Grant Hutchins

I’ve just updated a couple of my old personal project websites.

• Twitter Sucks! - Upgraded all Ruby gems and got it working again. Updated CSS and picked newer fonts from Google Fonts.
• Flittr = Flickr + Twitter - Upgraded three major versions of Rails and got it (almost) working again. Switched from the fleakr gem to the flickr gem. Right now, every tweet falls back to a lolcats image because the Yahoo! Term Extraction API no longer exists.

Both applications are currently running on Heroku’s free tier. Once I get them modernized enough I may move them to the “Hobby” tier. I also upgraded both from their ancient Cedar-10 stack.

I’m catching up on MacStories’s “iPad at 10” coverage from last month.

I keep coming across mentions of the original argument that the iPad is “just a bigger iPhone”. I always find that argument to be so strange, because the iPhone was a blockbuster category-defining device. I have never thought of the fact that an iPad is similar to a large iPhone as negative in any way. I also appreciate viewpoints like this one focused on accessibility that make it obvious that being like a bigger iPhone is an incredible advantage.

It’s funny how aggressively people in the tech media will dismiss something just because it’s not completely novel.

Anyway, 10 years later, I have finally gotten to the point where I don’t own a laptop and use an iPad for all my mobile computing tasks.

Been having fun the last couple days working on some Rails jobs that download multi-gigabyte gzipped tarballs via SFTP.

It’s been a fun challenge to avoid using a lot of RAM and disk space so that the jobs can easily run on our Heroku workers.

My wife and I have been having fun staying in this weekend and watching season 1 of The Outsider.

I just read Dealing With a Once-In-A-Century Pathogen and I feel like COVID-19 will prove to be very different than anything that’s come before it.

On Super Tuesday, I was surprised to find a new episode of Election Profit Makers in my podcast player. This was my favorite podcast back in 2016. They follow the election by making bets on election outcomes on PredictIt.org. They also do things like read JavaScript source code live.

It has been great catching up with my former coworker Joe Masilotti who happened to come to IndieWebCamp 2020 Austin with me!

Today at IndieWebCamp 2020 Austin I’m figuring out what my personal site nertzy.com has on it and running it through indiewebify.me to get some basics like h-card set up. After that, I’ll be looking into social reader apps. 🤓

It’s been a fun afternoon of discussions at IndieWebCamp 2020 Austin today.

I just led a breakout discussion about what we can do to reclaim our personal data from social media silos #reclaimyourweb

Everyone is presenting their personal websites. I just hopped up and presented nertzy.com and how I have copies of my older blogs at http://old.nertzy.com and http://old.nertzy.com/old/ and how I want to merge that old content into my site someday.

I’m going to post a lot today 😉

@nataliekayh at IndieWebCamp 2020 Austin talking about people coming over to micro.blog: “It’s not the dark side, it’s the light side”

I’m at IndieWebCamp Austin 2020 this weekend.

At T22 at 2:02 on 2/2/2020 (@ Tumble 22 in Austin, TX) via Swarm

My wife and I tried out climbing at Austin Bouldering Project last Friday. It was a blast! 🧗‍♂️

Had a great first day at my new job. Great view on this foggy 🌫 day from our corner office. Looking forward to kicking things off in Dallas tomorrow.

I just started reading the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. I appreciate his attention to detail and willingness to be open about the complexities behind his British Cycling example in the first chapter. Read his update here.

I'm getting excited about Play Date, an upcoming handheld video game system from Panic. They released an update and things are looking really good for a release later this year!

Grabbing some cookies from Tiny’s 🍪

Had a great time at the IndieWeb meetup tonight here in Austin. Met some new folks, and recognized a couple people from many years back.