markjgsmith

The ankle injury appears to have made some good progress. It's feeling less painful and wobbly today, and that's good because I did a bit of walking yesterday, so I was half expecting it to be all swollen today. I think I've also mostly recovered from yesterday's horendous alergy flareup, though sinuses are stil a bit red and irritated. Difficult getting going this morning though. #

Bit of a disaster getting places today because of a general strike, but the weather is nice. Having to make sure I'm not putting too much weight on the ankle, and not walking too much. Working on the mobile device today, listening to tech podcasts and writing cover letters as best I can. #

Seen on an old bronze / brass plaque, turned a metalic green by time and weather, over a small bridge in a small town earlier:

"Hommage a la 1ere armée americaine et la brigade piron - 5 September 1944"

Reminder that something big happened here 80 years ago. It's just part of every day life. #

Very difficult day today because I had another alergy flare up day. Completely exhausted. It's just impossible to do anything when you are repeatedly being punched in the face. That's not far off what it feels like. Seriously. Anyway still got some stuff done despite a very antagonistic world.

Why you trying to punch yourself in face world? #

The ankle had been getting somewhat better following 2 days of almost no walking. I went to the shops earlier though, just a 10 minute walk away, and it definitely still was feeling weak, I couldn't put any weight on it. I've been back now for a few hours and it feels quite painful again. Having an injury like this is basically the last thing I need right now. Very difficult to focus and stay motivated.

The weather has cleared up a bit, with some sunshine this afternoon. It even got a bit warm, reaching to the low twenties (Celcius). #

I've noticed that all the links in yesterday's 'today's links' section all have words missing at the end of the link text. It's because the editor I'm using to edit the files adds a newline at the end of files when you save them, and that causes the link posts generated from them to not have space between the text and the domain. I wrote about it previously. I tried to modify the editor to not add newlines, but that didn't work for whatever reason, so I found a workaround which was to use the 'truncate' command. I thought it was only removing newlines, but turns out it was just truncating the file by a small amount each time, so if I ran it multiple times, which I was doing by running it on all the links each time I created a new link, then after removing the newline, it would start removing actual words. Oh noes!

Maybe at some point I'll find a better solution, but for the minute I jut need to remember to only run it once per file after saving the file.

Computers are fabulous, but also kind of annoying sometimes. #

I've been checking out the NodeJS certifications that the Linux foundation are selling. They look kind of interesting, though I find their marketing a bit confusing. I guess the JSNAD and JSNSD would be most appropriate for a web developer. It's a bit confusing whether the certification is included in the training course or not. I know some industries really like these types of certifications. #

Cold and drizzly rain day today where I am. Ankle still hurting quite a lot, so I'm trying to keep that leg rested and perched up on a cushion. All the new blogging scripts, bash aliases and of course the laptop, are making writing much more enjoyable. #

Now that I have my feed reading setup on the new laptop with Feedly and Newsify, I am familiarising myself with how everything looks. Around the start of the year, I pruned my RSS feeds and orgnanised them into two groups, News and Bloggers. News has stuff from media publications, organisations, that kind of stuff, while Bloggers is basically just for individuals running their own website. It's super simple and feels really clean. #

Jim Nielsen appears to have figured out the whole having your websites on different subdomains thing. When I did it myself, everything felt very scattered to me, which is why I decided to move to having everything on a seperate domain. Jim's setup looks pretty cool though. He's also got a lot of neat things on the websites like inbound and outbound links, useful stats, social validation, projetcs, notes. I think the fact that his main landing page doesn't have any tabs, menus or sidebars is crucial. #

I've managed to somehow twist by ankle so I've been hobbling along the past few days. It's swollen and really hurts to walk. So I'm trying not to put too much weight on it.

Making some progress on setting up the laptop. I think I finally got a cross platform solution for daily note taking using Notion. I've also gotten all my Bookmarks synched between all my devices using Google Chrome sync. And while I was on the organising front, I removed android apps I wasn't using, re-organised the ones I am using, and I just improved my blogging workflow by adding some bash aliases that will make it easy to create the markdown files I use for posts. Adding the uuids, date and times has been a real pain, as well as naming the files. With the new aliases that will all happen instantly and be always correct.

I also decided I haven't been listening to enough music recently, so I logged back into Spotify after many years not using the account, and used their very intuitive software to tell them what bands I like. It was a little trip down memory lane, passing through all the major music epochs of my life, with Spotify suggesting bands as I clicked on ones I liked.

One day all these small niggley things you have to do when you setup a new machine will be automatic. Though it's definitely getting easier in many places. There is a long way to go. #

Setting up a basic blogging environment on the new laptop. If this note makes it onto the website then it worked! #

Very hectic few days, so I haven't had much of a chance to do any blogging. I've been spending quite a lot of time setting up the new laptop, lots of sort of annoying issues that I've needed to iron out, maybe I'll get some time to write about them soon. Mostly they have been related to re-activating various accounts and online tools. The laptop itself is very great. I have things in a functional state, but still quite a bit to do. I have found some temporary accomodation which should make things a bit easier. I just moved in earlier today, I will be here for the next month, at which point I will have found a job, and be in a more stable situation. Lots to do. #

I just bought a new Mac Book Air 15". I've been trying to buy a laptop for something like 4 years now, so as you can imagine, I am quite happy :) #

Day trip into the capital today. Really sunny weather, cold in the mornings but by afternoon really quite warm. And oh my gosh Europe can be so very beautiful. #

I figured out a compromise as for the dotfiles dilema. Fully updating the dotfiles was indeed too big a job for right now, however progress was too slow not to do something, so I've created a temporary bashrc file containing alias' for navigation, file creation and file editing for all the basic blogging tasks I do day to day. That should make things a big more streamlined. Also backed it up. #

Some internet connectivity / WiFi issues today for some reason. Thankfully with a static website powered by git, I can still blog without complete interuption. #

Matthew Mazinski on the Peter McCormack Podcast [30:42]: "A very interesting phenomenon, since Trump has taken power, you could look at all the defence stocks in the United States, they are down. In Europe they are up. Complete polar opposites, and big. European stocks are flying right now. Europea defense contractors are flying right now. Specifically because Europe knows that they need to shoulder more of the burden, because they need to rely on the United States anymore". #

Internet / WiFi connection appears to be operational again. #

A quick update to the issue I was having with the Notion UI a few days ago. I contacted their support team and after a bit of back and forth, and some screenshots, we were able figure out the issue. They had been describing a different interface for some reason. Turns out there is a button for turning text into a list. #

Turns out the text editor I was using in iOS was automatically removing newlines at the end of posts, but Neovim, which I'm using on Android, does not. That resulted in no space betwwen daily link text and it's domain. Removing the newline fixed the space problem. Now I just need to figure out a way to make this the default, because having the manually do it each time will be way too tedious. #

I really need to update my dotfiles so that they work on Android. It feels like a bit of an impossible task at the minute. Though I have the essentials of my publishing workflow working on Android, it's so tedious to do many things. Normally I would customize my bash shell, adding shortcuts and customisations that would speed things up, eliminating repetitive tedious steps in my workflow. That normally would go in the dotfiles. However updating the dotfiles I fear could become a much bigger job than I want to tackle right now. Classic programmer catch 22 situation. #

I've been testing out the Notion app on Android today, because I really need a replacement for OneNote which is so horrible to use. Notion looks great in lots of ways, but it seems impossible to turn existing text into a bulletted or check list. You have to know before you start typing that you are going to be writing a list. That's totally impractical, makes it very hard to work alongside existing apps. Cut and pasting a list from another app just isn't possible, as far as I can tell. #

As part of last week's Android setup I have installed all major GPTs. So that's ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. I've been using them to answer basic questions, like for instance which are the best Android text editors and git clients. The answers have been quite good.

Today I noticed that there was a push notification that Grok had been installed. I had tried to install it a few days ago but was told it wasn't available yet but that I could opt for it to auto-install when it was available, which I did. When I opened the app, this time instead of just using it a bit like a web browser, I decided to "have a chat" with it. It was pretty interesting, and to be honest quite fun.

We talked about general life stuff, and that turned into a conversation about my software development projects, and I gave Grok links to the docs, and it was able to read through them and asked me some useful questions. It was kind of like a brainstorming session where you are trying to find a way to best present your product. It was neat. I got the impression that I could have gotten very technical if I had wanted to.

Later we also talked about the Trump tariffs and the effect on the stock markets and general chaos around the world. Grok was able to search through live market data and correlate with tweets from the past few days. Everyone it seems is moving to safety, basically that's treasury bonds and gold. After a bit of back and forth we came up with a set of metrics to watch to get an idea of when the tides will be turning and folks will be starting to get back into Bitcoin.

Then I ran out of messages. I guess I used all my quota. Oh well.

Pretty cool though. I am wondering now how else I could use AI in daily activities. #

Just a test note to see if the notes feature is still working. If this note appears as the last post in the current day then this test worked! :) #