jamesg

I was just chatting with a friend and an idea came up that I have been thinking about for a few days: an email to RSS converter. This service would let you subscribe to an email newsletter via email and then send all posts from that newsletter into an RSS feed.

There are two types of posts I write about programming. The ones I like writing most are those where I discuss how I built something, or how I intend on building something. It's fun to explain how I build projects. I like the technical details. This is not one of those posts. This is a post about what it's like to be a developer. The developer life, if you will.

This is the fifth post in the Advent of Technical Writing series, wherein I will share something I have learned from my experience as a technical writer. My experience is primarily in software technical writing, but what you read may apply to different fields, too. View all posts in the series.

I am tempted by all of the IndieWeb websites to add more features to this site. Yesterday evening, I had somewhat of a realization: the parts of my website that stand the test of time are those that are simple and do not require any overhead.

On this Tuesday evening, I found myself wondering: about what could I write? A question indeed. This was one of those times when I didn't have anything in particular on my mind, and went searching for inspiration anyway. As I thought I should prepare for bed, an idea came to mind. I could go to my bookmarks archive and see if I have read anything recently that would inspire me.

I have a blogroll page on this site where I list the blogs which I am actively reading. I love having a blogroll because it makes it easy for people to find other blogs to explore. If I am subscribed to a good blog, the least I can do is add a link to my site so that other people can discover that same blog. However, my current process for updating my blogroll is quite laborious. I have to remember to add links to my blogroll and then add them manually. This isn't too bad if I am adding one or two links but it starts to get tedious if I want to add many links to my blogroll. I am subscribed to around 100 feeds and I don't list them all on my blogroll.

MIT's Scratch makes programming playful. Drag and drop blocks, then connect them together. Moments later, you can have a program that does exactly as you instructed. One doesn't even need to call it programming; instead, we can call it play. Like Lego blocks, you connect the blocks and make something that, at the end, is yours.

Sometimes I feel like I have to be working on a coding project otherwise I am somehow behind. I do not like to feel that way. I like to code because I can build something meaningful, but what I build is only meaningful if I have a good idea. I'm slowly training myself to step back and to stop worrying about not having a particular project to work on. Making small changes to my existing work is more meaningful than starting something new.

On Thursday, Aaron noted an idea for a service that would, given a URL, return the profile photo associated with the h-card on that URL. I found the idea intriguing, noting my interest in building it. I agreed that it would be great to have an API to call to retrieve a photo, similar to Gravatar but using h-cards.

One of my favourite patterns in the Python programming language is the

This is the tenth post in the Advent of Technical Writing series, wherein I will share something I have learned from my experience as a technical writer. My experience is primarily in software technical writing, but what you read may apply to different fields, too. View all posts in the series.

I have enjoyed crafting my daily update that is printed with the thermal printer. So far, my daily update includes, among other things, my schedule, the weather for the day, my RSS feed, a news update from The Guardian, and a tech news update from The Guardian. But I wanted to keep experimenting with the printer. Then I got an idea: why don't I try to add an IndieWeb word of the day to the update?

I spent some time last night quizzing myself on the AP Style Guide, a topic on which I have never specifically studied but about which I am curious. My scores varied between the tests I tried. I certainly learned a thing or two. It got me thinking: to what style guide does the Guardian, the newspaper I read most regularly, adhere? I found in a Google Search that they have a series of articles in which they outline their style guide, divided into individual articles for each letter of the alphabet ^1 [^2].

I am writing a blog post every day from December 1st to December 24th, 2021, about a blogger whose writing or site I follow. My aim for this series is to help you discover new blogs and to help get the word out about content creators whose blogs I appreciate. You can read more about this series in the inaugural Day 1 post.

In 2021, I embarked on a journey to print out the content on my blog. The scope of the project was limited. I decided to print all of my coffee posts published both on this blog as well as Steampunk Coffee, for whom I had written numerous blog posts. I decided to print only the coffee posts so that the printed version would have a theme. I was excited by the prospects of being able to hold my writings on coffee in my hands, and looked forward to a day where I could print another volume. That time has come.

As I write, I am sitting next to a speaker in a coffee shop, after having read the newspaper and enjoyed a fulfilling breakfast. I am writing on my phone. Not my preferred tool for writing, but inspiration can strike anywhere. I need to get my thoughts on the proverbial notepad.

Last night, I was experimenting more with word surprisals (entropy), which are calculated using the probabilities of a word appearing in a specified corpus. For my analyses, I was using a corpus of articles from the New York Times to calculate word surprisals, which has proven effective for my blog [^1]. I started to think about whether you could use word surprisals for authorship verification.

I read

I was in a discussion yesterday about introducing young people (17-18) to generative text models. I noted that

Pocket Casts, the application I use to listen to podcasts, released a Pocket Casts Wrapped feature. This feature creates a Spotify Wrapped-esque slideshow featuring the highlights of one's year in listening to podcasts. According to my Pocket Casts Wrapped, I listened to 24 different shows and 364 podcast episodes in total. If I were to listen to all those podcasts back-to-back, I would spend seven days and three hours listening.

When I first started implementing my Micropub endpoint, the tool I use to post content such as likes and bookmarks on my website, I decided that I would show a brief message stating how I had reacted a post. The format for these posts was

The rain outside here in San Francisco is unyielding. This is perhaps a sign that I should let my feet rest after two long days of walking outdoors. While the rain falls, I have taken an opportunity to do a bit of writing and design. I decided to make a poster that shows the IndieWeb principles. The poster, sized for A4 paper, is available in JPG and PDF forms.

The topic of this month's IndieWeb Carnival is self care. This prompt comes at an apt time. One week ago, I was considering about what I could write. I hesitated, pondering whether the subject matter would be too difficult to tackle. That very sentiment encapsulates, in a round about way, how I feel approach self care: it is complicated.

I've been enjoying the Missing Bean Peruvian Direct Trade beans for about a week. I got a small box of the beans from my local coffee shop when I ran out of beans at home. At first, I did not know what beans I was drinking. I recently popped back into my local coffee shop to find out. The beans are from Missing Bean.

Below is my recipe for brewing coffee with the Aeropress. The Aeropress is my primary brewing device.

On Monday, my Acaia Pearl scale arrived, the latest addition to my home brew bar. I decided to purchase this scale because my previous scales were not as accurate or responsive as I would like. The Acaia Pearl scale has a reputation for being the best scale for professionals and home brewers so I decided it was worth a look. After further research, I found the scale met my needs: the Pearl was advertised as fast and accurate.

Spotify Wrapped. A year of one's music in review, packaged into a delightful, colourful interactive experience. I saw someone post their Spotify Wrapped and almost immediately went to Spotify, wondering if mine was ready. It was. I skipped through most of the review, searching for the headline statistic: who were the top artists to whom I had listened.

Within my first day or two of arriving in San Francisco, I saw Cruise driverless cars on the road. The cars are allowed to drive during the day with a driver at the helm. After 10:30pm the cars can drive in autonomous mode without a driver. I forgot that driverless cars were allowed on the streets here. Later, a friend asked whether I wanted to take a ride in a driverless car.