Today marks the last Microblogvember day. One last post where I include a daily prompt word into 280 characters and hit publish. The last month helped me to reinforce a habit of daily writing. Thanks to all who participated, I enjoyed your daily updates. This was a blast!
We are all forced to adapt to live quite pedestrian lives. While the quantity of social interaction dropped, for me the quality has risen. I cherish every time I’m able to see friends and family. And that’s a positive in my book.
The case is awesome BTW. It’s an Akasa Gem Pro, machined from aluminium and completely passively cooled. Still keeps the RPi 4, 4gb only at ~36° Celsius (96,8 Fahrenheit).
A Raspberry Pi project is a bit like getting your first tattoo. Once you have one you keep getting more and more.
I don’t have any tattoos myself but the ever increasing number of Pi project is proving my point.
Often people try to mask their intentions with words. But in the end actions or lack thereof always reveal the true story.
Last week we saw a prime example of this behavior. With a political implosion as a result.
These days, a relatively modest investment can buy amazing audio quality. One dilemma is sending music to the DAC/AMP (now directly connected to the PC). With a bit of tinkering and a Raspberry Pi this should be solvable. Should look into this some more, looks like a fun project to do1.
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Edit: that didn’t take very long ↩︎
Ever since Spotify launched in The Netherlands I have been a subscriber (even before the official launch… but let’s not tell Spotify). But now music discovery and keeping everything organized is getting harder by the day. These issues small and not real dealbreakers, but still…
My 60+ playlists (educated guess, didn’t want to count) are a hot mess of curated lists and my lists (with no way of keeping them separate). I have lists based on genre, new finds, based on band, albums, list where I store all-time favorites, ….. (sometimes even creatively combined). So if I want to find a specific artist/track and I don’t recall the name I have to start guessing in which playlist I may have saved the song. This wouldn’t be so bad if I would know which playlists are mine and which are curated by the service. Well I just have to open them all and start looking… wait… was “90s acoustic” my own or is it by Spotify??
The “Made for You” part has gradually starting to offer me more of the music I already listen to… just split in more different playlists.
What also doesn’t help is that the play and search history isn’t synced between apps and desktop. And don’t ask me why the homepage only shows “Recently Played” playlists but leaves out individual tracks?? Earlier today I couldn’t remember the name of a new artist I listened to the day before and wanted to check out. Spend half an hour to find the track I listened to (was well hidden in the search on the iOS app so showed no trace on desktop).
At the moment I do not have a solution for the issues above. And don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy the service, just getting my thoughts out there for future reference.
A daily writing habit never stuck. Is this topic interesting and my writing good enough? The one thing the Mbnov challenge showed me is to adjust this mindset. Not every post has to be insightful, long, and articulated. Just, write. Tomorrow offers a new opportunity to do it even better.
Working from my home office, most of the day is spend on Teams video conferencing. After quite some time, I’m now pretty used to looking at a screen while discussing stuff. But for a one-on-one conversation, it’s still not as convenient as the good old telephone call to me.
82.3 Kb
Fiddled a bit more with optimization of the website. As the website is hosted by Micro.blog I a little limited on what is possible. But still the result is quite good:
- Scaled and compressed all images, resizing and reuploading isn’t the most inspiering to do, but still it counted for 90% of the bloat in size (and my website isn’t even very image heavy)
- Removed the Gravatar integration with a static favicon and header image. Gravatar isn’t privacy-friendly at all and the standard integration within Micro.blog is quite unneccesary. So win for privacy and reduced one request
- Stopped using the custom CSS function within Micro.blog and just added all to the the custom theme CSS, saving one request
Overall some minor changes which resulted in reducing my homepage from 3,3Mb to 82.3 Kb uncompressed1.
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click on the Waterfall tab to check the uncompressed size of the site ↩︎
I got triggered by a post from Ton Zijlstra about the 512k club. With two quick changes to my Micro.blog website I reduced the uncompressed size from 3,3Mb to 141Kb. Mainly resizing a image and not embedding YouTube.
Still some other small optimizations I will do tonight (getting rid of Gravatar in the Marfa theme).
The provision to focus on important topics vs seemingly urgent random stuff requires me to look ahead. 4 PM each day I draft my todo-list for the next day. This single action results in two things: a todo list for tomorrow and a clear picture of what still needs to be done today
After 16 years my trusty Sennheiser HD-25 headphones broke. Nothing that can not be fixed with some DIY maintenance. I the meantime this provides an opportunity to tryout a new set of headphones with a different sound signature. Picked up the Beyerdynamic 770 Pro, quite excited.
Capture a thought, even if it’s only a short message, by writing every day. I realize that it’s not so much what I write. It’s about how it helps me to reflect on the day.
For the second time this year, the youth department of a right-wing political party in The Netherlands crossed a border. Sharing anti-Semitic expressions on WhatsApp and Instagram. Unbelievable, but you get what you sow. Throwing out whistleblowers, letting offenders stay.
Exactly one month from now before it will be officially winter. That means one month of autumn left. Didn’t really get outside that often with my camera during this beatiful time of year. But still 31 days to make it up and enjoy the fall colors.
Why does Spotify think it’s a good idea to auto-start the app? Didn’t set it up to do so and it’s not in the OSx login options. Disable auto starting is kindly hidden by Spotify in it’s own menu. Burried in the “advanced” section. Bugs me everytime I do a clean install.
Staying within the theme, one of those old gems for me is “Mazzy Star - Fade into you”1
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External link to YouTube ↩︎