I have been experimenting with various habit tracking and home automation prototypes for quite a while. While I like the idea of having smart buttons around my house, they are a bit expensive for what I want to do with them, and I have not yet had luck getting an IKEA Tradfri button working. A few weeks ago, I recalled the NFC tag support in Home Assistant and wondered if I could use that.

I nearly did not notice the day, but it has now been one year since I moved into my new apartment.

For the first year I was in Fukuoka, I was in an apartment provided via a contract with my Japanese school. After my school year was up, I needed to find new accommodations. A classmate was moving out around the same time and recommend their old place which worked out great since it was the same management company as my initial apartment which made all the paperwork easy.

One of the things that has been nice about the recent interest in Mastodon, is the idea that each account has a built in RSS feed. RSS is great for subscribing to one type of information, but what about more software adding more calendar feeds?

My day typically involves too much context switching, but being able to put various bits of information in my calendar helps when I attempt to make a plan for the day.

I’ve been using hugo for my blog for a while, and while I appreciate being able to write posts in anything that supports Markdown, I’ve never enjoyed making sense of their template system. My site curently uses a fork of hugo-bootstrap (to fix minor bugs) with some other customizations from hugo-worklog that I wrote.

Ideally I would like a system where I can use django for the site, but maintain the same editing flow I have for my current site.

Eight Years

As of the end of last month, I’ve been in Japan for 8 years. Depending on my mood at the time, that sometimes seems like a short time and sometimes seems like a long time. I was only in San Francisco for a bit over 7 years so Japan is now where I’ve lived the longest outside of my family home.

The biggest changes from last year involve moving into a new place and adopting two cats. As a child, I always grew up with cats and especially with a lot of alone time I’ve been really happy to have two cats of my own. I may have been a bit naive on the difficulty of being a single (cat) father, but overall I think it has been a positive addition.

After experimenting the other day, I continued thinking about better ways to solve my analytics problem. I did not really want to run a separate fluentd instance in a container just to use out_exec but I wanted to use same functionality. I decided to take an afternoon and see how difficult it would be to create a go output plugin and built fluent-bit-exec_out .

Building a plugin

I started looking for examples https://github.com/fluent/fluent-bit-go/network/dependents on how to build a plugin. I’m not a Go developer by default, so most of my code is not particularly nice but it works.

I’ve been using the self-hosted version plausible with my blog and development site. It generally works well, but there are times I’d like to have a little bit more customization on the reports. I’m already collecting nginx logs using ltsv and fluent-bit’s tail plugin. Since I have extra time to tinker over my winter break, I’ve been experimenting a bit.

Default Plausible Configuration

The default path with Plausible is easy. You create a site in their admin and copy the Javascript snippet onto your site. This works ok for simple cases but doesn’t work for most bots and such that do not run javascript. Since I want to get information on the bots that are hitting my site we need to do something with our server logs.

Through middle and high school I was in the Boy Scouts. Each Boy Scout Troop is broken up into patrols of several boys. Each patrol has a name, which was often something pretty generic when I was in scouts. Common examples would be animals or creatures like fox patrol, bat patrol, dragon patrol, etc. While sitting around a campfire one evening, a friend commented on how generic some of the names were.

Quite a long time ago (long enough ago I do not remember the original source) I read a blog post or poll about various folder names on the computer. I recently remembered it and thought about writing it down.

Projects

I believe when I was in university, they had us using Eclipse as an IDE to write Java code. By default, Eclipse defaulted to a ~/Projects folder, so for many years that has been my default directory for my own projects. When I moved to web development and PHP and then later into Python, I used other editors like TextMate or Atom but I kept using ~/Projects for any of my coding projects.

Many sites are designed to snare your attention and keep you scrolling for as long as possible. This is often not particularly compatible with taking just a short break. Because so many sites are designed with patterns to hijack your brain, often we need to be proactive about not letting them get the initial hook.

For a while now, I’ve been using DNS to help me out. A few months ago, I started using NextDNS to help me with that. With my heavy internet usage (and possibly a misconfiguration on my side) I exceeded their free tier a bit each month,but I was happy enough with their service that I became a subscriber. (They have an affiliate program though I doubt I would get much traffic from my link.)