Lost In Haste
Lost In Haste

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Photo Challenge: April 2024

Photo Challenge: Sept 2023

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Tech 📱 The RSS feed for Tech 📱.

  • Follow-Up (Part 2): I was trying to listen to some Holiday music this morning, only to realize none of my Sonos speakers worked with AirPlay. After digging online, it turns out the only way to get a Sonos speaker back into HomeKit after the home is deleted is to factory reset the Sonos. 😱😅

  • Follow-Up: I think my HomeKit set up is mostly back to normal. I was a little stupid and didn’t take backups / exports…so I lost some historical data (mostly temperature / humidity / air quality) but at least my Holiday automations are working again. 🎄😅

  • My HomeKit set up has been rock-solid for years but the minute I added a Matter plug (the “Meross Matter Smart Plug Mini”), everything breaks…and as it’s Apple land, where everything works perfectly until it doesn’t, fixing it is going to be…unpleasant. 😱😭

  • Follow-Up: The IKEA Sonos speaker is working perfectly (which is more than I could ever say of the HomePod Mini stereo set up) this morning; holiday music is flooding the room whilst I’m debugging some legacy Java code. 🤓🎄 (Yes, I had a spare speaker lying around… 🤣) 📷

    Christmas tree with lights and one ornament at the top (a photo frame with no photo for privacy purposes), in front of a record player, with the end of a lamp on the right side of the photo. An IKEA Sonos speaker is on top of the record player, with an 'Ella' record in the middle and a series of objects is on the left side of the record player: three Nintendo amiibo figures (Link, Bowser, and Bokoblin), a Lego penguin, a Jesus stature, and a N64 Lego cube. On top of the cube is a HomePod mini, along with two of the amiibo, and a dried pink rose.

  • Default Apps and Services of 2023

    It seems like a lot of folks have been writing about the default apps / services they use and while I’m late to the game, here is my list…at least for 2023. 🤣 I did a little tweak to the format everyone seems to be using: I split up my home and work life, as I do my best to keep things separate.

    Assuming his site / page are working, you can go see a list on Rob Knight’s website or add your site to the list at Github.

    📨 Mail Client

    📮 Mail Server

    • Home: Fastmail & iCloud
    • Work: Exchange

    📝 Notes

    ✅ To-Do

    📷 Camera

    • Home: iPhone 15 Pro
    • Work: N/A

    🟦 Photo Management

    📆 Calendar

    📁 Cloud File Storage

    • Home: iCloud, Backblaze, & OneDrive
    • Work: Enterprise-hosted SharePoint / OneDrive

    📖 RSS

    🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts

    • Home: Contacts / Cardhop
    • Work: Outlook / Exchange

    🌐 Browser

    • Home: Safari
    • Work: Edge

    💬 Chat

    • Home: iMessage, What’s App, & Signal
    • Work: Teams & Slack

    🔖 Bookmarks

    📑 Read It Later

    📄 Word Processing

    • Home: Pages & Word
    • Work: Word

    📈 Spreadsheets

    • Home: Numbers & Excel
    • Work: Excel

    📊 Presentations

    • Home: N/A
    • Work: PowerPoint

    🛒 Shopping Lists

    🍴 Meal Planning

    💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance

    📰 News

    • Home: Combination of RSS and Podcasts.
    • Work: N/A

    🎵 Music

    • Home: Music & Plex
    • Work: N/A

    🎤 Podcasts

    🔐 Password Management

    • Home: 1Password 4
    • Work: N/A

    🤖 Code Editing

    📚 Books

    • Home: Kindle
    • Work: N/A

    🌎 Blogging

    🖼️ Screenshots

    🌤️ Weather

    📑 Clipboard Manager

    1. Trying to convince my sister-in-law to use it instead of a series of external hard drives; she has an extreme aversion to playing for cloud storage. ↩︎

    2. I’ve been pushing my Team to use a common Wiki page for shared bookmarks. ↩︎

    3. I was using PocketSmith but as they recently raised their prices without offering anything new, I’ve moved on. ↩︎

    4. It took years but I was finally able to convince my Parents to start using a password manager, especially when functions on both their iOS and Windows devices. ↩︎

    5. I use Day One for my personal thoughts and journal. ↩︎

  • Moved 18.3 TB of data from my Storage server to my Media server; gotta love the “rsync -va --progress” command! 💻🤓 #HappyGeek

  • I realize I have an old Kindle (it’s the first version of the Paperwhite) but would it really be so hard for Amazon to auto-sync the time on the device like every other network connected device in the modern age? 🤣

  • My various UPS’s (uninterrupted power supply) weren’t cheap, especially the giant one powering my server rack, but every time my street has an outage, I’m very happy I have them. 🔋🔌😁

  • Slowly starting the process of moving my domains away from Google. 🤞🏻

  • ⌚️ Apple Watch Update: After it crashed at breakfast, I just got a “you’re almost out of battery” notification…and it’s only been three hours since I put it on. 🤬🪫 I’m still paying for this piece of junk… 😱😖

  • Another day, another issue with watchOS 10.1 on the Apple Watch Ultra v1. I have never been this disappointed in an Apple product before. ⌚️😱 Two hardware resets and the issues still persist.

  • New Plugin: Simple Image Generation

    So I did a thing: I wrote my first Micro.Blog plugin. 🥳 It’s nothing fancy, just another image generator but, as I was in the process of migrating the content from my old blog to here, I realized I had already created one in my Hugo instance…all I needed to do was port it over to GitHub and get it in the right format (also, documentation, mustn’t forget the documentation 🤢). Yes, I could have just changed out the Shortcode for proper HTML as part of the migration but I wanted to keep the same format I was already using…and when does a developer ever take the easy road…? 🤣

    Once the repo was in place, it was a pretty easy process to move my photos to Micro.Blog (thank you MarsEdit) and the markdown code…and there you have it, easy-peasy.

    Screen grab of my work on the Plugin page of Micro.blog's Plug-in page.

    I have to say, it's pretty darn cool to see my work (limited as it is) on the Plug-in page. 😄

    If you’re interested in the Plugin (and really, you shouldn’t be), it can be found on GitHub. If you want to use the plugin, documentation exists on GitHub or you can continue reading. 😂

    Note: In the code examples below, curry brackets have been replaced with straight ones so that Micro.Blog’s Hugo instance doesn’t crash / fail / give-up.

    Image Only

    The only required parameter for the shortcode / plugin is src.

    [[< simple-image src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/8317/2023/winter-ice-and-light.jpg" >]]

    Result:

    <figure>
    <img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/8317/2023/winter-ice-and-light.jpg">
</figure>

    Clickable Image

    Including the link parameter will allow the image to be clickable.

    [[< simple-image src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/8317/2023/winter-ice-and-light.jpg" link="https://lostinhaste.com/2023/09/29/september-microblog-photo.html" >]]

    Results:

    <figure>
    <a href="https://lostinhaste.com/2023/09/29/september-microblog-photo.html">
        <img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/8317/2023/winter-ice-and-light.jpg">
    </a>
</figure>

    Image with Caption / Alt

    Adding text in the alt parameter will result in the generation of an image with alternative text. If the caption parameter is used, additional text will be rendered near the image, within the figure html tag.

    [[< simple-image src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/8317/2023/winter-ice-and-light.jpg" alt="View of the St. Lawrence River, with ice chunks occupying most of the surface, at night, with houses covered in snow and streets with lights at the bottom of the picture. On the upper part of the picture, across the river, lights can be seen up and down a bluff, with a few well-light buildings prominent in the cloudy night sky." caption="An icy view of lower Old Town Quebec during winter." >]]

    Result:

    <figure>
    <img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/8317/2023/winter-ice-and-light.jpg" alt="View of the St. Lawrence River, with ice chunks occupying most of the surface, at night, with houses covered in snow and streets with lights at the bottom of the picture. On the upper part of the picture, across the river, lights can be seen up and down a bluff, with a few well-light buildings prominent in the cloudy night sky.">
    <figcaption>
        <p>
            An icy view of lower Old Town Quebec during winter.
        </p> 
    </figcaption>
</figure>
    View of the St. Lawrence River, with ice chunks occupying most of the surface, at night, with houses covered in snow and streets with lights at the bottom of the picture. On the upper part of the picture, across the river, lights can be seen up and down a bluff, with a few well-light buildings prominent in the cloudy night sky.

    An icy view of lower Old Town Quebec during winter.

    Image with Title / Caption

    Adding the title parameter will generate an h4 html tag within the greater figure html tag.

    [[< simple-image src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/8317/2023/winter-ice-and-light.jpg" title="Winter in Quebec" caption="An icy view of lower Old Town Quebec during winter." >]]

    Result:

    <figure>
    <img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/8317/2023/winter-ice-and-light.jpg" alt="An icy view of lower Old Town Quebec during winter.">
    <figcaption>
        <h4>Winter in Quebec</h4>
        <p>
            An icy view of lower Old Town Quebec during winter.
        </p> 
    </figcaption>
</figure>
    An icy view of lower Old Town Quebec during winter.

    Winter in Quebec

    An icy view of lower Old Town Quebec during winter.

    Including the attr and attrlink parameters will allow for the creation of a hyperlink within the figure html tag element.

    [[< simple-image src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/8317/2023/winter-ice-and-light.jpg" attr="Original Post" attrlink="https://lostinhaste.com/2023/09/29/september-microblog-photo.html" >]]

    Results:

    <figure>
    <img src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/8317/2023/winter-ice-and-light.jpg">
    <figcaption>
        <p>
            <a href="https://lostinhaste.com/2023/09/29/september-microblog-photo.html"> 
                Original Post
            </a> 
        </p> 
    </figcaption>
</figure>

    Original Post of the photo...

  • Migrating from Hugo to Micro.Blog

    I’ve been splitting my time between my own site (pictured below) and my Micro.Blog instance for…a while now. At first, I tried to keep long-form posts on my site (created using Hugo, hosted at Cloud Flare) and micro / random thoughts to Micro.Blog but the other day, I thought it would be cool /fun to run both with the same theme and matching links at the top.

    …obviously, that didn’t work out…

    However, working on that put an idea in my head: maintain two places online?

    My site, I created that randomly, with no clear goal. It was really just random luck I ran into Hugo as my email provider allows static site hosting. Now that I’m using Micro.Blog, I don’t really need the old site…I mean, it’s pretty awesome the way it works (Hugo site committed to GitHub and then CloudFlare takes those commits and builds the site and hosts it)…but with Micro.Blog, I can easily post with my phone and there isn’t much to maintain (minus some plugins I have a feeling I’m going to be creating / using).

    So…I’m moving / migrating.

    Things I have to worry about:

    • The main site is at the base domain where as Micro.Blog is pointed to a subdomain
    • I want to keep my old posts and pictures from my main site, so I’ll have to port them over into Micro.Blog
    • I would like to maintain links, both to the original main site and to the current version of Micro.Blog

  • This has to be the buggiest version of WatchOS I’ve ever used. 😭 Even after an erase / reset, the battery is draining too fast. The heart rate complication doesn’t work anymore. Now I can’t get into the widgets, which means a restart. What is going on at Apple?! 😱

  • Random Thought: Yea, this sounds about right, once the price is outside of what most “normal” people would consider reasonable, piracy increases… 🏴‍☠️

    Screen grab of a Tweet from Tom Warren, with the following verbiage: if Apple TV, Netflix, and Disney+ keep raising prices then it will only force more people into piracy. It's already surprising how many in the UK use modified Fire TV sticks to access pirated TV shows and movies