The sports world got some sad news last night. Mike Lange, who was the long-time voice of the Pittsburgh Penguins, passed away at the age of 76. His sayings were one of the best things about the broadcast, besides his incredible knowledge about hockey. He retired in 2021 and will be missed by all of …

Still very cold, but no new snow!

Another bitter cold rest of the week!

Heading back home to Pittsburgh this afternoon after a fun weekend with the Maryland grandkids!

Rainy Sunday morning down in Maryland.

Down in Maryland for the weekend, helping my son and his family get organized. My wife is so great at organizing!

Heading down to Maryland this afternoon to see my son, his family, and my grandkids. 😊

Very rainy morning.

I see my cardiologist today for my annual checkup and hopefully a new prescription to replace VASCEPA. It was bad enough when this medication cost $100 a month, but with my new Medicare Advantage update, it is now $348 a month, which is incredible and unaffordable.

Got some running around to do early this morning, then I have a Zoom meeting at 11:00.

An interesting problem arose on my daughter’s Etsy site. She was trying to issue a refund, but there was a bug in their code that was showing a transparent sign-out layer over the top of the div that contained the refund actions, so anytime she tried to click the refund popup menu, she got …

It’s Super Bowl Sunday! I truly hope the Philadelphia Eagles win, thwarting the Kansas City Chiefs' three-peat!

Show day! My daughter is part of the I Made It! Mine at The Block Northway event today! She’s one of over 120 vendors selling all types of wares. It runs from 10:00 to 3:00 today, so stop by! 😀

I’ve been reluctant for whatever reason to use ChatGPT to write Python code for me. For some reason, my stubborn old-fashioned programmer’s way of thinking kept telling me to write my own code so I would learn from my mistakes. But today I thought I would give ChatGPT a try on creating a …

I have to quit doom scrolling. What’s going on in D.C. is horrible and depressing. If they do something to Social Security and Medicare, they are going to hurt 70 million seniors, some of whom surely voted these bastards into office! Someone has to do something about Musk. A much cooler day …

Today is going to be a busy day between running errands and doing some soul searching about the current state of my affairs.

My next hurdle is figuring out how to do subheads in my Drummer script that publishes to my micro.blog site. Right now, it doesn’t work at all. ☹️ I’m actually growing used to having my blogroll on its own page on my micro.blog site here. The more I learn about the micro.blog platform, …

Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit! IYKYK.

It’s January 31st, and believe it or not, there is rolling thunder and rain happening outside my window. I have a micro.blog site that I had stopped pushing my content to, but now I’m thinking that I want to start using the site again. I need to learn how to change the theme/style to …

This is a test for my new concept on my Micro.blog site.

While out running around, I think I’m going to turn my Micro.blog site into a TIL (Things I Learned) site and point to it from my main blog. I’m thinking about changing my Micro.blog site, which currently mirrors my Electric Drummer blog, to something else that I can link to from my main blog. …

A beautiful morning with a little bit of fog. Going to finally be sunny and in the mid 70s after all of the rain the last week.

My daughter just dropped off the Blue Yeti Nano Premium microphone and I discovered they work best with wired over the ear headphones so I placed an order at BestBuy for the Sony - ZX Series Wired On-Ear Headphones that I will pick up tomorrow. This is a test. I did a quick and dirty audio recording …

Rabbit, rabbit! 🐇

I realize I do a lot of noodling in my brain about all type of things that I need to get written down on this blog. I know my writing is a bit sloppy but I think I could become a decent blogger if I used some disipline in my daily routine. I’d also like to post more on social media. The …

Missed posting yesterday as my daughter had an outdoor show that we had to set up at 6:30 AM! The show continues today at the Mt. Lebanon Artist’s Market.

Somedays I get so far down a rabbit hole that I can’t seem to find my way back out. Today is one of those days. Another cool, gray morning!

September 26 September 25 September 24 September 23 September 22 September 21 September 20 September 19 September 18 September 17 September 16 September 15 September 14 September 13 September 12 September 11 September 10 September 9 September 8 September 7 September 6 September 5 September 4 …

With all of the different current technologies that keep vying for my attention and begging me to learn about I sometimes feel the the dogs in the movie Up! Squirrel!! Need to do some running around today and then take my grandson to soccer late in the afternoon. After soccer my wife and I will be …

I just got access to Advanced Voice Mode in ChatGPT on both the iOS and Mac apps. Very interesting with a much more natural way of conversing. What caught me by surprise is I was watching a video about hurricane Helene and when I had fisnished ChatGPT asked me if I was in the path of the hurricane! …

Excellent post by Dave Winer about the situation we find ourselves in regarding abortion. It’s horrible what the white Republican men have done to the women of our country! I need to make changes in my life instead of living in the past.

Kind of scary yet exciting: “It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.” – Sam Altman Cool and rainy today. But the Steelers won again! 😀

Every day I use Python for quick hit ideas run in the terminal. It is such an easy and simple yet robust language that just about any idea I have can be implemented in pure Python. There are so many cli tools built with Python that I use including ones I have created myself. Good morning sports …

Just read a post by Dave Winer about healthcare as you get older that I really relate to. I’m a little bit older than Dave but I have been through very similar things with the healthcare system. It’s not fun. My daughter has a small show today at the East Liberty Wine Festival. They …

The Beatles Recording Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts club Band Lot of logistics to figure out for tomorrow’s show. A lot of moving pieces! 🚚

Interesting read: Taste is Eating Silicon Valley - “Just as software ate the world and dramatically transformed industries in the last era, taste is now eating software—and with it, Silicon Valley” A famous lecture given in 1982 by computer science pioneer Grace Hopper, “Future …

I’m going to put my Drummer script issues to the back burner and get back to my Python tools that I’ve let sit idle for too long! Because I still haven’t time to fix my script I copied and pasted into my micro.blog site the missing information for the days I was testing the …

Busy day ahead.

Didn’t get a chance to do much digging into my script yesterday. Hopefully I can get to it today.

Morning notes Had great ribs last night at Dee Jays! Didn’t have much time to dig into my script issues with regard to these headers. Maybe this morning?

Morning notes Having dinner with a good friend this evening at my favorite ribs place Dee Jays! Haven’t had a chance to look into what my script is doing when I use these headers and nothing shows up on my micro.blog. Hopefully I can take a look this weekend and put a fix in place.

Good morning America! How are you?

Afternoon notes Morning notes

The debate last night was a master class in dealing with a malignant narcissist. Harris laid traps for Trump that he just walked right into showing the country who he really is!

I absolutely love using Dave Winer’s Electric Drummer for writing my blog content and pushing it to multiple platforms. I also love the scripting capability! The only thing I wish I could do is call shell scripts with ED then I could use my other programming loves of bash and python to do some …

Working on a command line RSS retriever so I can store entries in Datasette. The Steelers had an ugly win againast Atlanta yesterday! But it’s still a W!

Brisk morning! Feels like football weather! 🏈

Feels like fall this morning! 🍂

Feels like fall this morning! 🍂

Beautiful morning! 😀 The Ravens-Chiefs game last night was fun to watch! The tip of the receiver’s toe decided the game as time expired!

Started learning about Github Actions yesterday and finally got an example to actually run without errors. Still diggin'…

Loving this weather although the temp is going up to around 80 but the dew point is low!

Another beautiful day ahead! Sunny and pleasant!

Our local rail system called the T is finally back in full service in my neighborhood! Since my wife and I are “senior citizens” we can ride for free! In fact we’re taking it down to the north shore to check out the WW II ship that is currently docked by Acrisure stadium. …

Rabbit, rabbit! 🐰

I find I’m using ChatGPT more and more to help with coding questions where I used to rely completely on stack overflow. Last day of August and it’s going to be another hot day!

“Every day is a bonus.” – Badger Bob Johnson I really love how I can update my main blog, my micro.blog and my Datasette instance all from Electric Drummer! 😎 I have my annual dermatologist appointment today. Ever since my mom passed away from melanoma in 1991 I have been getting …

Ended up spending 5 hours at the Subaru dealer yesterday waiting for my Forester inspection. The biggest time waster was a bearing problem that was covered by my warranty but gave the mechanics all kind of problems. They did have great Wi-Fi though! 😎

Strive not to be a success, but rather be of value. – Albert Einstein Another scorcher today! I’m really tired of this excessive heat! 🥵

Mid 90s today with a poor air quality alert to boot! I can’t wait until fall gets here!

Another hot day with possible thunderstorms! ⛈️

I’ve added a parser for urls that are in a blog entry. I create an array of the urls and add it at the end of the blog entry before it is added to my Datasette instance. I might revisit the feature at a later date but I like it for now. A new version of my KM macro that directly updates my …

Now I can go back to looking at why my vector encoding didn’t work last night. Now I’m trying a new trick using my icon on the side of Drummer to both update my blog and update my Datasette instance. It worked! 🔥 This is really cool! Turns out the Keyboard Maestro supports url schemes so …

Next I want to experiment with creating vectors of my content so I can do similarity searchs. Finished importing my blog posts that have been written in Drummer into a Datasette instance. VP Harris gave an electrifying speech last night! One of the best I have heard! 😍

Today I’m hoping to get all of my blog entries into datasette and then create vectors of them for working with an llm. Made good progress working with shot-scraper and sqlite-utils to integrate my blog with datasette. 😎

The Obamas were on fire last night! 🔥🔥

My goals for today: Incorporate sqlite with my blogging learn shot-scraper learn Github Actions Another cool, crisp and beautiful morning! 😍

I’m looking at how I could store my blog content in an sqlite database so I can do more data exploration of it with Datasette. I’m wondering if I should convert the opml to markdown… I love working with data. Between pandas for python and datasette by Simon Willison there is so …

The Pirates scored more runs in yesterday afternoon’s win (7-2) than the Steelers scored in their loss last night (9-3)! I know it’s still preseason but the Steelers better figure out how to score touchdowns soon! Wasn’t the disruption of the quarterback room and a new offensive …

The Pirates finally broke their 10 game losing streak last night! 🙃

Looking forward to having lunch with some old work friends! 😍

Looks like the heat is coming back but with low humidity which I can deal with!

I can’t believe how great this weather is! 😎

Another beautiful morning! Going to eat my breakfast on the deck. 😍

It’s a beautiful, cool morning with lots of sunshine! Almost feels like fall! 😎 I was so busy yesterday that I forgot to post anything.

It’s a beautiful cool morning and it’s going to be a wonderful stretch of days coming up! Temps in the 70s and low humidity! My kind of weather! 😍

Finally going to be pleasant weather this weekend so I can open the windows and turn off the AC. 😎

It ended up getting hotter and stickier yesterday than what was forecasted! Today is another sticky day but it should be a little cooler!

A lot of storms and rain last night which we really needed! As a result it will be about 10 degrees cooler today! 😀

My annual wellness visit with my PCP is this afternoon.

Totally forgot to post anything yesterday and am getting a late start today! Too many things going on!🤪

Very humid this morning! I really don’t like this kind of weather! I’d much prefer temps in the 70s with low humidity! 😎

Rainy morning! ☔️

Rabbit, rabbit! 🐇

And now the heat is returning… 🥵

Came across this project last night: FastHTML. Pretty interesting for Python developers! 🐍 Going to be stormy today! ⛈️

Got some running around to do today.

Going to be really hot today! Might stay in the AC.

Heat is moving back in to the burgh for at least the weekend! 🥵

I’m getting my annual bloodwork this morning. 💉

Yesterday got away from me! Hope to be more focused today!

I need to focus more on my Python projects and less what is happening in the political world!

It’s fascinating how fast Kamala Harris has garnered support throughout the Democratic party. Plus she has raised $100 million dollars since Sunday! This is going to be a fun ride! 😃

Yesterday was certainly an extraordinary day in US politics! WIth Biden dropping out of the race and endorsing his vice president Kamala Harris for the nomination things are getting really interesting! Now the old fart in the race is Trump and his slipping, criminal mind! The republicans are like …

Good morning sports fans! My beloved Pirates have won 6 in a row! ⚾️ 😎

Nice cool Saturday morning! 😃

The Microsoft outage is causing havoc all around the world. Kind of scary how much we still depend on Microsoft and of course Amazon! 😳

Feels so much nicer this morning with the windows open and the AC off. 😀

Finally starting to cool down around here although it’s still a bit humid!

Hopefully today will be the last of the sweltering heat as cold front is moving in tomorrow. I’m really tired of this heat! 🥵

I really hope we collectively come to a more peaceful and understanding about our differences and learn to respect each other.

After last night I fear we may have just crossed the Rubicon.

Another hot one today in the low 90s! 🥵

The cool down lasted all of one day! Temps in the 90s coming back this weekend! 😡

The sweltering heat finally broke last night and it’s finally nice and cool with temps in the upper 60s this morning. 😀

This heat is unbelievable! It was already in the upper 80s at 9:00 this morning! We may get thunderstorms this afternoon which hopefully will break the heat wave! 🥵⛈️

We will be under a heat advisory starting at noon today! And global warming is a myth! 🥵

It’s my granddaughter’s 9th birthday today! Happy Birthday Pari Joon! 🎂🎁🎈🎉

Going to the Pirates-Mets game this afternoon! ⚾️

Good morning sports fans! Before a sell-out crowd my Pirates crushed the Mets last night 14-2 behind 7 home runs including 2 grand slams! Hope they still have some runs in the tank for the rest of the weekend! 😎

My oldest grandson put on his own fireworks show (with the help of his dad) last night! He even created a spotify playlist to accompany the show! We all had a great time! 😍

Happy 4th of July! 🎇🎆🧨

Still feeling down in the dumps with the way our country is right now.

Thought provoking article over on MacStories about how Large Language Models have “learned” and what affect they believe it will have on the open web. Still reeling about the Supreme Court rulings yesterday! 😡

After the Supreme Court rulings today the reality is we live in a corrupt country that the Republicans successfully caused through the many years of trying. We have to stop Republicans from taking more power by voting them out or in the case of Trump not voting him back in. A very sad day for true …

Watched the first 4 episodes of Presumed Innocent on Apple TV+ and it was defimitely a David E. Kelley driven show. Really liked it and can’t wait for next week’s episode!

Happy Birthday dad! If my dad was still roaming this earth he would have been 101 today! He really brought a smile to everyone he met! 😍

Watched the debate last night. Trump is such an outright liar, convicted felon and con man! Biden had an off night in presentation but he told the truth.

Had some rough thunderstorms last night with a couple of tornados outside of the city! Crazy weather!

Things got a little crazy yesterday and I’m still going to be catching up today.

Hoping to get back to building a Cookiecutter template for my vector embedding and search process.

Got back last night after driving through a fair amount of rain. At one point Apple CarPlay announced that the route we were on would take us into a tornado warning area and suggested a safer route! First time I ever had that happen!

Heading down to Maryland to see my grandkids and to celebrate my oldest son’s birthday! Won’t be any blog posts until I get back Sunday evening.

Another 90s day! 🥵

Juneteenth - A day we celebrate freedom! Another very hot day with popup thunderstorms expected once again! ⛈️

Our expected heat wave caused some serious storms late yesterday afternoon and more of the same is expected today with the high in the mid 90s!🥵 So much running around yesterday that I forgot to post on my blog!

Happy Father’s Day! 😀

Going to my grandson’s baseball game today! After we’re heading to a backyard pond supply place to get lily pads for our pond!

Nice morning but thunderstorms are heading our way this afternoon. ⛈️

It’s going be hot today (upper 80s) but next week will be a scorcher in the mid to upper 90s and possibly hitting 100! 🥵

Beautiful sunny morning! 😎

Have a meeting today to introduce me to some new talking head AI technology. 😎

Apple’s WWDC starts today! I couldn’t afford to attend but am looking forward to the keynote inroducing what Apple’s approach to AI will be! 🤖

My back is killing me this morning! I think the shoes I wore to the wedding last night angered my herniated discs! 😞

Going to my wife’s cousin’s son’s wedding today. (Did you follow that?) Nice weather all day! 😀

Having lunch with my dear friends today! 😍

Now we start prepping for the next show at the end of June! 😎

Time to set the studio back up after the show!

Last day of the Three Rivers Arts Festival for my daughter! It’s going to be a hot one in the upper 80s! 🥵

Day 4 of the Three Rivers Arts Festival! Turned out the expected showers never happend yesterday so sales were busy! 😀

Day 3 of the Three Rivers Arts Festival! Had a great day yesterday! Today is cooler with scattered light rain but should be a fun day!

Day 2 of the Three Rivers Arts Festival! We had a scare yesterday around 5:30 PM when a food vendor had one of their propane tanks explode! Flames were shooting up into the air! Since our booth was around 50 yards away we, along with everyone else in our section, had to evacuate for about 90 minutes …

Busy next 5 days with the Three Rivers Arts Festival supporting my daughter’s business! 😎

Trump found guilty on all counts!! 🤣 Arts Festival setup day! Busy, busy! 😀

Busy day! Lots of running around getting ready for the Three Rivers Arts Festival that starts on Friday. 😀

Had a great lunch with my old bosses and friends today! We talked a lot about what they are doing and how they believe I can be of help. Almost exclusively about AI and Large Language Models. Really looking forward to working with them again! 😀 Having lunch with my old bosses! Could be interesting! …

Happy Memorial Day! 🇺🇸

Really enjoying having the grandkids in town! 😍

Grandkids are in the house!! 😍

Memorial Day weekend is upon us! The unofficial start of summer! 😎

Just discovered that Target carries the Stream Deck Neo which I have been looking at for awhile now. And I also discovered I had over $15 in rewards at Target so I pulled the trigger on the $99 Neo and got it for $84. 😀 I use 2 Stream Decks already but I really like the sleekness of the Neo. Another …

I’m really thankful for whole house air conditioning! It’s been really hot the last few days and working without air would be difficult to say the least! 😎

Another scorcher in the burgh today! 🥵

Going to be pushing 90 the next few days! That’s hot!

Going for my first bike ride of the spring later this afternoon! 😎

The young Pirates pitching phenom Paul Skenes is sure fun to watch! ⚾️

Going to be a rainy day! ☔️

Decided to start an outline that is private where I can document my trials and tribulations with programming large language models with python. Beautiful sunny morning! 😎

Another round of uproar at OpenAI just after announcing new stuff with the cheif scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever resigning! WTF!

Going to spend a lot of time today (hopefully) working with the new Mac ChatGPT app along with the looking at the API for the new GPT 4o model.

I was able to get access to the new Mac ChatGPT app and it’s really sweet! Helped me quickly write a cli app this evening! Do you have the same problem I do where there are so many things that interest you that you constantly jump from one to another without accomplishing anything? I am trying …

One of my favorite quotes: Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, “Wow! What a ride!” Hunter …

I’m hoping this weekend I get some time to look deeper into groq.com and they’re api to see if I can hook it up to drummer. In a perfect world I can hook up my local ollama server to drummer as well but haven’t had any luck so far. Sunny morning but thunderstoms are on the schedule …

So it turns out my ear ache(s) were not from a cold but from very packed in wax! 😱 It took the nurse assistant about 90 minutes to loosen and clear out the was in my left ear. Gross! But I can ear normally once again! 😃 Couldn’t get into MedExpress yesterday as a walk-in so I made an actual …

Still fighting left ear problems so I’m going to stop by the local MedExpress today.

We had tornado warnings screaming on our phones at 1:30 this morning but nothing happened! Thank god! It’s a beautiful and sunny day now! ☀️

We’re supposed to get the tail end of the massive storms hitting the midwest! ⛈️

Still fighting an ear ache and now both ears feel stuffed like I’m driving through mountains! 😔

Woke up with an ear ache in my left ear. I wouldn’t be surprised if I contributed to it’s arrival by watching my grandkids play baseball in a could drizzle yesterday! 😩

So much for that summertime feeling! Chilly and rainy this Saturday morning!

Another hot day in the burgh! ☀️⛈️

Feels like Summertime! Always loved Janis Joplin! 😎

Very disturbing what is happening on college campuses. 😔

Bonnie’s concert was superb last night! Her opening act was Maia Sharp who was excellent as well!

Looking forward to dinner and the Bonnie Raitt concert tonight! I’ve probably seen her in concert over 30 times since the 70s! 😀

A lot of running around today!

Going to feel like summer the next few days with highs in the 80s! 😎

The sun is really bright this morning coming through my side window in my office!☀️

Client loved the progress made with using local LLM and critical document identification. My two favorite tools are Ollama and Simon WIllison’s LLM. I love working in the terminal! 🖥️

Going to be a busy and hopefully productive day! 🤞🏻

Primary day here in Pennsylvania but I’m registered as an Independent so I don’t get to vote! Stupid! 😠

Good morning America, how are ya! 😎

Such strange weather! We had 80s last week and today it’s 40° 🥶

Last night I finally realized the embeddings model you choose has a great impact on your RAG workflow and the quality of the answers returned from the LLM. A lot of testing today and tomorrow.

With the release of llama 3 from Meta yesterday afternoon the local llm capabilities have gotten more powerful!

I’m going to look at Simon Willison’s llm command line tool again as part of my toolchain for the project I’m working on. Sometimes the shiny objects (PrivateGPT) are more of a distraction than a solution.

Had a somewhat frustrating day working with PrivateGPT. I don’t think it’s going to the answer I’m looking for. Design issues in FeedLand blogrolls. I would really love to have the same blogroll on my Micro.blog site. Plan to continue working with Ollama and PrivateGPT today. I …

And… the Penguins miss the playoffs for the second year in a row. ☹️ Last night I started working with a project called PrivateGPT. This project enables me to “chat” with my files using local LLMs served by Ollama which is my favorite LLM tool to date.

Just updated my blogs in Electric Drummer with the new blogroll settings that Dave Winer has just released and it worked perfectly! You can see it at either here or here. I’m hoping that sometime in the near future I can implement this blogroll on my micro.blog site. We had some loud …

Beautiful and sunny Sunday morning!🌞

With tonight’s loss I think the Penguins season is most likely done. They don’t control their own destiny anymore and only have 2 games left. Stranger things have happend but I’m not counting on them making the playoffs this year. Still a lot of wind this morning but at least …

Extremely windy today! I actually like the sound it makes as it whistles through my office window!!💨 I think I might start looking to see if Noah is building a new ark! 💧

Good morning sunshine! The earth says hello! ☀️

Starting work on a new AI project that I hope to use local LLMs on. 🤞🏻

Beautiful morning! Going up to the mid 70s today! 😀

Solar eclipse day! Hope you have some safe glasses and a clear sky! 🌘

Cold morning but it’s going to warm up fairly quickly!

Finally starting to warm up and feel like spring! 🌷

Today’s quote: Be curious, not judgmental. – Walt Whitman Today is the Pirates home opener and the current temperature is 38°! Feels more like football weather! 🥶

Trying to get a handle on my “imposter syndrome” feeling this morning… Woke up to snow flurries! WTF!!

Airtable uses Javascript for all of its scripting interfaces but their Web API can be accessed by almost any language. I built a test using Python to call their API and it worked very well. I still find that Python is my favorite language to use! 🐍 Started looking into Airtable once again as they …

Yikes! Thunderstorms with lots of lightning, heavy rain, and flash flood warning! ⛈️⚡️

Just got back in town! Had a great time with the grandkids in Maryland! 😍

Won’t be online the rest of the day while traveling.

Heading to Maryland tomorrow to see the out of town grandkids.😀 I love using Electric Drummer to update my Micro.blog site!

Hoping to take a look at Open Interpreter today. Chilly but sunny this morning! 🌞

I hadn’t created any new Apple Shortcuts for a long while but I had an idea today to quickly show me a couple of stocks total value of the shares I hold. It was actually fun creating it and I’m quite satisfied with the result! 😀 Dryer still waiting on parts so it’s off to the …

I’m really becoming a terminal lover especially since I installed Warp. I love all of Simon Willison’s cli tools such as llm and sqlite-utils which are inspiring me to create my own! Stay tuned! Rainy morning. ☔️

Yay! My dryer is being fixed today as well! UPDATE: When the repairman started working on my dryer another part blew after he put in the new parts he had ordered for the original repair so I am again waiting for new parts. ☹️ Beautiful morning and the temperature is going to hit the mid 60s today! 😎

Very sunny but cool Sunday morning! 😀

Since our 2 year old dryer is on the fritz and awaiting a part which arrives on Monday I will have to go to the local laundromat to dry our laundry today. Brings back memories from when I was single and living in a small apartment in the mid 70s. 😀 Rainy and chilly this Saturday morning. 💧

Annual cardioligist appontment today!

Sometimes the best laid plans… It’s even colder today than yesterday! 24° 🥶

A lot of running around today so not much writing. A lot of wind this morning with gusts up to 40 mph! This must be the March lion roaring! 🦁

Started exploring the datasets at Data.gov to use with Datasette. Woke up to snow on the grass!! ❄️

One more of my favorite quotes: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.” — ​Albert Einstein One of my favorite quotes: “If you talk to a man in a …

Damn! It’s going to get cold again this week! Could even see some flurries! 😠 All the quarterbacks that were on the Steeler roster last year are gone by either release, trade or free agency! Now the quarterback room has Russell Wilson who has won a super bowl and Justin Fields who was acquired …

End of the short lived Kenny Pickett era with the Steelers.

Looking into why my Bookmarks page on my Micro.blog isn’t updating automatically when I use the bookmarklet to add a site/page. UPDATE: It may have to do with adding new content to my blog itself. Turns out all other “data” pages like Bookmarks do not update until the entire site …

My next steps are to learn more about the Micro.blog platform and what it’s features are. I forgot… Happy 𝝅 day! Success!! 😀 😀 😎 Now I have deleted the attribute to check to see if the new post logic works as well! This is the first test with the new logic. And it worked!! My intention …

I just discovered the problem! I was using the wrong term (method instead of type) in the request object and now it's working! Tomorrow is going to be fun! 😀 Still struggling with using Drummer to update my micro.blog site. My script seems to work as there are no errors but nothing shows up on my …

This is an interesting test for my Micro.blog site. I’m using a Jupyter Notebook to write my content and then sending it to my site. Let’s see how this works!

This is a test of an emoji 😀

Hopefully finding a solution to using Drummer with my micro.blog site today.

I would really prefer to use Drummer for both my blog and my micro.blog so I need to dig further into the micro.blog API. Right now I am copying and pasting from Drummer to MarsEdit which is not very efficient. Just added a custom domian to my Micro.blog site garywthompson.dev Working on getting my …

That worked but it was sort of brute force as it took away the extra space between lines. There are 2 returns before this line.

I added some code to strip tags out of the item.description. Checking to see if it works.

Doing some debugging to see where the HTML tags are coming from…

Interestingly I do not see the HTML code in the xml file itself so I need to do some digging.

I changed some code in feedtomasto.js so let's see if I did it right! 😀

My masto server does not support markdown 😩

Masto is showing HTML markup from my personal feed.

Adding a new item to my personal feed to see if it shows up in my Masto feed. I may have broken something.

I'm testing feedToMasto with my personal feed.

RSS 2.0 spec at Harvard

Between micro.blog, mastodon.social and feedland.org there is so much potential with RSS. I want to explore using RSS with data sensors controlled by my Raspberry Pi.

Testing the new post interface of micro.blog

Now I am seeing if I can push this to my public micro.blog page.

Trying another test over to micro.blog

What is Mastodon?

This week in Python

Another test to see if undefined will go away as my feed title. Update: Read the documentation dummy! Everything works now as advertised!

Markdown New Bold Test Italic test

This is really quite cool!!

Taking another look at micro.blog now that Twitter is possibly imploding…

Still not sure why my micro.blog doesn’t update when posting from Drummer!

Taking another look at micro.blog now that Twitter is possibly imploding…

Decide I wanted to see how I can use my micro.blog today. Still seem to be having trouble publishing from Drummer! Maybe I am not waiting long enough for the updates to appear. 😀 Trying a different Drummer verb for publishing!

Back to working on integrating Drummer with Obsidian. Last night I discovered the reason my Shortcuts app on my Mac was so unresponsive was due to a corrupt SQLite database under the hood. Deleted it along with the other pref files in Library > Shortcuts and let them get rebuilt. Now the …

This is a test to see if it disappears

Working on my scripts to integrate monthly entries with Obsidian. I also still need to work on integrating the inlineImage and image attributes with my Obsidian data.: Test of a sub

I realized that what I truly enjoy most is scripting in all forms. On the Mac I use Drummer to create scripts that initially were for blogging but now the scripts are becoming more utilities to connect different programs and web site/APIs. I also use Shortcuts in Monterey as “glue” …

A new test for Obsidian again.

I like where this is heading integrating Drummer with Obsidian. I’ve got a shortcut that I call from the Services menu that takes the data for a particular day and creates a file in Obsidian with the same date in the microblog folder.

Testing the link to Scripting News

Today I have been noodling more that coding! I am truly amazed that the Mac Shortcuts app is running so smoothly since I cleaned up it’s corrupted prefs and database! 😃

Testing the link mechanism in Drummer

On a side note I am also noodling about recreating what I’m doing in shortcuts as root scripts like I used to do with Frontier and its object databases.

Now onto nested subs and image attributes!

Turns out it was a nested if/end in my main shortcut causing the issue because of how I was putting my debug alerts in nested if/end blocks as well! 😱

This is a final line test.

After further testing it appears that my “function” shortcut isn’t getting called at all when the alerts are turned off. Almost like a timing issue!

Ran into some issues with creating a “function” shortcut to handle looping through the subs in the Drummer JSON. If I put in some debug alerts it runs fine but if I disable them it doesn’t do the final sub in my test.

I also need to figure out how to handle Drummer images in Obsidian.

I have gotten the basic daily outline working in Obsidian! 😃 Now I have to work on how to build a subroutine in Shortcuts to loop through looking for subs.: I also need to figure out how to handle Drummer images in Obsidian. And this is a nested test for my checkSubs function.

I’m starting to believe that I’m wasting my time getting outline mode working in Obsidian.

This line is a sub of the previous text but is showing up flat in Obsidian. Time to start digging!

And another sub with additinal text to make it wrap around. And another sub with additinal text to make it wrap around. And another sub with additinal text to make it wrap around.

Another sub test.

I think using E/D is the way forward for me to integrate all of my thinking with Obsidian and really whatever tools I can also figure out out to connect. I'd love to figure out how to connect my <a href="http://readwise.io">Readwise</a> highlights. I: Another sub test. And still another sub test. Another one bites the dust

Continuing work on my Drummer/Obsidian/Shortcuts integration focusing on the Mac today. I have come to realize that my shortcut I am using from the Services menu doesn’t honor multiple levels of my outline so when I send the data over to Obsidian it is flat which for archiving purposes is fine …

For some reason my micro.blog site isn't updating as fast as it used to but I don't know if it is related to E/D or something else. The posts show up in the micro.blog dashboard but not on my actual site so it must be a micro.blog issue.: This is a different test for handling 1 nested level.

For some reason my micro.blog site isn’t updating as fast as it used to but I don’t know if it is related to E/D or something else. The posts show up in the micro.blog dashboard but not on my actual site so it must be a micro.blog issue.

I am exploring using Electric Drummer for my work with integrating my outlines with my Obsidian enviornment. What’s very cool is using url schemes in Electric Drummer do not trigger any security dialogs like Safari and Chrome! This could lead to some very cool capabilities on the Mac! I have …

Now fighting an iPad version of the shortcut not working properly!

I like where this is heading integrating Drummer with Obsidian. I’ve got a shortcut that I call from the Services menu that takes the data for a particular day and creates a file in Obsidian with the same date in the microblog folder.

I’m starting to believe that I’m wasting my time getting outline mode working in Obsidian.

This line is a sub of the previous text but is showing up flat in Obsidian. Time to start digging!

Continuing work on my Drummer/Obsidian/Shortcuts integration focusing on the Mac today. I have come to realize that my shortcut I am using from the Services menu doesn’t honor multiple levels of my outline so when I send the data over to Obsidian it is flat which for archiving purposes is fine …

Testing the link mechanism in Drummer

Today I have been noodling more that coding! I am truly amazed that the Mac Shortcuts app is running so smoothly since I cleaned up it’s corrupted prefs and database! 😃

Finally feel like I have a great path forward!! And no more use of url schemes from within Safari! 😀

I’ve taken a new path for integrating Drummer content with Obsidian. Thanks to Federico Viticci of macstories.net and his Obsidian Clip for Mac shortcut I have a starting point for how I can accomplish my goal. I’ve modified his shortcut so it will work both on the Mac as a Service and …

I wish Safari handled url scheme permissions the way the Shortcuts app does. Ask you once and then remembers your choice from that point on.

The one challenge with using url schemes to pass data from Drummer to any app (Shortcuts or Obsidian at the moment) always prompts a permission dialog box in Safari and Chrome on my Mac and iPad. I will have to live with it as that is the security model in both macOS and iPadOS. Sadly I can’t …

Back to working on integrating Drummer with Obsidian. Last night I discovered the reason my Shortcuts app on my Mac was so unresponsive was due to a corrupt SQLite database under the hood. Deleted it along with the other pref files in Library > Shortcuts and let them get rebuilt. Now the …

I used to do a lot of Frontier scripting and automation back in the day and Drummer is starting to get me going in a similar direction.

My goal is to use Drummer for most of my data collecting and note taking and then pushing them into Obsidian as my main location for all of my data storage.

I’m looking into bypassing the shortcuts app and using Obsidan’s url scheme directly. Initial tests look promising. Using this approach would eliminate a lot of heartache on the Mac side with shortcuts being an unfinished product. Plus I can do a lot of text manipulation via the …

I’ve got a pretty good start on a script that will allow me to pass over the data from my outline entries via a Siri shortcut. The next step will be to pass this text over to Obsidian…

Now I am concentrating on learning what the limits are of Drummer’s scripting environment. I’ve already discovered that I can call a Siri shortcut using the verb webBrowser.openUrl(). I can see Drummer becoming my main way of launching all type of inter connected scripting environments starting with …

So now I’m using Drummer on my 11” iPad Pro and it’s working quite well! I take my this iPad Pro pretty much everywhere I go since I have an LTE SIM card I switch back and forth between my 12.9” and 11” iPad Pros.

I have discovered that deleting my outline doesn’t delete my micro.blog which is cool but now they are out of sync but that’s ok as I’m just experimenting at the moment.

Well gotta start over as I accidentally deleted my Drummer outline that I was using to create my micro.blog.

Working on a shortcut that will parse the OPML of this blog into JSON and finally into markdown to be stored in Obsidian.

Gotta look into changing the CSS used in my micro.blog site so lines like this won’t have an additional date.

So I decided to give Shortcuts on Monterey a try again since I had been attempting to use them all summer during the beta period but was just too painful! Alas, nothing has changed and the Shortcuts editor is basically too buggy to do anything worthwhile! Back to using it just on the iPad for the …

Working with Secure Shellfish to upload files from my iPad Pro to my little used WordPress server and setting the clipboard to the path so I can add the image attribute. Tester.

So I wrote a python script on my Mac that uploads an image to my WordPress server that I’m not really using and puts the url on the clipboard so I can paste it into an attribute in Drummer like the image below. Very cool! I think I’m going to see if I can do something similar on my iPad …

Digging into Obsidian and seeing if there is some way to capture what I write on my gwthompson.micro.blog site in my vault.

A longer post that would be a normal post length in another blogging platform. I don’t know the limits of micro.blog but will find out soon enough! I think I might try using a custom domain eventually but for now I’ll use the default gwthompson.micro.blog.

Very cool!!

Posting to microblog from Drummer