Radio Blog

Meetings are the deathnail of productivity.

Why do people insist on asking my opinion when they never take my suggestion to heart?

This is what getting up at 3 in the morning gets you.

I like that there are new MacBook Pro's but I've never been happier than with the M4 Max. Save yourself some money and get one if you find one. There's not much difference between M5 and M4.

It's a tappity-tap kind of day. IYKMYK.

Caught this shot of an American Kestrel on the hover of a field along the coast this weekend.

Supposedly doom scrolling is supposed to trigger a dopamine reaction in your brain that makes you feel better. Yeah, no. Not me.

Snow level looks to have dropped to 1000 feet. It was 32 degrees Farenheit when I got up this morning. I hope it snows here.

Tried running Claude through Ollama with Qwen3 as the model. Talk about frustrating.

Five day weekend next week. So looking forward to it.

I wanted to go pet my cat but she was cleaning herself and I realized that she's probably thinking “OMG. I got human all over me. Gotta wash that off before it stains. Stupid humans."

Got a new lens. Had to try it out. Here's a bird sitting on the powerlines that run behind my house. I guess it's a House Finch.

Well, look at that. Suddenly it's Friday and a 3 day weekend.

Wednesday.

Happy Tuesday.

The freeway is very loud this morning. Lots of traffic.

Because of issues I have using ftp with my hosting provider I've added rsync functionality. You now have the option to ftp, sftp, or rsync your static site files to your web host. As always you can use username/password or id_rsa for passwordless connecting.

The Photo Manager has also been moved from the Settings pane to the sidebar as the new Media section.

Working on Mandeep's site. Let's hope I don't break anything irreparably. ;)

Taking forever to download.

Trying to determine if there's still a bug in the app when it tries to upload the static files to the host. I seem to be getting an rsync error about port 22 but if I click the upload site button it works fine. It's hard to diagnose because it could be the hosting provider limiting the port.

Testing the publish feature to see if the bug is fixed, again!

Let's test this again.

Test posting again because you haven't seen this enough have you?

Testing the publish button.

Let's test this again.

Well that's all the bugs fixed for tonight. The next thing to work on will be improving the editor. Currently it's an HTML editor but I'm thinking now a rich text or markdown would be better.

Well hello there.

Making some changes to the app. Your blog can now be saved to Github where you will be able to import and sync your blog. This is useful if, like me, you work on many different machines.

Honestly thought I was going to lose all my posts. Happy I didn't.

Just tried to do a site backup and it failed saying the data wasn't in the correct format. I guess that's ok because the backup will be in Github. In fact, I can probably remove the backup and import from static files feature now that my data is synced to Github. There was only one other person testing the app and I don't believe they have used it at all.

Just fixed a bug with the blog upload. Let's see if it's fixed.

Well, I'm not seeing an error so looks like we're good.

Error was still there. Made an update. Hopefully this fixes it.

Bug testing.

Waiting for the next round of storms. This one is supposed to drop 5' of snow in the Sierra.

Half an inch of rain in 15 minutes. I guess the storm is finally here.

No wonder why Christmas only comes once a year, Santa spends 3 months doing marketing and then does an around the world trip in 24 hours. It'd take me 9 months to recover from that, too!

Went to Target a couple of days ago and there wasn't a Salvation Army bell ringer in front.

My dog's nose tells me that as milk is exposed to air longer and longer the more it smells like cheese.

Turns out the milk was bad.

Some days I think to myself: “I need a bag of gummy bears.”

The Four R's of IT: Restart, Reboot, Reinstall, Recycle.

That moment you look back at an app you made several years ago and wonder, “How is this actually working?”

Fog so thick it registered 0.01” precipitation.

Successfully accomplished everything on my todo list today which had nothing on it.

Out of Splenda for my hot tea so almost Doordashed Starbucks for me and my daughter but after the upcharges and fees and everything I went to Amazon and bought a box of coffee pods and a bag of Splenda for less than the cost of Doordashing Starbucks.

Big storm supposed to start soon. Just had a smattering of rain so far. Got my boots all waxed up and ready to go. I'm ready for the wet and wild weather.

I really shouldn't watch camera videos because then I buy them.

Midweek holdays where you have to work on both sides of the holiday are evil. It feels like this week has 2 Mondays.

Can't sleep and I hope I'm not getting pink eye.

Rough night. Being sick sucks.

Day 2 of the cold. Thought I'd dodged it. I was feeling better earlier but now I'm congested again and coughing.

Also, I didn't realize it's been so long since I last posted. I'll have to try to update more regularly.

I think I have some kind of selective muteism that keeps people from hearing what I say. As an example, when someone asks “how do I do this?” I will respond and they continue what they're doing as if they didn't hear my answer to the point where they get so frustrated they give up.

Today's the day when people realize how vulnerable hosting on Amazon has left them. Too many services are there making it a prime (pun intended) target for widespread disruption of services. Take your stuff in-house.

Trying the Kirkland VitaRain Zero. It's like VitaminWater with less taste and no sugar.

Chopped up the red onion and the gherkins to have a gourmet tuna sandwich for lunch only to realize we gave away all the canned tuna at the last school canned food drive. I was so looking foward to it too. Today's lunch just won't be the same.

Nice little storm. So far we've got nearly an inch or rain. Hopefully this won't be all the rain we get for the season but it's a La Nina year and typically we get a little rain in October and November and then it's dry until the next season.

For some reason we're not able to publish again.

Got lazy and finally added a key from my mac to my host. Password stuff was killing me.

My current go-to drink from S-bucks: venti decaf sugar free vanilla latte with protein milk and sugar free vanilla protein foam and 2 extra shots

Well once again Starbucks messed up and the venti decaf sugar free vanilla latte was not decaf and I'm so wired I'm charging batteries just by walking by them.

That FTP is broke yall.

Thank you Captain Obvious.

Yes, but why is the rum gone?

I'm sure you don't need me to tell you this but…it's Friday yall!

Had a little bit of rain yesterday at only 0.06”. Most of that came from one downpour with some intermittent sprinkles throughout the day. Other places locally had a lot more. We don't seem to get as much from storms that blow in from the west as we sit in the rainshadow of Mount Oso. It's not a big peak for California but it's enough to mess up our rainfall totals compared to the rest of the region.

Bug fixing this morning. This was working before and now it's not. Probably a perms issue as I pushed Dev to Production yesterday.

Got my blood work done on Friday. Everything is good and my A1C is down to 5.0. Super happy about that.

Gashed my shin on my bed. We paid our friends husband who is a wood worker to make us this super beefy strong bed so it's a platform bed with 2x4's that surronund the mattress. They got rounded corners but you slam your shin into it and you still get a gash and bruise.

Realizing that I fit almost all signs of being autistic.

Putting a link to your website from your website is a little redundant. Just sayin'.

I should have known with all the wackiness…it's Monday.

Is it too much to ask that you actually help?

Between bashing my head on the metal porch swing yesterday and sinuses (because they're doing the almonds) my head feels like a giant granite boulder.

As predicted yesterdays lightning storm sparked a large number of fires, mostly in the foothills where it's miles and miles of dry grass. Chinese Camp along Highway 49 to Yosemite was destroyed. Doesn't look like there is much left standing. I'll have to take a trip up after the fire is done to survey the damage.

I wonder how the lumber yard and gold mine fared. The news video only showed Main Street in Chinese Camp.

My tummy has been upset a lot lately. Like easily irritated. No clue why.

Got a bit of thunder and lightning this morning. The bad thing is that the temperature was 75 degrees Farenheit with only 50% humidity. Fire weather. The storm was heading North/North East straight into the dry Sierra.

Excited for the Apple event next week. It's time to upgrade my M1 iPad Pro.

Past the point of having time to mess around with this code anymore. It's time to get shit done.

I have no idea why this isn't working. Stupid ambiguous MS SQL errors.

Well that's not good.

Ha! Monday strikes again.

The truck passed smog with flying colors. Pretty good for a 26 year old vehicle.

No, it's not my everyday drive but it will be what the youngling drives while in college.

Seriously what happened to this SFTP server. I was just here yesterday.

Took a spontaneous jaunt to Disneyland for my birthday over the weekend. It's amazing how something so seemingly innocuous can turn into an adventure.

Unfortunately, this may be our last trip. My autistic son is having problems handling the excitement and stress of the trip and isn't sleeping while there. This is leading to behavioral issues and we feel like he's not enjoying his time there. This makes me sad because the reason we go so frequent was his enjoyment and how much he got out of going. It seems like the last few years however, he's been more stressed and had a harder time relaxing and enjoying the park.

Here's a photo from our visit. This is Tiana's Bayou Adventure from the train platform in New Orleans Square. It was a fun trip overall. 4.5/5.

Having a problem with SSHPASS on my Mac. It seems to work once but then the system needs a restart before it'll work again.

Update: I didn't really need sshpass because I'm using passwordless logon to the linux system so I didn't need to pass any credentials in my CURL statement.

Read something in a book earlier that really resonated with me. Because I grew up on a farm where we didn't have a lot of extra to go around, we'll use the term “disadvantaged compared to many”, I can be very reactionary and have a tendency to move quickly without thinking about the repercussions. That's not always a good thing because it tends to get one in trouble and can alienate people who are more cautious and like to think situations through.

Sometimes I can be very aloof and less focused on the feelings of others and more concerned with the goal. It's only afterwards that I feel remorse and show concern for others.

I'm completely aware that the way my brain works and the way I communicate are completely foreign to most people. And that doesn't really bother me.

Made some major changes to the sftp/ssh functionality and the posts. No longer are there separate posts for each day. Instead the calendar links to the permalinks for that day. There's also a back to top button now so if you hop to a day you can hit that button to quidkly return to the top. Clicking the blog title at the top will also take you to the top also. The RSS feed now also links to the permalinks in the home page instead of the individual day pages.

Made a few more updates to how the pages work. Testing those now.

I was getting a weird error where everytime I'd type in the post field it'd trigger an sftp upload. Simple fix. Missing bracket.

I must say, sftp is MUCH faster than ftp uploads.

Another test post.

Trying out CopyParty on my linux dev machine which is notoriously hard to access files on. So far it’s awesome.

A photo from my walk Sunday morning.

I should probably edit the size of these things down as they're 50mp which is WAAAAAAY overkill and takes forever to upload.

There's been a bug with this post in the app for the HTML rendering.

Is it fixed?

Ok, looks like the bug is fixed. I'll have to export a new pkg and put it up on my server.

I've had Pixelmator Pro or a long time but I use Photoshop more. Adobe has increased the price of Photoshop and Lightroom again so I'm contemplating dumping it. Two years ago I made the decision to dump Creative Suite and go to Affinity apps. Affinity Photo is good but I'm more comfortable with Photoshop and Lightroom.

Here's a photo that was editing using Photomator, the Apple version of Lightroom.

I should note that photo was completely black except for the lights. In Photomator I was able to pull everything up without it looking too overdone and HDR.

Why does that one young lady look so well exposed when other faces are dark? She's standing in front of Ramone's and is lit by the neon sign. If you notice other people in the background have a similar effect by virtue of being under Flo's V8 Cafe's lights. The one group just behind the girl happens to be facing away from the lights.

I've been encountering ftp issues after I uploaded the 50mp files. I reduced their file size then replaced them in the posts and picture uploader. That “kinda” seemed to work but I ended up manually removing and replacing them on the ftp server. They were exceeding the timeout limit on the ftp. This may be something specific to my host.

Anyway, that seems to have fixed the ftp issue.

Just beware if you're uploaing images to scale them properly before hand.

Slow Saturday. The wife gets kids for her class on Monday so this weekend is preparation both physically and mentally.

We’re making changes to the UI. This is a test post.

Well implementing a rich text editor didn’t work. Evidently there are issues with SwiftUI thata make it problematic to have an html editor and rich text editor and then to switch back and forth between them. Maybe someday but not now.

This release has import/export capabilities for settings, posts, and images.

Also, I use Oxford commas. Bite me.

I’m working on speeding up the upload process by only uploading files that have changed instead of uploading everything everytime the site changes.

The youngling just paid for their first semester of college. She had no idea how expensive it was going to be.

Implementing a new feature on the backend. Just testing it now.

Well, I think I’m at a spot where I’m good for the time being.

Ok I was wrong. I’m changing the RSS feed to only show posts from the last 24 hours instead of all posts. That seemed a bit of overkill.

Slightly disappointed the tsunami wasn't bigger. At the same time I'm happy because I was asleep and would have missed the devastation.

My eyeroll is how I nonverbally point out you've just said something incredibly stupid.

Drinking a half-caf this morning where I normally drink only decaf. It's making me sassy af.

Tuesday appears to be Monday part deux.

Happy Monday...said no one ever.

I hate Mondays and Mondays hate me.

Did my 5 mile walk this morning. A little slow at 86 minutes because I was trying out the my new Insta360 Ace Pro 2. One of the main advantages I see over my old GoPros is the flip out screen I did have a hard time trying to get it where it shoots horizontal and vertical video at the same time. I'm going to have to look up how to do that again.

After Dane mentioned Publii I gave it a look. Sad to say I'd never heard of it before. I imported LoydSchutte.com from wordpress and now my site is running on Publii. I did have to do a redirect because the app doesn't support specifying a page as the home page in the theme I was using. At least not that I could find. It's interesting and fun. It gives me some ideas for my app. It's Electron or Meteor based so used JavaScript on the backend. I'm not going to port my app over. I like having a native Mac app written in Swift.

It occurs to me that there is are 2 whole generations who have no idea who this is.

The best thing about Radio Userland was that it lent itself to short form, micro blogging exceedingly well as it had no built in post headlines. Sure, you could add your own but that's not the way it was structured out of the box. Out of the box it was built more for recording thoughts and then going back to expand upon them. Everything that came after was structured more like Blogger with a separate post title and content that was geared more towards long format posting. We live in the age of TL;lDR. I think long format posting is really what lead to the demise of blogging. Short form posting is where it's at baby!

Also the post editing and generation field is a bit buggy in this iteration making it hard to go back very far in a post to correct typos. You'll just have to live with them. Mea culpa!

Here's a sample photo I took this morning from my morning walk using the Insta360 Ace Pro 2. The camera takes 50mp Raw + JPG images. This is from the edited Raw (really DNG format) file that I color corrected in Photoshop.

Good Saturday morning to you!

TGIF!

There's still a few small quirks but I think I have the app about where I want it.

One of the things I need to work on is the editor. I think it could be better. The editor settings doesn't seem to be working. I increased the font but it's not inicreasing in the editor view. I'll have to wait for my next big push to deal with that.

I really want to get the editor nailed down and functioning flawlessly before I start work on the RSS reader. RSS readers are a dime a dozen at this point so I may decide to not implement one at all and to just keep this as kind of an online editor.

Here's a shot of the editor.

As you can see by the screenshot it has the functionality to upload to your ftp or sftp server or generate a static site for backup or manual upload to your desktop.

The settings panel allows you to not only configure your ftp/sftp and blog settings, but also upload photos, edit the sidebar (in html for the moment) and edit your static site's css stylesheet.

Oh, I forgot to mention the website is a static site. The app uses a database on the backend but the generated site is static. Can't beat the speed.

I need to add to my list the ability to edit the head of the site or configurable fields and a way to drop or purge the database. That'll be in a future release.

Hello world