Matthew Lang

I’m curious about hosting my own Mastodon instance. More so to see what’s involved in running it and how it integrates with other instances.

Nicholas Bate has a plan if you are serious.

Three generations of Lang are out on the course today at Elderslie Golf Club. The boys had a great time playing with their Papa.

The last splash of colour in the garden before winter sets in.

What is the sign of a good developer’s blog? An RSS feed, of course! Good to see one on the 37signals development blog. Just two articles in, and I’m already hooked.

I’m not convinced that the departure of Twitter users to Mastodon will be permanent. We’ve been here before. I can’t remember the reason why. After a few weeks, though, everyone flocked back to Twitter. Most people will want to remain on Twitter as it’s easier.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been migrating several Rails applications to Hatchbox. I’ve still got a couple of applications to go. Still, one last thing I wanted to do was migrate my blog over to DigitalOcean’s Apps platform.

I’ve been using Render to host my blog for the last few months. While it’s free, and I have been okay with using it, I’ve wanted to minimize my digital footprint of the services I use. Over the weekend, I spent almost eight hours trying to get my blog to compile and run on DigitalOcean.

Sadly, my blog wouldn’t compile due to the Tailwind integration I am using. An error with the Jekyll PostCSS gem kept breaking the building of the website. I’m still digging into the actual issue, but it is getting parked until I have more time to look into it.

I started another minilog yesterday.

That’s 12 notebooks mostly completed over the last year. I say mostly completed, as there’s a couple of notebooks in there that I didn’t finish. It’s been a good daily exercise over the last year and I’m going to continue it through to next year. Also, it gives me something to do with my Field Notes subscription!

I’ll also start sharing a few pages from them again as they are completed.

After the cancellation of Setapp, I’m reviewing several other subscriptions that could be for the chop. There’s no average monthly figure that I’m aiming for as a budget for these subscriptions, but reducing them over the next few weeks is the plan.

I cancelled my Setapp subscription today. I’m only using a handful of apps from this, and I know it would be cheaper for me to use alternatives.

Spent most of the afternoon finalising some changes for my Rails app for posting to my Jekyll blog. It needs a few more tweaks before I open source the application, but it now allows me to log in on multiple devices, which means you might see more of my posts soon.

I finished watching the first season of Amazon’s Rings of Power this afternoon. I enjoyed it, but I did find it a tad slow.

With Ethan playing the last round of a competition at Longniddry Golf Club today, Jen, Drew, and I decided to wander around the surrounding area.

We had already planned to take a walk along Longniddry Bents. Despite the usual grey weather that Scotland is famous for, the walk along the beach was great. We then headed into Cockenzie and Port Seton, but with little to do there, we had a look to see what was nearby.

We decided to head there because Rosslyn Chapel was just a half hour away. We were a few minutes late for the tour’s start, which allowed us to take some great pictures of the outside of the chapel while everyone was inside getting the guided tour. The inside of the chapel was just as beautiful as the outside. Particularly the Apprentice Pillar and the many carvings on the pillars and arches inside the chapel.

All in all, it was a pretty great day.

I am trying out something new this morning. I built a small Rails app that streamlines the posting process to my blog. It automates most of the process and only requires the post content itself. If it’s working, you should see this post!

My “must watch” for 2023.

It’s great to finally see a trailer for The Last of Us, which features all the characters and locations from the game.

I must admit, I had goosebumps when it came to the clip of the skyscrapers in Boston.

Also, the clickers look fantastic and a bit different from the usual post-apocalyptic worlds we’ve seen in other films and television shows.

I just found out today that you can email your journal entries to Day One. Game changer!

A couple of weeks ago Drew bought this Lego Marvel Venom set. We decided to try out the additional light kit for it from Light My Bricks.

I have to say, the final result looks pretty good. The LEDs and wires fitted into the build nicely, although the green LEDs that go in behind the Venom’s teeth were a bit of a pain to fit and to stay in place.

Unbeknownst to Drew, he’s got a another light kit heading his way for Christmas which will be for the Lego DC Batman head we’ve bought him. I’m looking forward to seeing how that one turns out.

I’m a sucker for all things space, even more so when it comes to anything that allows us to see what’s in space. Hence the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition is something I look forward to every year.

The Andromeda galaxy captured by Yang Hanwen and Zhou Zezhen which won Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year, is one of my favourites of this year’s winners.

The overall winner though was Gerlad Rhemann’s image of Comet Leonard which was taken on Christmas Day of last year. It captures the point when a piece of the comet’s tail becomes seperated due to high velocity solar particles.

I quite like these AirTag strap mounts from ElevationLab. Good for mounting an AirTag on all types of items. I particularly like the idea of putting one on my trusty YNOT backpack.

The last few years in the UK have been a bit of a rollercoaster. We’ve had Brexit, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the rising cost of energy bills and now the death of her majesty the Queen. It’s been a lot to take in mentally.

It’s this continuing changing of circumstances that seems to be affecting people. I’ve had similar feelings about the future. As has my wife. Well, it turns out it’s actually more common than I thought.

The result is that many of us are experiencing future fatigue: “When several difficult experiences happen back to back, your mind starts to use this information to predict the future and it can appear bleak as a result,” says Cobban, which causes us to lose “a sense of hope about the future being different in a positive way”.

— Surprised by how disoriented you feel right now? You’re not the only one

As for getting over these feelings of uncertainty, it is recommended by psychotherapist Nova Cobban that you focus on things that you can see the outcome of.

As well as limiting your time on social media (“feeding the anxiety” by looking more than once or twice daily is not helpful, Duff advises), it’s important to focus on the aspects of your life that you can actually influence and shape. “Look at what you are spending your time and energy on,” suggests Cobban. “Is it things that you have no control over but greatly concern you or is it things you can actually personally have a beneficial effect on?”

— Surprised by how disoriented you feel right now? You’re not the only one

After nine years with my MacBook Pro, it’s time to upgrade. I’ve been using the same MacBook Pro since 2013, and it’s been a great machine. However, it’s time to upgrade.

Over the last year, I’ve noticed an evident degradation in my MacBook Pro performance. It can usually only handle a handful of apps open at any time. I tend to have Firefox, VS Code, iTerm and Docker available anytime. Anything else I can open at the same time is usually a bonus. If I have to open a few more apps, I’ll shut down all my development apps to allow more apps to open.

I’ve been researching the new MacBooks over the last few months, and I’m pretty sure the new MacBook Air is the right fit for me. The Pro would be a good fit if I needed a dedicated machine I used most of the day. Still, as I already have a reliable work laptop, I just need a light development machine to use at night and at weekends.

I’ve only owned two MacBooks over the last 15 years, which is pretty good. I wonder how long my new MacBookAir will last me?

Tonight, I’ve been building HTML templates with Tailwind to integrate them into a CMS of sorts using Rails. Is it a product? No, it’s just me hacking about on a wee Rails app and trying to brush up my skills once more. The last time I genuinely enjoyed doing this was a good couple of years ago.

So what prompted this change?

Well, the main reason is that I’m enjoying my job now. It’s full-time, but I’m also fully remote, so cutting out the commute has been a big win. There’s something to be said about working from home. It definitely suits me better than being in an office. I don’t mind being in an office environment, but the distractions can put your focus off a bit, depending on where you work. Working from home means, I can get my head down and get on with the work.

I’m using Ruby on Rails again. It’s not the most recent version, but I’ll take working with any version of Rails over working with just about anything else at the moment.

While working remotely, I am in a close-knit team that regularly checks with each other throughout the day. Although being remote has its benefits, you do need some contact with others throughout the day. Although Slack isn’t the ideal medium for this as it is pretty distracting, being able to meet and discuss with your team members regularly throughout the day breaks up the day nicely.

As a result, I’m finding myself reaching for the laptop more at night and hacking on Rails or Laravel apps. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to finish this little bit of code before turning in for the night.

Rebecca Toh has restarted her newsletter and in it’s first edition, Rebecca suggests accepting that we’ll never do everything perfectly and to enjoy more what we love to do.

Instead of working to make things perfect, why don’t we spend our energy instead on enjoying the things we love to do and getting utterly lost in them?

Maybe that is the true art we’re here to learn - to go deeper and deeper into the things that draw us in for no good reason, and to find true, lasting, simple joy in that.

— Rebecca Toh

Invest wisely with NB.

Invest by being there when you are there.

— Invest Wednesday 7

All good investments, but number 5 is a good start.

It’s been 24 hours since I installed iOS 16. The update process took quite some time to complete on my iPhone 12, but it still took longer on my wife’s iPhone XR. That aside, the update process was straightforward.

Being able to edit a message and undo the sending of a message is new to the Messages app. Undo the sending of a message? I don’t think I’ve ever had to undo the sending of a message; however, I don’t live in my messages app. Many other iPhone users have sent a message they wished they could un-send.

Being able to edit a message, though, that’s a nice feature. Most of the messages I can see myself editing will result from typos. Even with the auto-correct, I still manage to make some typos when sending messages.

Aside from all the other features new to iOS 16, the most significant change is what you first see on your iPhone when you pick it up. The Lock Screen.

There are several new features here that I’ve enjoyed messing about with. You can now create more than one Lock Screen and Home Screen pairing and switch between these throughout the day. I’ve got several screens set up now, but I’ve yet to examine how changing your focus affects these screens. However, using the different focuses is something I plan on doing to try and curb the number of times I reach for my phone throughout the day. The widgets on Lock Screens are also a nice touch, and hopefully, we’ll see more of these added in the future.

Overall the iOS 16 update is pretty good so far.