Toby's Log

Wednesday, the same day that Apple announced some new products, updates, and what-not, I noticed a message from Homebrew that my 2020 Macbook Air (Intel) is no longer officially supported by the project. I've still been able to update things, just needing to build more from source, but it will become fully unsupported in Fall 2027. Apple will still provide MacOS 15 Sequoia with security updates to that same approximate date. So that provides a likely end to when my Macbook can be considered up-to-date and secure.

I finally used my Minimal Phone (MP01) as an actual phone for about a week. Previously, I had been using it as basically a small e-reader, waiting on the perpetually pending OS update. But I decided I had waited long enough and went ahead and put my SIM in it. Since I had already set up the OS and Google account, it just worked. I really liked the hardware (e-paper and physical keyboard), but I gave up on it mainly because I don't think the OS update situation will satisfy my security needs.

This past weekend, I went to Blossom to see the Cleveland Orchestra, for the first and likely last time this season. The headline piece was a Ravel piano concerto. Continue reading post "#4885"

I have decided to create an ideas page and section with a sub-page per idea to hold all my ideas instead of doing them as posts on my blog. This is largely because I view blog posts as temporal things that are only really modified for fixes after initial publishing, whereas regular pages are evergreen, modified as much as desired to achieve their purpose. I want to be able to update my ideas if I come up with more details, find a better way to explain them, or even want to take them in a different direction. I have many idea posts that have sat unpublished, languishing waiting for a more thorough handling. As pages, I will be able to put up the skeleton of an idea and flesh it out later.

My Uncle Tom's estate is having a second auction. Smaller than the last one, wi…

It was quite smoky today. Lots of smoke wafted down from Canadian wildfires to Akron, Ohio and beyond. Continue reading post "#4882"

Despite being a PHP developer and Firefox user for a couple decades, I hadn't added a search of php.net to my Firefox search engine list until some months back. Now I can type @php<tab> and then enter a search to quickly look up PHP functions, classes, etc. Continue reading post "#4881"

I have brought back the display of existing comments on this blog. When I switched away from WordPress to my own blog solution, I didn't build any display of comments on posts since I haven't had comments enabled in years and wanted to make the switch quickly. I also wasn't sure how I wanted to handle storing them, since my site data repo is public and will likely have an open license at some point. Storing quotes by others under my own license is probably fine, but I decided to mostly do summaries unless the exact quote seemed important. I did mostly do full quotes of my responses, since that's definitely my data. So I put their comments and my responses all in a single markdown file per post, in more of a prose format than normal comments are shown.

We at Cogneato have finally shut down our servers and most other services with Rackspace. It is definitely a relief to be done with that. It was a six year operation, but a sudden large increase in costs pushed us to get it finished.

I think I've got the issues with my wiki-blog's publishing to git fixed. Continue reading post "#4878"

I switched my blog away from WordPress and to my own wiki-blog software a little over a week ago. I did so even without an easy way to publish posts, as I had to create the date based folder structure, increment an id, enter formatted dates and other meta-data, and run a rebuild of my static list pages, all manually. After a fair amount of work, I now have an automated way to do most of this via CLI.

As of last night, this blog is no longer running on WordPress, as it had since ≈2005. I have removed it and related code, switching to my own wiki-blog software. It builds a blog from a directory structure of markdown files. I've been working towards simplifying my site for some time, managing content with files kept in a git repo, using less complicated setups, and being static generator capable. Removing WordPress was in the plans for a while, but it was complicated to migrate. I've been pushing hard towards it for the last month or so and finally decided to make the switch even though things aren't perfect and some things aren't implemented with wiki-blog.