By the time our hot water adventure is over tomorrow (oh I hope), it will be eight days and $1300 dollars 🪟💸, with that cost going to bring the new hot water heater up to code and the cost of a motel room so my household could take showers. Thankfully my home warranty covers the new hardware cost.
Month: November 2023
Tinylytics for Micro.blog v3.1.0
I’m excited to share I’ve released a new version of my Tinylytics for Micro.blog plugin, bringing it to version 3.1.0. You should see an update in your site’s plugins section soon if not already.
I’m giving Obsidian a spin for notes again. I looked at it briefly once before. I’ve only scratched the surface, but I get the hype. I think what turned me off last time was syncing, but I wasn’t aware it could sync via iCloud. That’s enough for me. Anyone have good pointers?
Well, the hot water heater saga looks grim. Home warranty company has to approve repair next steps. They and repair company won’t be open until next Monday. The soonest a repair looks plausible is Tuesday. Maybe even Wednesday. This is going to be a very long and somewhat smelly weekend.
There’s nothing quite like waking up to the hot water heater being on the fritz the day before a major US holiday. If there’s one thing high on my list of “Oh, hell no” items, it has to be taking a cold shower. 🥶
My App Defaults
I wasn’t going to do a post like this… But what the heck, all the popular kids are doing it this week, so why shouldn’t I? I’m not really much of a defaults guy. I’ve always preferred to support indie developers, so will usually go that route if their app is as good or better than the Apple default.
| Category | Application |
|---|---|
| Mail Client | Apple Mail |
| Mail Server | iCloud Mail with custom email domains |
| Notes | Obsidian |
| To-Do | Things |
| Photo Shooting | Apple Camera |
| Photo Management | Apple Photos |
| Photo Editing | Pixelmator Pro |
| Calendar | Fantastical |
| Cloud File Storage | iCloud |
| RSS | Reeder (with Feedbin) |
| Contacts | Apple Contacts |
| Browser | Safari (Chrome and Firefox for dev work) |
| Chat | Apple Messages (Teams 🤮 and Slack at work) |
| Bookmarks | Things |
| Read It Later | Things |
| Word Processing | Microsoft Word |
| Spreadsheets | Microsoft Excel |
| Presentations | Microsoft Powerpoint |
| Shopping Lists | Bear |
| Meal Planning | Don’t do meal planning |
| Budgeting and Personal Finance | Microsoft Excel/Bank Mobile App |
| News | Safari/Reeder |
| Music | Apple Music |
| Podcasts | Overcast |
| Mastodon | Mona |
| Password Management | 1Password |
| Code Editor | Nova (VS Code when I have to) |
Some extra utility apps in my toolbox I can’t live without…
- Launchbar: It’s the first app I install on any new Mac. I’m lost without it.
- Bartender: To hide menubar icons that are pointless.
- FastScripts: Assign a keystroke to AppleScripts to do various things.
- Shottr: For taking screenshots. The price can’t be beat and it does a great job.
- Magnet: Resize and arrange windows with a keystroke. Obviously, I hate taking my hands off the keyboard.
My transition to the “dark side” is complete. I tried switching to light mode on my workstation and it damn near blinded me… Does that make me one of the cool kids now?
There’s an 80’s music festival going on downtown this weekend. Whoever’s onstage right now is really getting the crowd going. Every five minutes there’s a loud roar. It’s pretty awesome to hear. Kind of wish we had gotten tickets.
Put in some good work on Tinylytics for Micro.blog this afternoon. A couple of cool new features are coming: The ability to link to your public stats if you’ve enabled them and the option to show a web ring avatar for other sites who’ve enabled that in their Tinylytics settings. Check out the footer of this page to see them in action. I’ll let things bake in for a few days while I update documentation.
I killed off my WordPress site over at jimmitchellmedia.net today, setting up a domain forward to my main jimmitchell.org domain. It’s time to consolidate my online persona into one bucket and make Micro.blog my web house.
I’m glad we canceled our weekend plans. A serious bug in the deployment from earlier this week was found late yesterday and I’m spending my PTO day working with the team to resolve it. The good news is it looks like we’ve found the fix. Some of the day might be salvageable. 🤞🏻
I was about to put a note in my (soon to come) Microcasts topics folder about a thing that just happened, but it turns out I already added it as episode #003. Maybe I should bump it up to episode #002… But then the topic for that episode is one that chaps my hide too.
What Lies Below
Underwater Data Centers: Servers Beneath the Surface – Dgtl Infra
Since 2015, several data centers have been submerged underwater in both the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Ocean. The first underwater data center was deployed by Microsoft into the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of California, through an experiment called Project Natick, with Phase 1 being a vessel carrying 1 rack, containing 24 servers.
I’m hoping with the rainy weekend predicted for SoCal, I can get caught up on Tinylytics for Micro.blog plugin work. We were planning to take the RV out, but who wants to sit in a small box in the rain? I’d rather sit in a bigger box with better amenities.
Today will be a very long day… Awake at 1:30am, thinking (worrying) about what I need to get done in preparation for an after-hours system deployment that will take until at least 10pm. Such is the glamorous life of an IT manager. It’s a given that far too many cups of coffee will be consumed today.