- We moved countries! 🚚: a lot has happened since I last logged something here. At the end of November, we moved from Finland to Belgium. It became a tumultuous multi-day undertaking despite long preparations, but luckily we could count on the support of a handful of great friends, who I want to warmly thank once again! 🙏 Helsinki waved us goodbye with some snowfall, and it’s been good to be back in Belgium. In mid-February we will settle into our new long-term Brussels apartment.
- I’ve been in India 🇮🇳: for almost a month now, for family matters (a wedding, birth, …), and a small vacation next week (Sri Lanka). Escaping the West-European winter for a while, and entering the realm of the merciless mosquitoes. It’s probably also been my longest stretch of out-of-home remote work so far, and I’m happy with what we’ve achieved last month. The period before hadn’t been easy with our moving preparations, and my colleagues having welcomed a newborn.
- Emulation & projects 🎮: to cope with the intense fall and winter period of 2024, I let off steam with a temporary obsession for handheld retro gaming. I got XU Mini M & Retroid Pocket 5 consoles and re-indulged into childhood favorites such as Pokemon FireRed, WipEout Pulse and Shaun White Snowboarding (PSP). More recently the free-time pendulum swung back into the project sphere, and I built a new version of my 2018 “No Feed” prototype. The angle is slightly different now: I primarily wanted to keep an eye on the things shared by close friends and family without opening algorithmic social media home feeds. This time, I’m using a headless Chromium browser to periodically scrape the social feeds of people, which lets my system know when there is new a new post. Only then, and at my desired frequency, will the system generate a new item in an RSS feed; displaying a list of first names and links to account pages to check. It ties into my habit of opening my RSS feed reader daily. After the first tests I’m optimistic: it helps me keep in touch with close ones, nothing more, nothing less!
- About this feed: if you’re reading this in an feed reader (cool!), I just fixed a bug which lead to all my blog post’s Atom
guids being the same JS function code. That function had to be called to produce the correctguid- whoopsie. This might mean that you’ll see duplicates of my posts, my apologies for that. I’ll try to ensure this is a one-time thing.
In this now page, I tell you what's going on in my life around this time.
(that is, if I updated it recently).
For more about now pages; see nownownow.com/about.
These updates are part of my feed.
Then
— the archive of now- Weather & activity: temperatures have been hovering around 20°C, which is surprisingly warm for this time of the year. Regardless, fall colors are starting to appear. When it arrives, autumn comes hard and fast in Helsinki, and is also gone in an instant. We’ll probably stop our weekly outdoor basketball sessions soon, and will move to indoor badminton. We rediscovered the sport last year, and I’m already looking forward to starting again!
- Website work: as I’m writing this, I’m working on a sizeable extension of this personal website. I’ve had concrete plans for a while:
- to add my recent projects and Readup activity on the home page
- to add a Now page which also features partially on the home page
- to move my blog posts to a separate page, and perhaps,
- to add in some old photography to spice up the look!
I also really have to add RSS feeds. I’ve gotten very much into RSS consumption over the last months, and I’d love to provide it myself.
Building your own website is fun, but it also takes time. Today, I started by upgrading my two-year-old Strapi CMS deployment from v4.2.2 to v4.25.10, to take advantage of some new layout features. Eight migration guides, one docs PR, and many hours later, my Strapi is better shape than it ever has been.
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Work: despite a good overall response rate from hosts listed on our WTMG map, it sometimes happens that an often-contacted host is not responding anymore. The annoying experience of being ignored is on top of the list of the feedback we receive from travellers. This month, we want to set up sustainable procedures to soft-unlist abandoned accounts.
Until now, we’ve unlisted abandoned accounts once per year, with a crude admin script. This time, we’re defining nuanced conditions for these accounts, based on their recent response rate, response time, and more. To implement these, I’m writing the largest SQL queries I’ve ever written, CTE-galore 😄. Using them, we will be able to do a meaningful, semi-automated cleanup more regularly.
This is also the first application of the Postgres replica of our Firestore, which I might write more about later.
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WWII: it was hard to miss that this year marks the 80th birthday of many significant events of World War II. To learn more about its causes and effects, I’ve been listening to D-Day: The Tide Turns, Adolf Hitler: Rise and Downfall, two excellent podcasts from the Noiser network. I can strongly recommend both so far! They’re both engrossing and informative, exploring background factors, as well as driving the narrative of major events with apt sound effects. I also started reading Anne Frank’s diary (the original publication in Dutch), and I picked up Battlefield V during a sale. That last one is more for entertainment than for learning, but it is inspired on some lesser-known events of WWII, including the sabotage of Vemork heavy water plant, which I’ve learned, after reading the previous Wikipedia article, was a grim and eventually impressive series of daring operations.
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Readup: I’m still dreaming about Readup’s potential, particularly about how it might relate to the fediverse. I recently read the Webmention spec (I think it’s the first W3C spec I read from start to finish!). It would be cool to send out webmentions with Readup, but I’m wondering how many sites support it. I also started working on some glue code to put my most recent Readup posts on my site here.