Check out my new TESTING page where I hope to continue testing new features. Also, be sure to have a look at my new HIKES site and especially some of the “highlighted” hikes that are listed in bold there.
Note that HIKES used to be a “section” here, but there are a lot of them so I made a site just for them.
Reduce Spaces Stored Image Sizes
Ok, I get the sense that constantly pulling enormous digital images from DigitalOcean Spaces to rebuild this blog is unnecessarily chewing up lots of bandwidth. Today I’d like to begin fixing that by creating a utility, probably in Python, to grab all those images one-by-one, make a smaller copy of each, and put those copies back into a web-ready subdirectory in Spaces, or something like that.
There’s a wealth of probably pertinent information to be had in https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/api/spaces-api/. Unfortunately, Spaces isn’t compatible with DO’s own command line utility, doctl, but it is compatible with s3cmd and the link I’ve provided documents how to get started with that. 🙂
The command I ran to make my first “merge” was: python3 gpxmerger.py "/Users/mark/Downloads/2023-04-14 16:32 - 3m 11s.gpx" "/Users/mark/Downloads/2023-04-14 20:40 - 3m 27s.gpx". I think I might tweak the script soon to just pull all of the .gpx files from a specified directory.
Update: My fork of the project now accepts a single target_directory argument and uses “glob” to grab all the .gpx files in that directory.
First Varsity Soccer Officiating
My knees and back are definitely feeling better than 2 weeks ago. Tonight I was AR2 for a varsity women’s match with Independence at STC. Final score was 11-2 on a very windy night, and it showed. The crew of TJ and Dustin did a great job and I feel like I learned a lot from them tonight. Thank you, gentlemen.
Filing 2022 Income Taxes
Tonight is the night we file our 2022 income taxes. Got nice little refunds from both Federal and Iowa, but all of my Fed refund is going toward first quarter estimated payments for 2023. 😕
Maybe Paperless NGX
Today’s income tax prep adventures has me believing that I need a new instance of Paperless, maybe Paperless-NGX this time? Now if I can just get Mackenzie to stand up and configure a new bare-metal Linux server. 🙃
Survived First Soccer Officiating
Completed my first soccer officiating assignment tonight… STC middle school girls and boys doubleheader, plus two B-games, vs. Mt. Vernon. 2.5 hours total play, but not too bad. I still have a LOT to learn!
Updated Rootstalk with Landscape Orientation Message
I pushed some Rootstalk updates into production (https://Rootstalk.Grinnell.edu) this morning and am making note of that here since I don’t have this slick micropost capability on my professional blog. 🙃
Easter Nap Time
Time for an Easter Sunday post-feast nap! Nice dinner here with me, Chris, Mackenzie, Morgan, Justin, Leonard, Barb, Deb, Doug, Mason and Michael.
Hot Spring Spa is Gone
My old Hot Spring spa is gone! Listed it at about noon and by 4 PM I had 15 interested parties, most of them very serious. It went to a young couple who came very well prepared to haul it away… flatbed truck with a lift, and an extra set of muscles. It departed shortly after 8 PM. Well done!
I’m making some significant changes to the code behind this blog today. Specifically, I’m going to move my micropost “front matter” from the post.excerpt or post.custom_excerpt field to the “body” of the post where it might look like this example (taken from this very post):
-+-+-+
location: Toledo, IA
price: $50.00
note: This is just some sample "front matter". My parser removed the "split" characters from the delimiter you see here.
I Need VSCode Debugging!
To do this effectively I really need live dev debugging in VSCode, but how can I do that?
