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I took a week or so off social media but have been unable to maintain my distance. The trick is to limit myself to checking the feed a couple times a day. There’s so much great stuff out there, so I don’t want to leave completely, but I have to stop reaching for it every time there’s a lull in my thoughts.

Posts here are no longer being automatically syndicated to Mastodon via EchoFeed. I want to control when they show up on Mastodon, and that may be different than when I publish them here.

It’s just two cut-to-size closet shelving sections and some PVC for support. It’s a little rickety, but I can set it up or tear it down and store everything in about 30 seconds.

 I’m still taking sewing lessons. The first week we made pillowcases and it was actually fun, other than having to rip a whole seam and start over :).

Monday’s project was this drawstring bag.

This was my first time cutting fabric, and I found it harder than expected. There’s nothing to work against for the first cut, if you know what I mean. After taking forever figuring out the cuts, I was having trouble with my sewing machine. I still haven’t figured out what the problem was, but it seems OK now. The class is 3 hours long and I was there for 3.5 hours and still didn’t get to the drawstring. I finished the drawstring this morning. It was tricky because I don’t have an edgestitch presser foot for my machine, so I was a bit all over the place. I missed a small section, but I’m choosing to ignore it.

Sewing is hard, but it’s really cool to walk in with a random pile of fabric and walk out with an actual thing I made with it. Can’t wait until next week.

 

In high school, I mowed lawns for extra cash. I remember vividly the time I was mowing our neighbor’s back yard and I had the idea for a painting (see above). I actually stopped the mower and went inside to start painting immediately. I miss feeling so creative that I’d stop whatever I was doing because I had an idea.

Had second sewing class yesterday. We made drawstring bags. Well, tried to. I struggled with the sewing machine for half the class. It kept jamming. And when it wasn’t jamming, I was mis-threading it. We cut several pieces of fabric for the first time. That was harder than I expected. Like my dad often said while building something, “I cut it twice and it’s still too short.” I didn’t finish. I still need to make and thread the drawstring.

People think too much of themselves. We’re not that special. Or important.

Early this year, I decided I was Hanging up the Hobonichi. As is normal for me, I changed my mind and ordered the 2025 Techo, just in case. FOMO, mostly.

You can’t read the room if you’re not in the room.

I was considering bringing back ox-hugo for generating posts here, but according to this comment, he plans to remove support for YAML frontmatter, and I’m not using TOML, so that’s a no-go.

I feel like if Apple just said “Screw it, we’re sick of this” and stopped making iPhones altogether, we’d all just go buy some Android phone and it would be fine. Then maybe we could collectively shut up about Apple and that would be even better.

 

Performance is important, of course, but I honestly don’t fuss too much over it on my sites. At least I don’t let it get in the way of publishing how I want to publish. For example, I don’t bother with a CDN because I don’t want to futz with the links and I don’t want the dependency.

Some things, though, are unintrusive while being helpful. Expires headers being one of them. I was getting “B” performance ratings, and the main culprit was a lack of expires headers, so I added them.

Here’s how I did it in Caddy:

(static) {
	@static {
		file
		path *.js *.css *.ico *.gif *.jpg *.jpeg *.png *.svg *.woff *.woff2 *.json
	}
	header @static Cache-Control max-age=5184000
}

Then, in the baty.net configuration block, for example, I added an import static line.

Now, I’m an “A” student again.

Why is it that the first part of every issue of every newsletter is about either changes to the newsletter format or apologizing for being late with the newsletter?

A few of the things I never want to think about:

• Timezones
• Retina versions of graphics
• Unit tests
• Git branches
• Code linting
• Pen testing
• Licensing
• Build pipelines
• Docker