Welcome to the post-fourth-of-july post!

Insofar as family things go, we did not really do a whole lot yesterday. It's tough to get into any kind of celebratory spirit when the country (world?) has basically gone to shit. It's pretty sad, the Fourth of July (and Halloween) are our favorite holidays around the house. We did wind up picking a few things up for the kiddos, however, it is just really heart rending to see your children disappointed - when all they really want to do is light off a smoke bomb or two. It's the little things, you know?

My wife and I are both on vacation this week and we're looking forward to (not) cleaning out the garage. We have managed to get some things straightened out in our bedroom - which really, really needs it. Plus, yesterday we did actually manage to (mostly) finish getting the sheepadoodle trimmed. That's only taken a month or so. She no longer looks super silly with only half her body trimmed out. No more "tutu" for her.

The twins survived their first week of Once Upon a One More Time musical practice. We still need to procure tickets for that one.

Not really much else going on that I'm aware of, so here are the links that passed through my RSS reader and caught my interest.

Today is the Fourth of July Eve, also known as July third. For those of us in the States, today is basically part one of the holiday. All the offices are closed and it's not like any business is going to get done. I took Thursday - yesterday - off, as well as next week, for my vacation time so I've got absolutely nothing going on at this point.

Right now I'm currently waiting on my latest guix home reconfigure run to finish up, my old laptop isn't the quickest so it'll take some time to run.

I did a reinstall yesterday mainly due to boredom and wanting to start from as little as possible. I used the minimal live iso image that hako provides and it worked like a charm. It's a pretty quick install. After that, it was get a minimal GUI set up with i3, though I did include another basic desktop environment that I can't even recall the name of currently as I didn't use it. Then it was a guix pull and system reconfigure and reboot.

Naturally, I had forgotten to read the news, so I had to go back in and make a super quick fix.

At this point, my home reconfig has finished, I've got a basic niri and noctalia setup going. I'll need to get the niri settings sorted out with how I prefer them; get my preferred web browser installed, Vivaldi, most likely via flatpak I think; get my emacs and password store moved over, along with keys. Then I can investigate getting my private channel set up perhaps.

So far so good.

Now, I just need to finish my coffee and go mow. It's supposed to rain tomorrow at some point. Yippe!

There was not a whole lot going over the last week, besides trying to keep from melting under the obsessive heat that we seem to be under these days.

Yesterdays was pretty good, despite getting off to something of a rough start. Came downstairs after mowing the lawn to - finally! - grab my morning coffee, only to find out that there was not even enough left for me to fill my mug. Talk about depressing. Sure, we could go the route of "single serving" coffee making devices, but our counterspace is at a premium right now, and no, I will not get rid of my Bunn commerical pourover coffee maker. I've had that thing for about a decade now and it's performed like a champ. I dealt with a lack of coffee and I survived.

Barely.

We had the opportunity to visit with some acquaintances last night as well, who invited us and others over for a pre-fourth fireworks extravaganza that their neighborhood throws. It was cool and pretty neat to get to be involved in what was - essentially - a professional fireworks display so closely. I guess the person that runs it does setups all over the area, so they run this one about a week early…you know, busy with the actual fourth and all. We're looking forward to being back next year. Even the kids had a decent time, or at least the profess to have done so.

I've not had a lot of time to work on my Guix System configuration over the last week, there has been too much going on in the world of work. There still is. This upcoming week is going to be another short one for me too, with the holiday coming up and, sigh, a vacation. I'll need to take the Thursday off as well to burn yet another day of time off. I'm not too certain that I'll get much time during the stay-cation, either, as we really need to work on getting our garage sorted out. We're debating doing a garage sell, but that is just a ton of work.

With that, here are some of the links in my RSS feed that caught my eye over the last week.

Long weekends are almost as bad a short vacations - they just aren't quite long enough, but they are plenty long enough to make one not want to get back into the swing of things.

Not to mention that getting everything caught back up can be exhausting to the point that you either need a vacation or another long weekend to rest up from your Monday back.

This last weekend we were able to attend the youth play that our twins have been working with over the past month or so - Lost Girl. It was really great getting to see them both in a performance that was not of the school. The cast and crew did really, really well, and it was a great time.

Not only did we (parents) get to see, but the twins' older brother was able to attend as well! This was the first time that he has been able to watch something of theirs and it was very cool to have him there as well. Plus, my wife and I had a couple of out of town friends that were able to attend too - which is always a good time.

My foray back into the world of Guix System is continuing along nicely. A base system is installed with the i3 window manager and I'll be shortly working towards getting that migrated over to a Niri setup with (eventually) Noctalia. Then once I'm comfortable with that I'll tackle guix home. In between all of this, and honestly for that past however many years, I've been doing lots (and lots, and lots) of reading and perusing of other user's guix configs to see what they do. The ideas are good, but I want to build up from a solid core. It's been a good road for learning, starting with the desire to want to pick up more "lisp-like" programming experience via the Emacs and elisp route. I feel like I know just enough to, perhaps, be dangerous at this point. All thanks to Practical Common Lisp (and many, many, many other resources) book.

Here are some links of interest that I have stumbled upon from my RSS feeds over the last week. Well, I guess more like 8 days since I'm late. One of these days I may even re-categorize (or do away with completely…) my feed sources.

It's Friday, so that must mean that it's time to make an attempt at some kind of productivity around the house.

Not really.

What I have come to a decision on, however, is that I'm getting ready to replace my Arch-derived laptops (well, some of the older ones, anyhow) with other options.

I'm sure that everyone has heard about the kerfuffle surrounding the Archlinux AUR. Thankfully, from what I have been able to determine for my part, I'm clean. Historically I've been burned too many times in the past by that little bit of dependency nightmare, so I try to avoid it at all costs.

Now, I think I'm going to once again see if I can't get into the Guix System. I feel A LOT more comfortable with Lisp languages now than I did a few months ago, plus I feel that I have at least a better understanding of Guix and it's whole setup.

The unfortunate part being that I, like a lot of people, need to use a nonguix image just to be able to connect wirelessly. That does throw a small wrench into things.

There are solutions to that problem, though. Some amazing people provide install images that work very well.

Currently, I'm sitting here waiting for a pull command to finish up so I can actually do the install using the nonguix channel. Patience is one thing I do have at the moment.

Ah, the first boot is done!

Now the tweaking begins

I was thinking earlier today, after having received yet another notification on my phone, that I should do something about changing the notification alert sounds on some of my android applications. You know, to make it a tad easier to know what is coming in, with the hopes of an easier way to separate the so-called wheat from the chaff.

That got me to realize that it's been a really long time since I've done anything of the source with my phone(s). I used to be one of those kinds of people that would have custom ring tones for every single person in my contacts list. I would have custom sounds for the each incoming text. Custom notification sounds FTW! Right?!

I would go through a multitude of apps and web sites and everything, finding all the cool sound bites and bits and bobs and etcetera.

Perhaps as I've gotten older, I just don't care as much? Honestly, for the vast majority of time my phone is on silent. The only important alerts that I get are from family, and they are permitted through the "quiet time". Every time that I think, "you know, it might be nice to be able to distinguish one message app from another", it's just not important enough to take the 30 or so minutes that it would require to invest in making that change.

There are probably other things that I used to do as well, that just aren't as important to me these days, but this was certainly one of them.

It's another Saturday morning, more or less, so I guess it's time for the second edition of my Weekly Links of Interest.

Not a whole lot going on at this time, besides a ton of rain and otherwise humid cruddy weather. Don't take me wrong, the rain is a great thing and I'd much rather it rain than not. It just means that I've got a smaller and smaller window to get the yard work done. I'm just glad that I was able to do so this morning.

This week we picked up some tickets to see one of the plays that the twins will be in, which will be coming up at the end of this week. We're really looking forward to seeing the kiddos in it. After that, it'll be a musical.

It's Saturday around these parts and at this exact point in time, so I guess it's a good day to make a new post.

I've been more or less okay with my Emacs config for a bit now, at least comfortable enough that I've started using Elfeed once again for my main RSS reader. I might even go ahead and take my FreshRSS instance down soon - I've not loaded that up in a bit.

With that bit of information, I've also got Elfeed Curate set up to do some exporting for me, and I think I'll add that into my weekly posts starting today. I'll call it my Weekly Links of Interest, seeing as the export is links-of-interest.org. Makes perfect sense to me.

It is supposed to rain today (depending on where you look, of course) and I had made a plan to head out this afternoon and see about getting some yard work done.

Namely, my yard needs to be mown. It's a process that I actually like doing, even with all of the obstacles that happen to be in the way. It's one of the few moments during the week that I just kind of get to chill out and not really have to think too much about anything in general. I put some kind of music on (usually nerdcore these days, seeing as I'm - you know - a nerd) and just zone the hell out and play dodge the dog bombs.

Now, we've had the same lawnmower for about ten years. It's a Snapper battery powered department store special that we bought the first Summer we lived here. It's been a shockingly decent machine and has lasted longer that I ever would have expected it to.

It lasted up until today. I quite literally ran the wheels off the thing.

Sure, I could maybe replace all the bearings and fix the wheels. But the batteries still need to be replaced and I never actually got around to picking up some extras way, way, back when we still could. They no longer make them any more, of course. So, yeah, gonna have to get another one.

The only thing now is I have no clue when I'll be able to mow again. Hopefully the rain can hold out until that happens, but I'm not gonna hold my breath.

It's June the first and has been for the largest part of today. It's also Monday, so that's cool, I guess.

Today has been a day of catching up from the weekend at work, doing some reading, watching the kiddos do their thing and just enjoying the peace and quiet that sometimes just occurs naturally around these parts.

One of the things that I've been trying to be a little better at is making an attempt to stay more on top of my mastodon stream. Not that it's super important to me, but I have this tendency to be a constant, oh, 15 hours behind on it. I think what I really need to do is just prune the thing. I'm following way too many people. I will note that I'm also trying to be a bit more active over there, for those that care. Heh.

I debated, though not too heavily if I'm being honest, about participating in the Junited blogging campaign started by Robert Birming, I just have a hard time carving out the time to read (or search out) all those people that are cooler than me and reading what they've got. I think it might be more along the lines of information overload or decision paralysis in getting started with something like that. Sure in the past I've done the "post every day for this month!" challenges - which are completely different - but I find that I liken those more to a job or a chore, and they lose their fun really quickly. I think that's one reason why I was unable to complete the 100 Days To Unwind challenge I had attempted a couple of years ago. I write for myself, or at least future me.

Something that, I have this fear, is going to be more and more important for myself as time inevitably marches on. My thought processes are not what they used to be, I have found.

Anyway.

The twins started back up with week two of play practice/class. Which is now also completely paid for - with a major bit of thanks to a very helpful scholarship that took out one of the classes for both of them. It's great that this town has very cool arts and theater opportunities for kids and people to do - and even better that those of us who would not be able to have our kids partake are able to do so. I know on paper there are a lot of families or people out there who look like they might be doing okay, or getting by, but in this day and age? Not so much on closer examination. Especially if they have a family that consists of more than just two. That cliff can seem rather insurmountable.

Speaking of scholarships, we also received word that our band kiddo has received an award to help pay for half of their trip for next year! Yet more of the amazing opportunities that our kids get to take part in! I never had the chance to do something like take a trip to Disney World, and I'm just really stoked that they can.

All right, I think that's about all that I've got to give today. I really need to mow, but I think I'm gonna put that one off today.

Until next time.

Let's go with "Time Zone Appropriate Greeting"! I've never been a fan of Good morning anyhow, having always attributed my dislike of the new day from way back in my time of working in retail management. Ugh, people, gross.

I've been making a handful of updates on the ol' Pagecord blog. I should probably make some additions to the Emacs pagecord.el module as well, since I've got a few things that I have to do there as well. Namely, I need to add the org-export-with-sub-superscripts change that I have at the file level with ^:{}. That's needed since one of the tag filters uses an underscore, no big deal though as I don't use sub or superscripts. I might make some adjustments to the titleless filter for status updates, to have them not show up in the main post area, but I don't know yet on that. It's not like I post a whole lot, but I do need to be cognizant of rss feeds. Echofeed also pushes those out, which is fine, since it would be stuff that I wouldn't throw out to mastodon on their own.

I've also done some playing around with elfeed-curate and its export functionality (which is pretty cool, I think). I'm thinking about integrating that with a weekly stash of elfeed posts that I find interesting. I'm currently exporting to an org file, links-of-interest.org, which also happens to save an html file not that I need it, and that org file can be imported into one of my org blog posts or pages, kind of like this:

#+include: "~/org/links-of-interest.org" :only-contents t

Got a new homepage set up, along with "snaps" (photo posts) and "quickbits" (status updates, title free posts). I want to see about getting a zettel template too, for mobile.

An actually somewhat restful Saturday

It's the weekend everybody.

At least, here,now, where I currently sit - it's the weekend. It's nice.

Got to sleep in until just after 0730. Coffee was already made since the wife had to go into work for half a day of mandatory overtime today. It stinks, but it's a part of the process.

Made the youngest some food, haven't had to let the doggo out.

Life is good.

Things to do today

Not too much is planned for today. One of the twins has an appointment at 1300.

The wife and I have a birthday party celebration for a friend that we'll be attending later this evening out of town. It'll be about an hour drive out and we won't be back until much later tonight…or, rather, very very early tomorrow morning.

I fully expect that I'll be paying for tonight's shenannigans for the next couple of weeks. I can't stay out and up like that and not be the worse for wear these days.

Absolutely worth it though.

The blog related stuff

I've got some ideas rollng around in my head.

Pagecord has some really nifty template variables and functions that can be used with pages (not posts). I've been toying with perhaps using those in conjuction with tags for things like photos and non-titled pages. I don't know.

I would like to finalize my /uses and /now slashpages.

Maybe join an indie webring.