Toby's Log

Arborvitaes

This past weekend, I planted the last of four arborvitaes that I bought back in spring. I wanted something for a bit of privacy in my backyard, and read that arborvitaes are native-ish, easy to care for, and great for privacy. I saw them 50% off at Petiti’s one day while looking for other stuff, so I went ahead and picked up four that were maybe 4 some feet tall for $200.

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Our life is a giant puzzle, with a great many pieces that must be fit together to make it “right”. Each individual task, project, area of our life that we work on is its own puzzle, composed of many pieces that must be fit together while also fitting into the larger puzzle that is our life. Likewise, our life is part of a much, much larger puzzle that is the world, the universe, everything, and as we work on our life puzzle, we must look at that larger puzzle and ensure ours fits into it.


Last Thursday, I got about 4.5 inches of rain at my house (Akron). A good ground soaking. I got a bit of wet carpet in my basement, but no damage. I hear there was bad flooding in the valley.

Hasn’t rained since, so I’ve still had to water my garden, but not as much.


Site partially static

I am pleased to say that most of the non-blog parts of my site are now served from static files. I have been working toward making a static version of my site for a while. I have created a PHP static web task that can crawl a site and turn the responses into an Apache friendly directory structure. Those pages now can be served extra fast, without going through PHP, and could be served on a free static host if I wanted. To go static, I not only had to write the code to build the static files, but also had to modify my site code to have the desired output when called from that context and modify my Apache configuration to respond correctly and add some headers that were being added by PHP before.

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Compact about:profiles in Firefox

Firefox allows us to create multiple browser profiles to separate our activities, such as work, personal, finance, etc. It has an about:profiles page to manage and launch these. The page has not gotten much UX love and does not make very good use of space. On load, I can’t see the full second profile on my laptop (Macbook) screen. After living with this a long time, I decided to use userContent.css to customize the appearance so everything fits on one screen and I can quickly and easily find the two things I need most of the time: Each profile’s name, and the button to launch it with.

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