Toby's Log - Toby Mackenzie's Site

#4883

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 18:34:38 -0400

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

#4882

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:26:33 -0400

It was quite smoky today. Lots of smoke wafted down from Canadian wildfires to Akron, Ohio and beyond.

#4881

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:57:40 -0400

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 and then enter a search to quickly look up PHP functions, classes, etc.

Blog comments / mentions display back

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 11:58:00 -0400

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.

Goodbye, Rackspace

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:14:17 -0400

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.

#4878

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:47:47 -0400

I think I've got the issues with my wiki-blog's publishing to git fixed.

wiki-blog post publishing

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:19:59 -0400

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.

WordPress no longer running this blog

Tue, 26 May 2026 23:47:00 -0400

As of last night, this blog is no longer running on WordPress, as it had since 2003. 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.

#4875

Wed, 13 May 2026 00:00:39 -0400

Yesterday I got a letter from the IRS, a form CP5071. It said I had to verify my identity with them for them to continue processing my tax return.

#4872

Mon, 11 May 2026 16:58:25 -0400

I'm glad to see that MacVim 183, released on April 8th, contains the fix for the…

#4864

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:01:23 -0400

I won two art pieces from my Uncle Tom's estate auction. They will go on my walls along with my Uncle Joe's and other art.

#4860

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 23:50:12 -0400

Another of my uncles, Tom, passed away, and they're now having the first auction…