The Art Of Not Asking Why

On This Day page dates are broken

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 08:32:40 -0400

My On This Day page is a little broken.

Turns out that when I made the change to ISO dates, I broke the dates on this page.

I implemented this page about a year and a half ago. It uses an external JS code, over at https://github.com/cleverdevil/micromemories, and my guess is that the American date format is built into the code, and there’s some sort of conflict between the way my dates are displayed now and how this code sees dates.

I have an idea of how to fix this (there’s a Hugo code that should work in the help forum) but I’m not sure how to implement it (I’m guessing some sort of partial HTML file) and more importantly, where. If I try to place the code directly in the page, it shows as plain text.

For now I’m leaving the old code up, as the page itself is still functional, and the dates of the posts on it are obvious enough (it’s called “on this day” after all), it’s just the year that is unknown - until you click on the post and it opens in its own page.

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 08:10:00 -0400

Doctorow reflects on how, in a way, his life’s work can be summed with one angry poop emojy:

Pluralistic: A free, open visual identity for enshittification (24 Apr 2026) pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/24/poop-emoji-plus-plus/#devin-washburn

Needless to say, I got myself the sticker.

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:47:51 -0400

So far, I’m enjoying Inkwell. The main advantages over my FreshRSS setup is mainly the speed and the cleaner UI.

Since I discover most of my RSS feed via blogs and reading posts online, I already have the browser open, and adding a new feed to Inkwell is faster then doing so on FreshRSS because my Synology needs to wake up if it’s hibernating, then it needs to log me in - and sometimes the container FreshRSS is on is not available for some reason and I need to restart it or wait patiently. Not an issue with Inkwell.

There are a few issues that need to be polished out, especially on the web and the Mac version, but I’m already leaning into the philosophy behind the app: read what’s new today, and don’t worry about what I missed. It’s easy enough to visit the Inkwell blog and read past posts if needed.

Things I want to do with my website (part 1)

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:56:11 -0400

I was inspired to write this post by Connie Sue, who in turn was inspired by Frances, who in turn was prompted to write something by James. Apparently, the indie web is an inspiring place!¹

This morning I woke up thinking about the Tinker Station in Pacific Drive. This is a rather specific feature in a specific video game, so let me backtrack for a moment. Don’t worry, I will climb back out of this tangent and return to the topic at hand after three paragraphs.

In Pacific Drive, you spend time customizing, upgrading, and fixing your car, which you use throughout the game. This takes place in the in-game garage, which you park at the end of a drive (a “level” in the game, basically). The garage has various tools and stations, including the Tinker Station.

The Tinker Station, in a nutshell that would make sense in today’s lingo, is an AI that helps you fix various weird quirks with your car. For example, say the car’s lights dim when you swerve your steering wheel hard to the right, or the engine hood pops open when you put your car in reverse. At the end of the drive with that weird quirk (or a couple), you go to that Tinker Station and outline your problem inside the Tinker Station with an If/Then logic: “hood > opens / car > in reverse”. If you guessed the problem and the cause correctly, the Tinker Station congratulates you in glowing rainbow neon colors and tells you what tools you need to fix the issue.

There’s a lot more going on with the game, which I think is one of the best games I picked up in the last 2 years, and the Tinker Station is only one detail, and a small one at that. And this is what I’m getting at, by taking the long route and smelling the roses.

my website has a games section, which doesn’t see much action. Or, rather, it doesn’t see much action compared to how much time I spend playing video games. I usually clock at least 2 hours of video gaming a day. I have a gaming desktop. I play only in Linux these days, and I usually play games that are not your usual popular alien shooters (ok, I do have a couple, I need mindless games to let my brain cool off at the end of a workday). The point I’m failing to make here yet again is that: a. I spend a lot of time playing games and b. I am somewhat of a niche player with somewhat of a niche gaming choice, and I have a lot to say about said games.

So why does my gaming section get updated once every three months or so? In short: there’s too much to say.

Take for example my explanation above. The Tinker Station is only one aspect of the game that I want to write about. I also want to talk about how the game is scary without being purely a horror game; this is because of a good story and great voice acting, exploration, dreary background music, and letting the player’s mind fill in the blanks when reading lab reports and notes found throughout the game. The good kind of scary. The scary I like, without cheap jump scares. Another great thing about this game is how you play it driving a car, but also on foot, which fortuitously makes this game great to play with a friend: one on a controller and one on a keyboard - making this a delightful experience as the two of you work together.

Each one of the three elements I highlighted above can be a separate post, and these are just the ones that popped into my head thinking about this one game. I already have other points like these listed in my notes for two other games I’m playing that I want to discuss as well. See how long this post is? And I’m only using Pacific Drive as an example to explain what I want to do with my Games section - and I didn’t even get to the point yet! (and as you can see from the footnote below, it’s not even all I’m trying to say!)

When there’s so much to say that writing isn’t enough, I usually turn to recording videos. I do this when I want to write in my journal, but I just need to vent. I want to borrow the same consept for video games.

I’m not new to recording and publishing videos. TAONAW still has a YouTube channel, which is mostly deserted, and there used to be a PeerTube channel on an instance that has since shut down. Micro.blog’s new-ish take on video uploads (which has been available for a few months now) is a tempting opportunity just for that. But every time I tried to stick with video content, I failed. Video editing takes a lot of time and effort, and it’s a process I need to unlearn and relearn to find my natural flow. Still, for games, I feel this is the best way to explain and show what I want to say about video games in a way that people would understand and hopefully enjoy.

So I’m going to give it another try soon, hopefully.

Footnotes

¹: I wanted to write about what I do next for my website, but I ended up writing about only one of those things - and as you can see, it’s more than enough to be a post on its own. Hence, part 1.

About writing other bloggers Email

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:21:49 -0400

I discovered another person to follow this week, and as I reached out via email, I realized this had become somewhat of a habit for me: writing emails to other bloggers. I’m not sure when I started doing this more, but I’ve been doing it more in the last year or so.

Other folks who blog, especially those who open up a bit more and talk about their personal lives, is something I appreciate. I know it’s not an easy thing to do, especially if there are some contradictions between personal and professional life. For a while, that was my situation as well. Not to say I’m completely open about my personal life on my blog, but in general I feel I can be more authentic there, and I’d like to think readers can sense that as well. I said before that blogging about blogging is writing about yourself; well, this applies here too.

Reaching out by email is something more intimate and personal than a comment. That’s because it’s a 1:1 conversation and tends to be a longer, more thoughtful exchange. I think every email I sent received a response. That in itself is a reason to write. People open up, tell me more, and exchange information. I enjoy getting ot know them, as a loose level of friendship online.

It feels like a privilege, though it shouldn’t. I think everyone should be able to write and express themselves online, but most folks don’t know how or don’t have the means. Owning a blog, a website that you have control over, is hard. It shouldn’t be.

Testing Inkwell by Micro.blog

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 21:00:15 -0400

Inkwell’s development is going strong, and the beta app for Android was just released¹. That’s what I was waiting on before trying it out - I usually read my RSS feeds on my Android, and I also wanted to see how it works as a central hub for syncing my RSS feeds across my two phones and my Mac.

It’s another smart addition to the Micro.blog suite of apps: it allows Micro.blog users to subscribe to the blogs they like and read them easily. To add to that point, Inkwell has a dedicated “Discover” section, which is “A curated list of personal and indie blogs from Blogroll.org² and Micro.blog.” This is a nice touch, as it provides a good place to subscribe to blogs if you don’t know where to find them, and not just on Micro.blog.

My current setup for RSS feeds is with FreshRSS on Docker, which is probably overkill for most folks - especially the non-techie ones. I have FreshRSS synced with Elfeed, an Emacs RSS reader, but that means it’s desktop-only, while I do most of my reading on my phones.

I’m going to test Inkwell for a couple of days and see how I feel about it. I’m a heavy user of RSS feeds, and it’s good to see Micro.blog taking this direction as it’s one of the cornerstones of the indie web.

Footnotes

¹ : I’m not sure if Manton is ready for more users to jump in beyond those on Micro.blog at this point, so I don’t want to give out the link at this point.

² : blogroll.org is sponsored by Micro.blog.

Archive by month

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 17:48:12 -0400

So I guess I am on a roll?

Added a small square as a decorative element (a little square) for the dates in the posts. That’s the small change.

I also figured out why Manton’s plugin, for archive by month, didn’t work for me. It clicked when I realized what went wrong last time.

The plugin is meant to replace the default layouts/list.archivehtml.html, not the one I have, which is slightly modified by TinyTheme. So what I just went and snatched the code from the above and pasted it inside layouts/list.archivehtml.html, write after the condition to activate the microhook partials/microhook-archive-lead.html in there. Now I have an archive page built around years and months. Good stuff.

ISO dates are back

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 07:45:28 -0400

As if I didn’t have enough with fixing and tweaking my blog recently… Maybe it just gave me an appetite. With a bit of help from Claude (mostly as a pointer) I added two microhooks to my blog:

layouts/partials/microhook-post-list-byline.html and layouts/partials/microhook-post-byline.html

These change the date from the standard, nice American format to the ISO format, which I prefer (as was the case on my old blog). Computer folks should feel right at home, but for most of you, this may be a bit jarring, but not too hard to get used to. I hope.

The Hugo code for that (including a link that opens the post in its dedicated file):

layouts/partials/microhook-post-list-byline.html

    <a href="{{ .Permalink }}" class="post-date u-url dt-published"><time datetime="{{ .Date.Format "2006-01-02" }}">{{ .Date.Format "2006-01-02" }}</time></a>

layouts/partials/microhook-post-byline.html

    <a href="{{ .Permalink }}" class="post-date u-url dt-published"><time datetime="{{ .Date.Format "2006-01-02" }}">{{ .Date.Format "2006-01-02" }}</time></a>

The key that I forgot is that the .Date.Format elements actually need to use the year 2006. Why, well, I didn’t get it from the docs, but this Stack Overflow post explains it in a way I can follow better: the different elements of the date have saved locations defined by number:

    Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 -0700 MST 2006
    0   1   2  3  4  5              6

So 0 is for the day, which is Monday, Jan is for the month, which is 1… It kind of adds up, but still doesn’t. I need my coffee.

What makes a good blog good?

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:54:37 -0400

I’m up again after snatching another hour of sleep or so. Before I go to the office, I thought I’d ask the blogosphere (does anyone still use this term? Does it exist?) what makes a good blog good?

This is a question I kind of answered before, when I explained what blogs I usually add to my blogroll. Two main things:

A blog by one person, not a group (or a publication of sorts)
That person publishes posts regularly (once a week or so at least)

These are good, but they are guidelines more than explanations. So what is “good” blog, anyway?

One of the first things that comes to mind is the quality of the writing. It’s hard to pin down, because it can vary from those who write beautiful essays to those who prefer a quick list of links with explanations. Also, I tend to find that people who write about something they’re passionate about are usually interesting and the writing quality takes a second or even a third place, if they include photos or something else that presents what they do.

Writing is still important. It’s not about grammar and typos (though those have their respectful plce) as much as it is about style and confidence. I’m not sure how to put it into the right words, but you can tell when you read a blog by someone who writes often. I think some popular bloggers “wrote it until they made it,” in a way. They’ve been at it for long enough to know how to write well enough, and their style is prominent. You know it’s there when you read it.

Most bloggers use a service for their blog, myself included, which is why it’s even more important that a “good” blog has a certain personality that shows through the service’s default template. Certain visual tweaks, perhaps, or a logo, or some plugin that does something different beyond the usual things, like emails and comments. For example, Sacha Chua writes almost exclusively about Emacs and Lisp, but she sometimes includes sketches and mindmaps as the visual person she is. Annie has a rather simple Micro.blog-themed blog, but she has a Guestbook with sketches. Sal, who has a “plain”, simple-looking blog, writes about other things besides tech (even though he’s a tech guy), showing his readers who he is as a person.

Then there’s the matter of website maintenance itself. Not everyone’s a techie, and that’s good (I keep saying we need more non-techies to blog), but if someone has a blog, they should care about it. These days, this usually means a theme that looks OK on both a computer screen and a smartphone, an RSS feed, and an ad-free experience. I would also like to say no heavy scripts loading in the background, but some folks who use certain services don’t really have a choice; they just use what’s given to them. Still, keeping links working, a good archive, a working search… in my mind, these are the equivalent of keeping your home clean and tidy, at least to a degree.

What do you think?

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:58:34 -0400

My blog on Manue’s Prople and Blogs today!

manuelmoreale.com/interview…

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 04:04:08 -0400

It’s 4 AM, and I’m up again. I really need this insomnia to go away.

Apple Watch after 2 years

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:14:28 -0400

My AppleCare informed me that my Apple Watch’s coverage is running out. Yep, turns out it’s been two years since I got it. I’ve been wearing it every day pretty much since, so I thought I’d write up a follow-up to my initial post and see how it lives up to the hype.

Since I got the Apple Watch, I stopped using TrainWell (which at the time was called Co-Pilot, until Microsoft came knocking on their door). Overall, I think leaving Trainwell was a good choice, even though it’s a good app. If you’re curious, I expanded on this previously. The Apple Watch is still good for exercise, and I use it often for walking, running, and strength training. Of all of those, I think it really shines for jogging. I can use it without my phone (so I don’t run with a slab in a pouch or around my arm), and it syncs automatically when I’m back. It gives me a map of my route and my speeds in various colors, so I know where I stopped to take a breath and how long the entire thing was, along with a bunch of other metrics for average speed, elevation, etc.

Strength training is… OK. It doesn’t do much besides measuring how long I’ve been training. There’s some useful data, like my heart rate or calories burned, but I’m not generally concerned with those. What I am missing is a way for it to track the exercises and sets I’m doing (TrainWell did this nicely), and maybe resume automatically after each set, but I can live without it. I currently track my exercises in Apple Notes because I can see them on the watch (took Apple long enough): this way I can take a quick look and see what I need to do without looking at my phone, which can be distracting.

Meditation is treated like other exercises on the watch, under “mind and body.” That’s too little in my opinion, and shouldn’t be included as an exercise cateogry, but I guess that’s why there are dedicated meditation apps. When I time my meditation with the watch this way, the slight vibration works as a way to tell me how far along I am, but even that can be too distracting, and I’m considering just using a soft audible chime from my phone, using a regular countdown. I recently started using a new meditation app, Waking Up, after a friend recommended it. It’s too early to expand on it here, but so far, it’s pretty good - ~~no Apple watch app though~~. Actually, there is an App, I didn’t realize. I’m not sure it does more than just measuring how long I meditate, though. I shall explore.

My sleeping issues… Oh man. What sleep.
The Apple Watch doesn’t help me with sleep as much as it reinforces what I already know: I don’t sleep enough. The new sleep grade from Apple makes sense, and it’s explained well enough, but it’s like being reminded constantly that I suck at math all over again, as was the case for me during my school and college years. I know I have a problem, and constantly looking at graphs and charts and bad grades visualizing this to me every day is not helpful, though I’m aware it’s up to me to do something else with the information or just turn it off completely. The positive side of it is that it helps me to justify naps during the day, as I do need them.

As for the gimmicks, like taking selfies with the watch or the double-tap to open and dismiss certain apps - I don’t use those. The watch face is too small, and the interface is often too minimal to do much with. Every now and then I use it to respond to a message in WhatsApp, which I use with the family, but when I do, I just tap the microphone to say something quick. Otherwise I reach for my phone, which I have on me all the time anyway.

I got rid of Teams on the watch long ago, even though I thought it would be useful for work. The number of messages I get on this app is impossible to manage, and I find that I mute conversations constantly. The last thing I need is another vibration on my wrist to remind me that two people are talking to each other in yet another 20-plus person chat which happens to include me.

There is one gimmicky feature I use all the time though, and that’s the reminders. Having the watch on my wrist is the quickest and easiest way for me to remind myself to do something later. Even if I mess up the dictation, which happens often enough, I have it written down and it’s easy to go back and edit later on my phone or Mac.

Overall, looking at what I wrote two years ago, the hype died down for sure. I still find that I don’t like how the Apple watch looks. It’s a generic square slab, and I miss how my Casio G-Shock looked on my wrist. Still, it’s a piece of technology I use every day, mostly for MFA for work when I sign into various apps, and when I pay for stuff (being able to pay for the subway this way, even through the sleeve of my coat in the winter, is very nice). One feature I didn’t think much about when I got it was how well it works with Apple Maps: when I walk, it vibrats e a certain way for a right turn than it does for a left turn, and it’s really nice to be able to keep my hands in my pocket (again, this comes in handy in the winter).

I’m probably going to buy a new one soon, though I feel like if I wait another year or so it’s not a big deal.

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:33:30 -0400

Apple Mail - highlight a part of an email, and it shows up in your reply. Email threads are sorted by chronological order.

Outlook - Highlighting does nothing. Copy-paste automatically defaults to the original fonts and style, not that of the email. Email threads (“conversations”) have two timelines in one: chronological and reverse-chronological.

I’m starting to think they have a position for “torturer” they hire for now and then.

We've built an AI so good it will kill us with its kindness

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:32:21 -0400

From my journal, about trying Claude yesterday:

I went back and asked it a couple of questions for the options it chose and it explained those to me too in a way that in the past I’d spend hours on IRC (or Reddit or whatever) to try and get this info from some Linux asshat who would only know half of it, if at all. It’s the learning part I like the most. The part that it gives me an answer, and I can ask why, and then why again, and again. I understand why people freak out AI will teach their kids one day, but dude, if this was my programming professor at college… I’d be in a different place today.

It’s yet another example of what a great teacher AI can be, but this time, it really landed home:

There’s a lot going on at school (and in college) in terms of human to human relationship. But those afternoons I fell asleep in the library trying to cram information into my head that I just couldn’t understand for hours, no matter how hard I tried. Those hours of frustration trying to find help on various Linux forums, to get someone to help me boot up my computer, and being told again and again to RTFM (and that’s when I got a response) were a punishment I earned for my curiosity.

It took me years to gain the confidence I have today to justify my unorthodox learning style, that of going from the end, not from the beginning, with tomes of text.

I was discouraged by my teachers and at some point by my parents. I don’t think they had bad intentions: it came from a good place. They saw me struggle and fail again and again and again and suggested (some less gently than others) that I should try something else.

Yesterday I tried Claude with something rather elementary for Linux users: mounting an SMB share from my Synology to my Linux computer.

The traditional approach (which I believe is still best) is to work through the fstab. I didn’t want to “mess with it” because I knew that it’s one of those sensitive system files that might mess up the computer boot if I’m not careful, and I used that fear to have me just use the GUI file explorer.

Claude gave me just the right amount of encouragement from the start:

Your concern about fstab is valid but manageable — the risk is real but small if you’re only adding a new remote mount entry at the bottom. You’re not touching the existing lines for your OS drives, so even if the SMB entry is wrong, the worst that realistically happens is the mount fails on boot and you get dropped into a recovery prompt. You can add nofail to the options to completely eliminate even that risk:

That was right. I was just adding to the file. It wouldn’t damage things this way. What’s more, it suggested the nofail option, which I had in my fstab before, but I didn’t remember why and where I got it from; it was one of those things I copied and pasted because it worked. Claude, with this simple sentence, explained what it was and how it would help.

The rest of the conversation with it felt like a good patient teacher, because that’s how I treated it. Claude could have given me the whole answer, and it did suggest it. I could have just copied and pasted my fstab as it is, let it work its magic, paste it back, and enjoy the magic without understanding it. But that’s not how I work.

I chose to go step by step. I told it I’m going to switch from my Mac to my Linux desktop, which wasn’t needed, but it helped me by roleplaying with it a bit, making it my teacher. And it got better from there, as it assumed that role and waited for me patiently. Of course it would, it’s code on a computer. But it acted out the role nevertheless. It polite and patient, and that’s one of those small things that clicked and made it work.

When we got to a point of testing the fstab and it didn’t work, it asked me to paste the errors I got and worked with me through them patiently. It told me I forgot a sudo one time (duh), and at another time, it asked me if I’m sure I downloaded and installed cifs-utils on my Linux desktop as it suggested, and I forgot. “Oops,” I typed, playing my role; “no problem, you need some coffee,” it replied to me with a wink emoji. Once again: I know it’s not human. I understand it doesn’t have real patience. But how much I needed that patience - even an artificial one - before! How often was it missing!

Suddenly, I got goosebumps. I remembered something else:

The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. It would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine was the only one that measured up.

In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 12:06:50 -0400

More signs of spring 📷

I took a walk and listened to the birds for a moment. It’s always nice to get chances like this in Manhattan:

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:26:05 -0400

Fighting with bots. I’m not provided the option I need (work/enterprise-related shipment, and the only option on the website or on the phone is for home service.) The bot doesn’t route me to a human, no matter what I try. Some service.

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 07:26:04 -0400

One of my automatic tasks for my Mac is to delete my downloads folder every weekend. At the start, I was worried this would cause me to lose important files, but I have backups and it actually made me more purposeful with how I save them.

What are some of yours?

So I fixed my blog again

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:06:07 -0400

I’ve mentioned that some pages of my blog haven’t been working. I’ve since fixed those pages and reinforced two pre-existing notions of mine: first, AI (LLMs specifically) can be a great tool if you use it to learn and enhance your existing skills; second, my blog writing is more important than I realized.

What went wrong

As you may know, if you visit my blog (though I realize most of you probably read this via RSS readers), I have several pages on my blog (which effectively make it a website, right? Are all blogs websites? 🤔). Some of those correspond to categories (such as my Emacs org-mode page or my movie reviews), while others are informative, like my about page and archive, which also include a search option for the site. You know, the basic blog-owner stuff.

My website is hosted by Micro.blog, which utilizes Hugo to build its sites. I switched to Tiny Theme, which is made especially for Micro.blog and comes with a few extra features, two years ago. These features, called Microhooks, can further customize the theme if you’re willing to make a few technical adjustments.

In my case, I use Microhooks on some of the pages. The archive page, which displays categories and all posts by day by default, was modified to include the search plugin and additional information I added before the default page starts. Then, for the Emacs org-mode category, there’s an introductory text with an image I created a while back, and then the rest of the post that fits into that category.

About a week ago, those Microhooks stopped working. The pages I mentioned displayed the default theme, as if I never customized them with Microhooks.

The fix

I struggled for a couple of days trying to figure out what went wrong. I thought a recent update to the theme and the plugins broke something, but I didn’t know what. I looked into the Microhooks instructions, but as far as I could tell, everything was set up correctly. I have a test blog, and when I ran the same code on it, the issue with the archive page repeated, while the Emacs Org-mode page was fixed. I went back and forth a couple of times, but I couldn’t see anything that would cause the problem.

Over the weekend, I had more time, so I took a deeper look into the theme. I am far from a Hugo expert (in fact, I one of the main reasons I oppted for Micro.blog was to stop working with on my static blog directly) but I understand the general idea of how things are built: there’s one main page which calls other parts, and these parts call other parts in turn, each one is defined in a separate HTML file. I scanned the different HTML files of the theme and found where the Microhooks I used were activated.

For the archive and search page, there is layouts/_default/list.archivehtml.html, which includes the following lines:

    {{ if templates.Exists "partials/microhook-archive-lead.html" }}
    {{ partial "microhook-archive-lead.html" . }}
    {{ end }

That partial (which is Hugo’s sort of “functions” or quick plug-ins for the theme), microhook-archive-lead.html, is the microhook HTML I created to include the search plugin and the intro to the archive and search page. This looked OK to me at the time, until I saw that another page, layouts/list.archivehtml.html, contained no reference to this Microhook. This looked odd to me: both pages have the same name (and thus the same function, I guessed). One is called default, and the default one is the one that was modified with my changes? That didn’t make sense.

This is where I fired up Qwen3-Coder (through Kagi) to help me understand how these pages work in Hugo. I asked it which page Hugo uses first, and sure enough, it replied that layouts/_default/list.archivehtml.html page is the default, sometimes used as a fallback option when layouts/list.archivehtml.html is not present¹. So, as it turned out, my files were flipped: the default file showed the changes, while the file meant for customizations showed the default. I copied the code condition above from the layouts/_default/list.archivehtml.html to layouts/list.archivehtml.html, and things started to work as they should.

Why this happened, I have no idea. I made no changes to the pages. My only theory is that a recent update flipped the code in the files somehow for whatever reason.

My other issue was a stupid user error, as most of these issues go. The Microhook layouts/partials/microhook-category-header.html is the one responsible for pointing out which category page should have a special introduction. What the LLM told me that I didn’t know (or maybe forgot) is that it does that by utilizing the page’s .title variable. This is where I made a mistake: I used the file’s name, using the URL, not the title of the page, which happened to be different. Since this was a conditional statement looking for a specific page title that wasn’t found, it was ignored. Once I changed the value in the HTML to reflect that page’s proper title, it was fixed. Of course, it was a damn dash I omitted by mistake.

The fun of blogging

While this was a technical issue, it affected my desire to blog. As long as my pages didn’t work correctly and I couldn’t fix them, I didn’t want to blog. It didn’t feel right, even though these issues were not critical, at least from the readers' point of view, but they were important to me. I enjoy my blog. I had to fix it. Once I did, that feeling reversed completely, and my desire returned in force. The post you’re reading now was itching to be written, and it’s only now, half an hour before midnight, that I have the time and some reserve energy to draft it. It feels good.

Footnotes

¹: I can’t emphasize how useful AI has been in scanning Hugo (or other technical documentation in general) and explaining things to me in plain English. I could spend hours looking at Hugo’s documentation and indexes, rereading the same sentences over and over, and not understand what something does or how it works with something else. Even now, as I write this post and check for links, the AI links me to the relevant section in the documentation, which I would otherwise just glaze over. It’s like having a teacher holding a pencil to a word or a phrase in a huge textbook.

A Minecraft Movie, 2025 - ★★½

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:47:50 -0400

Solid fun, a nice plot for a movie based on a video game. Highly expected, nothing too special, but a somewhat confusing plot - the one that is based on the real world feels almost as fantastical as the Minecraft one.

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 23:58:21 -0400

I seem to have fixed the issues on my blog. This required a deeper dive into my template and understanding how Hugo prioritizes pages. Qwen3 helped by answering my clarifying questions from the documentation and gave me a bit of confidence, which did the trick.

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:00:28 -0400

Some of the pages on my site are not working properly. I’m trying to figure out the problem and get it sorted out, but so far it’s a lot of head scratching. I’m replicating the same structure to a new, similar theme, with a newer Hugo build, so we will see how that works out.

Mushroom Soup 🍜

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:05:40 -0400

This was my first attempt at making mushroom soup from scratch - well, with vegetable broth. All from vegetables I got from the farmer’s market (I usually go on weekends). Up until now, I only made Butternut squash soup, and these are pretty good, so I decided to expand a bit.

To make it, I used:

5 King Oyster Mushrooms
1 small yellow onion
4 regular Yukon potatoes (1 large, 3 small ones)
4 garlic cloves
Fresh Parsley (a few leaves, about a spoonful)
Olive oil (about 1/3 of a cup)
Water + vegetable vegan broth

I wanted to create a creamy-like soup, and I thought the potatoes would work. They did, and it made a good thick soup.

To prepare any soup, I usually work from the “hard” veggies that need more cooking toward the soft ones. In this case, the diced potatoes (big chunks, each potato cut three to four times) went in first with the garlic and onion, and let it stay on medium-high heat (not boiling) for about 10 minutes. It’s important to remember that for this kind of thick soup, the liquid (water+oil+broth) should not cover the vegetables completely. I’d say about up to 2/3 or so, maybe a little more. Less liquid = more thickness, naturally.

The potatoes got soft fast. I added the chopped parsley and mushrooms next for another 5 minutes or so, adding salt and some black pepper - I wanted the most basic ingredients, since I wanted to taste the basic soup first, building on that and thinking what to add later.

After everything was ready (give or take the 15-18 minute zone), I poured it into my blender in two batches (too much for one batch). The Vitamix makes quick work of everything in seconds, but I let it run for about 20 seconds, then poured the thick, yellowish-cream mixture into a bowl.

The soup was hearty and good, very easy to make. For next time, I took a couple of notes:

The consistency was good, but I want to improve on the mushroom flavor. I should increase the amount of mushrooms, probably from 5 to 8 to try.
For texture and flavor, I want to try chopped mushrooms at the end after the blender phase. I could also use a different kind of mushrooms for this finish, perhaps.
Some recipes I found suggested using fennel. After tasting this soup, especially with king oyster mushrooms, I tend to agree. I think it would add a good flavor.
Salt and black pepper were a good idea. I have a lot of spices, but this soup is good in its basic form, and I think that if I were to add anything too sophisticated, it would take away from the mushroom flavor.

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 09:01:44 -0400

‘Tis the season…

Gesundheit!

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 09:23:00 -0400

Seems like some of the pages on my blog are now working as they should. There’s supposed to be an introduction for the Archive page and the Emacs page. I’m using Tiny Theme, and the HTML for those micro-hooks is in place, which makes me think something went wrong with the update I did about a month ago.

I guess rebuilding the blog is the next step - which usually breaks the movies page… stand by….

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 09:03:24 -0400

Hank Green on why AI scares him:

“People tend to prefer their choices to be taken away.”

(The link below will take you directly to that part)

It’s an hour and a half long video with a long introduction and a video thrown in the middle, probably one of the longer rants by Hank Green, with an interview in the middle by Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University.

I’m still watching this conversation. It’s a lot to take in, but I think it keeps going back to the sentence I quoted above. It has been true for a while (forever?), on different platforms (not just AI), and one of the most apparent examples for me is dating apps. Tinder started the trend of “swiping people” left and right, emphasizing how people look and present, and not who they are.

It’s easy to blame the app, but we who use them are not much better. Going through profiles on a dating app (even those that allow more detailed ones), the person usually sums up their being into a single sentence, with a “bumper sticker” style emojis presenting whatever ideology is popular this time around.

The very concept of a dating app today is a joke when you think about how impossible it is to summarize who the person behind the profile is. Yet, this is what we prefer and what we use. We all have decision fatigue, and it only gets worse as we get bombarded by even more information, so we rely on technologies like AI to summarize that for us as we grow lazier and our capacity to retain information and make knowledge decisions based on that information is diminishing every day.