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Hoorntjes

Weet je deze nog? Ik zal dat in elk geval niet snel vergeten! De Dodentocht, wat een zot ding was me dat.  Bij die hele dodentocht hoort natuurlijk ook wat merchandising. Ik had het geluk om een ticket te kunnen overkopen maar was net te laat om ook maar iets van die toffe dingen te bestellen. Vorige week viel er plots een mailtje in de postdoos met het bericht dat er nog Dodentocht Duvel Glazen gekocht en afgehaald konden worden.Wie stond er zaterdagvoormiddag aan de poort van een magazijn in Bornem denk je? 🙋🏻‍♂️

Bought a new SIM card for my dad, his old mobile operator is ceasing its activities. 🥺

Roughtor, Bodmin Moor

I have been in a photographic rut for a few years. This probably coincides with some health difficulties over the same period, so it's not really surprising. However, I've felt the need to start a photographic blog, and now I need to fill it with something before I can get started on some fresh work. So here is a shot of Roughtor on Bodmin Moor, taken from my files. It was probably taken around this time of year, but not this year. I don't think it's changed much since anyway. It hasn't changed much for millions of years. If you're...

Continuous Learning: Markets evolve, and so should your knowledge. Read books, attend webinars, join trading forums, buy trading courses.  Watch the odd YouTube video here and there but don't overload yourself and get analysis paralysis. Learn and follow a teacher and style you like, but be sure to crack on and start becoming self sufficient as soon as possible.

Break Tasks into Smaller Steps: Sometimes large projects can seem overwhelming.  Breaking them down into smaller, manageable tasks can make them less daunting and easier to tackle.

Short Ruby Newsletter - edition 110

Short Ruby Newsletter - edition 110 highlightsAvo is looking for a mid-level Ruby on Rails Developer and I could not recommend enough the experience of working with Adrian Marin - the creator of Avo: 🚀 Launches• Donn Felker launched Ruby Static Pro - a Ruby static generator template based on Middleman • Tare Robrock (re)launched Translated - auto-magical translations for Rails models • Rails Designer (pre)launched a new book - "Javascript for Rails Developer" 📅 Events• Alex Rudall announced a workshop by Obie Fernandez about "Ruby AI Show n Tell" • Honeybadger and Wafris are organizing an online workshop about...

Duplicati - Free Encrypted Offsite Backup for Your Mac

I am a firm believer in establishing a backup routine with multiple failsafes. I've managed to hold on to some of my data for over 25 years as a result. Yep, I still have the MP3 files I downloaded from Napster in the 90s. I run a Time Machine backup and I make regular SuperDuper full disk clones. For offsite data storage, I recently discovered Duplicati, a free, open-source backup program that uses encryption to securely store your data on various cloud services, local drives, or remote servers. It offers flexible scheduling, versioning, and incremental backups for reliable data protection....

Try-Catch In UCL - Some Notes

Stared working on a `try` command to UCL, which can be used to trap errors that occur within a block. This is very much inspired by try-blocks in Java and Python, where the main block will run, and if any error occurs, it will fall through to the catch block: try { echo "Something bad can happen here" } catch { echo "It's all right. I'll run next" }This is all I've got working at the moment, but I want to quickly write some notes on how I'd like this to work, lest I forget it later. First, much like...

New week ahead, I should afford it day by day... 😫

Sunday, October 20, 2024

Too Close To Call Yesterday's British Columbia provincial election was impossibly close. We won't know the official outcome for at least a week. The stalemate has me wondering if something about our increasingly polarized society is contributing to 50/50 outcomes. Queued I've started listening to Oliver Burkeman's follow-up to Four Thousand Weeks, Meditations for Mortals, Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. I'm consuming the prescribed 1 chapter a day, for 28 days. It's off to a strong start. Atmospheric Rivers and Creeks I remember a time, not too long ago, when an Atmospheric River...

• 🚀 You can now view all of your uploads (assets) that are part of your posts on a dedicated screen. This allows you to quickly download them in original format, view the post they are attached to and also search by filename or your post content. This is still a work in progress, so please expect some tweaks. You'll find this in the new "Assets" section that you can get to in the main dropdown. • ⚠️ Assets are tied to a post, so when you delete the post, the attached uploads will also be deleted — that's by...

Leaning into zettlekasten

I am thoroughly enjoying the process of writing. Collecting ideas sparks my creativity, and I am able to articulate my thoughts effectively. I anticipate the positive outcome of atomic notes. 

The original email issue has been fixed by the upstream provider. Thanks all for waiting. I did revert some settings in the meantime which solved it momentarily, however we're back to normal and all up to date. It was not related to a development email (a feature I am working on) being marked as spam, phew.

I'm Super-Glad I'm Not Using WordPress Anymore...

...because the ongoing dumpster-fire that is Matt Mullenweg would make me nervous as heck. I've no idea how this will shake out, but it's distressing to watch. 🙁

This is a place you may sincerely miss. 😉 I will be writing microposts about everything here. Do not expect me to write anything super original, just daily random thoughts.

A quick update on sending emails. This seems to be an issue with recent upgrades, I’ll investigate and fix this and update accordingly.

❌ We're currently experiencing an issue with our mail provider that is stopping us sending confirmation emails, and others like domain name notifications. Will keep you updated once I hear more. I believe this is an automatic flag due to some testing yesterday which stopped further outgoing emails after one email was automatically flagged as spam. Please feel free to email if you need confirmations approved and I'll do it manually.

Weekly Update - 20 Oct 2024

Yeah, I know, it's been a while… again. A lot has been happening in life and there've been many days that I haven't done any work on anything. Things are starting to settle down now, although I am expecting a few more bumpy days ahead, so we'll see how we go with project work. Cyber BurgerYeah, I'm getting pretty tired of this one. I'm right in the trough of despair here, where the initial excitement has worn off and I just want to finish it. All the remaining work for it has been defined, which I think helps, and now...

• 👾 Explore will now show both posts with and without title on the same page. This is something I wanted to do for some time as I didn't like to switch between the two and thought it was silly. Also, Amit, nails it that they're not supposed to be just "shorts" or labelled otherwise. There is also a new RSS feed for this. The existing feeds work as they did as I didn't want to mess with your flow.

derelict gate

I wanted to start a blog for my photographs. Using Scribbles makes sense for that purpose now that Vincent has added a large size pop-up view option when you click the image. To my thinking, this alone makes the platform more suited for photography blogs above the many other simple blogging services that are to be found now. However, this is probably only true on higher resolution monitors on a desktop computer rather than your average portable device. Phones and tablets might actually show the pictures smaller in the new view because of now trying to show more page around...

ClicKnow - A Different Kind of AI Tool

Most AI tools on the market these days fall into one of two categories: • Writing assistants that correct spelling and grammar or do other text manipulation • Basic question answering or search engine type functions ClicKnow by independent developer aike9m studio doesn't do either of those things. It also doesn't require a monthly fee or the use of your own API key. What ClicKnow does is act on text you select to perform a variety of functions. It is compatible with PopClip in that you can have apps running at the same time and get full functionality from both...

A titleless post is not a micropost. By definition, a micropost is "a very short posted message." The hyponym is tweet or toot. Microposts are generally short, but titleless posts need not be. They can ramble along for as long as the thought warrants. Calling a titleless post a micropost is like calling a subject-less email an SMS. Both lack a particular property but are inherently distinct. Microblogging requires a different mindset, one that I have yet to master. However, microblogging is still blogging—it's in the name, after all. A short post is still a blog post. The reverse, though,...

Been trying to work on an "assets" view for a blog on Scribbles. Coming along nicely... but now it's way past 3AM and getting tired. I might ship this as a beta tomorrow. It'll look up all your assets across all your posts, then show them — you can then download them, or go to the post in question where it is.

Well, I did solve one issue with my big screen... the contrast was set to 100%... no wonder it looked so bad 😅 Looking a bit better now, which is nice. Also, nice to have a flow with typing again... so nice to work on a keyboard that works — and I still make mistakes!!! 🤪

• 👾 Improved the blog export to now also include all of your original images and videos. The HTML that will be created will use the images or videos as found in the folder instead of the Scribbles CDN URL. • ❤️ Added a Nitpick option to set a "powered by scribbles" image into the footer of your site. It's a lovely icon created by Ning. By default, any new blog will have this option enabled by default. Existing blogs will have it disabled — didn't want to mess with the Zen. Give it a try. You can see it...

Several weeks on a 6-speed Brompton C-Line

I bought a six-speed Brompton C-Line several weeks ago, replacing a Zizzo Forté. I like having a non-electric "get around" bike, and I like having a folding bike for camping trips or flexible city travel. The Zizzo was fine, but a little creaky for my tastes, with an ungainly fold. I bought the Brompton on the strength of a good test ride that told me it'd be fine for my purposes: Steel frame, interesting suspension, decent gearing, and surprisingly comfortable geometry. I was imagining round trips of six or seven miles within my part of town, and the occasional slightly...

• 🚀 For posts with images, you can now click on those images to open up a lightbox. Works great. Click to open, click to close. It'll always load the higher resolution image to maximise the space. It's super simple and hopefully will tick a lot of boxes. It'll have a blurred background in either white or black, depending on the colour scheme. You can of course override some elements with the ".lightbox" class in your custom CSS. The image will also take into account your screen height, so it'll fit as it needs. Give it a try:

Celebrating 5500 subscribers

Two months ago, I was celebrating reaching 5000 subscribers with Short Ruby Newsletter Today I am happy to share that we have over 5500 subscribers! Not a round number, but the pace of new subscribers is picking up steam. Thank you for trusting me and subscribing to the newsletter! A huge thanks to all the paying subscribers and founding members who contribute every month to keep the newsletter's costs down. If you are not a subscriber, visit https://newsletter.shortruby.com and subscribe to get the newsletter every Monday in your inbox. What is Short Ruby Newsletter?It is a Monday morning summary of...

• 👾 Tweaked the explore section to show image previews for posts that have them. I think it looks nicer and it's easier to see when a post does include an image or not. Especially great for photos that have a little bit of text. More work needs to be done here though, but a great step to make it look nicer.

Kiano - A Unique Image Sorter and Viewer for Apple Photos

Kiano, a free app from the Visual Computing Group, provides a unique way to view and search your photo library. On my M3 iMac, it analyzed 22K images in about two and half minutes. It then displayed a grid of all the photos grouped together by similarity to one another. For example, all the landscape images I had showing broad expanses of sky were together, as were the man, many dual selfies of my wife and i. You can choose to have the sorting weighted towards color or towards content. Clicking on an image opens it within the program, where...

Daily Planning: Spend a few minutes at the start or end of your day to plan the next day's activities.  This can include listing tasks, setting priorities, and scheduling breaks. • 🖨️ Productivity printables for your office • 📆 Today is the Day Planner

Pennystock Supernovas

Timothy Sykes has a great framework to focus on stocks that usually run pre-market. The step to focus on is step 3: Step #1: The Pre-Pump or Promotion Step #2: Ramp Step #3: Supernova • This step represents the peak of the stock's price increase during the pump. It's often the point where the stock achieves its highest valuation due to the cumulative effect of the promotion. At this stage, there's typically high volatility, with the price possibly fluctuating widely even within a trading day. It's a critical moment for traders to decide whether to sell or hold, as the...

Loose opinions, strongly held. 

CoopSearch

CoopSearch This isn't anything new but, I wanted to re-share my project, CoopSearch, a self-hosted search engine built on the SearXNG platform. I moved it from a subdomain of Cooperserver.com over to its own domain (CoopSearch.com). For those that don't know or haven't used it, essentially, it's a search engine that keeps your searches private, gives you results from a variety of sources (you can set which ones), and doesn't track you. It's a search engine, aggregating results from Google, DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, and over 70 others, all while protecting your privacy.CoopSearch doesn't track your searches or share your IP...

The imposter director revisits the cradle

It isn't something I really emphasize on my résumé or in interviews, but for a spell (more than a year? Less than two?) I was Puppet's engineering director for the platform team — the people who made the core open source Puppet distribution. I was assigned the group in the wake of a re-org that had made a ton of theoretical sense for the many teams working on everything but the platform, but had made no sense  for the platform team itself. I wouldn't have ended up with that group, but there was a lot of disaffection over the re-org,...