Micro

Meena video interviewed my dad this weekend. The intent was to document his thoughts and perspectives of the years gone by and to get glimpses of his generation. We learnt so many interesting things about our family that we wouldn’t have known if we hadn’t done this. An oral history of sorts! This has been on the back burner for a while now and I’m so glad we got this rolling! This along with the family tree project has sent me down the rabbit hole of documenting our ancestral history. ...

#TIL you don’t quite have to give your email address (or it’s alias) to subscribe to substack newsletters. Just append ‘/feed’ to the publication link to fetch its RSS feed.

Just published Appa’s first book - ‘Smell of the Soil’ in print format. This has been on his (and my) ’to-do’ list for a while now. We did publish the digital version in December 2017 and looking back makes me wonder why we didn’t publish the print version earlier! It’s been a few years that he’s been wanting to do this and we’ve had quite some discussion on what’s the best way to publish/market and never quite came to a consensus. Today, on an impulse, I hit the publish button with a small publishing firm in India and ordered the first copy for myself. Can’t wait to get my hands on it and send him a copy! ...

While walking someone through a few features of Trilium notes, I realized the Trilium notes electron app is really good! Besides the offline-first feature it provides, it also lets me have an additional backup of the notes. And then I also figured, I did have to tweak the volume configuration in my yaml a bit for the data to be persistent!

@ndanes@smallcamp.art I’ve had absolutely zero issues using [nextcloudpi](https://ownyourbits.com/nextcloudpi/#supported_systems). Silently been chugging along for a few years now with auto-updates and close to zero manual intervention. For the maps alternative, I’ve had my eyes on [Magic earth](https://www.magicearth.com/)

“You know, sometimes all you need is 20 seconds of insane courage, just literally 20 seconds of embarrassing bravery, and I promise you something great will come of it.” – Benjamin Mee, (We Bought a Zoo, 2011)

It just struck me today how much I love writing crude, rewarding code. The type that is just sufficient to get the job done and that which ‘scratches your itch’ and might probably be useful for someone else too. I am not a software developer. Never been one. My day job is far, far from it. It’s been more than a decade that I’ve worked in a software firm. And even when I did, a good bunch of my time then was spent of mainframe code [Rexx / JCL] and Change Management. ...

This is fascinating @petervangeit ! Wasn’t aware of SOI Maps. Thanks for sharing

Tweaked this setup further to make it a bit more seamless. I used a different but more reliable script to fetch the activity json files and setup a cron job to run twice every week. Next-up: 01. Make the parsing and data display theme agnostic. 02. Add a quick link to publish individual activities as posts if required 03. Build some cool charts :)