Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years, but other than their privacy stance, there’s not much else to keep me there.

I’ve been intrigued by the interest in Kagi in my Micro.blog timeline over the last few months. So much so that I created a free account for myself today. Loving it so far!

Enjoying a very relaxed Saturday

I love Saturdays like this. No plans, no need to go anywhere. Just going with the flow.

The Goonies Lego build is coming along nicely. Some really great finishing touches, and it’s great to have most of the movie in a single build. I’m leaving the next couple of bags for Drew to do tonight.

A LEGO pirate shipwreck set displayed on a wooden dining table, featuring a tilted brown ship hull built into gray rocky cliffs with several minifigures positioned throughout the scene, including characters on the upper deck and in a cave-like area below.

I put the finishing touches on a new learning feature in Dailymuse today. It’s a spaced-repetition feature that sends notes to you over a period you define. It’s like flash cards by email. I’ll be testing this myself for the next few weeks before I release it.

Fajitas for dinner tonight, followed by an episode of Tulsa King and an episode of Shrinking, will wrap up a much-needed relaxing Saturday.

Three hours later, and I’ve managed to deploy my first Rails application using Kamal. I’m not completely sold on it yet, but I can see the appeal. Now that I have something working and can refer to, over the next few weeks, I’ll aim to deploy a more complex Rails application.

I am having a go at deploying a Rails application with Kamal tonight. I’m at the point where I am wondering why it doesn’t work the first time as it does in the demo video on the Kamal website.

I am trying to determine other ways to measure in-app activity besides tracking email open rates for Dailymuse. Difficult to do for an email product, but I’d rather not go down the tracking-pixel road.

Jen put me on to a Japanese stationery store called Bungu, which came up in her Instagram feed. I ordered a variety of things to try out, as well as a couple of things for Drew. It arrived this morning, with the items wrapped in new cloth. Very fancy. Will write more about the contents later.

A furoshiki-style cloth wrapping in white, red, and brown with the text "bungu" printed in red, tied in a knot on a desk next to a white mechanical keyboard and smartphone.

A clear plastic bag of Japanese stationery items labelled "bungu," containing various office supplies including pens, erasers (PLUS brand), a book clip, washi tape, and other writing accessories, displayed on a light fabric surface.

I think Drew and I are going to make a start on The Goonies set tonight. He’s been itching to get started on it. I think I’ve made him wait long enough.

A LEGO Ideas set based on The Goonies, showing the box art featuring One-Eyed Willy's pirate ship built in brown and grey bricks. Multiple minifigures representing characters from the 1985 film are arranged across the multi-level ship interior. The box sits on a wooden surface, with a retro space-themed poster partially visible in the background.

Just uploaded my own bookmarking app, Cairn. Uses an HN-like algorithm to age links from the board over time, but adds weights to different tags, so that combinations of tags for each bookmark produce different scores and should show the more important tags at the top. Will write more on this later.