Welcome to the journal. This part of the site contains a reverse-chronological list of entries, a blog by any other name. You may also want to browse entries by tag or category.
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Moving from Spacemacs to Doom Emacs
As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been experimenting with Lume to replace Hugo as the static site generator for this site. I quickly ran into an issue because Lume is written in TypeScript, and I simply could not get my editor to work with TypeScript. TypeScript is JavaScript with types. Like JavaScript, it can be used for both web programming and server-side (or just regular) programming. For the latter, there are a number of current runtimes that are in use, with Node.
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Hugo does not Spark Joy
I haven’t been writing much in the last couple of months. A large part of that is due to life circumstances, but a not-insignificant part of that comes from the site as it is not sparking joy. When I started with Version 3 a couple of years ago, the idea was to have a static, locally-generated site completely under my control, that I could use to experiment with ideas about what I wanted the site to be.
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Requiem for a Tumblelog
In the process of my continued tinkering with this site, I have been thinking a lot more about personal websites, blogs, social media, and writing on the web in general. After getting the journal into working shape, I wanted to figure out a replacement for short, roughly tweet-sized posts. I can usually come up with something blog-post-sized to write about 2-3 times a week, but a couple times a day I want to share something smaller: a random thought, a link to something I’ve found interesting, a fun trailer for a movie or show, the occasional picture or image.
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Revising Goals for Version 3
Almost two years ago now I launched what I called version 3 of this website. I moved from a home-grown, custom, static site generator to Hugo. I moved my existing home page and about page, added the beginnings of a blog, and some notes. After letting the site lie mostly unchanged since, I made some major aesthetic changes, and have been trying to write more regularly over the last few weeks.
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RSS Cleanup
I decided to start the new month by doing some clean, in this case, cleaning up my RSS feeds. For a while now I’ve been using Feedbin as the “backend”, to fetch the feeds from sources. I use Reeder 5, mainly on my iPad mini, but also sometimes on my phone and MacBook, to actually read said feeds. As a setup it works great, especially since from Reeder I can easily save links to Apple Notes if I want to refer to them later.
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Size and Color Changes
In the spirit of devoting more energy to writing regularly, I wanted to tweak the design of the site to be somewhat less offensive than what it was. The previous design was cobbled together from various sources and previous versions of the site. Things like font sizes, padding and margins were based only on what looked good and was pretty inconsistent for different parts of the site. The colors were okay, but fairly random.
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Sunday Selection 2024-02-18
Another year, another attempt to blog on a more regular basis. Life has been pretty hectic the last few years, and it doesn’t seem like that’s going to let up anytime soon. Over the last few years I’ve developed a tendency to pull inward, to spend most of my time in my own head, exploring my own thoughts and emotions, rather than engaging with the outside world. This has certainly been partially due to the isolation of COVID-19, moving out to a solo apartment, then to a more remote and rural area, and spending most of my time alone.
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The Mandalorians
Spoilers for season 3 of The Mandalorian and season 1 of The Book of Boba Fett below. We are about half way through Season 3 of The Mandalorian. I’m enjoying it so far, but it has a very different feel and focus than the first two seasons. While the earlier seasons were focused very much on the adventures of the eponymous Mandalorian Din Djarin and his foundling Grogu, this season seems to be much more about the surrounding characters and the post-Empire galaxy they inhabit.
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The Zen of Dune
I finally got around to watching Denis Villeneuve’s Dune over the weekend. I appreciated how beautiful and well-considered it was, but I’ll have to watch it again to make up my mind as to how much I actually liked it. It also very clearly felt like the first half of a movie, rather than a complete one. All that being said, what really struck me is what one of the characters, Jamis, says in one of Paul Atreides’ visions:
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Version 3
I decided to finally get my act together and update my website. Of course, me being me, I couldn’t just update the events page and call it a day. No, I had to do a complete rebuild. It’s not a redesign, because it’s not just visible style tweaks, but a complete overhaul of how the site is built and deployed, as well as reconsidering and greatly expanding the purpose(s) it serves.