Category: Day to Day

Day to day finds and observations, not presented on the front page.

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I’ve reconfigured my book list automation so it also publishes them to the book section on my blog.

About a year ago, late 2021, I made it easy for myself to publish lists of books I’ve read in OPML. Before I first made those lists in early 2021 I would publish postings about some of my reading in the book section of this site. Switching to making OPML lists based on my internal notes meant I had stopped posting to the books section. There’s however no reason why I wouldn’t do both. The OPML lists are hardly discoverable, and posting them here as well means they are being shared in RSS too. Yet, I don’t want to do things twice, so tonight I automated it.

The script that goes through my internal book notes on my laptop to create the OPML lists, now also creates posts for each book in my site. Not for all books, just for book notes that have changed in the last week and are part of the current year’s reading. It builds on my existing personal Micropub client I use to post other things to this site too. Meaning that if I run the script weekly it will automatically post any books I’ve finished that week. Today at the start I set the script to any book read this year, so this year’s reading list is up to date.

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In reply to Finding Connectors in Mastodon by Julian Elve

This reminds me of years ago when birdsite was young I did a similar comparison for Twitter. I looked at profiles to see if they seemed in it for the conversation, in it to actually connect. Those would have a balanced ratio of followed/followers. As in contrast with profiles that were ‘large antenna arrays’ (many more followed than followers), ‘A-listers’ (many more followers than followed). Dubbed it conversational symmetry back then in that post. And yes, Valdis Krebs comes to mind too.

Although connectors are defined by their behaviour, in that they join up those who seek knowledge with those who share it, it was suggested that we look at individuals who had a high ratio of follwers to followed as a starting point. …. there’s part of me that’s not convinced that follower ratio is a good measure for who is a ‘Connector’ – perhaps a good Connector would tend to show a more balanced ratio of followers / follows? … in pragmatic terms I am pretty happy with my ad hoc observation that Connectors seem to be “balanced”…

Julian Elve

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David Libeau keeps a list of small Mastodon tools. One of them is a scheduler for Mastodon posts. I can schedule posts for Mastodon inside this site, by scheduling them here in WordPress and autoposting to my Mastodon account. However Libeau’s tool is a tiny tool one can self-host. I installed it locally on a webserver on my laptop and tested its use.

It works by making API calls to my (own) Mastodon instance. In your Mastodon settings, hit developers and add an application, and copy its API key. Take that API key to login to your Mastodon instance in the interface of the scheduler. That’s all. It currently doesn’t support adding media to posts, nor having multiple Mastodon profiles to post to. Because of the latter I have two copies in my laptop’s webserver, one for my personal account and one for my work account.


A screenshot of the scheduler’s interface, showing a scheduled post.


A screenshot of a post made with the scheduler, the same as shown in the image above.

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We have a wide range of Hue lights in our home. They’re programmable for different times of day and settings.
The default behaviour is that after having been without power they light up bright and white.
This is true when you toggle the physical wall switch, but also after a power outage.

When we leave home for a longer time we use the physical switches to power off all lights.
Power outages during the night however mean all the lights in the house come on. And power outages are now occurring a few times a year as the networks are apparantly struggling with the load balancing required for distributed electricity generation. As happened last night. E noticed, I slept through it all, and switched everything off again.

An online search revealed it is possible to change the behaviour of the Hue lights when power comes back on. However because this default behaviour is stored on the lightbulb you have to set it for all Hue bulbs separately. In the Hue app in Settings, go to Lights where you’ll find all the bulbs listed. Go to each one and set Power On to ‘power loss recovery’. That way the lights will return to the setting (on or off) they had when the power went off. (The other options are the default full brightness, the last lighting setting getting switched on, or a custom setting getting switched on)


Dinner during a power outage last December

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I read daily, and browse bookstores often. At times you pick up a book in a store, or come across it online, look at it and think that it might be interesting, only to conclude it isn’t and leave it. Until you encounter it a next time, and think it interesting and again conclude it isn’t. Some of those might be interesting at a different point in time when my own interests have shifted to align with it better.

Others I’d better not read because they’re badly written, or there’s strong indications the content doesn’t live up to its backflap pitch. Better to spend my reading time on a different book.

For that group I want to break out of the repeated ‘oh this might be interesting…..oh it’s not’ cycle. I already keep notes about books I haven’t bought yet but might. It’s a sort of preselection stage before both my current reading stack and my anti-library. I now added a Won’t Read List, for books I haven’t bought for which I want to ensure my future self also won’t. You might say it’s type of critical ignoring. I do positive curation in my notes, but now adding negative curation too for those books I repeatedly encountered and rejected.

Through my feeds I follow the book notes and recommendations of other bloggers, and have found some fun and great books through them. For their negative recommendations I never had a use before, but now there’s a way to curate those for myself too.

The inaugural version of my personal ‘Won’t read list’ has two books. Maybe I’ll add it to the OPML book lists I share online.

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In reply to Naming things by Sebastiaan Andeweg

Ha! Begin jaren negentig noemden we de mail en maillist server bij mijn studievereniging Bettie. Genoemd naar de band Bettie serveert. Heb je iets om te delen? Stuur maar naar Bettie. Bettie serveert de mail.

Ik ken ook wel teams die hun softwareprojecten willekeurige namen geven. Maakt het mogelijk er over te praten zonder meteen publiek te maken wat iets is of moet gaan doen.

…in mijn hoofd heb ik nu een service genaamd Truus die de orders aanmaakt. De e-mail? ‘O ja, die stuurt Truus.’

Sebastiaan Andeweg