Watching the coverage of Hurricane Ian via the Accuweather web site. Switched to the Weather Channel live stream after a bit of searching to watch people trying to stay upright while in a hurricane, but their stream ended after a while and it looks like they put it behind a paywall. The last I checked Ian was category 4, but only one MPH less than category 5. #

I gave in and turned the furnace on this morning. After five days in a row of temperatures dropping in to the 40s the house is just not warming back up enough during the day.#

I just discovered something about the glossary function in Drummer that does not work as I expect. If a a glossary word is in the URL of a HTML hyperlink, the glossary then replaces that work with the glossary entry. For example, the link to the web page I applied to Zettelkasten below includes the world roam, which I had on the glossary and when I published the blog it changed the link to what I had specified in the glossary. I think that glossary scanning should ignore anything within HTML. In the mean time I changed the glossary entry for Roam so that I have to surround it with quotes to control when I want the glossary to replace Roam with Roam.#

Every time I read something about Zettelkasten I come to the conclusion that it is too much work. #

I continue to be surprised how tightly coupled the Apple Watch is to the iPhone. One would think Apple would learn from the success they had with the iPod that they can benefit mightily from not locking in a particular product to their ecosystem. Ok, so you really don't want to "aid" the Android market by enabling Apple Watch to work with Android even if that would likely result in wiping out WearOS on the day it's announced. (Or perhaps that's the reason?) But surely, it wouldn't hurt Apple if they coupled Apple Watch with iPad and Mac? I use Android phones, iPads, and a Mac, why shouldn't I be able to add Apple Watch to that mix? #

It's funny in a way, changing desktop operating systems takes little effort on my part but switching browsers means resetting/logging in to all sorts of things to get the environment working in the manner to which I am used to.#

Chrome shutdown again in my LXQT desktop container, so I have decided to switch to Firefox for a while. Chrome seems to have problems with certain pages, it consistently shutdown when opening one page this morning that Firefox had no problem opening.#

Updated the Google Pixelbook to Chrome OS 105, and so far the close a virtual desktop and all its apps function is not working. However, I have played with the save virtual desktop as template feature that enables one to create a named virtual desktop that has specific apps running, and then launch that desktop and apps all at once. The feature also works for specific web sites. For example, I opened Drummer and Pocket in two tabs in Chrome then saved that as a Reading and Writing virtual desktop and now I can launch it and automatically open Drummer and Pocket. #

No matter whether one personally knows the person or not, when an icon has existed one's entire life, it is nearly impossible to not feel some loss. So, I feel some sorrow learning that Queen Elizabeth has passed.#

Next month Google will have their smartphone season event to launch the Pixel 7 and more importantly to me the Pixel Watch. I wonder whether the Pixel Watch will be available via stores like Best Buy or exclusively on Google's store? I really, really, do not want to buy direct from Google.#

I didn't see much of interest while watching Apple's iPhone event they held yesterday. I do realize that I am a stubborn holdout by not switching to iPhone given that I am otherwise "all-in" with the Apple ecosystem. I do think the satellite-based, "SOS" system is interesting and probably a pre-cursor to the type of services we will see come on line as Starlink gets more satellites. #

Idea: Write a Drummer script to create a Wikipedia link for a particular search word or phrase.#

Occasionally Chrome crashes when running on my LXQT desktop container. Shut off some extensions to see if that handles memory better although the Proxmox monitor doesn't show the container using much more than 1 GB of the 4GB allocated to it.#

Trying Google's "Hold For Me" for the first time as I've been waiting on hold for at least ten minutes so far. Waiting to tell someone to come and pick up our trash because we were skipped on the regular collection day. The company that does this must either only have one person answering calls or does a really poor job. How long should one wait on hold before giving up? I gave up after 30 minutes and sent an email. #

906 is the only area code for the entire Upper Peninsula of Michigan.#

Now that it's September I thought I would finally change the header graphic here to something more seasonable.#

Good morning on the first day of September! Better still, the Raspberry Pi server is still running, although I have not yet dared try the update again. First I need to think about backing it up properly.#

The Raspberry Pi server that I built following the pi-hosted instructions has crashed hard. It appears the external boot disk may have become corrupted, or worse, that the USB bus in the Raspberry Pi is suddenly having problems with the external drive. Fortunately, I think I've recovered what data that I have, but I am attempting to recover the boot partition before I rebuild this server from scratch. When I boot I see "Firmware not found" on the diagnostic screen.#

It took some work, but I managed to recover the Raspberry Pi server. Writing down some quick notes here to remember what I did. First off, the problem occurred while I was doing an apt full-upgrade via Shell In A Box. Not sure whether the problem was caused because I was logged in using Shell In A Box or just bad luck. Something happened to cause files in the boot partition to be deleted. What I did to fix was the following:#

The troubleshooting was not as direct as suggested above, I did several other things in the attempt to resolve that did not work, the key ones being:#

I don't want to believe that today is the last day of August. I have a emotional aversion to Labor Day weekend, it marked the end of summer and the return to school during my childhood. Even now as a 56 year old I am still emotionally tied to the passage of time during my childhood.#

I have Android 13 installed on my Google Pixel 4a. I found that when I play music in Spotify that the name of the track currently playing displays in the ambient display, but today I am using YT Music and surprised to find that it does not do the same. How a non-Google app is able to do something better on Google's phones is beyond me. #

Note to self: Google says the last guaranteed upgrade for your Pixel 4a is in August 2023. I think this means that you will get one more full upgrade of Android but that you won't get any security updates for it after August 2023. In other words, you probably need to replace the phone next year.#

I am looking at the COVID transmission rates for Oakland County in Michigan and observe that the daily new cases in July 2022 were not as low as in July 2021 or 2020, and I don't know what to make of this. It could be that better data is being collected. It could also mean we are getting closer to a new normal. New cases will never be zero for long. It feels like most everyone has accepted where we at is the new normal except, although it also feels like for some people that will never happen. Technically, I think an epidemic is not considered over until the R(0) is consistently below 1. I also note that the vaccination rate has plateaued and is not really going to improve. #

9to5Google says the microphone of the Google Pixelbuds Pro hold their own in comparison to the Apple Airpods, which appear to be a standard barer for wireless ear bud microphone quality. I've made one phone call with my Pixelbuds Pro and found the audio to not be high enough, even when I had the volume maxed out. I tend to agree the initial point of the review that most people listen to music and don't use ear buds for phone calls, and when listening to music I find the Pixelbuds Pro work very well.#

Back at the turn of the century when I was a published author, I burned backups of my writing to CDROMs that I took to my office for offsite protection. Now that one can buy USB drives with terabytes of storage at reasonable prices I probably would use something like this solution to carry my backups off site. Cryptsetup, used in this project, is a Linux utility to provide full disk encryption. #

Dave recognized that the People menu in tweetfeed.org wasn't going to work because it got too long. The list of people using the app is in an OPML file but when I open it via URL in Drummer all I see is the text, which is that person's Twitter ID, and I have no way of finding the associated URL. Note that the format to a person's feed is http://tweetfeed.org/[text]/rss.xml. I wonder whether scripts work against files opened as URLs? #

On Friday I stumbled upon Jess Martin's summary of the Render Conference, a confab of 75 technologists working on tools for thought or adjacent experiments. The summary includes several embedded videos from presentations given at the conference, though unfortunately the audio quality is not the best. Jerry Michalski is one of the co-hosts who has been using The Brain for 25 years and makes a version available at JerrysBrain.com. The Brain is a mind mapping tool that pre-exists all of the modern "tools for thought" applications, and at one time I owned a copy that I used but I did not keep up paying for the version upgrades. For some reason I prefer the upon/down hierarchy of outlines rather than the radient, multi-direction 0f mind maps. One thing that recall liking about The Brain is that you can use it to link to files on your computer, so it works well to link to other documents on your computer. #

Readwise, which I use to store highlights from Pocket and Kindle books in Roam and Evernote, was in attendance and gave demonstration of the reading application they are developing. I am keeping an eye on this because it has the potential of being more useful to me than Pocket if it enables me to high and annotate web articles. #

Martin notes in his summary of the conference that interoperability was a big theme. Included in the conference was a explanation of a protocol called Noosphere that appears intended to allow different tools for thought products to share information with each other. A point made during the presentation of Noosphere is that the Internet itself is a tool for thought. I watch some of the video on Noosphere but it was over my head, but if the gist is providing an API for exchanging information then I think the developer is on the right track. Earlier in the year Dave Winer was pushing OPML as the "protocol" that could be that glue between tools of thought, but OPML is file format and the current iterations of these tools aren't really working with files, but rather non-structured databases. Moving files around is tedious in comparison to exchanging data via APIs. #

I think there is more to mine out of the videos from the conference that I need more time to digest. Linus Lee was in attendance and he participated in a session about AI and ML in building tools for thought, which I think gets us closer to what the ultimate goal of making this software easier to use for personal augmentation. #

As I read through tweets in River5 I wish that it was smart enough to make shared links linkable. Right now I see a tweet and the URL as part of the same description text, to get to the link I first have to click the item in River5 to take me to Twitter and that tweet to then click the link that was shared in the tweet. Look at the screenshot below for examples of what I mean. Again, I think what lies ahead is however Dave plans to use the source name space within the items of the feed.#

Dave has released TweetFeed and I signed up to have it create my feed of Tweets. One can see other's feeds via the People menu. The solution will become more valuable when one can subscribe to a feed of any user. Other solutions like TweetFeed exist (For example nitter) but cost money to subscribe to feeds of multiple users. #

Note below that River5 displays all of the content of a Tweet (see description in the feed) as a title of an RSS item which is why each entry has a larger font and is all part of a hyperlink to the tweet. Nitter's feed copies the description in to a title that River5 renders as a title and then the description. I personally would prefer that River5 did not render descriptions as titles but instead just rendered the description or if there is no title used the pubDate for the title rather than the description. However, I suspect that Dave is heading toward a new feed reader that may replace River5 that renders the feed differently.#

Android 13 has a setting, turned off by default, that allows one to control devices known to Google Home without having to unlock the phone. Home device control was added to Quick Settings in Android 12 but to use it one first had to unlock their phone, even though the Lock Screen in includes a Home button. It always seemed silly to me to allow a user to put a button on the lock screen but not really do anything with it until the phone was unlocked.#

Per 9to5Google the search bar at the bottom of the home screen and the top of the app launcher in Android 13 is supposed to be the same, but it has reverted to the differences that existed with Android 12. The unification has existed throughout the beta testing.#

I am reading that Google has released Android 13 for certain Pixel devices and so initiated System Update on my Pixel 4a and found it available. I haven't been following Android 13 closely so frankly I don't know whether there is much to it, but I am a glutton for new, shiny objects and so I have initiated the process. The installer is classifying it as a security update.#

Android 13 is installed and the good news is that I am not noticing a tremendous amount of difference. One thing I do see out the hop is that the track currently playing in Spotify is displaying on the ambient display, which is good. I also notice that there is media controls card that displays when I press the power button. #

I am preparing to build a Docker container for River5 to ultimately run on my Raspberry Pi server. First, I am going to work on creating the image using Docker running in a Debian 10 container hosted in my Proxmox environment. #

How To Make Notes and Write is a free e-book on taking notes and organizing information. I've downloaded to my iPad to read but have not yet read it.#

One frustration I've had with Mac OS is window management, particularly the need to resize windows to the way I want them when I attach my Macbook Air to my external monitor. Today I learned about Moom and I have installed it to try it out. Looks like Moom has a lot of features, but all I want to do is save the windows as I have them and then be able to invoke the configuration when I want. Can't believe I have to buy an app to do this as this should be built-in. I know Windows has the same problem but at least I Microsoft provides Powertoys. #

Via Andy's response to my brain dump yesterday about indexes, I learned about Indieseek.xyz, which upon first glance looks like a modern Yahoo alternative. To my point I tried to make yesterday, when I go to Indieseek.xyz and browse through the categories I find new things. Browsing is how we first used the web, but it takes more time and is more laid back. Browsing is different than searching, both have their place. To what I was going for yesterday, like most things modern, I think there is value in separating the presentation and interaction with of indexes with data of the index itself. For whatever reason, I like the expand/collapse format of outlines, but others may prefer the more "flat" format as exists on Indieseek. Ideally, users could do both but interact with the same data, if you think about it, that is what RSS provides and I think is the idea behind OPML too and hence why Dave was trying to get other developers like Logseq to fully support OPML... then users could use the tool they prefer to view and interact with the same data/information.#

I have started using LXQT on Ubuntu and just learned how to create a shortcut for an application. You have to drag and drop it from the menu to the task bar. It's strange to me how LXQT doesn't really support right-click on objects. #

Played a bit with orgmode today by walkthru Andy Sylvester's Org Mode For Beginners videos. In comparison to todotxt, one of the things that I do not like is that in orgmode prioritization only works in agenda mode. Right now I don't schedule tasks, I am keeping a simple list of tasks with A, B, C, and D priorities. There is only one A priority task, the one that I am currently working on. B tasks are what I plan to work on today, C are this week, and D are the next week. #

Went on a trip out of town this past weekend and while I was away my Raspberry Pi server lost connection to the WiFi network in my home. My wife told me there had been some brief disruptions in power, so I assumed it had not booted properly and just figured I would wait until I got home to troubleshoot. What I found is the Pi booted just fine, but for some reason dropped connection to the network. A search on google found several sites of information from other people who have had the problem, one that suggested disabling Power Management made sense, particularly after I found Power Management was on. Ever since I made the chance the Raspberry Pi has maintained connection, so hoping this did in fact resolve the problem. #

I think Dave is saying something provocative here, that one cannot make money on writing and publishing to the web. At least not if it is the prime directive. The fact that Medium was always about making money should not be a surprise, Ev basically made his name and first money selling Blogger and then Twitter. While Dave has kept developing his tools and writing everyone else has been trying their darnedest to get rich. Even Dave's arguments with journalists is rooted in their making money. It has always been about making money. It's not so much about blogging or even the Internet, it's about the culture in the United States. #

BTW, for most people wealth is addictive. It seems that once one makes their first million, they spend all their energy on making their next million. Dave only seems to be immune because he appears not driven by "more" and perhaps because he broke free from addiction, but unfortunately U.S. society as a whole is not as wise. Attention is also addictive. #

Seems to me that nearly everyone dislikes Biden, as if they forget how awful and dangerous Trump was. I can't help but think ageism is a big part to do with this, in general we tend to treat old people with contempt. At the same time, I got to point out that a part of the problem is that we are stuck picking baby boomers as presidential candidates. Many Democrats who dislike Biden prefer Bernie Sanders, who is 80 years old. Hilary is 74 years old. People freaked out because of Barack Obama's ethnicity, but the fact that he was just in his fifties while president probably caused come consternation too. Sooner or later the next generation is going to step up even though I know most boomers are scared to see it happen.#

The more I think about the ninth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the more angry I get at the fundamentalist judges on the Supreme Court. The amendment clearly states it is not the intent for the Constitution to enumerate every right of citizens, but it also refers to those as "rights retained by the people." To me that says we, the citizens of the United States determine what are rights if they are not enumerated in the Constitution and not some Supreme Court justices using logic that justifies their ideology. The purpose of government, said the Founders, was to preserve the rights of citizens, not to remove rights. #

We are one of those rare households that has an active AT&T landline and over the weekend we discovered that we had no dialtone. No idea for how long it was out though. Technician is at our location now tracking down the cause. #

I have several Raspberry Pis on my home network that I access via the .local domain rather than IP address. Most of my devices know how to resolve the .local names but for some reason the Ubuntu 20.04 server hosting my lxqt desktop does not.#

Found cursors on pling.com and decided to keep it simple and use the Windows 10 versions available. #

Good morning. Today is the first work day that I am using the LXQT desktop I set up in Proxmox last week rather than the desktop running on a Raspberry Pi. Not too surprised that so far the LXQT desktop, even though it's running in a VM on old Intel hardware seems smoother than Raspberry Pi. Not tremendously different, but perceptible. One thing that I need to do is figure out how to get new mouse cursors installed.#

I am going to use each of these desktops that I have set up in Proxmox as an alternate to the one that I've been running on a Raspberry Pi as my personal computer during the work day. During the day I am sitting in front of a 32-inch BenQ Monitor at 4K and when I connect to a VNC display using a 1921x1080 geometry, which works well on my Macbook, the scaling doesn't work well on the big monitor. The solution is simple, start another VNC display using the 2560x1600 geometry that I've been using with the Raspberry Pi. It looks much better!#

Today i built a LXQT desktop based on a Ubuntu container running in Proxmox, and I am testing it by writing this post.#

Hello to July! We are well in the midst of summer now.#