Your Twitter “Go Bag”

Charlie has been showing more interest in stuffed animals recently and has been very affectionate toward them, giving them hugs and snuggling them. This week he started carrying around a stuffed sloth almost as large as he is. Some times when he gets home from daycare, Sloth is the first thing he picks up.

Charlie also has a new thing where he takes his sippy cup and hits it against your cup and says “Cheers!” He’ll also do it with whatever food he and you have in your hands at any given time.

I was a solo dad for a few days this week while Amanda was on a work trip. Totally doable, but it tends to crowd out the possibility of doing anything other than the baseline during that time. Each time I solo parent for a few days, I have a new appreciation for single parents.

I had to work on Saturday for a quick turnaround project. Thankfully that only happens once a year.

After I published last week’s post, I spent some time outside sowing some flower seeds that need cold stratification. Then I came in and made dinner. Sitter was sick and we couldn’t find anyone else, so we canceled our dinner reservations for Amanda’s birthday and instead did “NY Steakhouse Night” at home. A 2.5in NY strip cooked in the sous vide and seared in butter, creamed spinach, hash browns, and a bottle of French wine. It was great!

First big freeze of the season froze all of my jalapeños before most of them turned red, so I had to pick them all and throw them in the smoker to make chipotles, even though they were still green. They seemed to turn out pretty well after 6.5 hours in the smoker, though I haven’t eaten any yet. The plan is to pack most of them in adobo sauce.

IndieWeb stuff:

I’m @cagrimmett on Mastodon.

I installed ActivityPub on this site so you can follow my blog posts at @cagrimmett wherever federated posts are fetched.

I joined the IndieWeb Webring and set up my representative h-card on my homepage.

https://indiewebify.me/ is a helpful tool!

https://github.com/Ryuno-Ki/webmention-tools allows you to send webmentions from the command line.

You can also send them with curl!

More to come.

Two project ideas:

I like the idea of BookWyrm, but I like keeping my books all on my own site. Perhaps I write a dedicated ActivityPub feed for my books page? Something like @books@cagrimmett.com. What If I make this into a WordPress plugin so others can use it, too? Make book lists and notes available via RSS and ActivityPub. Maybe it extends the existing ActivityPub plugin. We can call it the IndieWeb Book Club.

A good project for learning how to make WordPress blocks: An easy block to allow WordPress site owners to add a representative hCard to their site. It should optionally support all hcard properties.

Relevant links:

about representative hcards: http://microformats.org/wiki/representative-h-card

hcard properties: http://microformats.org/wiki/h-card

A couple thoughts on the Twitter debacle:

If Musk were quietly, diligently making changes internally for the first month and announcing occasional improvements after they were shipped and stable, we’d all have a different outlook and maybe give him the benefit of the doubt. Instead, he chose mass firings and daily public spectacles. Makes me think the real reason that Tesla and SpaceX are so loved is because of incredible PR and comms teams keeping his nonsense reigned in. People he doesn’t have at Twitter.

How can the remaining staff at Twitter get anything done amidst such radical uncertainty?

Chris Aldrich on your Twitter Go-Bag.

Scrape useful metadata about your Twitter archive.

This week I learned there are tools run by OpenDNS, Google DNS, and Cloudflare DNS where you can request that they update their DNS cache for a particular domain and record type.

Google’s for 8.8.8.8: https://dns.google/cache

Cloudflare’s for 1.1.1.1: https://cloudflare-dns.com/purge-cache/

OpenDNS’s: https://cachecheck.opendns.com/

Two cocktails we’ve been enjoying this week:

Scotch hot toddy

2oz Scotch

1 tsp honey

1 star anise

3 cloves

1 lemon slice, juice squeezed into the cup

Top with boiling water

As an alternative to the scotch toddy, I subbed in an amaro for the scotch, which was pretty good!