit and recreate them. Hmmm. Although, just looked it up, and 274 posts is a LOT to do manually.

Micro.blog Theming

Mb runs on Hugo themes, and I had previously gotten as far as cloning the internet-weblog theme. Have to merge that with the default Micro.blog templates and in general figure that out.

I cloned the Marfa theme so I can see about figuring out the defaults.