Friday Thoughts 10
This is my second thoughts post to reach 10+ posts. The other being Wednesdays. Here are some of my jumbled thoughts.
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I'm far from the first person to write about the new blog curation website, Bubbles (link opens in new tab). I was first alerted to this by Brandon, and then several other posts about it popped up into my RSS feed. When I first clicked through to the site almost all of the top 10 posts were about Bubbles. I guess it's because it just launched, so not many other posts floated up to the top via upvotes.
Apparently you can access the list of blogs that have been curated here: https://bubbles.town/blogs.txt. I appreciate that the site owners are transparent in this regard (and happy to see that mine is in the list!). You can read more on their "about" page. As with others I'm going to keep an eye on the website and hope it doesn't get toxic.
I intend to use it solely for discovery and not to narcissistically see where my posts end up, but let's be real...I'll be a little curious on where my posts end up.
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Speaking of the aforementioned Brandon, I got an idea for a new post about the topic of newsletters (I mentioned this in a post last week). I haven't started work on it yet but hopefully I'll get something together next week.
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Several months ago, I set up a desktop Linux Mint server so I could host video files and serve a USB hard drive for network photos. The video file (ripping DVDs) project has stalled, and I don't often use the network drive (but having it handy on my phone and computers is actually quite cool). The reality is I don't use it very much other than it being a fun toy. It's running on an older hard disc drive, and it badly needs an upgrade to a solid state drive. It's maxed out at 8GB RAM (there are no more ports on the motherboard and I believe it's DDR3, so technically inferior to what's available now) so over the network it's quite slow. Streaming videos is a bit painful.
So I turned the machine off. For the photo drive I can hook it up to my main machine and access it at a faster transfer speed whenever I need it, and there's less risk of it dying because it's on all the time. Maybe I'll return to it when I eventually replace the internal drive with an SSD. It's still there and ready to access whenever I feel the urge to play around in Linux.
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I decided to move on from my Yashica MF-2; I haven't seen the photos yet (the roll should be ready on Monday) but there are some drawbacks:
- It's heavy.
- The film door is finnicky to open.
- The flash doesn't work consistently
I found someone selling a Konica Z-Up 120 for $40 that I'm trying to pick up. The only hang-up is arranging said pick up :) After I have the other camera I'll return the Yashica to the store I bought it from. They have a 30-day return policy and I feel like my 3 complaints are enough to warrant a return.
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My next hobby project is a small LEGO knock-off set I got at the dollar store. It's an MTV boombox and shouldn't take very long to assemble. I usually document my progress with photos, but this time I want to try something a little different. My plan is to record with video, and then convert that regular video into a timelapse video. My phone camera can do this natively but I think I'll get more out of playing around in Premiere than using a shortcut.
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Still on my list of goals this week is to write a review of Yoshi's Island - I'm slacking on it. Honestly it'll probably be next week when I get to it. Maybe today in the afternoon...maybe.
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It's cool that Windows' Notepad application supports markdown, but it's syntax is terrible. I wrote this post using that method and when I switched to the syntax view it added a bunch of extra line spaces that I had to delete. It is also strictly markdown in the sense that it doesn't render HTML. So instead of rendering ¶ as the character, it renders it as \¶ (an escape key) assuming I want to literally type ¶. Annoying.