I might be crazy but I think I’m moving my personal programming projects from Ruby and Python back to Smalltalk in both its Pharo and Squeak derivatives. This could get interesting.

Editorial shenanigans aside, I still subscribe to the digital versions of the Washington Post, New York Times, and Minneapolis Star-Tribune, as well as my local paper, the mostly excellent Rochester Post-Bulletin and will continue to do so.

Doing some cleanup and testing. Please ignore my noise for a bit. Thanks.

RIP Spider John Koerner.

Does anyone else add columns of numbers this way?

Backing off of Python back to Ruby and Pharo. I know Python is more popular, but having objects everywhere helps me think more deeply about the nature of programming problems.

I just loaded up KeyboardMaestro a couple of days ago. I have to say it’s slicker than snot.

Tired of getting up at 5:30 to move the thermostat from 65° to 70° so I installed a new Ecobee thermostat I can control while I’m still in bed. It should “learn” our routine over the next few days.

A bit chilly today. Might want to put on a jacket.

Thinking that 2024 might be the year I try cultivated meat.

Pot roast. Cheesy mashed potatoes. Garlicky carrots. Pumpkin cheesecake. What’s not to like?

Chess with my daughter’s SO. He won. I need to brush up.

‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the hall a soft wimpering was heard The OS failed to install… Sigh.

A QUIET CHRISTMAS

Ann and I can’t be the only ones who celebrate a very quiet Christmas. We’ll go to church in the morning – no Christmas Eve services for us – too noisy. My daughter and her boyfriend will be over for dinner. We have a small tree. We don’t exchange gifts. We give each other gifts throughout the year instead. It will be a quiet day. Might not even turn on the TV.

I should get rid of duplicate apps. Too many do almost the same thing.

Starting to learn Dutch again. I want to be able to understand the relatives when Ann and I visit. Hopefully I can keep it up for a year and a bit.

Nearly ready to put the old place up for sale. It’s been a long road.

The Crazy Days are coming to an end. Our move out of our old place has taken months with Ann pretty much out of commission with her nerve pain and me working. Lots of clean up and repair.

NEW TVS ARE TOO DAMN "SMART"

Problem: Our new LG G3 TV was turning off after 15 minutes when the HDMI switch is set to the Spectrum DVR. It worked fine when the HDMI switch is set to the Apple TV 4K. It seemed to be some sort of interaction between the TV and the DVR. Configuration: HDMI 4-port switch box LG G3 TV (HDMI port 4 to switch box output) Spectrum DVR (Magnavox) (input port 2 on switch box) Apple TV 4K (input port 3 on switch box) All cabling is Ultimate HDMI, suitable for 8K, in wall rated.

This upcoming week is move week. Ann and I move from our wooded 2-acre lot back into town. Downsizing from 2300 to 1600 sq ft, and from 4 levels to 1 level (no stairs!). Hoping to massively simplify.

WHERE HAVE I BEEN

Following after @manton, @maique, and others. Reminds me a bit of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFRpa81MUAY. Countries Lived United States Countries Visited (in order) Canada Cayman Islands Jamaica Sweden Switzerland Netherlands Belgium Mexico Germany Czech Republic Portugal UK (Scotland, Northern Ireland) Ireland Next Countries (sort of in order) Italy Hungary Austria Poland Spain Morocco Greece Norway Finland Iceland Denmark UK (England) France Fiji New Zealand Australia Argentina Chile States Lived (3) Michigan - 12 years Wisconsin - 11 years Minnesota - 46 years States Visited (40) Several weeks (8) Arizona California Colorado Florida New Hampshire New York North Carolina Washington A few days (25) Alabama Alaska Arkansas Connecticut Georgia Illinois Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Massachusetts Mississippi Missouri Nebraska New Jersey New Mexico Oklahoma Pennsylvania South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Virginia Washington DC (not a state) Wyoming Overnight (4) Indiana Maine Ohio West Virginia Transited by train (3) Idaho Montana North Dakota States missed (8) Delaware Hawaii Maryland Nevada Oregon Rhode Island Utah Vermont Canadian provinces Quebec New Brunswick Prince Edward Island Ontario Manitoba Saskatchewan Alberta British Columbia

I’m finding that I’m using the BBEdit scratchpad and Tot for almost all my #plaintext composition. BBEdit is the second program I install after 1Password on a new Mac.

New tries in the past 24 hours: Ivory for macOS (good so far), Kagi search trial (not sure yet, seems good), latest Quicken for Windows on my dad’s laptop (a vast improvement over Quicken 2015 that my dad was using), back to TunnelBear from ClearVPN, and there are probably more I don’t remember.

What goes? A lot of books donated to our public library. Extra furniture. All the CDs donated as well. Maple and walnut boards I’ve been saving. Woodworking tools. Snowblowers. Lawnmowers. Bicycles. The list is huge. Some sold mostly given away.

Moving soon. Downsizing from 2300 to 1600 sq ft. Good thing I never bought that 3D printer.

Finally getting around to getting and setting up Yubikeys. Fun times!

Ann and I saw Hamlet at the Guthrie Theater yesterday. Excellent!

This week I’m playing with the Zola static site generator. Maybe a new toy will get me blogging more often? That’s probably wishful thinking, but even if it doesn’t I’ll be brushing up on rudimentary CSS.

The creators of Smalltalk: Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, et. al. have my admiration. Simple, elegant, and useful in its time. I go to the Squeak implementation every so often and sigh.

I’ve never played a Mario game in my life but somehow this just seems right. It’s-a-me, Mario’s shoe: Red Wing makes boots inspired by video game character Mario - MPR News

Why is it that the days you feel too tired to journal are the days when everything happens?

At DeBine brewery in Palm Harbor next to the Pinellas Trail. Informal survey seems to be Half e-bike to regular bike. E-bikes have exploded in popularity over the past two years.

Attempting to wrest control of my OmniFocus database from the clutches of entropy.

Dad had a TAVR surgery yesterday. Looks like it went well. This means he’ll still beat me at golf.

My dad is 95. He still beats me in golf. Yes, he’s that good and I’m that bad.

Should be Crimson King Court.

Ripping through the feeds this morning. Followed a bunch of folks on Mastodon last night. Unfollowed some of them this morning. Just managing the firehose.

After eluding traps for two days the pantry-raiding rodent has been finally been dispatched.

One of the perils of living in the country - mice - pantry raiding mice. Grrrr.

I’m happy that Jason Kottke is back publishing at kottke.org.

Today’s workout: Shoveling snow/slush/ice off the drive. 200+ shovelfulls @ 10-20lbs each. I expect to be sore tomorrow.

The terrific turkey tortas version 2.0 was better than 1.0. Still working on improvements. Will I be ready in time?

Each year at Thanksgiving we have a contest among the Dykstal siblings. This year it’s turkey sandwiches. I’m doing “terrific turkey tortas”. I finally located a source for bolillos in here in town. Today is a practice day. Yum!

Ann has COVID. We think she got it at the Dublin airport, but no way to be sure of course. Could have been the plane, a restaurant, or a cab just as easily. I’m still negative and testing every so often.

Finishing up cardiac rehab today. Feeling great!

WHERE WE ARE NOW

So here we are. Ann is doing really well. She is heading to PT this week with the goal of getting her knee back in shape. She’s in the final week of radiation treatment for the cancer. Her prognosis is excellent. There is one wrinkle in all of this which I won’t get into, but the prognosis for that is very good as well. Ann is going to be OK.

HEART ATTACK!

The Monday after Easter I had a heart attack. It was just after dinner. Ann and I were watching TV. We had just gotten back that noon from visiting my son in San Antonio for Easter and were catching up on some shows when I could not get comfortable. A mild pain in my upper chest had reached about mid way down my upper arms. It was not severe but was getting worse.

KNEE FRACTURE!

The proposed breast cancer treatment was pretty routine and the prognosis was really good. However, Ann was having issues with her knee after a misstep during a workout so she had an MRI. We had scheduled a cruise to Alaska’s Inside Passage for early May and all the docs said “go”. We went. The day we hit Juneau (and reliable cell service) Ann got a note that her ortho folks were recommending that she be non-weight-bearing due to a knee fracture and meniscus tear.

BREAST CANCER!

The day after I was released from the hospital for the heart attack, Ann got a call from our primary physician. Her last mammogram showed a tumor in her left breast. It was small, caught early. More diagnosis needed. More appointments scheduled.

I’ve been absent for quite a while. Although I’ve been a faithful reader of my timeline, a lot has been going on. So much that I haven’t even been able to write in my daily journal which was unbroken for three years. Deets to follow.

Ann and I are heading to Seattle to cruise the Inside Passage up to Alaska and back. Hope to post some pictures when I can.

I’ve replaced my 7-year-old ebike with a new step-thru model. The ebike is my main commute vehicle in non-winter months. My old bones are going to like the step-thru. Now I just have to wait until late March.

Pulled the trigger on this Diplomat Aero yesterday.

I have yet to find a scheme for general stuff that can take the place of Circus Ponies Notebook. It had pages and sections. Each page was an outline and handled attachments with ease. OneNote sort of comes close but doesn’t quite hack it. Anyone else miss this?

TESTING ULYSSES

This is a test. It is only a test. Don’t get so worked up about it. :) Testing some formatting I’ve not posted from Ulysses yet. Let’s see how this works. Here is some inline code: cd /home/ddykstal. Here is some code that I use to reformat text in Drafts. // Get the full text of the clipping as an array of strings let a = editor.getText().split("\n"); let b = []; let knownSources = [ {suffix: " - The Washington Post", source: "The Washington Post"}, {suffix: " - The New York Times", source: "The New York Times"}, {suffix: " : NPR", source: "NPR"}, {suffix: " - POLITICO", source: "POLITICO"}, {suffix: " | MPR News", source: "MPR News"}, {suffix: " | Star Tribune", source: "Star Tribune"}, {suffix: " - StarTribune.

Ann bought a new step-through bike today so, of course, that means I had to buy a new bike rack for the truck. 😜

I just bought two Homepod mini’s and set them up in stereo in our condo. These things are great! I’ve got a Sonos setup at home and these are more convenient if you are into the Apple ecosystem.

I keep way too many fountain pens inked up (9). But I can cut back anytime I want. 😂

One thing that is NOT getting a lot of use is the reMarkable 2. I’m a little surprised at that. I’m finding it too single-purpose and find that I’m much more keyboard oriented. I think it has a place for some folks, perhaps just not me.

I’ve been using a new iPad Air while traveling. I’m a little surprised by how much I like using the new keyboard/trackpad. I almost never touch the Apple Pencil.

I’m getting tired of having to learn a whole new set of keyboard shortcuts for every notetaking app I’ve tried; looking at you Roam, Workflowy, Craft, Tinderbox, … I’m swearing you all off and sticking with plaintext. Off in the darkness someone whispers “nvUltra”. SQUIRREL!

I’m off to Florida tomorrow to visit my Dad. I’ll see how he’s doing and do the inevitable tech support. My daughter has been visiting him for the past two weeks and she leaves as I arrive. It wasn’t planned, but we’ll actually meet each other in the airport.

Back at the gym for a solid week now. Slow going and a bit sore at first. To be expected.

I don’t post political content here to keep things civil. However, if you are interested, I do post my left-of-center and somewhat snarky comments to news clippings on my clippings blog. I’m pretty far behind though; there is lots of stuff still in Drafts.

I have this love/hate relationship with desktop linux.

New furnace installed today. The old one (going on 20 years) would stop with a clogged condensate tube every 3 hours. It was time for an upgrade anyway.

I’m beginning to shed apps that take too much mental energy: Roam and Workflowy among them. Give me plain text, a rock-solid RDB, and a modern scripting language instead.

I noticed this artifact on my Big Sur desktop background. Brings new meaning to the phrase “If you believe that I’ve got a bridge to sell you.”

Our new well parts are in and working: controls, new pressure tank, new pump. It feels great to have reliable water again after 2 weeks. It’s easy to take for granted. I can’t help but think now how lucky we are to have this, hundreds of millions of people do not.

The Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations | Live Science - Very interesting.

I’m thinking of using a Raspberry Pi Zero to take pics of the backyard from a window at specific times of the day for over a year. These would be in my time zone and not adjusted for daylight saving time / summer time. Anyone with experience in setting something like this up?

REMARKABLE 2: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

So far I like it. the OCR experience is OK. It is reasonably accurate for my cursive handwriting, but you can only export by email coming from a remarkable.com address. The iPad’s scribble support is better from that perspective. OCR was not an interesting use case for me though. The weight and thickness are huge pluses. It’s easy to carry around; much easier than an iPad and even most paper notebooks.

Some time ago I posted how I was abandoning wordpress and blot for micro.blog. Well, that didn’t happen. I’ll probably move my two wordpress sites to hugo when I’ve sussed enough of it, and I finally have plans for blot.

Techo entries for Jan 2 & 3. Phenology entries are for sunrise, sunset, weather, unusual weather events, and any animals observed. Other entries record sleep hours. That’s St. Clare on the right. She’s in charge of marking the current day.

Our 33 year old 5-party well began acting up on December 23rd. We’ve had to manually start the pump every 4-5 hours to bring it back up to pressure. Yesterday the pressure tank started leaking. Tomorrow all the bits get replaced.

My New Years gift to myself is a reMarkable 2. I’ve always found e-ink interesting. I think I’m going to be using this for a sketchbook, commonplace book, and quick capture.

Finally getting around to getting rid of old, obsolete, technical books. I mean, who really needs iWork ‘09: The Missing Manual?

Science is dynamic. It changes based on evidence. If it did not, it would be religion.

normal. command. insert. These are vim modes. I tried, I really did, to see the utility folks claim for vim over so-called modeless “graphical” editors like atom and bbedit. It’s just not there. Giving up on vim.

SWANS

Ann and I took a short road trip yesterday to Brownsville and Weaver Bottoms on the Mississippi River to see migrating tundra swans. There were thousands of them in Brownsville on the river along with various ducks and a lot of Canada geese. Weaver Bottoms had several hundred. The swans will stay in these feeding areas for about 2-3 week and then all leave at once, heading to Chesapeake Bay and points south along the Atlantic seaboard.

I’m finding the Daily Notes section in Roam incredibly useful for collecting references to news articles. I tag them but I probably should be going back and directly linking them where they have a tight connection. It’s the kind of stuff I would do in Pinboard, but better.

Nice. The Guthrie is doing a “Dicken’s Holiday Classic” streaming in December. Should be fun.

Up late to watch the Perseids. Was out for 30 minutes. Saw two bright ones and I think I saw some very dim ones but it’s hard to tell.

Today I gave my 90th blood donation. I was surprised.

Latest peeve: Seeing staunch used instead of stanch when describing something that needs to be restricted or contained. Makes my teeth hurt.

History shows again and again how Nature points out the folly of men.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. Henry David Thoreau 💬

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else. Benjamin Franklin 💬

I hate edge tiling of windows.

💬 Groucho Marx: I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.

New pen! Lamy 2000. Black with EF nib. Colorverse “Map of Mars” ink.

Maintain a social distance while Dancing in the Street.:)

Thinking about a gofundme for local restaurant workers who survive on tips. Is this workable?

My nephew has made it home from Denmark where he was studying.

Archdiocese of Detroit suspends all public Masses

More ink! I’m probably set for this life and many after.

I’ve been journaling regularly now for over a year and sporadically before that: pen, paper, and text only. I don’t understand journaling like this.

I received three new inks today. Can’t wait to try them out.

I’ve recovered from my norovirus attack and am now basking in a cool breeze off a Dunedin fishing pier. #mbfeb

My Gwen Ifill stamps have arrived!

Remembering this from a while back. Still true.

The KVM experiment failed. The display emulation doesn’t match the monitor and fools the attached computers. They won’t drive it to its full resolution. It was also cable hell. I knew the cable mess was going to be bad, but not this bad.

Fired up the new Intel NUC i3 running an Ubuntu Linux variant yesterday. Not a bad little machine. Now I need to get a KVM to control all these beasts. It’s like a vacuum cleaner for money.

Done. All five systems updated to Catalina. No problems noticed as yet.

Me: knock knock Grandson: who’s there Me: deciduous GS: deciduous who? Me (as Elvis): 🎶 deciduous high class, but that was just a lie 🎶 GS: huh? I’ll see myself out …

I have a dedicated Linux box arriving soon. I’m done with the gyrations of living with VMware. It’s good for casual use, but I struggled with the office VPN and 2 layers of key remapping.

Moving from 13” MacBook Pro to 16” MacBook Pro. It’s all about the screen real estate. I can work directly on the 16”. I always found myself wanting to hook the 13” to a monitor.

It’s 8:30pm and I can’t keep my eyes open.

Spent the day sizing and hanging coats for our annual Christmas Anonymous Store Day. Tomorrow, folks who’ve registered through their social service agencies will come and be able to pick up gifts and winter clothing for their families. Busy day tomorrow!

It’s vs its. They’re vs their. You’re vs your. I KNOW THE DIFFERENCE! Why don’t my fingers know before I hit the post button? Sigh.

I’ve been using Tower as a git client for a few years. I like it, but it’s time to get my command line git chops up to snuff again. Use it or lose it.

Updating second of five systems to Catalina. First one went smoothly and some critical VPN software checked out fine.

Heading out of town a bit early to avoid the snowstorm. Nearly 10" of heavy wet slop expected here.

I’m back in May with my “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” backlog. Only 29 more to listen to and I’ll be all caught up!