Weekly Notes 2024.05

• News articles are continuing to be published regarding Precision Planting’s 2024 announcements. This post from AgriNews had a good overview, and (in my opinion) nicely combined comments from yours truly with those of Justin McMenamy, Vice President - Disruptive Products.
• Friday was the release of Apple Vision Pro, so I’ve been watching and reading reviews of it all week. I’ve linked some of my favorites below in the Read and Watched sections. I’m not yet convinced to drop $3500 on it, but I’m also still considering it…
• I’m still actively using OmniFocus 4, and did my first (abbreviated) weekly review with it today. While I still wish there was some more natural language processing built in, similar to Todoist, the overall experience is growing on me.
• A project at work has me dusting off my Python skills (meager though they are), and also relearning how documents in MongoDB work. It also gave me an excuse to play with Python packages in Nix, which I’m still finding extremely useful for software development.

Read

• Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro

Listened To

• Accidental Tech Podcast: 572: Cryptofarts and Copyright Infringement
• Clockwise: 539: You Folks Need Some Help
• Connected: 487: Mr. Fake John Voorhees Goes to Europe
• Focused: 196: Focus & The Reading Life, with Maryanne Wolf
• Getting Things Done: 242: Slice of GTD Life with Richards and Spurgeon
• Issues, Etc.: 293: Countering Technological Liturgies - Joshua Pauling
• Issues, Etc.: 311: Responding to Roman Catholic Proof Texts: Protestants Deny the Real Presence - Dr. Steven Parks
• Issues, Etc.: 332: Evangelical Cliches - Bryan Wolfmueller
• It’s a Thing: 301: Little Treats Mission Creep
• It’s a Thing: 302: Spray Candy Is My Roman Empire
• Mac Power Users: 729: Don’t Hear What We Aren’t Saying
• The Rebound: 480: You Like Developers? Name Three
• The Talk Show With John Gruber: 394: ‘An Impossible Balcony’, With Matthew Panzarino
• Upgrade: 497: The Poison Pill
• We’re Not Wrong: About the Border and Gen Z’s Gender Split

Watched

• Apple Vision Pro Unboxing! - Marques Brownlee
• Using Apple Vision Pro: What It’s Actually Like! - Marques Brownlee
• Apple Vision Pro Review: Tomorrow’s Ideas… Today’s Tech! - Marques Brownlee
• Apple Vision Pro - Unboxing, Review and demos! - iJustine
• The Thing No One Will Say About Apple Vision Pro - Casey Neistat

Weekly Notes 2024.04

• Overall, this week was relatively uneventful (outside of some stuff at work). I didn’t focus much on personal projects, except for…
• Only a few weeks after claiming that I was sticking with Todoist for the foreseeable future for as my task manager, I once again got curious about OmniFocus, and ended up switching my entire task list over mid-week. Todoist has been implementing more team-based features recently, which I don’t need. And something about OmniFocus keeps drawing my attention… We’ll see how long it lasts.
• On Saturday, I spent a substantial amount of time becoming familiar with the Nix package manager, which I am interested in using for reproducible builds of a project at work. The basic premise was easy to learn, though it took most of the day to get a fully functional solution.
• Sunday so far has consisted of Divine Service in the morning, some cooking over lunch (which included prep for the week ahead), and some small amount of time focusing on a work project.

Read

• Using nix-shell to create and share reproducible embedded development environments

Listened To

• Accidental Tech Podcast: 571: Adding Some Carrot
• Clockwise: 538: If I Lose It, I’ll Die
• Connected: 486: Elden Widge
• Getting Things Done: 242: Slice of GTD Life with Richards and Spurgeon
• Late Night Linux: 265
• Linux Matters: Fetch Is Going to Happen
• Mac Power Users: 728: All About AppleCare
• The Omni Show: How Kaitlin Salzke uses OmniFocus - Part 2
• The Rebound: 479: $3500 Worth of FOMO
• The Talk Show With John Gruber: 393: ‘An Asterisk on the Bento Box’, With Marco Arment
• Upgrade: 496: 40th Anniversary of the Mac Draft
• We’re Not Wrong: About the New Hampshire Primary (Live from Manchester)

Watched

• Reacher (2022), S2, E05-08

Weekly Notes 2024.03

• Even though it’s technically a holiday, I had work on Monday, preparing for our conference, and will instead use it as a floating holiday sometime later this year.
• Tuesday through Friday of this week was Winter Conference 2024 for Precision Planting. The following links include coverage from various agriculture-focused outlets, a few of which quote yours truly, and I’ve thrown in a picture of one of the show stands as well:
  • Successful Farming: Precision Planting launches CornerStone Planting System
  • CropLife: Precision Planting Launches New Planting System
  • Progressive Farmer: New Planting System From Precision
• Over the weekend I spent some time improving my Obsidian daily note setup, mostly adjusting the file location(s)
• To automate some of the work, I used zmv, which was a new tool to me… it’s shockingly powerful

Read

• Author Clock
  • I’m very tempted to either buy one of these, or set up a screen at my home showing off the web version 🤔
• Long Live Webpages
• What Even is a Webmention?
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling (finished)

Listened To

• Accidental Tech Podcast: 570: The Local Mooching Situation
• Clockwise: 537: All I Found Were Three Apple TV Remotes
• Connected: 485: A Mobile Hamburger Menu Three Feet Wide
• Cortex: 151: The Second Best Time is Now
• Dot Social: Pivoting Out of the Attention Economoy, with medium’s Tony Stubblebine
• Focused: 195: The Productivity Field Guide
• Late Night Linux: 264
• Mac Power Users: 727: The Productivity Field Guide
• The Rebound: 478: Skizzy
• Under the Radar: 285: Recreational Computing
• Upgrade: 495: Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong
• We’re Not Wrong: About the Iowa Caucus

Watched

• Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023), S1, E10
• Reacher (2022), S2, E01-04

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.