Weeknotes Oct 05 2025
The first winter (butternut) squash to come from the garden, guarded by sasquatch.A good chunk of the blogs I read regularly are filled with weeknotes, so I figured that I may as well jump on the train. If for nothing else it gives me a reason to put words on a page at a regular interval. We’ll see how it goes.
Highlights
Not too much to highlight from this past week - fire night with the youngest’s archery team after practice was an adventure and good for the soul. Did a bunch of updates to the RSS feed layout for the site that I think will benefit both of the readers ;)
Also finally got the nVidia Jetson board that I bought a while ago up and going and accepting API requests, which is a net win. My bookmark summarization / tagging and coding reviews now all run on a self-hosted LLM (Qwen3) so I can stop feeding the Anthropic machine. I’ll probably wind up playing with some RAG pipelines also, just because I want to see how I can make the puzzle pieces work.
One Thing Learned
It is possible to get comments into a static site. In pre-alpha right now, but hopefully this should be coming to the website soon-ish.
Links
Hugo / Static Site Generation
- https://blog.laromierre.com/post/optimize-hugo-website-rss-feeds-concise-guide/ - Some good information about RSS and layout editing in Hugo.
- https://staticman.net/ - A little server application that converts dynamic content into a static HTML page through GitHub actions.
- https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-static-blog-with-mastodon/ - Demo code and POC to retrieve a thread on Mastodon and embed it as a comment section inside a static site. Requires some JS on the site.
- https://danielpecos.com/2022/12/25/mastodon-as-comment-system-for-your-static-blog/ - Some more POC and demo code for embedding a mastodon thread as a pseudo comment section in Hugo.
Random tool things
- https://validator.w3.org/feed/#validate_by_input - a tool for validating RSS feeds.
- https://scruss.com/blog/2025/10/01/raspberry-pi-vs-used-thin-client/ - Some quick benchmarking of Dell thin clients vs. Raspberry Pi 4 & 5. tl;dr - the 5070 lands somewhere between the 4 and 5 for performance, and is < $100.
- https://getchipdrop.com - a service that coordinates using home owners as tree trimming waste (logs/branches/chips) for arborists. I’m in need of 20-30 yards of wood chips, and this will (hopefully) be an effective way to get that quantity. More to follow.
From the archives
- https://aperture.org/editorial/why-daido-moriyamas-radical-vision-is-misunderstood/ - A Japanese photographer with a very distinctive style that I was studying some time ago.
- http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.shtml - On the history of operating systems. A long read, but worth it to understand how we go to Android vs. iPhone.
- https://xfree99x.bandcamp.com/track/trans-riot-music
Now Playing
Shawn Mullins - as much of his discography as I am able to hunt down. Finally found a copy of Jeff’s Last Dance (all 3 volumes), but still 2 more ancient independent releases from 1991/1993 to find. We’ll be seeing him in concert on Tuesday, so if presented the opportunity I may ask him if he happens to know where a copy or two exists. I’m pretty sure that Soul’s Core is going to go to the grave on repeat in my head.
Screen Time
Way…Too….Much… That’s why I’m putting it here. I need to see the numbers go down.
Average - 10h 4m daily
Ok, A huge portion of it is my alarm clock and doesn’t count…but still
- Loud Alarm: 24 hours (iPhone requires any 3rd party alarms to be the active application and screen awake to work correctly)
- Reddit: 8 hours. Oof - r/composing, r/gardening and a couple of others have really sucked me in this week.
- TikTok: 7.5 hours. Really? REALLY? Must. Delete. I don’t like this number.
- Discord: 4.75 hours.
- xfree99x.bandcamp.com: 4.75 hours. Listened to an album. OK use of time.
- Signal: 3 hours .
- Firefox: 2 hours.
Some photos
