Weekly Notes 2024.02

• Early in the week, I spent a little time to make my Mastodon account discoverable by searching for this domain.
• This week’s office time was primarily devoted to preparation for our annual Winter Conference.
• On Thursday, I cleaned up the post structure on this website, which accidentally led to me spamming my RSS feed with old posts.
• Friday morning I woke up to the sounds of my battery backups all going off at 3a, due to the loss of power in my neighborhood (really the first time this has happened since I moved here). Thankfully, the local power company was able to find the issue and restore power by about 5:30a, and so I was able to go about the rest of my day as planned.
• This weekend, in my free time, I’ve been playing some of Tavern Master and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, both on PC via the Steam store.
  • Tavern Master is a style of strategy game that I normally enjoy, though I’m currently finding it a bit tedious. We’ll see if I continue to play it or not…
  • Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is an action game that is definitely outside of my normal gaming style, but it’s proving to be interesting so far. I expect that I’ll keep playing it occasionally.
• This weekend also saw a cold snap to negative temperatures in the Midwest, along with some of the first real snow I’ve had to shovel this season. I’m happily staying indoors as much as I can.

Read

• Amazon Is Selling Products With AI-Generated Names Like “I Cannot Fulfill This Request It Goes Against OpenAI Use Policy”
• Migrating from Substack to self-hosted Ghost: the details

Listened To

• Mac Power Users: 726: Journaling Update: Apple’s New App, Day One Updates & More
• Focused: 194: I’d Like to Take a Mulligan
• Upgrade: 494: Copyright Violation Machine
• The Omni Show: How Kourosh Dini Uses OmniFocus - Part 2
• Dot Social: Moderation and Migration for a Better Social Web, with Fediverse Leader Tim Chambers
• Linux Matters: 20: Unfold Your Coding Potential
• Late Night Linux: 263
• Connected: 484: The Rickies (January 2024)
• The Rebound: 477: Brrreeeeoooooouuuuuuuggghhh
• Clockwise: 536: Spay and Neuter Your Pets
• We’re Not Wrong: About the Secretary of Defense Going Missing and DEI
• It’s a Thing: 299: Smut Rising
• Accidental Tech Podcast: 569: Do Grasshoppers Have Tongues?

Watched

• January 13th: A Somber Day In Lithuania
• xXx (2002)

Sorry for the Spam in the RSS Feed This Morning

This morning I made some changes to the permalink structure of my blog posts, which inadvertently caused a number of my older posts to reappear in the RSS feeds. Sorry for the spam!

Enable Mastodon Discovery by Domain

While doing some reading on integrating Mastodon and Hugo this afternoon, I ran across a handy little project by Francesco Maida.

In the past, I’ve considered running my own Mastodon server, but that’s not yet an endeavor I’m ready to take on. However, being discoverable by anyone looking for me on Mastodon using my own domain? Thanks to this python script, that’s easy! Sweet!

For more information on how this all works, see either the README in the GitHub link above, or this blog post by Maarten Balliauw.

Weekly Notes 2024.01

I decided to try something a little different this year. I’ve seen other bloggers (for example, Jamie Tanna) implement a weekly review of sorts on their blogs, and thought it might strike an interesting balance between daily, monthly, and yearly posting, all of which I’ve tried at one point or another. I’ve also attempted weekly posts in the past, but often with some specific topic in mind. These notes will be simple recaps of my week.

Adding giscus Comments

One day after the tenth anniversary of this blog, and I’m already making changes?!?

Yes, you read that right.

In both of the original incarnations of this website, via Squarespace and WordPress, I had a commenting system available and enabled, although I never received much feedback from it. If I’m honest, it was mostly spam, actually. And so, when I migrated to Hugo, I didn’t make finding a comment solution a high priority.

10 Years of JustinVollmer.com

Today marks the 10 year anniversary of this website. It’s really, really hard to believe that I’ve been posting to and updating the site for a full decade already, and even crazier when I look back at how things have changed over the years, both in terms of the website, and in terms of me as a human as well.

Reflections on JustinVollmer.com

January 6, 2014, was supposed to be a work day for me. However, where I was living at the time was under a Level 3 snow emergency that day, and so instead of driving to the office, I stayed home. Back then, I was much less equipped to work remotely than I am now, and so I didn’t have anything pressing to work on, and decided to set up a website. I had heard of Squarespace, and after taking a quick look at its features, decided it was probably the easiest way to start out. And so, with that, JustinVollmer.com was born! 🎉 If you want to get an idea of my thought process at the time, check out my Welcome blog post, left up for posterity.

2023 Year in Review

Wow, this year has seemingly flown by! Somehow, it’s already December 31st, which means, it’s time for me to publish my year in review! I’ve decided once again this year to focus on major changes (or how things have stayed the same) in the last 12 months, instead of writing a sequential highlight reel.

Not a lot has changed in my personal life over the past 12 months, which is largely fine with me (I’m sure that will come as a shock to those who know me well… sarcasm). I am still attending the same LCMS church that I referenced in last year’s review, and continuing my study of theology, though at a slower rate than in 2022.