turkeyBsides

Mar 23, 2024 ∞

🇹🇷 Benetton Scooter

Jan 12, 2024 ∞

thingsThisWeek #83

Last one of the xMas-themed celebrations: Kings Day. And I must really find a job. Really. It was a messy week.

🇹🇷 Friday was extra nice. Our Turkish friend was spending her last day in town, we joined her for lunch. Had a VERY nice burger in a spot I don’t visit often enough, with a yummy IPA. The girls went the opposite way and had oysters, shrimp, and white wine. All of us had a good time. When dinner time arrived we were joined by a brother in law, who found himself alone in the city, wife away in one of those corporate team building weekends. We cooked, he was tinyMovieStar’s toy for the evening, and she cried her heart out when he left. She was SO sleepy and tired by then, it took her two minutes to fall asleep.
🏊‍♀️ Still no way to talk the little one back into the pool. She says she will go “next time”, but she’s been doing that for a while. We will wait a bit longer before canceling the monthly payments, but would really love for her to properly learn how to swim. Maybe tomorrow she’ll wake up and wants to go.
👑 Kings Day was a blast. We had lunch at my parents (Saturday Classic), and then moved to the in-laws. I’m aware I’ve said it before, the house is always busy, but this time around it was incredibly so. The whole gang was around, and I mean all of it! There are a couple of family members who are harder to meet, as they live far from the country, and can’t always make it. They all did this time around. It was fabulous. Lots of singing, eating, talking, drinking, drawing.
😔 The rest of the week felt pretty shitty, truth be told. I need to find regular work, this freelancing thing is a mess. Work has been slowing down last year, and I do miss the steady pay. I’m pretty sure I’m not getting that again, not in the newspaper business, and I’m feeling a bit lost. Hope things brighten up, but it’s not easy to figure things out.
📺 The Brothers Sun. Good.
🍿 No movies this week.
🎙 Core Int, Extremamente Desagradável, Catching the Kingpins, Ruminate.
👻 Moving a Ghost blog. DinkiWinkiMinkiWinki was hosted at Ghost(Pro), and the one thing that kept bothering me for a while was the cost. The service is great, but I was paying a hefty sum to have the blog sit there, posts taking months to write. I was looking for an alternative, ever since I moved it to a monthly subscription, trying to force me to act, looking at the monthly payment. If I’d paid for a full year, I wouldn’t have done this. The blog is too big by now, over 5GB in photos, so that was also keeping me from moving. I was afraid, and lazy. In the end I went with PikaPods. It looks like a nice service, and hopefully stable enough so I don’t have to move again. The Ghost part of moving was impressively simple, with the provided zipped archive they sent on request. Everything (I mean EVERYTHING) is in there, so it’s just a matter of importing stuff into the new home. Then comes DNS (thanks for being cool, Porkbun), Cloudflare, Mailgun. A pain. But a manageable one. It took a couple of hours to sort through this mess, and it was done. There’s was a new post on DinkiWinkiMinkiWinki to celebrate the move, and I’ll try to get to the next one in less than a year. Promise. Also, I should write a longer post about this whole thing, especially about PikaPods. It’s an impressive service that a lot of people, who do not look at self-hosting with a favourable eye, could use.
🔎 Kagi is no more, at least not for me. Shitty attitude, on top of a shitty deal. Sad to see this one go. I have a feeling I’ll get back to it sometime in the future. Other search engines feel even worse than they did before trying this one.
🌐 Since maique.lol is back in business, I thought it would be good to re-enable sidor♡life, the blog hosted at weblog.lol. I refactored the Drafts action I used to post there (it now adds a date to the frontmatter!), and added that to another one, the action that posts the same thing to both M.b and weblog.lol at the same time. It works. Tinylytics works brilliantly with omg.lol as well, so now I have Kudos on this blog too.
🧠 Went ahead and threw some money at GPT4 API. Nice. Cheap. Perfect for the new Shortcuts Jarrod made! The shortcuts are AWESOME.
🐰 I think I also solved my issues with bunny.net. It seems to be working now. CDN are fun.
⭐️ Wishing Micro.blog would stop having hiccups. It would be perfect without them. There are plenty other places, but none like it.

Jan 5, 2024 ∞

thingsThisWeek #82

Into the new year. Slowly.

🎉 NYE was spent with the usual gang, plus another couple with two-year old twins. She’s Portuguese, just back home after 15 years in Argentina. Husband from Argentina. A really nice couple, and very talented with empanadas. I ate too much. We all did. The kids went to bed way too late, and that threw the whole week off balance.
😵 Tuesday (this week we’re calling it “Monday”) arrived, and it was time to forget all about excessive drinking, eating, and sleeping, and get back to the usual wake up time, and fight to get the little one dressed and out of the house. It didn’t work out as planned, sleeping schedule should be back to normal by… March? We then went to a couple of stores to deal with some returns (day off for movieStar), and back home. Editing photos. VERY Exciting.
🚗 This week I also had to visit my mechanic, a couple of things have been nagging me. He didn’t find them important, and told me to come back another day to have them properly checked. He did order the mirror that is broken. I had to run some errands after that, and ended up in IKEA. Not thrilled, but it was mostly painless. I will have to go back soon, movieStar did not approve one of the items purchased.
🇹🇷 We finally met our friend from Istanbul who’s visiting. We had a wonderful late afternoon/dinner with her, and the three kids who are traveling with her. Took them to a couple of our spots, and they seemed to enjoy their time, and the food. Mission accomplished. Still hope to see them again before the fly out.
🎥 This week there was a special homage to an old friend, at the Cinemateca (Film Museum/Art House). He’s a director but, most importantly, father of a couple of close friends of ours, and a very important figure in my late teens/early adulthood. He lives close by, and we still see him often. I stopped by, hang for a bit, and walked back home. Didn’t stay for the movies, but had to go there.
📺 Finished the short Stonehouse. The Crown is back on. Slowly.
🍿 I’m on a roll! We watched a few this week. Barbie. Finally. Loved it. Ricky Gervais: Armageddon. Did not like. At all. The Killer. Lukewarm. Hell Dogs. Love these Japanese movies.
📚 Picked up The Last Resort again.
⭐️ M.b Importing static content. Neat trick. I kinda got it to work. As with most things these days, not 100%, and no way I can figure out why it will not perform to that level.
📱 Turned ON notifications on Gluon, and OFF on the official Micro.blog app. They are just not reliable, not after this many years. Gluon’s notifications even have the incredible, and revolutionary feature of taking you to the actual conversation they refer to! I’m using Gluon almost exclusively now. The M.b app isn’t great, that’s the truth. For a service with so many moving parts, and an app that can be used as a full ActivityPub client, it’s very basic. Glad Gluon, and Vincent, are around. Sorry about the rant.
🐰 bunny.net has CDN, it has storage, it has fonts. And it’s cheap. Perfect to play with. I’m using it to serve Atkinson on the blog, and wanted (for a while now) to have a way to easily send files over, and get a link back, ready to paste into a post. Not that I need it, mind you, but for the challenge. Yes, it’s a challenge for me. I tried before, and gave up. The Shortcut seemed impossible to tweak. This week I decided to try again! I did it. Using Dropshare to upload inside a Shortcut, and a few issues solved with the filename, but I did it! Of course things can’t just be perfect, so I now have an IP from Hong Kong trying to load a file every minute! That has (with the help of many) led me to learn a bit more about the whole CDN. Tricky stuff, for my untrained skills. This will be an ongoing task.
📆 HEY has released their Calendar app. Well, not really the app, because Apple won’t approve the actual thing, but web version for now. There’s also an Android app out already, if you use that. On the web (laptop) it’s fine. Nothing spectacular, but full of little ideas that I can see myself using. Sadly it’s not great yet on mobile, and that’s where I need it to shine. Nowhere near the kind of polish we get with Fantastical, for one. I’m aware this is v1.0, and I’m looking forward to the app, and see how it evolves.