Something of a todo list

Writing this on a flight to Japan, and I’ve been thinking for some time that I really should have some kind of to-do list, some set of projects and things to work on.

Because it’s me and I am incapable of commitment, this takes the form of a set of ideas for things to do more than anything else. Stuff I want to work on, and maybe I will.

Concrete goose

Well, I do have a house, and I do think a low-poly goose would look really good in front of it. Especially if it had outfits. Since I don’t have a 3d printer in Japan, I probably wouldn’t actually try to make the goose this trip, but learning to model it would be a good start.

Blog

Like, come on, it’s been practically a year. This is probably top priority. The primary blocker is the JS image gallery stuff. Comments would be nice to have. A logo would be nice, but is definitely not required at this stage. Let’s try to commit to getting the blog done this trip.

MPD music system

I am really tired of itunes. The basic thing I want is more reliability or at least debugability. A better UI would be nice, although I’m not holding my breath for that one. Ability to have a “now playing” remote display. Control from a phone app, maybe.

Misskey install

Self-explanatory. Also depends on getting a logo put together, though. My plan is to run an instance on Amazon lightsail, maybe with a forwarder using the present nginx server.

Buying a huge pile of doujinshi

Heritage art form. I seriously and non-ironically plan to go to like 3 events and also hit a bunch of shops, because of course I do. Honestly this probably shouldn’t be on the list, because it’s more like my default behavior than something I need to remind myself to do. On the other hand, shipping myself a couple of m-bags does sound at least somewhat useful.

Finishing the album cover selection tool / more TLMC script stuff

This one’s really close to being done, and I do have to process the unsorted “temp version” from the beginning of this year. And I might have some more physical albums to add.

Japanese sentence diagram TeX

Also a thing I’ve been meaning to work on for years, also simple. (I mean, not that I actually know TeX, but the principle is pretty simple and well-understood.) Incidentally, the point of that is for flashcards, and with Fedora’s dropping Anki, I should find another flashcard program. Mnemosyne?

That seems like a prety good list. Of course, the odds are that I’ll ignore it completely, opting instead to wander around and be touristy, or else work on something not in the list at all.

I am terrible at blogging

In some ways it’s my favorite medium, but I really am absurdly bad at blogging.

So my plan was to go to Japan, set up a quick site, blog extensively. That didn’t really happen. I have got a bunch of entries written, but my choice of Hugo as the backend has led to a few snags. (I’m not saying other choices wouldn’t have caused issues of their own. It’s fundamentally unknowable, as far as I’m concerned.)

The basic stumbling block I’ve got really revolves around integration of images. I’m just. . . not completely happy with what I’ve got, and it’s a real problem, especially since I’m not sure I can really be happy with what the web’s converged on. Like, the generally accepted JS lightbox convention. . . is to my mind a mistake, but it’s what people want, and familiarity trumps most other UI concerns.

Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. I just thought I should, like, update, if only to verify that the pipeline is still working.

Second

Second

testing a longer post, with images.

Second test post for hugo – this one’s using the local create, then push to production with git hook workflow.

It’s a popular workflow because it’s so obvious, so very much the sort of thing that computers should be doing to save us from toil. The fact that it’s still a surprising pain to set up is a bit of an indictment of our industry, but here we are. “It is, as people used to say, to my unending annoyance, what it is.”

As I seem to say fairly often, my approach to blogging, and in fact many things to do with computers, is frankly stone-age. My very sentence there, its implication of computers as discrete objects, feels rather old-fashioned.

Test

Tap tap. Is this thing on?