Weeknotes #16

Weeknotes Returns!

It has been a long few months, but I am happy to say my Weeknotes are back! It has been quite the journey since last I wrote, but here’s the short version. As mentioned in the How Taming Knots Works post, Taming Knots is a folder of markdown files that Hugo converts into pretty, static HTML for me. Previously, this was all happening through GitHub Actions and deployed to GitHub Pages. I want to eventually move off of GitHub as much as I possibly can, so I have tried a few different things. I tried moving to Codeberg Pages, I tried to move to Gitea and use their Actions pipeline to deploy to Cloudflare Pages. I even looked at GitLab for a bit. Eventually though, I decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze right at this second and that the tinkering was getting in the way of the writing, so I settled everything back down into a setup where I feel like I can move away easily if I need to, but also I can continue to write while I do more research on a better option long term. Taming Knots is still a bunch of markdown files that get uploaded to a Github Repo, but now instead of building and hosting through GitHub, I have Cloudflare Pages watching for changes to the repo and building and deploying the site when it detects a commit. Being on Cloudflare means that I can easily pull the Github piece out and replace it with GitLab if I so choose or I can use any other “Actions” style worker to run Cloudflare’s Wrangler tool to package up and deploy the website from many other code ops platform, including Gitea which may make a comeback eventually. All that to say I basically made a big loop, but now I feel more ready to go on the second journey eventually.

Moving!

Another reason my weeknotes have lapsed is that I’m moving! We are selling the house out in the boonies and moving to a much more affordable place for the next year or two. As you can imagine, packing up the entire house and getting it ready for sale is taking up a lot of my time. Thankfully, this stress will be significantly lessened soon, so my weeknotes and other writing can resume.

Projects

I’ve finally gotten my home server into a spot I’m really happy with. I hope it’s easy for me to quickly set back up post-move. I’ve set everything up to be fairly portable. You can read more about it In my Home Server post.

Playing

  • Alan Wake II - I’ve been really enjoying this one. I love the wide variety in tones that are clearly separated by the characters. Having one character working with a more unsteady and often silly tone while the other does very serious, intense investigation is a fantastic combination.
  • Easy Delivery Co. - When I don’t have the brain power for Alan Wake, I’ve been playing this fun winter delivery game. It’s got fun physics and definitely fits into the “drive a shitty car” genre of vehicle games that I enjoy so very much.
  • Ridge Racer 2 - A game for when I truly do not want to have to use brain at all. Cars go fast. Do cool drifts. My PSP is so pretty.

Reading

  • Still working my way through House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski. I’d estimate I’m about a third of the way through it. It’s tough to tell becuase there’s a lot of flipping back and forth.

Watching

  • Twin Peaks - Emily and I have finished the first two seasons and the movie. We talked about it On the podcast for a few hours. I’m excited to get back to it and watch The Return.
  • City the Animation - Still plucking away at this. It’s extremely good, I just haven’t gotten to it as often as I’d like.