Matthew Lang

I think I’ve managed to get my note banners working so that you can invert them. Going to come back to the changes tomorrow and review them.

Basic Apple Guy’s doing another round of gradients for September. I’ve been using Basic Apply Guy’s wallpapers for a couple of years now. Couple that with the wallpapers posted on r/wallpaper and that’s pretty much my two sources for wallpaper.

Now that Typepad is shutting down, I’m wondering if and where Nicholas Bate will relocate his blog. Nicholas Bate’s blog was one of the first blogs I remember following on Google Reader. It would be a shame to lose it.

Dave Winer, with a preference for ChatGPT, I would also love to see implemented.

I want a ChatGPT pref that lets me turn off human impersonation. I want it to behave like a search engine. I ask questions, it answers. Period.

I created some banner images of my own for Apple Notes and Bear this morning, like the ones you can use with the Forever Notes system. Unlike the ones you can download from the resources page, though, mine are a bit more customisable and generate a different set of mountains each time.

I quite like the end result of these.

The other nice thing about them is that the fill colour can be transparent. So in Bear, when you switch to a dark theme, the dark colour comes through the banner. It doesn’t look so great with the light themes, but I barely use them anyway.

Currently, I have two scripts, one for generating a transparent banner and one that generates a banner using a set of colours.

I plan on adding a few more over the next few months. Clouds, hills, snowflakes and skyscrapers could all be generated with random patterns and follow the same convention. I won’t be running a web server to allow others to generate these easily. Generating images consumes more energy than a typical web request, so in the meantime, you’ll need to download the scripts and generate them yourself.

Source code is available on SourceHut.

I’m definitely curious about Omarchy.

As part of my plan to learn React, I’ve been building single-page HTML applications that use local storage to persist any information between sessions. As a start, I built a roulette wheel for our team at work to determine who goes first during stand-up each morning.

I have since moved on and created applications for a technical log, a start page, and I have a few other ideas brewing. The persistence to local storage in the browser is common between all the applications, but I’m trying to build different ways to interact with these applications so that I can learn more about React.

Next week, I hope to develop a replacement for the Excel spreadsheet we use to track our OKR goals at work. The Excel spreadsheet is functional and certainly doesn’t win any prizes for looks. I thought this would be a good learning project to tackle in React, as the formulas we use would enable the page to be more dynamic.

Lots of family adjustments are being made this week.

Ethan’s been going through his inductions, student orientation, meeting team mates, and getting to know his way around campus this week. I’m glad to see he’s settling in nicely at McKendree. He’s got a spot of volunteering today. Classes begin on Monday, the gym opens on Tuesday, and the golf team start preparations and work on Thursday.

The hardest part for Ethan has been the lack of golf this week. He’s only played one round this week, but there’ll be plenty of golf ahead when the fall competition schedule begins.

At home, we’re slowly getting used to Ethan not being around, and I’m glad his brother is still optimistic about the whole situation. Drew has been kept busy with his golf and going back to school.

He’s also looking into a potential new hobby in the form of Warhammer. That may spill over to me as well. I am curious about it. I played D&D during high school, but I haven’t played it since. This might be a nice way back into some elements of D&D, but without having to endure a long-running campaign.

I’ve been trying to find a cheap way to host an HTML page with a bit of React on it that can be deployed just by uploading it with an existing service I use. The React didn’t play too well with Micro.blog’s single page feature. I have a DigitalOcean account, so I uploaded it there for the moment.

Said our goodbyes to Ethan this morning as he heads to McKendree University in Illinois to play as part of their golf team.

It’s been a weekend of ups and downs but mostly tears as our close family of four deals with the prospect of Ethan living abroad for most of the year.

The good thing is he’s back for Christmas for a few weeks and then he’s back in April / May for the start of the golf season.

It’s going to be a great opportunity for him and I’m sure he’ll be a better person and golfer for it once he finishes his four years.

Go Bearcats! 😄

A great night at the golf club tonight, giving Ethan a big send-off before he heads to the States on Monday morning. A fantastic night of food, drink, chat and music. A few tears at the end of the night, but that’s been the way of it the last few days as the big day arrives.

I have a collection of posts in my blog’s archives that mostly contain links with a single image and a comment. A lot of the links for these posts are now returning 404s. I’m tempted to just bring all the images together in a single Micro.blog collection and remove the posts.

The idea of a three-column theme for a Micro.blog is growing on me.

Bothy was a nice starter for learning about how themes work in Hugo and Micro.blog, but I would like to do more with a theme.

Here are just a few ideas I thought of for a new theme

• Show a header image - I like the idea of a header image for your website. I love the simplicity of text, but having a more visual theme is something that I think is missing from the current collection of Micro.blog themes.
• Show a micro update using emojis or just one word - A little bit of extra meta to let people know what you are up to.
• Show the latest image(s) from a category - Showing images from a particular category would add another visual element to the page.
• Show recent posts - A staple of many a WordPress blog back in the day. Time for this to make a comeback!

With such a larger number of elements for this theme, I might start off with a blank HTML page and start outlining what I need using Tailwind CSS to get a quick prototype up and running. I can then iterate on that for a while, working out the finer points. Once I am happy with it, I can then start building the theme using the finished prototype.

Picked up these A6 notebooks that Atoms To Astronauts were selling. This set of notebooks comprises of covers from maths, chemistry and physics.

Just 48 pages in each notebook, which I didn’t think was a lot, but it’s the same as a standard Field Notes notebook.

Bothy 1.0.0 is finally here. Summaries are now supported, as well as several styling fixes included. A good time to give it a major release.

I have made lots of mistakes building the Bothy theme, and I have even shipped some of those mistakes as well! On the positive side, I have learned a lot from it.

The next theme should be more of a straightforward process, but I won’t be starting on that until the darker nights have kicked in.

Bothy now supports category pages and the recently added category intro text.

Update is available in the plugins page.

Great afternoon of golf with the wee guy. Getting to the point where he now takes money off me every time we go out now. 😂

In a couple of weeks, it’s the start of another school year here in Scotland. Another to-do list comes with the usual items for this time of year. School uniform, school bag, topping up the meals account and many other things. I’ve added another potential item to the list.

AI subscription.

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and the many other AI subscription services became popular at an ideal time for my oldest. He was in his final year of school. He was curious about how it could be used to aid his homework and studies. I showed him how I use it for my own coding and learning, and its benefits.

He used it to his benefit in his first year of college and finished with good grades in his coursework. I also reinforced to him that it shouldn’t be used to do the work for him. Research, yes; learning, yes, but final essays and coursework should be his work and his work alone. He’s now off to college in the US in a couple of weeks, and I think he’ll use it well to help his studies.

My youngest is going into his second year of high school, and now I am wondering if I should be onboarding him to AI tools to help his studies. In his first year of high school, he didn’t get much homework, and trying to ensure he was on the right level for his age was difficult. My thought process behind introducing him to AI tools at this age is to show him how to use these tools correctly and not just use them as copy-and-paste tools.

AI tools are here to stay, and my hope is that by onboarding him to these tools early, he uses them correctly and enhances his learning. I’m also hoping that he finds another use for them beyond schoolwork. He’s pretty creative and has a good imagination. It’s a quality that his teachers commented on in primary school, but in high school, he’s yet to find an outlet for this. It might be that introducing him to these AI tools now would not only help his schoolwork but also provide him with access to other topics he might want to learn about.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that introducing him now to these tools is the right move, and in doing so, would ensure that he’s comfortable with AI tools and how to use them appropriately.

It’s taken me a lot longer than I thought, but I finally finished my own Micro.blog theme, Bothy.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to build my own Micro.blog theme, but I kept putting it off. After playing around with TailwindCSS to get something up and running, I started to see how I wanted my own theme to look. Nothing fancy, a single-column layout with a simple header and just a little bit of CSS to make it easy to read. After a few attempts at getting a workflow going for it, I finally managed to ship a working version of the theme.

It’s by no means finished, and there will likely be a flurry of updates as I address any issues that arise and add other partials and templates that I might have missed or haven’t styled.

Full docs are available on the theme’s Micro.blog site, and you’ll find the source code on SourceHut as well. There is a repo on GitHub, but this is just to allow Micro.blog to pick up changes to the blog so that it can be updated as a plug-in.

If you’re curious as to how it looks, you can take a look at my blog or the Bothy website.

Bothy can be installed from the plug-ins directory.

Enjoy!

Swamped with work and other commitments over the last two weeks. I need to create some downtime for myself and keep it as a regular thing.

Caught a cracking shot of the wee guy playing in the par 3 comp today. Learned a lot of what’s possible when taking action shots with my iPhone.

I tried to get back to working on my theme for Micro.blog last night. I managed to hold out for a few minutes before tiredness and frustration kicked in.

I have a theme working locally with Hugo. I have created a theme on Micro.blog and have started uploading the individual templates, but it seems like such a chore, and there are some differences between my theme locally and what is on Micro.blog, in that my Hugo themes don’t always work on Micro.blog.

Is there a more effective way to do this?

I watched Moneyball tonight for the first time. Can’t believe it took me all this time to watch it. I absolutely loved it.