This past week was pretty uneventful. Work has been busy enough that I haven’t devoted much time to personal projects.
Over the weekend I replaced a failing drive on my media/backup server, which required a pretty small amount of my direct time to get resolved, but took well over 12 hours to rebuild the array.
Over the weekend I also watched the first part of Dune. I quite enjoyed it, and am looking forward to seeing the sequel sometime soon (probably when it’s out on BluRay).
Listened To
Accidental Tech Podcast: 578: Weird Can Be Beautiful
Ask Noah Show: 380: Open Source Task Management
Clockwise: 545: Cake and Cookies
Connected: 493: Ends in Potify
Dot Social: Moving the Fediverse Forward at FedifForum and Beyond, with Johannes Ernst of Dazzle Labs
DTNS/Good Day Internet: Why is DTN’s Twitch Channel called GDI? - Editor’s Desk
DTNS/Good Day Internet: About ByteDance (Narrative)
Issues, Etc.: 0743: The Book of Mormon - Dr. Jordan Cooper
Issues, Etc.: 0753: This Week in Pop-Christianity: A Jesse Duplantis Easter Sermon - Pr. Chris Rosebrough
It’s a Thing: 308: Living in a World of Fandom
Late Night Linux: 272
Mac Power Users: 735: Catching up with Ryan JA Murphy
The Rebound: 486: I’m Eating a Turtleneck
Upgrade: 503: We Own the Refs, the Stadium, and the Field
This week was, for some reason, slightly exhausting for me, though I can’t point to any one specific event or series of events that caused the exhaustion. I had a fairly standard work week, and then enjoyed a visit from my sister this weekend.
Also this weekend, I had the pleasure of watching an amazing performance by the Concordia University - Chicago Wind Symphony. It’s been many years since I attended an event of this nature, and I didn’t realize until afterwards how much I’ve missed it. All of the performers did a fantastic job, and it was a delightful way to spend an evening.
In the generally-interesting category, I ran across DropDMG when reading through a blog earlier this week. While I don’t have an immediate need to distribute macOS applications, knowing that such a tool exists could be useful in the future.
Last week I referenced to trippy, a handy networking tool that I had run across but hadn’t had a use for yet. This week I ended up having a use case… and I can definitely report that it’s handy for tracking down routing issues!
Mid-week, I got annoyed at the amount of effort that I was putting into OmniFocus, and reverted to using Todoist. In general I like a lot of features of OmniFocus more, but it has a few extra steps required for virtually every action I want to do, and it doesn’t feel fast on my iPhone. Todoist both has features I don’t want, and is missing features I’d like, but it works at the speed I think, and more often gets out of my way. We’ll see how long this lasts before I’m tempted by another tool again. 😂
On Saturday, I decided to quit using a self-hosted FreshRSS instance for my RSS aggregator, and migrate to Newsblur. It costs about half as much as what my DigitalOcean droplet was costing me to run FreshRSS, works at least as well (if not better), and reduces the number of computers that I’m managing. And in the grand scheme of things, I’m not sure that I care if I self-host my RSS aggregator. It’s a cool thing to say “I did it”, but I don’t think it provides me many benefits presently.
I haven’t actually tried this yet, but after trying the Vision Pro a few weeks ago, I am convinced that capturing photos & video for a future where I use one is a worthwhile endeavor.
Listened To
Accidental Tech Podcast: 576: Quiet Little Leech
Bad Voltage: 3x65: Not Evenly Distributed
Congressional Dish: CD287: War Money
Connected: 491: Improper Work Attire
DTNS/Good Day Internet: Are We in A Dot-Com Bust? - Editor’s Desk
Focused: 198: Revisiting Journaling
Getting Things Done: 248: Workplace Challenges - Improvements
Issues, Etc.: 0584: Worshipping with the Church Triumphant – Pr. Andrew Packer
Issues, Etc.: 0612: This Week in Pop-Christianity: Joel Osteen on the Whispers of God – Pr. Chris Rosebrough
Just & Sinner: Luther’s Contribution of the Two Kinds of Righteousness
Late Night Linux: 270
Mac Power Users: 733: Our Favorite iPhone Apps
Mac Power Users: 734: I Got to Be the Hero
The Rebound: 484: What Breed Of Dog Is Biting Me?
The Talk Show With John Gruber: 396: ‘The Essence of Stealing’, With David Barnard
This week I ran across trippy, an interesting little networking tool that combines the functionality of traceroute and ping. I don’t have a current use, but am filing it away for when I need it.
Much of my in-office time this week was focused on troubleshooting new products. I experimented some with using SSH from a Java app, which I’d not done previously. Once I figured out the basic requirements, it was pretty seamless!
This weekend once again included ripping some new-to-me Jazz & Swing CDs to my Plex server, along with some albums of hymns from CPH. I continue to enjoy using Plexamp, combined with my own library, to stream music, instead of one of the major streaming services.
A large portion of this week in the office was spent working through some interesting networking configuration to allow test devices at remote sites to securely access a cloud database… thankfully people much smarter than I were able to assist!
Precision Planting’s 20|20 Display was featured this week in a story on the Qt website, which included an interview with my coworker Dave. It’s a nice view into some of the products we work on, along with some of the technical decisions we’ve made over the years.
While working on a project in the office, I was reminded that, sometimes, slightly over-engineering is not a bad thing. I had forgotten that I built a safe-guard into a product’s software so that it wouldn’t install updates that didn’t explicitly include support for its hardware revision. While it was an annoyance this time, it also has saved many headaches in the past.
This weekend was spent ripping some new (to me) Jazz CDs to my Plex server. I’m really enjoying some of the new albums, and am currently listening to The Best of Miles Davis: The Capitol/Blue Note Years while writing this post.
