Pieces on Hey Loura!

Blind to the Feeling of Advancement

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 09:15:52 -0400

Recently I’ve been met with paired astonishment, me at them and them at me, when I under-indicated my skills in conversation. It doesn’t matter what skill in question. Taijiquan, writing haiku, or software development. My perspective is that I’m a beginner, maybe advanced beginner if I’m being generous. Not impressive. Theirs is the opposite. I’m flabbergasted at the praise and they seemed incredulous I don’t get it.

It’s not a new occurrence but with it happening twice in quick succession, once with my taijiquan teacher and once with an acquaintance I’m hoping a friendship will develop with, it made me pause and take notice. And think about where the disconnect might be. They are both intelligent individuals and I take their opinion seriously. I also am aware, in vague terms, that I’m prone to undersell myself. I used to attribute that to my upbringing. My family was very critique oriented. But lately I’ve been thinking the root cause is something else entirely.

I’m not 100% sure when I connected the dots and determined I have a severely deficient autobiographical memory or SDAM. I don’t have a very strong time-sense of the past. More than a few years ago… I think. Just like now, I had questions about my inner experience, read an article and realized it was describing me. Cool. Except, maybe not? Unlike some other experiences I’ve read about with people discovering they might have SDAM, I didn’t react negatively. Just another fact to store in my back pocket so to speak. But now, if I think it through, it might explain a few things about this situation.

Have you ever read an autobiographical account about someone? I’ve read a bunch and as a kid (embarrassingly as a young adult as well) I thought they were just making stuff up. It is impossible to have a past that way. At least that’s how it appeared to me. That version of memory, the episodic kind that encompasses recalling events or episodes in your life and the autobiographical kind that builds a personal history and a sense of self, is largely locked off to me. I can grab and hold on to the factual information but everything else fades and runs together like a chalk drawing in the rain. Gone when the weather clears. If I can’t hold onto my past, what am I to compare the present to?

It was easier when I was in school. I either got the grade or I didn’t. That was a built in metric for how I was doing. Sports as well. I swam well in the meet or I didn’t. I didn’t need to guess or reflect. But when you leave school and childhood people stop giving you reliable metrics. Sure, I have goals at my job. Unfortunately, with my sample size of three jobs, performance reviews seem more a political thing than a true measure of progress or skill. I don’t remember learning to code. I did at some point and I’m better at it now. But how much better? How much better compared to others? I can always point to a multitude of things around software development I don’t know yet. So how can I be advanced at it? There is no memory or feeling of learning. I can only access how it feels to write code now. So how can I judge?

With coding at least I can approximate. I can look at what I wrote years ago and can spot lots of errors or better ways to do things. Honestly, if it wasn’t saved on my computer and I didn’t have the factual knowledge it was mine, I’d be none the wiser as to who wrote it. There is no emotional connection to it. Same with poetry and journals. Not even an echo of feeling if it’s been long enough. So where does that leave things that don’t have obvious artifacts? Say, a moving meditation practice like taijiquan? Same root problem. I have no feeling of ever learning, of feeling awkward and clumsy with the movements. Of not being able to find my root and balance. Taijiquan is the bedrock I want to build my life on and I’ve wanted for a while to take my practice to the next level. But how can I do that, if I can’t do an honest assessment of where I am based on where I’ve been?

Last year I signed up for a competition. Why? Because my first taijiquan teacher had stopped giving me feedback, for a long time actually, and though I could tell I was the most advanced out of the regular students, I couldn’t tell if I was stagnating. So off I went to at least have some external metric (despite taijiquan competitions not always ranking against internal skill versus external showmanship). It was eye-opening. I did well but it also shone a light on the uncomfortable truth that I needed to move on from my teacher. I’m happy now with a new teacher but it highlighted the fact that unless I’m vigilant and have external goalposts, I can easily end up not moving forward. I’m blind to the feeling of advancement.

Now that I have a better idea of what the issue is for me, I need to figure out what I can do about it. I can start using the feedback from others who comment on my skills as metrics rather than dismiss it as a type of flattery. And I can make sure I have teachers who give me concrete feedback at regular intervals. This is all pretty basic, but honestly it never really occurred to me. It’s never really registered that others probably have an internal sense of progression and accomplishment that they can reference and that my lack of it has real consequences. I stay in situations where I stagnate way too long without the perception of it. It’s better to figure it out in my forties than later, but it’s made me consider whether I may have been farther along in my career or in my taijiquan journey if I had questioned this aspect of myself sooner.

P.S. I drafted this blog post just about three weeks ago before circling back to it over the weekend. I hadn’t finished the last paragraph since I wasn’t sure how I wanted to end it. The tone of it, new and unedited, stuck out like a sore thumb. In three weeks, I could no longer summon the emotional state I was in when I started, and honestly I probably couldn’t at a week out either. I edited it back to match, but still. It’s an apt illustration and a reminder why I don’t or shouldn’t sit on drafts long.

Finishing up my Taijiquan Haiku

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:43:23 -0400

I was working on my taijiquan haiku series and then lost steam. Part of it was the double haiku’s weren’t all as strong as each other. I decided since that was holding me up to simplify and do one haiku per each. Again these are in no way meant to speak like the classics or be authoritative. But crafting them has given me time to really think and dig deep on each one. My ultimate plan is to put these to watercolor and calligraphy and hang them in my home office.

Peng

spine long and crown high
sunk deep buoyant chi fills
surging spring, root fed

the water wheel coils
lithely adhering, yielding
new path, found and filled

three pairs move as one
a sealed touch with no gaps
leads compressed wave forth

swift beneath the still
sinks to swell, dive, fill hollows
wave recedes - surges

Tsai

deep water made clear
fish darting among the roots
still heron spears true

Leih

hips unlock the door
a millstone set in motion
wood splits with the grain

Chou

already inside
hip the hub, elbow the rim
small circle one point

Kao

six harmonies timed
center replaces center
one sharp arrival

The Mask In the Mirror

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 17:45:12 -0400

This month’s Indieweb Carnival is on “Masks, Identities & Cosplay” and this post is a response to the prompt “I invite you to consider what masks and cosplay mean and how they interact with identity, for you.”

The Mask In the Mirror

I don’t have many mirrors in my house. It never occurred to me to have a bunch, a simple one in the bathroom and a longer one somewhere to see outfits seems plenty to me. My teenaged daughter disagrees. One reason not to have them is they make me uncomfortable. Not in a “I don’t like the way I look” way. But because they startle me. Or can, they don’t always. It’s when I’m not expecting to see myself and I catch a glimpse of me anyway. The person looking back is me. Just unrecognizable. A stranger’s face meeting my eyes. Eerie.

I know this is not a common experience. It’s a byproduct of a trait that has shaped me. From childhood I was never sure who I was looking at unless I knew them really well or they stayed in the same context (a teacher in their classroom). Friendships suffer when you don’t acknowledge the person when you are out and about. Embarrassing situations abound. I tell people I’m bad at names and faces. They say they are too. But I think we are using different yardsticks to measure. Sometimes I don’t recognize my kids in different settings unless something else gives it away.

Yeah, I’m face blind.

In my case, using someone’s face as an aspect of their identity would be futile. So what holds firm? For me, speaking of the physical attributes, it’s the voice. Followed closely by their mannerisms and their gait. But more telling is the constellation of facts I keep about them. And somewhat importantly, if they are still holding firm to them. Change enough of the orbiting facts and you’ll be you, but just a different you to me if that makes sense. Not a mask or costume change. My perception shifts.

A month or so ago I gave a friend a ride home. We talked about common interests and at one point I asked why he started learning tai chi (years ago) if he was already practicing another style of martial arts at that point. It was because he found himself becoming a harsh person with the practice. Tai chi cultivates the opposite and he wanted that. For years he struggled with being kinder, being supportive, and being understanding. To me he currently embodies all those qualities. He identifies as someone struggling with it. I identify him as someone already there. Who’s right? Is identity a present state, a past narrative, or both?

When I’m startled by the face in the mirror, I’m still me. But if that stranger could look back out, would it also share that lack of recognition? My friend struggles with the story he tells himself built from his lifetime of experiences. When your inner self, like mine, offers no such narrative (I have almost no autobiographical memory), how should you piece yourself together? I have no choice other than to place my identity in the same way I recognize it in others. My inner collection of self facts forms a cohesive pattern. A bedrock of values I’ve formed each time I chose kindness, or openness, or admitted I was wrong. This is key in how I view identity. A view that is achingly present. If I embody qualities long enough, I change. My self perception shifts. I’m a different me.

I’ve never done cosplay or worn costumes outside of Halloween. I know a lot of people who enjoy it, the chance to embody a different person or to try on a new perspective. In terms of masks I’ve heard them used in a way that suggests different personas. I’m not sure I know how to do that. People who’ve known me across different segments of my life have remarked I present myself in a similar way, no matter the situation. When playing or running role playing games I excel at organization, rule knowledge, and setting up scenarios. I fall depressingly short at the role playing part of the game. No matter what tricks I try, I can’t imagine being anything other than how I am right now. Good thing I’m fond of my mask in the mirror.

Micro.blog Discovery Ideas

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 12:30:55 -0400

I wrote this draft on 7/28/2025 when I wanted to expand a reply into a full post but then shelved it. Now, almost one month later there is another post complaining about the Micro.blog discover feed. Anyway, I thought it might be nice to gather all of my ideas on the subject in one place.

My Ideas

When I first started, I found the account Micro Monday very helpful to find people around Micro.blog. It was an account that posted occasional roll calls about common topics and people could reply with links to other accounts (or their own) if it fit the topic. There was also a weekly Monday post that people could use to recommend other users or link to an interesting post. I found quite a few of the people I initially followed through that account.

Automated accounts

A roll call account:

What if we brought an account like Micro Monday back? We could crowd source a list of topics for roll calls and automate that account posting a roll call every two weeks. It could be listed on the sign up page as a good account to follow.

A weekly or daily recommendation account:

An automated account that creates a post prompting for this weeks or today’s interesting posts. People could reply and list their recommendations.

Potential cons of this approach

Since both of those would be standard Micro.blog accounts the report/block/mute functionality should work as well as respecting any muted keywords (I’m assuming this works in quoted content, haven’t checked). While this would help ease the burden of discovery, it may increase the burden on Micro.blog with more “report user” requests. It could also lead to fractured conversations if people replied to the automated account instead of following the thread back to the original user. Also the weekly or daily recommendation account would be prone to self-promotion and spamming… so idk.

Follow actions in the timeline

I did this on my own little client which showed the parent conversation first with the replies below it. I had a quick button next to the user I wasn’t following that let me follow them. I was able to quickly expand my follow list, which made my timeline nice and lively. When “seeing replies on the timeline” is enabled for an account, what if there was an indicator that a reply post was to someone you’re not following? And then maybe in the conversation view a follow button next to usernames you aren’t following (like on the “following # users you aren’t following” page)?

Sorting the “following # users you aren’t following”

I would add a last posted timestamp here and sort the list according to that, with the most recently active on top. It can be a burden to open each persons account page to see when they last posted.

Remove non Micro.blog accounts from the tagmoji feeds.

I think if these feeds were cleaned up and made more prominent on the discover UI it would be a nice place to find accounts to follow.

Conclusion

Anyway, these are wish list items and Micro.blog is a very small team. So when I see posts on my timeline complaining about the discover feed I try to think of solutions that don’t require constant attention to curate. But it is a delicate balance to strike, between features that allow discovery and keeping the more toxic nature of social media at bay.

In my personal opinion I like that Micro.blog has erred on the side manual curation for its discovery feed. Yes it is more cumbersome to find people to follow… but I like that? It has made me follow a larger variety of people on Micro.blog than I think I would if not constrained by a limited discovery feature. I also don’t mind the infrequent updates. Once or twice a week is fine by me. I have no urge to visit Discover all that often (which is nice given all the push for services to have you attention 100% of the time)

Just my 2 cents and I’m going to keep thinking on it. :)

🐲 Seventh Grade for 2024/2025

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 11:48:45 -0400

So last year and this year so far have been intense. And not in a good way. Which is why it’s taken me so long to write down what my kids have been doing for homeschooling. But better late than never 😅

I did make some micro posts about the school year. You can check them out if you’d like

My child decided that they would not set foot back in public school until high school. So unlike other years where I approached homeschooling with a (mostly) rosy attitude, this year I felt I was between a rock and a hard place. Nevertheless, after weighing the options I decided homeschooling, at least for now, was the better option. They had a strong and fond memories of a twice-a-week homeschooling group they could attend and I knew that group would be supportive. Plus academics suffered last year and I felt that taking time to re-solidify the material (especially in math) was important.

Course of Study

Writing, Spelling, Grammar and Literature

Writing, Spelling and Grammar

Writing and grammar this year were covered by a fun set of books I found that I thought were right up my child’s alley. They are the type of kid who memorizes Edgar Allen Poe poetry in their free time. This was a hit. I never had any issues with getting them to complete their lessons using Melancholy Grammar. They loved listening to the recommended podcasts and crafting stories from random prompts.

They also had writing sprinkled in from their Falcons class (more on that below) and for the last half of the school year I found a creative writing class on Outschool from a published young adult author who taught about structuring fiction stories and gave one-on-one feedback. Spelling was more, grit your teeth and get it done… We used Spelling You See this year because I was hoping a more visual approach would help. By the end of this year I think the issue is less with the mechanics of spelling and more with the lack of attention for spelling. Sigh. I’ve also noticed they tend to spell things correctly if someone other than me is going to be reading it. So, I might let this subject go next year and reassess mid-year.

Literature

I just let them pick a bunch of books to read in the first half of the year to get the joy back. Then for the second half of the year I found a cool Outschool class on banned books. This class assigned a book to read without letting the kids know why it was banned. Then they’d meet and discuss it over zoom and see if they could figure it out. Having to puzzle out the “why” kept my kid really engaged in the book.

In the House of the Seven Librarians
by Ellen Klages
Artemis Fowl
by Eoin Colfer
Spinning Silver: A Novel
by Naomi Novik
Howl's Moving Castle
by Diana Wynne Jones
Among the Impostors
by Margaret Peterson Haddix
Over Sea, Under Stone
by Susan Cooper
Ocean: A Visual Encyclopedia
by DK
Nature's Best Hope
by Douglas W. Tallamy
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (National Book Award Winner)
by Sherman Alexie
Ocean Anatomy
by Julia Rothman
Nimona
by Noelle Stevenson
The Left-Handed Fate
by Kate Milford
The Girl Who Drank the Moon (Winner of the 2017 Newbery Medal)
by Kelly Barnhill
The Facemaker
by Lindsey Fitzharris
Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?
by Caitlin Doughty

Science and Mathematics

Microbiology and Genetics

Anything with a microscope tends to be a hit with this kid. So once again I pulled out the Science Mom Microbiology and Genetics course. Both my kids have loved these courses. And I find it charming that while doing art projects my kid just re-listens to the lectures. She must have listened to the one on smallpox a dozen times by now.

Astronomy

Science mom also released a course on Astronomy during the spring and my kids love joining the classes while they are “live” so they can answer polls and ask questions and might get a shout-out. So even though it doubled up the science my kid was 100% game.

Pre-algebra

Math…. yikes…. math. Okay so this was soooo rusty.

The goal was to get them caught back up so they could do Algebra I next year. Now this was a personal goal of theirs. They have many talents and loves and one of those is science. And they know science builds upon math and in high school they want to be on the STEM track.Guys… math almost killed me this year (and them I assume 😆). We started with Derek Owens which has worked perfectly for my other child. This one, not so much. So then we tried Math Mammoth. Utter disaster. Then I tried Understanding Pre-algebra. I got nowhere. Finally I got an adaptive math program, ALEKS, online, because I could not figure out what else to do and just made them do an hour a day (jumping in to help when they didn’t understand a topic).

Somehow they aced the math portion of the end of the year standardized test I give them. And I also found some potential Algebra classes for next year, contacted the teachers, and had them give her a readiness assessment. Not stellar, but they did indicate readiness for Algebra next year.

Whew…

And I learned an important lesson. When my kids become pre-teens I need to back off teaching math. It hasn’t worked for either of them. 🤣

Interdisciplinary Studies

Back to the online Falcon’s group with the occasional in person meet-up.

They contributed pieces to the weekly newsletter/paper and performed in the annual Halloween play. Once again they covered a wide variety of topics (that I’m not doing justice) that included:

the People’s Puppet Parade and Purim
Nationalism and World Wars
Ledgers and formatting financial transactions
Repercussions of extended space visits on Astronauts bodies
Endangered species, adaptations, and neoteny
Persian new year, Nowruz
The crafting of Roman coins and the history of money
Symbolism in the book “Spinning Silver” by Naomi Novik
Holi the festival of color
How molds were made before 3d printing, metal casting
Samoa and fa’afafine, studying history through the lens of different cosmologies, gender stereotypes of different cultures.
Cultural stereotypes around gendered clothing and hair.
Liminal Space
Late We’wha from the Zuni tribe
Why do the money systems of different countries have different values?
Spreading information or disinformation
What it means to be open minded and the difference between how people think, versus what they think.
The Black Death, rats, and leftover resources leading to cheap paper
Currency, counterfeiting and prevention.
Developing a money system for use in class and hosting a makers fairs with a base 5 money system, ledger, taxes, and paying civic “employees”
Decomposition, death, and cultural burial traditions.
Ellis island and immigration
Factories, products, and planned obsolescence. Environmental and economical impacts

Art, Physical Education, and Health

Art was a free for all. They would tell me what they were interested in and I’d get them supplies and find teachers on Outschool. The top mediums were clay, painting, and digital animation.

P.E. was the swim team at the local YMCA. Besides swimming six hours a week and then attending multiple swim meets a month, the coaches reviewed healthy eating and how to take care of the body as an athlete. They even won “Most Improved Swimmer” at the end of the year banquet 🥰

For health we attended the chat form Stanford Medicine

Whew. This year was a lot. And even now in August I’m not recovered from it.

🐯 Ninth Grade for 2024/2025

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 20:44:21 -0400

I did make some micro posts about the year. You can check them out if you’d like

So last year I sat down with my son and looked at some of the high school requirements of various colleges and universities near us. Since he was little he’s been adamant that he wanted to study science so we focused on those that had strong science programs. Then with that list of requirements we made a rough plan for the next four years.

Course of Study

History, Writing, and Literature

History

For history my son wanted to begin with his World History requirement. I found several strong choices and we went through each option, looking at the syllabus and the topics offered. He chose World History: Africa and Asia with Aim Academy.

This class centered viewing history through the lens of Africa and Asia versus other courses that had a more European centric view. He met with the class once a week online where they discussed as a group that week’s topic. Then he had a full week of assignments, including map practice to memorize all the countries and major land features in Africa and Asia, literature to read, multiple videos to watch, and finally a dozen questions or so to answer and submit for grading. Throughout the year he had essays to write, book reviews, and papers on current topics in the news. The teacher was wonderful and met with my son to help him get back on track when the first few lessons through him for a loop.

Take a look at the book list for the class:

Wild Swans
by Jung Chang
Barefoot Gen Volume 1
by Keiji Nakazawa
Foundations of Chinese Civilization
by Jing Liu (Author of graphic novels)
Islam
by Karen Armstrong
Lissa
by Hamdy, Sherine
It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime
by Trevor Noah
Africa
by John Reader
Persepolis
by Marjane Satrapi
The Ocean of Churn
by Sanjeev Sanyal

And here are the films they had to watch (most were very intense for him)

The Woman King (2022)
Cry, Freedom (1987)
Hotel Rwanda (2004)
Wadjda (2012)
Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001)
First They Killed My Father (2017)

Writing

For writing he kept working with his tutor from last year. They worked on a variety of different writing tasks and he had daily free writing time. He covered filling out applications, how to write an email, editing essays, creating outlines, works cited, and how to prepare a presentation and then present it. It was a well rounded year that he enjoyed.

Literature

For the literature portion of his ELA class we sourced a variety of books for him to read and discuss. He also practiced summarizing books and writing reviews.

The Return of the King
by J
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
by Carl Sagan
Braiding Sweetgrass
by Robin Kimmerer
Legendborn
by Tracy Deonn
The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas
The Taming of the Shrew In Plain and Simple English (A Modern Translation)
by BookCaps
The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak
Ashfall
by Mike Mullin
The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, Book 1)
by J. R. R. Tolkien
The Two Towers
by J. R. R. Tolkien
Memory of Water
by Emmi Itäranta
Life as We Knew it
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Binti: The Complete Trilogy
by Nnedi Okorafor

One other aspect for literature was through a class I found on outschool. It’s called Visual Lit High School: Draw Your Way Through High School English Language Arts. Here he covered poetry and short stories learning oral expression, visual interpretation, and fundamental grammar skills.

Just a few of the poems, short stories, and podcasts he analyzed:

“A White Heron” Sarah Orne Jewett and Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers”
“Nonfiction Sketchnoting Activity Part 1. Podcast: “Colors” by Radiolab
“Before I Got My Eye Put Out” (336) by Emily Dickinson
“Joy” by Anton Chekhov and “I am Nobody” “I heard a Fly buzz” by Emily Dickinson
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce
“War” by Luigi Pirandello
“This Is What It Means To Say Phoenix, AZ” by Sherman Alexie
“A Ghost Story" by Mark Twain
“How To Become a Writer” by Lorrie Moore
“The Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri

Science and Mathematics

Honors Biology with a Lab

Honors Biology from taylormadescience.com covers the typical topics of cells, genetics, microbiology, plants, animals, human anatomy and physiology, and the environment.

This is the third class my son has done with this teacher and he gets a lot out of it. Every week he reads a chapter from the textbook and takes notes, watches a pre-recorded lesson and then takes a quiz, and then performs the lab with the teacher and other students and then writes up a lab report. In total there were twenty five labs including a frog dissection.

Understanding our Universe through Astronomy

Astronomy from g3 was one of his electives for the spring semester that was a high school level astronomy course adapted from college-level material. He had weekly webinars and textbook readings to cover as well as articles to read and a forum with other students to post responses to questions and prompts.

Motions of the Earth and Moon and the Laws of Motion
Light and Telescopes
The Formation of Stars and Planets
The Planets and other Bodies in the Solar System
The Stars and Their Evolutions (Low Mass and High Mass)
Galaxies and the Milky Way
The Evolution of the Universe
Formation and Structure of the Universe
Life in the Universe

His favorite part was making trading cards that looked like Magic the Gathering Cards that covered the planets, the moons, and other bodies in the solar system. His final paper for the semester was on Carl Sagan and his life as an astronomer.

Contributing to Scientific Understanding

Contributing to Scientific Understanding from Athena’s Academy was his elective for the fall semester. This online class had weekly webinars covering how to contribute to scientific understanding in a variety of ways as a high school student. My son chose to add to Wikipedia with additional information about invasive plant species in Massachusetts and conducted a survey of several local sites to quantify the types he found and identify them. Then he learned how Wikipedia works and how to format and submit his findings for inclusion.

Honors Geometry

I think we finally found a math that my son isn’t a fan of 😂

He muddled through it though. Once again we used Derek Owens. It is a solid math program that includes short videos, a textbook, and grading services. My son thinks the textbook is personally out to get him. My son had to email Mr. Owens many different times when ideas weren’t clicking and he always got back promptly with recorded videos that help my son tackle the concept.

Interdisciplinary Studies

This will be my son’s last year with his online Falcon’s group. He’s still planning on being active with some of the online clubs the kids run and join any get-togethers that are geographically feasible.

This counted as an elective that I’m calling “Integrated Humanities.” He contributed pieces to the weekly newsletter/paper and performed in the annual Halloween play. Once again they covered a wide variety of topics (that I’m not doing justice) that included:

the People’s Puppet Parade and Purim
Nationalism and World Wars
Ledgers and formatting financial transactions
Repercussions of extended space visits on Astronauts bodies
Endangered species, adaptations, and neoteny
Persian new year, Nowruz
The crafting of Roman coins and the history of money
Symbolism in the book “Spinning Silver” by Naomi Novik
Holi the festival of color
How molds were made before 3d printing, metal casting
Samoa and fa’afafine, studying history through the lens of different cosmologies, gender stereotypes of different cultures.
Cultural stereotypes around gendered clothing and hair.
Liminal Space
Late We’wha from the Zuni tribe
Why do the money systems of different countries have different values?
Spreading information or disinformation
What it means to be open minded and the difference between how people think, versus what they think.
The Black Death, rats, and leftover resources leading to cheap paper
Currency, counterfeiting and prevention.
Developing a money system for use in class and hosting makers fairs as a base 5 system, ledger, taxes, paying civic “employees”
Decomposition, death, and cultural burial traditions.
Ellis island and immigration
Factories, products, and planned obsolescence. Environmental and economical impacts

European Portuguese

Last up for the year was studying Portuguese. He worked with a tutor and the online program Practice Portuguese. We also worked through sections of the textbook Bom Dia! together.

Whew. This year was a lot and it really stretched my son. The beginning of the year was rough as he adjusted to a much higher workload and writing demands. I am so proud of what he accomplished. Next year is 10th grade and that seems both impossible to me and right around the corner. Yikes.

Mini-coding concept: An in-page editor for my blog posts

Tue, 06 May 2025 12:57:47 -0400

For a while I’ve had my own little personal edit button on my website that redirected me to the post in edit view on Lillihub. Last week I decided that maybe I wanted something even easier, an editor inside my website. So I’ve been playing around with that idea. Once again this takes advantage of having a Micropub enabled website. I have a small little server up on Deno Deploy for now handling that part of the integration. Here is a short video I recorded that shows off the editing portion:

Please forgive the quality. I stepped outside my comfort zone recording it, and it was either upload as-is or get stuck forever in the mire of editing/being social paralysis 😂

Backlinks on a Micro.blog hosted website

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 14:54:26 -0400

One of my goals when transforming my website into a digital garden was to include backlinks on my posts. A backlink is a link to a post that refers to the current post that you are viewing. There are several blog posts out there that explain how enable this for Hugo blogs that I used for inspiration. Here are the steps I used to get this functionality on my blog.

You will need to edit your theme for single blog posts which is located at layouts/posts/single.html (or if using a theme that supports Matt Langford’s microhooks, add/edit one for microhook-after-post.html)

The first thing that needs to happen is to grab the url of the page (in this case the relative permalink) and create a variable to store the matches you come across. That’s the {{ $pages := slice }}

You then iterate through all the blog pages… {{- range .Site.Pages -}} and store {{ $pages = $pages | append . }} any that contain the text of the relative permalink {{- if strings.Contains .Content $relpermalink -}}

	{{ $relpermalink := .RelPermalink }}
	{{ $pages := slice }}
	{{- range .Site.Pages -}}
		{{- if strings.Contains .Content $relpermalink -}}
			{{ $pages = $pages | append . }}
		{{- end -}}
	{{- end -}}

Next you’ll want to iterate through those pages and display them. For simplicity of this post I’m just using a basic HTML list. If the backlinking post has a title, let’s display that, otherwise just take the summary or truncate it.

{{ with $pages }}
	  
			  {{ range $pages }}
				{{- if .Title -}}
				
				  {{ .Title }}
				
				{{- else -}}
				
				  {{ .Summary | truncate 150 }}
				
				{{- end -}}
			  {{ end }}
			
	{{ end }}

Result on my website after some extra styling

You can checkout the full code snippet here:

Updated 4 Apr 2025 based on a comment by Leon Mika to stop backlinks to newsletter pages.

	{{ $relpermalink := .RelPermalink }}
	{{ $pages := slice }}
	{{- range .Site.Pages -}}
		{{- if strings.Contains .Content $relpermalink -}}
		  {{- if not (strings.HasPrefix .RelPermalink "/newsletters") -}}
			  {{ $pages = $pages | append . }}
			{{- end -}}
		{{- end -}}
	{{- end -}}
&#123;&#123; with $pages }}
  <ul class="backlinks">
		  &#123;&#123; range $pages }}
			{{- if .Title -}}
			<li>
			  <a class="p-url" href="&#123;&#123; .Permalink%20}}">&#123;&#123; .Title }}</a>
			</li>
			{{- else -}}
			<li>
			  <a class="p-url" href="&#123;&#123; .Permalink%20}}">&#123;&#123; .Summary | truncate 150 }}</a>
			</li>
			{{- end -}}
		  &#123;&#123; end }}
		</ul>
&#123;&#123; end }}

2024 Weird Web October

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 22:13:20 -0400

https://weirdweboctober.website/

Themes

Nature
CSS
Color - added 9/28/2025
Lists
Food
Notifications
Science
Hashtags
Blessed
Art
API
Ritual
GIFs
History
Audio
Social
Dimensions
Words
Data
Capitalism
Memes
Bugs
IRL
Cursed
Interactive
Chat
Nostalgia
Generative
Forms
Emoji
Spooky

Eight Silk Brocades

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 14:04:19 -0400

The eight silk brocades are a set of Qi Gong exercises meant to work and warm up muscles groups commonly used throughout the day. Especially the legs, hips, and back. I tend to use them as cool down exercises after a longer Tai Chi workout, see Long Yang, but the movements are also quite nice in the morning to wake up.

Eight Silk Brocades

Perform each exercise eight times breathing slowly. The mouth should be closed and your tongue should lightly press on the roof of your mouth. You should only take the movement to 70-80% of your maximum and you should not overextend or lock out your joints.

A Note on Breathing

Your breath should become a focus only after you commit the exercises to memory and don’t need to focus on the mechanics of your movements. In general, inhaling means the movements are coming back to the center of the body and exhaling means the movement should be moving away from your center. You should also raise up your stance slightly when you inhale and sink down slightly when you exhale.

The hardest part is that your breath should drive the movements and not the other way around. It is easy to think, “I move my hands apart and exhale” when it really should be “When I exhale, I move my hands apart”. Your breath dictates your speed.

1. Two Hands Hold up the Heavens

Stand in a neutral stance. Slowly bring your hands up, joining them together at about eye level, and continue raising them upward until they are interlaced high over your head with palms facing the sky. Slowly release letting your arms drop down to your sides ready to begin again.

2. Separate Heaven and Earth

Slowly bring your hands up but when they are a chest level push one hand down, palm down, and raise the other hand to the sky, palm up. Slowly circle your hands out to the side and around until they have traded positions. Then let the hands drift close, chest level, like you are holding an imaginary ball and do the same on the other side.

3. Drawing the Bow to Shoot the Eagle

Feet out wide, slightly more than shoulder length, with knees bent (a horse stance). Alternate a shooting the bow motion using the waist to twist side-to-side. Make sure your knees remain over the ankles and not twisting inward or over-extending forward. If they are, you need to adjust your stance. One set is considered “shooting” both left and right.

4. Wise Owl Looks Backward

Start in a neutral stance and then look back over the shoulder. As you do so turn your palms to face outward. When you return to look front your palms will return to normal facing to the back. One set is considered looking both left and right.

5. Shake the Back and Wag the Tail

Stand in a horse stance, placing your hands on your thighs. Starting with one corner bend forward, look down at the ground and then move from your waist to the other corner. Like you are trying to find a set of keys lost in the grass. When you reach the opposite corner from where you started bring yourself back up, gazing at the horizon. One set is considered looking both left and right.

6. Pull Down the Sky and Hold the Feet

Start in a neutral stance and let both hands float upward. When they are high overhead turn your palms to face you and bring them back down to settle on your lower back. With your hands trace down the back of your legs, bending at the waist as you do so. Go as far as you can and pause. To come up, bend your knees and pretend to sit back onto a stool while looking up at the sky.

7. Punch Forward with an Angry Gaze

In a horse stance punch forward, alternating sides.

8. Bouncing on the Back to Relieve illness

This begins with a fold with the body and then a rounding up as you bring your hands overhead. Then if you are comfortable take a moment to bend back even further into a slight backbend. Then let your hands drop to your sides and roll up on your toes. Then drop your heels to begin again. You can do a small hop if you are comfortable with it.

108 Long Yang Form

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 14:03:20 -0400

As my Sifu always says “This is your form” and it should feel like “coming home.” After many years of practice, it finally does.

The goal for beginners is to complete this form in about 15 minutes and as you advance you should slow it down. Every movement should flow into the next one and there should never be a moment where you are not moving. Advanced practitioners should aim for 40 minutes or longer.

Traditional Yang Tai Chi 108 Movement Long Form

Part One

YouTube Video

Beginning form.
Energy ball right to ward off left.
Energy ball left to ward off right.
Roll back
Press forward
Sit back then push
Single whip
Lifting hands
Elbow stroke to white crane flashes its wings
Brush knee and strike
Play the guitar
Left brush knee and strike
Right brush knee and strike
Center brush knee and strike
Play the guitar
Brush knee and strike
Scoop (catch the record)
Deflect, parry and punch
Seal the breath and push
Close by throwing the soap bubble

Part Two

YouTube Video

Tiger returns to the mountain
Roll back, press, sit back and push
Single whip
Step right, face left with fist under elbow
Step back and repulse the monkey
Step back and repulse the monkey
Step back and repulse the monkey
Shift weight three times to slant flying (left hand close)
Round the back to lifting hands
Elbow stroke to white crane flashes its wings
High pat on the horse
Dip the needle at the sea bottom
Fan through back
Face danger, sit back and cover high
Long knock to double chop
Grab, deflect, parry and punch
Shoulder stroke
Roll back, press, sit back and push
Single whip
Wave hands in clouds
Single whip
Spear forward, settle back
Circle hands right to open and kick left
Circle hands left to open and kick right
Turn double chop
Turn to open and kick left
Brush knee and strike
Brush knee and strike
Bend the steel bar
Lift the ceiling with your back to cover high
White snake spits out poison
Two eye hits to a grab, deflect, parry and punch
Sit back and cover high to open and kick right
Tame the tiger right
Turn and tame the tiger left
Cover to open and kick right
Double box the ears to the corner
Pass the kick by and separate left
Turn and open kick right
Scoop, deflect, parry, and punch
Seal the breath and push
Close by throwing the soap bubble

Part Three

Tiger returns to the mountain
Roll back, press, sit back and push
Single whip
Catch energy ball left
Shearing the horses mane, right
Shearing the horses mane, left
Shearing the horses mane, right
Ward off left
Energy ball left to ward off right.
Roll back, press, sit back and push
Single whip
Fair lady works the shuttle left
Fair lady works the shuttle right
Fair lady works the shuttle left
Fair lady works the shuttle right
Ward off left
Energy ball left to ward off right.
Single whip
Snake creeps down (two times)
Step back and repulse the monkey (three times)
Single leg to slant flying (left hand apart)
Round the back to lifting hands
Elbow stroke to white crane flashes its wings
High pat on the horse
Dip the needle at the sea bottom
Fan through back
Face danger, sit back and cover high
Long knock to double chop
Grab, deflect, parry and punch
Shoulder stroke, roll back, press, sit back and push
Single whip
Wave hands in clouds
Spear forward the settle back
Press and spear
Turn and long chop
Cover and open kick right
Scoop, deflect, parry and punch
Shoulder stroke to roll back, press, sit back and push
Single whip
Snake creeps down
Seven star block
To step back and ride the tiger
Eyebrow kick
Side step to draw the bow and shoot the tiger
Long scoop, deflect, parry and punch
Close by throwing the soap bubble

End Notes

Like many things, as this form was passed along from teacher to student and from one language to another, there are small changes to the movements and terminology. This is how I learned the form.

🐯 Eighth Grade For 2023/2024

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 13:33:39 -0400

Wow, eighth grade. How is this possible???

Note: This has been updated as of 3/13/2024.

Course of Study

History, Writing, and Literature

History

With the broad social studies aspect of his Falcons co-op we aren’t doing a large formal study of history. On his own he reviewed some Ancient history and the Middle Ages with the audiobooks from Curiosity Chronicles.

There is also a history focus in his art with “Visual History: Draw Stick Figure Stories of Modern World History” where he will be covering

The transformation of Eurasian societies in an era of global trade and rising European power, 1750-1870
Patterns of nationalism, state-building, and social reform in Europe and the Americas, 1830-1914
Patterns of global change in the era of Western military and economic domination, 1800-1914
Major global trends from 1750-1914
Reform, revolution, and social change in the world economy of the early century
The causes and global consequences of World War I

Writing

The bane of our homeschooling this year. So, I got my son some tutoring hours with Anna (see below for Falcons) to help unblock him and hopefully help him enjoy writing again. He’s doing lots of free writing and working some creative writing pieces. With his falcons class he also helped create and edit the Halloween play and wrote an essay on the symbolism in the movie Encanto.

He is also doing an online English Language Arts class. In the class they covered:

Grammar
How to summarize a book
Write an organized five-paragraph paper with a works cited page
Give two oral “Book Talks”
Learn how opinion writing is different from expository writing
Write and illustrate their own fable
Read short stories and participate in multiple Socratic Seminars
Study the narrative genre with an analysis of literary elements
Write a short story, creating a unique world, characters, conflict, suspense, tension, climax, resolution and theme
Write a book of their own poems
How to write compare/contrast pieces

Literature

I keep a well stocked bookcase of books that my son is free to pick from. He’s welcome to choose whatever he’s interested in from our collection of books or check out books from the library.

This is what he’s been reading so far this year:

Dungeon Crawler Carl
by Matt Dinniman
Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare
The Cartoon History of the Universe
by Larry Gonick
The Dreamer
by Pam Muñoz Ryan
The Voyage of the Beagle
by Charles Darwin
Watership Down
by Richard Adams
Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Graphic Novel
by George Orwell
Sapiens A Graphic History, Volume 1
by Yuval Noah Harari
How to Calculate Quickly
by Henry Sticker
Journey to Center of the Earth
by Jules Verne
The Story That Cannot Be Told
by J. Kasper Kramer
Cartoon Guide to Genetics
by Larry Gonick
When Bugs Were Big, Plants Were Strange, and Tetrapods Stalked the Earth
by Hannah Bonner
The Great Human Journey
by Ian Tattersall
The Unnameables
by Ellen Booraem
The Iliad
by Gareth Hinds
Macbeth
by Gareth Hinds
How to Train Your Dragon
by Cressida Cowell
An Uninterrupted View of the Sky
by Melanie Crowder
Rogue Protocol: The Murderbot Diaries
by Martha Wells
Poe: Stories and Poems
by Gareth Hinds
Hidden Figures
by Margot Lee Shetterly
The Neverending Story
by Michael Ende
Understanding Comics
by Scott McCloud
Network Effect
by Martha Wells
All Systems Red
by Martha Wells
Fugitive Telemetry
by Martha Wells
Wildhood
by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz
The Last Cuentista
by Donna Barba Higuera
Beowulf
by Gareth Hinds
Sapiens: A Graphic History, Volume 2
by Yuval Noah Harari

Science and Mathematics

My son was begging to do two science classes this year.

Honors High School Earth Science with a Lab

Once again we are doing a class from Taylor Made Science Honors Earth Science with Lab. He likes the teacher and really wants to stretch himself with science.

So this course covers the main fields of geology and an introduction to astronomy. The teacher sends a box of lab supplies as part of the course which helps out so much. The course is going to be a flipped classroom style this year - which was new.

So he does the textbook reading with guided notes on Friday and watches the lecture on Monday’s and takes a quick online quiz on the material. Wednesday he attends the zoom class where the teacher checks for understanding and then starts the lab with them, often breaking them into smaller groups. He’ll finish the lab after the class and submits it.

Physics (optional)

My son’s love of science really blossomed with Science Mom chemistry course that we did three years ago. Since then, whenever they offer a new course he is all on board. Plus, I want him to have fun with science. This year they are doing physics! The first course will be Physics 1: Mechanics and the second course will be on Physics 2: Electromagnetism. Since he’s doing another full science course this will be a fun extra that he can do as much or as little as he wants.

Mini Course - Ancient Mammals from the Permian to the Holocene

This was a fun outschool class I found for him to enjoy and he spent 8 weeks on it. He covered Mammoths & Elephants, Sail-backed Pelycosaurs (Dimetrodon & Edaphosaurs), Sabre-toothed felines, Dicynodonts, Horses, Gorgonopsids, Camels and Cynodonts. This prompted him to reread his Dinosaur encyclopedia and some of his pre-history bugs and animal books.

Honors Algebra 1

It’s math time. Algebra style. He’ll be using the self-paced online course Derek Owens Honors Algebra 1. I went back on forth on a few different options. Art of Problem Solving was a contender as well as the Thinkwell online course but I decided on Derek Owens because I think the format would work best with my son. There are videos that teach and you fill in notes as you go along. Homework that is done on paper and then emailed out to be graded. It comes back with handwritten corrections. I’m a big believer in handwriting out math and that’s ultimately what swayed me to Derek Owen over Thinkwell. Bonus, they do all the grading and record keeping.

Interdisciplinary Studies

One of the best homeschooling finds I found last year was Falcons. We used the online class last year and it was very apparent that this year we needed to keep Falcon’s as a cornerstone to our homeschooling again. The teacher, Anna, is fantastic. She weaves such wonderful topics together for the kids. Really, they covered too many things to enumerate here.

A small sample of topics would be making their own made up culture, practice about splitting the history part out from historical fiction, symbolism in Encanto, the building of bomb shelters and why people expected the Cold War to turn into WWIII, connecting Hollerith boards to the film “Hidden Figures”, reliable and unreliable sources, universal human experiences, Ramadan, Lunar New Year, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., what the differences were between texting and face-to-face communication when it comes to nuanced responses, the behavior of waves, how our brains process facial expressions vs emojis, cyberbullying, Shakespeare, coming of age ceremonies around the world, Aztecs, watching out for AI generated videos on youtube, and infinity

And here are some of the main questions they explored together so far:

What is the difference between machine “learning” and human learning?
Can machines resolve a contradiction between wants?
Do you need bad guys to make a good story?
Should we be celebrating Thanksgiving at all?
Does change always mean loss of power? For whom?
Why do we still have climate change?
What is a friend? How can we handle things when friends make mistakes?
How might the rapid/short forms of texting and social media be shaping our communication?
How does function often follow form in media?
How can we navigate inevitable change?
What is Encanto REALLY about? Why do you think so?
Why is there meaning assigned to human features?
What separates different cultures? What is culture?
What is food?
What is a puppet?
Why is there resistance to kids learning about Black history right now?
When does a culture “outgrow” its old laws? What’s done then?
Does everything in the past count as history?
How long ago does something have to be to be history?
Can an object be history?
Who in history tends to be included and who/what is left out?
How does symbolism affect how we tell history?
What determines the likelihood of certain histories being recorded and disseminated?
What is Black history? Is there a difference between Black history and history?
What types of changes do wars make? What are changes that aren’t war based?
What is the ultimate job of a culture?
What happens in the time after war?

Art and Music

Clarinet

He’s been practicing his clarinet and taking weekly private lessons. I think his interest is waning, but every time I suggest moving on he insists on keeping with it.

Art

We pivoted in art, since it really isn’t anything he wants to engage in. We did an online class called “Drawing Your Own Dragons & Other Cool Creatures!” for 15 weeks and he did make some cool monster fish drawing he enjoyed.

We are now going to try a class called “Visual History: Draw Stick Figure Stories of Modern World History” since he does enjoy stick figure drawing. He will also read “Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud and have an end of year art project to make a stick figure poster explaining something historical or scientific, his choice.

Health and Financial Literacy

My son is taking an online class on Pro-Social Skills for Teens. They cover topics for friendship making skills, dealing with feelings, alternatives to aggression, and skills for dealing with stress.

Physical Education

He continues on with our local swim team and attending the local Kung Fu classes when he is able. He was thrilled to be invited to the New England Championship with his swim team.

Things we dropped

Big History
Torchlight Constellations

🐯 Seventh Grade for 2022/2023

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 13:21:45 -0400

#homeschooling

I can’t believe we are done!

Seventh grade was a whirlwind and high school seems like it is just around the corner. I definitely felt like this year went by faster then last year! Now here I am putting together a progress report for my local school system and I decided that I should post it here on my blog. Now the school system gets a boring bullet list, but here I can have some fun. Hopefully this gives someone else some ideas about homeschooling the middle school years.

Mathematics:

Algebra is just around the corner so we used Understanding Pre-Algebra: Middle School Mathematics this year to get ready.

English Language Arts:

Writing

This year my son did writing with an outside teacher. He used a middle school class from the Well Trained Mind Academy - Expository Writing I. This had him writing narrative summaries, chronological narratives, descriptions, biographical sketches, and sequences, plus beginning literary essays about both fiction and poetry; one- and two-level outlining; thesaurus use and note-taking. This was probably the hardest thing he did this year and he knocked it out of the park.

Literature and Reading

For reading I don’t make a specific list of books that he needs to work through. Though I did stock our home library with about 20 new books for the school year making sure several of those were harder books, either classics or denser non-fiction works. He usually reads both a fiction book and a non-fiction book at a time but it’s up to him to pick out the particular book he wants in those categories.

The Hobbit: Illustrated Edition
by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Mighty Mars Rovers: The Incredible Adventures Of Spirit And Opportunity (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) (Scientists in the Field (Paperback))
by Elizabeth Rusch
The Odyssey
by Gareth Hinds
Science Comics by Falynn Koch 10 book set (Plagues, Solar System, Cats, The Brain, Bats, Dogs, Robots and Drones, Dinosaurs, Wild Weather, Trees)
by Falynn Koch
Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story
by Lee Berger
Fascinating Fibonaccis (Dale Seymour Publications)
by Dale Seymour Publications Secondary
Science Comics: Coral Reefs: Cities of the Ocean
by Maris Wicks
Navigating Early
by Clare Vanderpool
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: The Illustrated Edition (Harry Potter, Book 5) (Illustrated edition)
by J. K. Rowling
Team Moon: How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon
by Catherine Thimmesh
How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems
by Randall Munroe
Mistborn: The Final Empire
by Brandon Sanderson
Life Skills for Teens: How to Cook, Clean, Manage Money, Fix Your Car, Perform First Aid, and Just About Everything in Between
by Karen Harris
The Hero of Ages: Book Three of Mistborn
by Brandon Sanderson
What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
by Randall Munroe
Project Hail Mary: A Novel
by Andy Weir
The Well of Ascension
by Brandon Sanderson
Spinning Silver: A Novel
by Naomi Novik
The Left-Handed Fate
by Kate Milford
The Dark Talent
by Brandon Sanderson
Alcatraz versus the Shattered Lens
by Brandon Sanderson
The Scrivener's Bones
by Brandon Sanderson
Alcatraz Vs. the Evil Librarians
by Brandon Sanderson
Let's Talk about Sex
by Robie H. Harris
Sex, Puberty and All that Stuff
by Jacqui Bailey
The Twelve
by Cindy Lin
World Without Fish
by Mark Kurlansky
I Am Malala
by Malala Yousafzai
They Called Us Enemy
by George Takei
Seventh Grade vs. the Galaxy
by Joshua S. Levy
Science Comics: Rocks and Minerals
by Andy Hirsch
Science Comics: Sharks
by Joe Flood
Science Comics: Cats
by Andy Hirsch
Rez Dogs
by Joseph Bruchac
What If? 2
by Randall Munroe
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
by Jules Verne
Cosmic Queries
by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Grammar and Vocabulary

We used a couple of resources this year to cover common grammatical and spelling mistakes, sentence diagramming, and common Latin roots and stems. The resources were from the Critical Thinking Company: Sentence Diagramming Beginning, Word Roots Level 1, and Editor in Chief Level 2. There was also quite a lot of working with work roots during his interdisciplinary studies with his Falcon’s class (see below)

Science

Science is what my son loves more than anything. “There is no such thing as too much science” is a frequent quote I hear when we are bouncing around ideas of things to do an learn.

Astronomy & Space Science

One science he dove into this year was astronomy. He read several non-fiction works around this subject this year (see the reading list above) and took an online class from Outschool for a semester called Twisted Universe: More Ways Math Helps Us Understand Space and in it he covered some amazing topics like Titius-Bode Law and logarithmic patterns of planets in our solar system, ion engines, the Roche Limit, how to use the Rayleigh criterion to understand a telescope’s power, reviewing Newton’s Laws to understand how Newton’s Laws apply to space, the James Webb Space Telescope, what is escape velocity and how to analyze how fast a rocket needs to go in order to leave Earth and the moon, what are Solar Flares, Hubble’s Law, calculating and comparing the speeds each of Saturn’s rings as they orbit the planets and in general, calculating the speed of astronomical objects based on locations at different times. Whew….

Science Sleuths

Science Sleuths is a year long online class for middle schoolers that prepares them for honors high school level science classes involving labs. It’s taught by Cheryl Taylor. It covers basic science skills and lab techniques, such as scientific inquiry, scientific measurement, math and graphing skills used in science, and data collection and analysis. That they then use to solve mysteries around forensics topics. He also learned a valuable lesson around not losing supplies from his supply box.

We started the year by going over early American History but that fizzled out before January. Partly because there was an already full course load going on and partly because the online co-op I signed both my kids up for was doing a fantastic job covering social studies and a million other things.

So Falcon’s Edu is an online co-op run by an absolutely fabulous teacher named Anna. She weaves together complex topics for the kids to discuss and has really created a fantastic community. There was a weekly newsletter/paper that the kids put together and ran. My son contributed several pieces around gemstones and other science topics he was interested in at the time. They created a Halloween play and performed it over Zoom, they practiced running the class themselves, they did some crafting every class. They shared their interests and did deep dives on topics like colonialism, geography and how it affected history, selective breeding, taxonomic trees, mass production, plate tectonics, slavery and racism, Native American boarding schools, civic duties, advertising, protests, pandemics, primary and secondary sources, and Pride month. There is no way I could cover all that they did or do it justice, but here are some of the main discussion topics they explored together:

Can a colonized culture ever go back to the way it was?
Does might make right?
What does it mean to own land?
Apologies and their role in communities and in history
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and what is culture and how does it spread?
What does it mean to be an adult?
How do yard sales help save the world?
How humans around the world work with materials and use themselves as materials
What does it mean to be indigenous?
Whose voyages got into history books and why?
What would happen if all oil drilling stopped today?
What cultures would we expect to rely on bamboo?
How many pandemics have happened in history?
What about invasive species?
How would US history be different without African diaspora?
Is a ham and cheese sandwich expensive? What makes something expensive?
Does child labor make a culture stronger, weaker, or something else?
Why do so many cultures have similar holidays around the same time of year?
What is a bad guy?
What ways did the industrial revolution change society? Why did it change?
What is a memorial?
What makes a fruit, a fruit?
Why is a red panda called a red panda? What other animals are named for animals? Why?
When did Thanksgiving become a holiday?
Did humans domesticate dogs, or the other way around?
What is a missionary?
Are factories reverent? Can machines be reverent?
Why do holidays and books get outlawed?
What does it mean “having good done to you”? (around foster care and indigenous children)
How can we handle fear-mongering? Demonization versus humanization.
Do person-made problems also have person-made solutions?
What’s polite? Different culture mannerisms.
Why are animals on our planet so different?
How is a clam like a cricket?
Why do we classify animals? Is classification constructive in other areas?
Is hair political?
The “Don’t Say Gay” bill and other banned books/topics? Why so many so quickly?
Why do we have moments of silence?
Who gets to decide what is appropriate?
When inappropriate things happen in history, what should be done?

Physical Education and Health

He swam for the local swim team and did Kung Fu at a local school. He also stated going to some Tai Chi classes. I also had a couple books on puberty and sex for him to read and we spent a lot of time going over nutrition and how to keep bodies healthy.

Extracurriculars and Fieldtrips

This year we visited two different aquariums, the Corning Museum of Glass, and Niagara Falls. He did an 8 week course on python coding and continued playing the clarinet.

So that was it. Whew! No wonder the year flew by. He is excited for eighth grade, summer camp and more swimming! He also started a D&D campaign with some cousins and friends. Next up… braces 😆

🐲 Fifth Grade for 2022/2023

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 13:17:17 -0400

#homeschooling

We did it! Fifth grade is done!

This year was tough. My daughter is a reluctant homeschooler. She wasn’t thrilled when the pandemic shut everything down and sent her schooling at home and she wasn’t thrilled waiting for reliable vaccines and until I felt like schools had returned to a somewhat normal state. But I like to think that even with all bumps we had some fun 😁

Mathematics:

We actually cycled through a few different math curriculums to find one that worked for my daughter. Turns out she needed a curriculum that spirals through topics rather than a mastery approach. We ended up with Mathematics Reasoning Level F. It had bright interesting pages, it wasn’t the same thing day-in and day-out. I wouldn’t say she loved it, but she did get through it.

English Language Arts:

Writing, Grammar, and Spelling

This year my daughter did most of her writing with outside teachers. But also did some free writing and writing paragraphs about whatever interested her with me. There were quite a few about chickens 🐣. She enjoyed her online class through Outschool - Ongoing English Class. We also really focused on spelling this year using a variety of materials. In the end we used a curriculum called Apples and Pears.

Literature and Reading

For reading I don’t make a specific list of books that need to be worked through, I just challenge them to choose what’s interesting and to reach for a mix of easy and hard titles. I did end up picking an additional 12 books for our home library across fiction and non-fiction that I thought she’d be interested in. I did have to insist on at least one book being about puberty to her dismay.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (MinaLima Edition) (2)
by J. K. Rowling
Athena: Goddess of Wisdom and War (Tales of Great Goddesses)
by Imogen Greenberg
Hatchet: 30th Anniversary Edition (Brian's Saga Book 1)
by Gary Paulsen
Spinning Silver: A Novel
by Naomi Novik
The Left-Handed Fate
by Kate Milford
The Ancient Egyptian World
by Eric H. Cline
It's So Amazing!
by Robie H. Harris
A Kid's Guide to Keeping Chickens
by Melissa Caughey
Harriet the Spy
by Louise Fitzhugh
History Smashers: The Titanic
by Kate Messner
History Smashers: Women's Right to Vote
by Kate Messner
The School for Good and Evil
by Soman Chainani
Science Comics: Cats
by Andy Hirsch
Rez Dogs
by Joseph Bruchac
Primates
by Jim Ottaviani
The Phantom Tollbooth
by Norton Juster
Science Comics: Volcanoes
by Jon Chad
Science Comics: Crows
by Kyla Vanderklugt
How the U. S. Government Works
by Syl Sobel J. D.
Food Anatomy
by Julia Rothman
A Really Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson

Science

Kitchen Chemistry & Fundamental of Physics

This was a fun class that I found that I don’t think will be offered again but here is the link to the section she used: Kitchen Chemistry. This was a blast and she would have loved if it lasted all year long. I really enjoyed the molecular bond cookies she made.

I believe that the teacher is turning this course into a book for homeschoolers and if she does, I highly recommend it. The second half of the year was all about Physics. This was another fun class that was very hands on although I don’t think she liked it as much as kitchen chemistry: Fundamentals of Physics. We also did a lot of fun science experiments together. She gobbled up a lot of disease videos from Science Mom’s microbiology course we did last year and watched a bunch of science videos from Generation Genius.

My daughter loves history and she really loved the History Mystery class I found on Outschool. The class dove into a wide variety of mysteries including Boudica (Celtic Queen), the haunted Myrtle Plantation, mysteries in Chinese mythology, the mysterious life of King John, Dighton Rock and other mysterious carvings, the Man in the Iron Mask, the Isabella Stuart Gardner theft, the Ghost War, the mysterious Aztec, fun Norse mythology and strange laws in the United States. Now some did give her a fright, but the teacher is very forthcoming about the “scarier” topics so you can skip those if needed.

She also joined the Falcon’s with her brother this year. Falcon’s Edu is an online co-op run by an absolutely fabulous teacher named Anna. She weaves together complex topics for the kids to discuss and has really created a fantastic community. There was a weekly newsletter/paper that the kids put together and ran. My daughter contributed several pieces around chickens and created some pretty fantastic comics to share.

In Falcon’s they created a Halloween play and performed it over Zoom, they practiced running the class themselves, they did some crafting every class. They shared their interests and did deep dives on topics like colonialism, geography and how it affected history, selective breeding, taxonomic trees, mass production, plate tectonics, slavery and racism, Native American boarding schools, civic duties, advertising, protests, pandemics, primary and secondary sources, and Pride month. There is no way I could cover all that they did or do it justice, but here are some of the main discussion topics they explored together:

Can a colonized culture ever go back to the way it was?
Does might make right?
What does it mean to own land?
Apologies and their role in communities and in history
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and what is culture and how does it spread?
What does it mean to be an adult?
How do yard sales help save the world?
How humans around the world work with materials and use themselves as materials
What does it mean to be indigenous?
Whose voyages got into history books and why?
What would happen if all oil drilling stopped today?
What cultures would we expect to rely on bamboo?
How many pandemics have happened in history?
What about invasive species?
How would US history be different without African diaspora?
Is a ham and cheese sandwich expensive? What makes something expensive?
Does child labor make a culture stronger, weaker, or something else?
Why do so many cultures have similar holidays around the same time of year?
What is a bad guy?
What ways did the industrial revolution change society? Why did it change?
What is a memorial?
What makes a fruit, a fruit?
Why is a red panda called a red panda? What other animals are named for animals? Why?
When did Thanksgiving become a holiday?
Did humans domesticate dogs, or the other way around?
What is a missionary?
Are factories reverent? Can machines be reverent?
Why do holidays and books get outlawed?
What does it mean “having good done to you”? (around foster care and indigenous children)
How can we handle fear-mongering? Demonization versus humanization.
Do person-made problems also have person-made solutions?
What’s polite? Different culture mannerisms.
Why are animals on our planet so different?
How is a clam like a cricket?
Why do we classify animals? Is classification constructive in other areas?
Is hair political?
The “Don’t Say Gay” bill and other banned books/topics? Why so many so quickly?
Why do we have moments of silence?
Who gets to decide what is appropriate?
When inappropriate things happen in history, what should be done?

Physical Education & Health

My daughter joined a dance competition team and acrobatic dancing remains her favorite. We also talked a lot about puberty this year and making healthy food choices and what healthy relationships should look like.

Extracurriculars

She enjoyed a Harry Potter Club on Outschool and other drawing classes on Outschool. She also did a series of “Drawing with Scientists” online classes. Plus she was always outside building fairy gardens. This year we visited two different aquariums, the Corning Museum of Glass, and Niagara Falls. She also continued learning to play the guitar.

I’m a little sad that this year was our last year homeschooling but this girl knows what she wants and she’s fantastic enough to go get it. I’m sure next year will bring more dance, more requests to find pirate treasure, and a new adventure at school tackling the sixth grade.

🐯 Sixth Grade for 2021/2022

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 13:11:21 -0400

#homeschooling

This page was created 03/20/2024 as a look back to our earlier years homeschooling.

Mathematics

Math Mammoth Topical Books
ALEKS Middle School Course 3
Upper Elementary Challenge Math by Edward Zacaroo.

English Language Arts

Michael Clay Thompson Language Arts
Weekly paragraphs and small essays on topics from literature, social studies and science.
Spelling: Evan Moor Daily Practice
Evan Moor Daily Practice and lists of commonly misspelled words

Reading & Literature

The Eagle of the Ninth
by Rosemary Sutcliff
The Ancient American World
by William Leonard Fash
The Ancient Egyptian World
by Eric H. Cline
The Ancient Roman World
by Ronald Mellor
The Ancient Chinese World
by Terry Kleeman
Beowulf
by Robert Nye
The Trumpeter of Krakow
by Eric P. Kelly
The Door in the Wall
by Marguerite de Angeli
The Way Life Works
by Mahlon B. Hoagland
The Way We Work
by David Macaulay
Evolution
by Jay Hosler
The Stuff of Life
by Mark Schultz
Caesar's Gallic War
by Olivia E. Coolidge
D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths
by Ingri d'Aulaire
Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky
by David Bowles
Island of the Blue Dolphins
by Scott O'Dell
Bridge to Terabithia
by Katherine Paterson
The Golden Goblet
by Eloise Jarvis McGraw
Treasury of Egyptian Mythology
by Donna Jo Napoli

Science

Genetics and Microbiology by Science Mom
Biochemistry Literacy for Kids

US states geography, features, and capitals
Ancient China, Ancient Rome, Ancient Greeks, Ancient America

Electives

Typing: Online tool. Typsey.com
Music: Clarinet, online tutor
P.E: Martial Arts
Sports: Swim Team @ YMCA

Extracurriculars and Fieldtrips

New England Aquarium
Acadia National Parks
Hammond Museum: A Medieval Castle
Butterfly Atrium - Hershey Gardens
Hike along part of the Appalachian Trail
Wicked - The Musical

🐲 Fourth Grade for 2021/2022

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 12:58:00 -0400

#homeschooling

This page was created 03/19/2024 as a look back to our earlier years homeschooling.

Mathematics

Math Mammoth Topic Books
ALEKS Level 5
Primary Grade Challenge Math by Edward Zacaroo.

English Language Arts

Michael Clay Thompson Language Arts
Fable and Song by Cottage Press
Spelling: Evan Moor Daily Practice

Reading & Literature

A Wrinkle in Time
by Madeleine L'Engle
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
by J.K. Rowling
Redwall
by Brian Jacques
Science Comics: Coral Reefs
by Maris Wicks
Human Body Theater
by Maris Wicks
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh
by Robert C. O'Brien
Saint George and the Dragon
by Margaret Hodges
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
by E.L. Konigsburg
The Story of King Arthur and His Knights
by Howard Pyle
The Tale of Despereaux
by Kate DiCamillo
The Adventures of Robin Hood
by Richard Lancelyn Green
The Hundred Dresses
by Eleanor Estes

Science

Biology with Science Mom
Part of Biochemistry Literacy for kids

US states geography, features, and capitals
Middle Ages: Curiosity Chronicles Middle Ages

Electives

Typing: Online tool. Typsey.com
Music: Recorder, online tutor
P.E: Dance

Extracurriculars and Fieldtrips

New England Aquarium
Acadia National Parks
Hammond Museum: A Medieval Castle
Butterfly Atrium - Hershey Gardens
Hike along part of the Appalachian Trail
Wicked - The Musical

🐯 Fifth Grade for 2020/2021

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 12:50:07 -0400

#homeschooling

This page was created 03/19/2024 as a look back to our earlier years homeschooling.

Mathematics

Math Mammoth Grade 5
Upper Elementary Challenge Math by Edward Zacaroo.

English Language Arts

Michael Clay Thompson Language Arts
Elementary Sentence Composing by Killagon
Institute for Excellence in Writing - Style and Structure
Evan Moor Daily Practice and lists of commonly misspelled words

Reading & Literature

Hatchet: 30th Anniversary Edition (Brian's Saga Book 1)
by Gary Paulsen
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
by J.K. Rowling
A Wrinkle in Time
by Madeleine L'Engle
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
by J.K. Rowling
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh
by Robert C. O'Brien
Alice in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
Dealing with Dragons
by Patricia C. Wrede
Igraine the Brave
by Cornelia Funke
The Witch of Blackbird Pond
by Elizabeth George Speare
Ben and Me
by Robert Lawson
The Explorer
by Katherine Rundell
Peter Pan
by J. M. Barrie

Science

Earth Science by Science Mom
Chemistry by Science Mom

Early American History with SEA online classes
Ancient History & Geography with History Odyssey Level 2 - Ancient History
Some Middle Ages with Curiosity Chronicles Middle Ages

Electives

Typing: Online tool. Typsey.com
Music: Clarinet, online tutor
P.E.: Martial Arts

🐲 Third Grade for 2020/2021

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 12:17:33 -0400

#homeschooling

This page was created 03/14/2024 as a look back to our earlier years homeschooling.

Mathematics

Math Mammoth Grade 5
Primary Grade Challenge Math by Edward Zacaroo.

English Language Arts

Grammar: Michael Clay Thompson Language Arts
Writing: Elementary Sentence Composing by Killagon
Writing: Institute for Excellence in Writing - Style and Structure
Spelling: Evan Moor Daily Practice

Reading & Literature

Alice in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
Dealing with Dragons
by Patricia C. Wrede
Igraine the Brave
by Cornelia Funke
Framed!
by James Ponti
Charlotte's Web
by E. B. White
Pippi Longstocking
by Astrid Lindgren
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Pretty Books - Painted Editions)
by L. Frank Baum
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Colour Edition)
by Roald Dahl
Little House on the Prairie
by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Phantom Tollbooth
by Norton Juster

Science

Interest lead topics in biology, physics and chemistry
Month long study of climate change

Here is a model of a cell she made out of pizza 🍕

Early American History
Curiosity Chronicles Middle Ages

Electives

Typing: Online tool. Typsey.com
Music: Recorder
Art: Weekly online classes from Outschool.com
Health: Puberty, nutrition, safety

Using Deno and Micropub to launch heyloura.com into Geminispace!

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 16:19:54 -0400

After last mini-coding adventure where I was exploring a simple command-line browser idea I had there was a comment by @sod that mentioned I might enjoy looking into Gopher or Gemini as alternative protocols to http… and he was 100% correct 😁

Making a blueprint 🗺️

After exploring some gemini sites (called capsules) I decided I wanted one. But… I didn’t want to make extra work for myself by having to publish blog posts in two different places using two different tools. So I thought of two options. One, make a gemini server that could host my capsule and fetch my blog posts or two, I could go the other way. Make a gemini server, write posts in gemini syntax (.gmi) and then have them uploaded to my blog.

I decided to go with the first option.

1.) A scale model 📡

First thing first. I needed to get something running locally. I already had a gemini client installed called Lagrange and I’ve been using Deno quite a bit for hobby projects. Luckily someone else had made a Gemini server middleware that I could use.

First was the command to create the certificates needed

openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout key.pem -out cert.pem -days 3650 -nodes

And then I moved them into a cert subfolder I made in my project folder.

Next up was the main.js file and the handful of lines needed.

import { Application } from 'jsr:@arma/qgeminiserver@2.0.3';

const 
keyPath  = Deno.env.get('KEY_PATH')  || '../cert/key.pem',
certPath = Deno.env.get('CERT_PATH') || '../cert/cert.pem',
key      = await Deno.readTextFile(keyPath),
cert     = await Deno.readTextFile(certPath),
app      = new Application({key, cert});

app.use(ctx => {
  ctx.response.body = '# Hello World!'
});

await app.start();

I ran this file with the deno run --allow-env --allow-read --allow-net main.js command and there, in my Lagrange client after navigating to gemini://localhost/, was “Hello World”…beautiful 🤩

Getting my existing blog posts with Micropub

There are many things I like about using Micro.blog as my blog host. One of the big ones is the API and the Micropub implementation. In case you’re not familiar, Micropub is an open web standard for creating, editing, and deleting posts/pages from a website. So I just need a valid token and the location of my Micropub endpoint and the world is my oyster 🦪… well, at least my blog posts are… 🤣

So, Micro.blog has a spot on its website where I can generate app tokens and the micropub endpoint is in the HTML head of my blog’s index page. I grabbed those two items and stuck them in an .env file. Once there I could access them easily in Deno. var token = Deno.env.get('token') and var micropub = Deno.env.get('micropub'). I also needed the destination I was calling in Micropub, this is needed since I have several different blogs hosted and it needs to know which one I’m talking about. In this case, https://heyloura.com. var destination = Deno.env.get('destination'). I just declared each of these at the top of the file.

I replaced the route that was serving “Hello World” with a fetch request.

...
app.use(ctx => {
  const fetching = await fetch(`https://micro.blog/micropub?q=source&limit=10&mp-destination=${encodeURIComponent(destination)}`, { method: "GET", headers: { "Authorization": "Bearer " + token } } );
  const results = await fetching.json();
  let page = '';
  results.items.filter(p => p.properties["post-status"][0] == 'published').map((item, i) => { 
    page = page + item.properties["content"][0] + '\r\n\r\n';
  });

  ctx.response.body = page
});
...

I needed to filter out my draft posts, which is why there is a filter call with .filter(p => p.properties["post-status"][0] == 'published') and the content of each post is under item.properties["content"][0]. Now for this sample, I simplified the code. In actuality I added extra text, emojis, links to named blog posts (instead of just outputting) the content. You get the idea.

I once again saved and ran the run command and viola! I had a nice list of blog posts. Or at least that’s what I thought would happen… Instead everything was garbled.

Turns out the Gemini protocol doesn’t support markdown, which is what I typically use to write my posts in.

Doh!

From Markdown to Gemtext

Once again leaning on the open source community I found someone had already created a library Dioscuri. Awesome. Here’s what I needed to add at the top of my main.js file where the import statements go

import * as dioscuri from 'https://esm.sh/dioscuri@1'
import {fromMarkdown} from 'https://esm.sh/mdast-util-from-markdown@2'
import {gfm, gfmHtml} from 'https://esm.sh/micromark-extension-gfm@3'
import {gfmFromMarkdown, gfmToMarkdown} from 'https://esm.sh/mdast-util-gfm@3'
import {gfmFootnote, gfmFootnoteHtml} from 'https://esm.sh/micromark-extension-gfm-footnote@2'
import {gfmFootnoteFromMarkdown, gfmFootnoteToMarkdown} from 'https://esm.sh/mdast-util-gfm-footnote@2'

and then around the item.properties["content"][0] I called

dioscuri.toGemtext(
  dioscuri.fromMdast(
	  fromMarkdown(item.properties["content"][0]),
		{
		  tight:true,
			endlinks:true,
			extensions: [gfm(), gfmFootnote({inlineNotes: true})],mdastExtensions: [gfmFromMarkdown(), gfmFootnoteFromMarkdown()]
	 }
  )
)

Now everything is displaying a bit better.

Not perfectly. Links are gathered up at the bottom with a simple bracketed number and if it encounters any formatting it doesn’t understand it drops it.

But all your self-referencing links are still pointing to https blog?

Yes… which is why I made a little find and replace function. For a url that starts with https://heyloura.com/:year/:month/:day/:id I replaced the https://heyloura.com with a / so it became a relative link. But that means I need a route to capture those…

new Route('/:year/:month/:day/:id', async (ctx) => {
        const id = ctx.pathParams.id;
        const year = ctx.pathParams.year;
        const month = ctx.pathParams.month;
        const day = ctx.pathParams.day;
        let fetching = await fetch(`https://micro.blog/micropub?q=source&properties=content&url=https://heyloura.com/${year}/${month}/${day}/${id}&mp-destination=${encodeURIComponent(destination)}`, { method: "GET", headers: { "Authorization": "Bearer " + token } } );
        let post = await fetching.json();
        let content = dioscuriContent(post.properties["content"][0])
        ctx.response.body = content;
)

Here I grabbed the route parameters and then asked my Micropub endpoint for the contents of that URL. dioscuriContent is a helper function I made for the code in the previous section.

Now links that reference my blog posts up on my blog can be resolved on my little Gemini server.

That’s nice, but what about images?

In the Gemini protocol, images are never included in the page. You can only link to them and then if a user clicks on one can you see it. Luckily I have the url of where the image is and I have a server that can fetch. The tricky part is returning the image as a Unit8Array. No worries. I’ve got you covered.

    new Route('/uploads/:year/:id', async (ctx) => {
        const id = ctx.pathParams.id;
        const year = ctx.pathParams.year;
        let fetching = await fetch(`https://heyloura.com/uploads/${year}/${id}`, { method: "GET" } );
        const file = await fetching.blob();

        try {
            await file.arrayBuffer().then(function(data){
                var response = new ResponseOk(new Body(new Uint8Array(data)), file.type);
                ctx.response = response;
            });
        } catch(e) {
            console.log(e);
            ctx.response = ResponseFailure();
        }
    })

Same thing with the blog links. I checked for and replaced any url that had https://heyloura.com/uploads/:year/:id. Since I’m using a middleware for a gemserver I used it’s helper method for returning a response (to make sure everything is going over the correct port, etc…). So I added import { Application, handleRoutes, Route, ResponseOk, Body, ResponseFailure } from 'jsr:@arma/qgeminiserver@2.0.3'; to my import at the top of the file.

My little proof of concept is complete. I can load up my little server on localhost, click around my links, and even load images I have hosted on my blog. 🤠

Preparing the launch pad

Now this is the point where I’d normally put my little project up on Deno Deploy and the server hosting my code part is done. One big catch though… Deno Deploy doesn’t play nice with port 1965 and the TOFU certificates required by the Gemini protocol.

Sigh. Guess we are going to have to do this the hard way.

Setting up cloud hosting

I spun up Ubuntu 24.04 on a shared VPS. I’m using Hetzner and it’ll come to around $5.60 a month to host this thing (as of current pricing). I actually followed this blog post by David Sadler pretty closely when I was setting everything up.

On step “Install certificates” I did rename key.rsa to key.pem to match what I had in my main.js file and then I had to veer off on my own since I was going install deno and use my code to run the server.

First, deno needed to be installed. But! First first, zip wasn’t installed on the machine… so actually sudo apt install zip was first. Then came the curl -fsSL https://deno.land/install.sh | sh to get Deno installed.

I cd into the directory that was going to hold my little file and then created it with nano main.js and copied the contents over.

I verified everything was there. Ran my master command of deno run --allow-env --allow-read --allow-net main.js and saw the wonderful output that it was up and running on localhost.

The end.

Except… maybe I should check that I can reach my capsule with Lagrange

..er

… huh …

… crap …

I can’t 😭

Loura takes a nap

After running sudo ufw status verbose to make sure I had the firewall configured correctly and running sudo netstat -tnlp | grep :1965 to check it was listening on port 1965 and double checking the main.js file a dozen times. Every time I tried to connect I got connection refused.

So I walked around my neighborhood, appreciated the subtle signs of spring, ate a wonderful lunch, and then took a nap.

When I woke up and checked….

… Darn it, same error.

Sigh… search engine. Don’t fail me now.

I did finally find the answer on this AskUbunto thread from 2012.

Installing nmap and then running nmap confirmed nmap -A -T4 capsule.heyloura.com that it was 127.0.1.1 that was the issue. Nmap scan report for capsule.heyloura.com (127.0.1.1)

Now that I knew what to look for… I found a Github issue around it Deno.ListenOptions hostname defaults to 127.0.0.1 instead of 0.0.0.0

And, looking at the code for the middleware I’m using, I was delighted to see that I could pass in the hostname and specify 0.0.0.0 by changing new Application({key, cert}) to new Application({key, cert, hostname: '0.0.0.0'}).

Holding my breath and ran my server again, and did a little joy dance when it finally connected.

Launching 🚀

The last step I needed was to make sure that my server ran even when I wasn’t logged in and that it would load when the server was rebooted and that it would auto-restart if needed. Pup to the rescue. The install was easy with deno run -Ar jsr:@pup/pup setup and then pup init --id "deno-gemini" --autostart --cmd "deno run --allow-env --allow-read --allow-net main.js". I made sure things could keep running if my user isn’t logged in with sudo loginctl enable-linger username (where username was my username) and then to finish it off pup enable-service and pup run

And heyloura.com launched as capsule.heyloura.com 🪐

For those wanting to browse it:

gemini://capsule.heyloura.com/

Otherwise, here is a picture.

Final notes

The code above was simplified for brevity but hopefully I listed enough of the steps that someone else can copy what I did. I’m thrilled that changes I make to my blog are reflected immediately to my Gemini capsule and since it is all driven by Micropub I can use my own little tools for posting and managing content.

I’m enjoying wandering around Geminispace and hope that others are inspired to check it out.

Happy coding everyone, Loura

Explorations with a command line browser

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 17:19:25 -0400

So last weekend I was a bit tired of the internet. Which will probably be another post at some point. But suffice it to say that the invasive tracking browsers are up to just turns my stomach.

Which lead me back to an old desire of mine, building my own web browser. I’ve never gotten very far. Browsers are so very very complex and as soon as I get started I get overwhelmed. So maybe instead of tackling something so gargantuan, I start a bit smaller.

That lead me down a rabbit hole of text-based browsers. The one that struck me the most was Offpunk. I liked how it incorporated feeds, the simple text interface, and the concept of offline first. Which got me thinking…. What could I pull off in a couple of hours?

Deno has some libraries to help with a command line tool. I ended up grabbing deno-cliffy to start. I ran into some issues with getting it to import but eventually figured out that running deno add jsr:@cliffy/command@^1.0.0-rc.7 worked instead of using the import in the main.js file.

Now that was situated I grabbed an rss parser and a feed from a blog I enjoyed. I did a quick fetch to grab the feed and then parsed it using the tool.

Turns of cliffy lets you pass in a list of suggestions with a paging interface. Sweet…

const xml = await response.text();
const feed = await parseFeed(xml);

const postSelection = await Input.prompt({
  message: "Choose a post",
  info: true,
  list: true,
  maxRows: 20,
  suggestions: feed.entries.map(f => f.title.value)
});

As you can see, the list of items in the RSS feed are displayed and you can type/filter down to the one you want to view.

Once selected I fetched the actual post.

But displaying a bunch of HTML on the command line isn’t my idea of a good reading experience.

That where another library came in html-to-text from npm

A little bit of configuration later and I have….

Which is actually pretty nice to read. The big drawback is I don’t have paging and I find scrolling up on the command line to be distracting. Maybe I could pipe it to less or something.

Where to next?

I thought this was a nice and quick proof of concept that building something out like a text-based browser could be in my grasp (assuming I’m sticking to just getting text and not having to support forms)

But that doesn’t solve… I want my cool new browser on my android phone.

And I also want it without using web-view anything. My trust in the browser is waning. That strikes out almost all of the javascript -> cross platform apps tools.

Deno included.

Little Side Quest

There is a SDL2 deno project that I found in my quest to see if Deno could do desktop apps. The documentation is a bit poor and it took some major head scratching to get the dependencies squared away on Windows. But I was able to get a little “Hello World” up and running

Some idle thoughts

I do want to pursue this browser idea a bit further. I recently got the cross platform GUI library python Kivy up and running with a little test project. I may pull out my little idea sketchbook and see what I can come up with. What could a browser be… if we didn’t use the current browser kings as a blueprint?

Could RSS reign supreme? Bookmarks and link graphs?

Dear reader, have you ever thought about it?

Micro.blog Private Notes + 7.css Fun

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 19:48:00 -0400

Back in October I posted a bit about using YAML front-matter with Micro.blog private notes to extend it’s functionally. I ended up releasing that to Lillihub users earlier this year.

I’ve moved over to using analog index cards for most of my daily note taking but I still have several collections of notes I’m growing. And I needed a place for them. Why not use Micro.blog? Is what I asked myself. Now that Manton has built out a versioning system that saves note changes for 60 days I feel more confident using the service with a larger volume of notes. But what I’ve built out so far in Lillihub (tagging and having titles) is not quite enough.

A Fetch Quest - Getting my notes

Just like my last coding adventure, first I needed to authenticate. I’m not going to write that up again. But do not fear fellow adventurer. I have a map with the secrets of Micro.blog’s indieauth spelled out.

So now that I have the magical token, I need only ask the API nicely for what I need.

Firstly, my notebooks

const fetching = await fetch(`https://micro.blog/notes/notebooks`, { method: "GET", headers: { "Authorization": "Bearer " + token } } );
const results = await fetching.json();

And then upon choosing a notebook and divining its id, I can get all my lovely notes…

const fetching = await fetch(`https://micro.blog/notes/notebooks/${id}`, { method: "GET", headers: { "Authorization": "Bearer " + token } } );
const eNotes = await fetching.json();

But wait! I cannot read my lovely notes! They are garbled and undecipherable to my eye.

A Wizards Secret - Decrypt and encrypt my notes 🧙‍♀️

Luckily some documentation lights the way.

The end. 🤣

Okay, kidding! I’ll share (some of) my secrets.

Behold!

The first of three spells - creating a key 🔑

The first spell component needed is the private note key from Micro.blog. This I saved in localStorage so I could access when needed.

const imported_key = localStorage.getItem("notes_key") ? await crypto.subtle.importKey(
    'raw',
    hexStringToArrayBuffer(localStorage.getItem("notes_key").substr(4)),
    { name: 'AES-GCM', length: 256 },
    true,
    ['encrypt', 'decrypt']
) : '';
function hexStringToArrayBuffer(hexString) {
const length = hexString.length / 2;
const array_buffer = new ArrayBuffer(length);
const uint8_array = new Uint8Array(array_buffer);
<span class="token keyword">for</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token keyword">let</span> i <span class="token operator">=</span> <span class="token number">0</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span> i <span class="token operator"><</span> length<span class="token punctuation">;</span> i<span class="token operator">++</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span>
    <span class="token keyword">const</span> byte <span class="token operator">=</span> <span class="token function">parseInt</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>hexString<span class="token punctuation">.</span><span class="token function">substr</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>i <span class="token operator">*</span> <span class="token number">2</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token number">2</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token number">16</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span>
    uint8_array<span class="token punctuation">[</span>i<span class="token punctuation">]</span> <span class="token operator">=</span> byte<span class="token punctuation">;</span>
<span class="token punctuation">}</span>

<span class="token keyword">return</span> array_buffer<span class="token punctuation">;</span>

}

The second of three spells - decrypting 🧩

async function decryptWithKey(encryptedText, imported_key) {
    const encrypted_data = new Uint8Array(atob(encryptedText).split('').map(char => char.charCodeAt(0)));
    const iv = encrypted_data.slice(0, 12);
    const ciphertext = encrypted_data.slice(12);
<span class="token keyword">const</span> decrypted_buffer <span class="token operator">=</span> <span class="token keyword">await</span> crypto<span class="token punctuation">.</span>subtle<span class="token punctuation">.</span><span class="token function">decrypt</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>
    <span class="token punctuation">{</span> <span class="token literal-property property">name</span><span class="token operator">:</span> <span class="token string">'AES-GCM'</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> iv <span class="token punctuation">}</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span>
    imported_key<span class="token punctuation">,</span>
    ciphertext
<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span>

<span class="token keyword">const</span> decoder <span class="token operator">=</span> <span class="token keyword">new</span> <span class="token class-name">TextDecoder</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span>
<span class="token keyword">const</span> decrypted_text <span class="token operator">=</span> decoder<span class="token punctuation">.</span><span class="token function">decode</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>decrypted_buffer<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span>
<span class="token keyword">return</span> decrypted_text<span class="token punctuation">;</span>

}

The third of three spells - encrypting 🪄

async function encryptWithKey(text,  imported_key) {
    const iv = crypto.getRandomValues(new Uint8Array(12));
    const encoder = new TextEncoder();
    const plaintext_buffer = encoder.encode(text);
<span class="token keyword">const</span> ciphertext_buffer <span class="token operator">=</span> <span class="token keyword">await</span> crypto<span class="token punctuation">.</span>subtle<span class="token punctuation">.</span><span class="token function">encrypt</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>
    <span class="token punctuation">{</span> <span class="token literal-property property">name</span><span class="token operator">:</span> <span class="token string">'AES-GCM'</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> iv <span class="token punctuation">}</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span>
    imported_key<span class="token punctuation">,</span>
    plaintext_buffer
<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span>

<span class="token keyword">const</span> encrypted_data <span class="token operator">=</span> <span class="token keyword">new</span> <span class="token class-name">Uint8Array</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token punctuation">[</span><span class="token operator">...</span>iv<span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token operator">...</span><span class="token keyword">new</span> <span class="token class-name">Uint8Array</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>ciphertext_buffer<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">]</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span>
<span class="token keyword">const</span> base64_encoded <span class="token operator">=</span> <span class="token function">btoa</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>String<span class="token punctuation">.</span><span class="token function">fromCharCode</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token operator">...</span>encrypted_data<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span>
<span class="token keyword">return</span> base64_encoded<span class="token punctuation">;</span>

}

With these spells in our arsenal we can decrypt any of our notes and then save them again by re-encrypting them.

const markdown = await decryptWithKey(note, imported_key);
const eNote = await encryptWithKey(markdown, imported_key);

With that out of the way, let’s see what we can can do 🫠

I Can Never Make Up My Mind 🫥

I’ll admit it. I change up how I save my data regularly. No structure is safe for more than a couple of months. Maybe I’m strange. I find it soooooo soooothing to rename and reorganize digital files.

Not being able to move notes around in notebooks started to drive me insane.

Nor did the documentation hand me a simple endpoint to get it done either. Oh well. I’m sure I’ll think of something.

What about…. copy and delete? As in copy the note into a new notebook and then delete the original.

So with a little HTML, CSS, and JS I have lovely modal I can use to select a notebook and thus send my note along to it’s new home… Oh yeah, I better put up a warning for other users.

The code isn’t that complicated and there is no need to decrypt anything.

let fetching = await fetch(`https://micro.blog/notes/${id}`, { method: "GET", headers: { "Authorization": "Bearer " + accessTokenValue } } );
const eNote = await fetching.json();
const formBody = new URLSearchParams();
formBody.append(“notebook_id”, notebook);
formBody.append(“text”, eNote.content_text);
let posting = await fetch(‘https://micro.blog/notes', {
method: “POST”,
body: formBody.toString(),
headers: {
“Content-Type”: “application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8”,
“Authorization”: “Bearer “ + accessTokenValue
}
});
if(posting.ok) {
posting = await fetch(</span><span class="token string">https://micro.blog/notes/</span><span class="token interpolation"><span class="token interpolation-punctuation punctuation">${</span>id<span class="token interpolation-punctuation punctuation">}</span></span><span class="token template-punctuation string">, {
method: “DELETE”,
headers: {
“Authorization”: “Bearer “ + accessTokenValue
}
});
}

Sweet.

I also added in the ability to rename a notebook and delete a notebook. I won’t go into details since those are just endpoint you call and they are in the documentation.

Danger! ☠️ Loura lost 10 HP!

So while writing the first draft of this blog post, I stepped away from my desk and didn’t lock my computer. The cat took advantage of this and decided to step all over my keyboard. I lost the first draft 😢

Okay, that sucked. Maybe I should do something about that…

I know! auto save!

This was pretty easy. The editor I’m using is EasyMDE and it includes it out of the box. Sweet! Just pass it the right configuration autosave:{enabled:true} and….

Uh oh…..

Did you spot it?

Maybe I should let people know I’m saving a copy of the decrypted note in localStorage.

And thus a toggle was born.

Side Quest - Storing other one-off project data.

One other fun thing I started doing, was using using private notes to hold other small amounts of data for my growing collection of personal PWA’s. Remeber this project with the iframes? I did end up finishing that (though not the blog posts), turned it into a PWA and hooked it up to a private note. I just serialize the data and store it.

It’s my personal todo list calendar hybrid on my phone.

A Dragon’s Hoard Must Be Shiny! 🪙

Okay, okay. I made a micro post on January 15th when I discovered 7.css.

And I uh….

had a bit too much fun.

🤣😅🤣😅🤣

What I love about it? opening up all my notes in different windows! I can even drag the windows around and resize them.

Yep… 😅

The End

♥️ Loura

My 2025 Productivity System

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 14:40:16 -0400

I bounce around tools a lot trying to keep my life organized. Everywhere I look, the tasks I need to get done just keep multiplying. I’ve probably tried dozens of apps by now over the years. I really liked Notion, but didn’t like the lack of portability for my data. Logseq was fun but keeping things synced was hard. Obsidian was close to what I wanted, but ultimately the freedom to endlessly tweak the system made it more of a distraction to me.

Then came 2024 and my life getting exponentially more difficult in an emotional way and all these systems I crafted crumbled. When life was going fine, my executive function skills could keep up with multi-step processes or deal with some friction in the system. But just when I needed these systems the most to keep me afloat and make sure the essentials are getting done they failed. Or I failed, depending on your point of view.

What did keep me getting stuff done? The index card in my pocket.

Since then, my paper system has evolved and that’s what I want to take a moment to record in this post. But unlike other options, I can toss aside the extra’s in this system at anytime and go back to what I can depend on… a simple list on an index card.

The index card

I have three varieties of index cards in my system.

The capture card or inbox
Project cards
Reference cards

I keep all of these in a little index card holder in my pocket or purse. This is similar to the Hipster PDA. Here is a peak at my inbox card, where I jot down tasks or notes as I get them, and a reference card which is this month’s calendar so I can see what dates I have appointments scheduled

Similar to the Getting Things Done system, GTD, my inbox card captures whatever I come across. Periodically throughout the day I cross off things that take less than two minutes (and do them) and at the end of the day the rest of the items are transferred to projects cards, other reference cards, or put as notes on slips of paper (more on that below).

Project cards are the cornerstone of my system and each active project has its own card that is stored in my holder. I currently have around 20 that I’m carrying around. When a project is done I put it in storage if I think I might need to reference in the future otherwise I recycle it.

When I create a project card I brainstorm the tasks I think I need to do. Then I highlight the “Next Action” I need to take and the color it is highlighted corresponds to the context that task needs. I cross out tasks as I complete them and before I put the card away for the day I make sure I have another action highlighted for the next time I circle around to it.

Reference cards I tend to keep on a graph paper index card and contain information I want to reference. Monthly calendars or larger projects that will take more than six weeks are things I’ll normally write up a reference card for. As an example here are my six week homeschooling reference cards for the kids and one I put together for work. So when I’m homeschooling, I have the homeschooling reference cards on hand and when I’m working… the work one.

Now, I tend to view projects as things done at a discrete point in time. For instance, changing my HVAC filters is something that must be done and redone on a schedule. So “change HVAC filters in January” is a project in my system and I’ll make a project card for it. However, the reoccurring reminder to do it is not a project and I needed somewhere to store that and be sure to rediscover that reminder when I needed it.

Keeping organized - a tickler file

Now I’ve been familiar with 43 folders or a tickler file system since I read the post on Analog Office . I just never used one since… one, I was mostly using apps and two, they don’t tend to be portable. If I was going to break free of the apps I needed something portable.

In December 2024 inspiration struck and I crafted my own tickler file. One that was small, portable, and fit in my purse. I took an old Tomoe River A6 planner I wasn’t using and some washi tape I had on hand and went to crafting. I doubled up the pages and taped them together making slightly more than 43 pouches. Tomoe River paper is thin which helps keep this whole thing portable. The A6 size means that my 3x5 index cards fit right inside. Plus it folds open flat and I can use the outside of the pouches to put sticky notes.

I have a pouch for each day and monthly ones in the back. My reference cards, slips of papers with notes and reminders, all live in this pouch. At the beginning of the month I distribute all the slips of paper it collected to the dates they need to go. If they repeat, I keep that info on the paper and move it along as needed. This method of rotating out reoccurring cards is a lifesaver for all those home-based tasks that I need to keep in mind. Changing filters in the fish tank, car maintenance, you name it. I make a slip of paper and move them along.

One thing I did discover, is that I need to use thin paper to keep the tickler file from getting too big. I just tore apart an old Hobonichi journal, with Tomoe River paper, I never used and cut the paper to fit instead of using thicker index cards for everything.

Using the system

I wake up, make coffee and grab my tickler file. I open it up to today’s date and pull out whatever slips of paper it contains and glance at the sticky notes. I put aside what I feel like I can handle that day and move the rest to tomorrows folder. Then I pull out my index card holder and look through my projects cards. Anything new I think of I jot down on my inbox card as well as a tentative plan of attack for the day. Then I get to work.

My inbox index card is right there for when an email comes in or I get a Teams message. I have it in my pocket when homeschooling the kids so I can jot down a random supply I need to pick up. I bring it to work meetings. If I need to go somewhere, everything fits in my purse. In fact, my tickler file fits in my A6 planner cover that has card slots and a small mesh holder for my highlighters… so it often is my purse when I’m out and about.

At the end of the day I spend about 15 minutes sorting slips back into the ticker file or creating project cards or updating reference cards.

It’s been a long time since I felt so in control of my tasks across all facets of my life 😊🗃️

Micro.blog hosted blog - List only titled posts on homepage

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 18:07:00 -0400

Here are the steps I used to make my Micro.blog hosted blog list only the titled posts on my homepage and still paginate correctly. Note: This does require editing your blog theme.

1.) The file you need to edit is: layouts/index.html

2.) The line you are replacing should look something like this: {{- $paginator := .Paginate (where .Site.Pages.ByDate.Reverse “Type” “post”) (index .Site.Params “archive-paginate” | default 20) }} (assuming you and/or your theme haven’t already customized this)

3.) You are going to need to replace it with the following:

{{ $pages := where .Site.Pages.ByDate.Reverse "Type" "post" }}
{{ $pages = where $pages "Params.title" "ne" nil }}
{{- $paginator := .Paginate $pages (index .Site.Params "archive-paginate" | default 20) }}

Then save your changes.

I Created Some DCC Character Sheets

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 14:19:36 -0400

Looks like my little gaming group can get together this weekend to play some Dungeon Crawl Classics, DCC. Yay! During our last game I noticed that we spent just as much time looking up what the characters can do versus actually playing the game. I think that’s because we only get to play every four-six weeks which is just enough time to forget everything. So I hunted around for some good fan-made character sheets that actually explained what a character class/race could do. There were a couple of options that were close to what I wanted, but I ended up just drawing my own.

So here they are:

Micro.blog Bookmarks & Highlights

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 12:15:00 -0400

Life has been way too much lately and most of my hobbies were put on pause while I dealt with keeping up with the unexpected. One of those that was dropped was writing down weekly notes that focused on my development side projects (and honestly, even coding side-projects took a nose-dive). My last post was on March 1st 😱

So I’m doing a little reframing to make it feel a bit easier to write, thus the “Coding Adventure”. I want to keep these posts more along the line of “Hey, here’s something fun I played around with and it might still be mostly broken 🤪”

Background

I use Micro.blog, I know…. you’re shocked 😝 and one of the things I love, is how open they are with their API. It’s a fun playground of potential side-projects just waiting to be explored. One piece that I’ve dabbled with is the bookmarks feature. Basically you can save URLs as bookmarks and if you are a premium member, organize them with tags and add highlights. Manton, the creator of Micro.blog, rolled out a feature to bookmarks including having AI summarize the link (only if you’ve enabled AI on your account and, important to me, if the robots.txt of the bookmarked link allows it).

But it’s not a feature I use all that much and I wanted to see if I could change that with a few of my own touches.

Getting Started

Like most of my recent side-projects, I’ve been using Deno. Its quick to get started with a Github repo and they have hard free tier limits so I feel safe playing around.

The first thing I needed was a valid authorization token from micro.blog. I got this using indieauth and saving the resulting token in a http-only cookie. That way I’ll have the token with each page request. To make things easier in this proof of concept, I hard-coded values inside the server generated HTML form I was using. For instance the form action, the scope and response type. On the server I generated a random string for the state (the ${} notation is a JavaScript template literal) and I also included the state as a session cookie when the page is rendered.

<form action="https://micro.blog/indieauth/auth" method="get">
    <input type="url" placeholder="https://username.micro.blog" name="me">
    <input type="hidden" name="client_id" value="https://my-demo.com"/>
    <input type="hidden" name="redirect_uri" value="https://my-demo.com/auth"/>
    <input type="hidden" name="state" value="${uuid}"/>
    <input type="hidden" name="scope" value="create"/>
    <input type="hidden" name="response_type" value="code"/>
    <button type="submit">Sign Inbutton>
form>

Submitting this form creates a get request to Mico.blog’s indieauth endpoint which redirects me to approve the login. Once I approve it, it sends a request back to my /auth endpoint with a code and state in the query string of a URL. I check that the state matches the state inside the cookie and then I make a POST request to Micro.blog’s token endpoint, https://micro.blog/indieauth/token, using the code. If everything was wired up correctly I get back my lovey authorization token. Here is a code snippet of the token portion:

const formBody = new URLSearchParams();
formBody.append("code", code);
formBody.append("client_id", 'https://my-demo.com');
formBody.append("grant_type", "authorization_code");
// request access_token
const fetching = await fetch(‘https://micro.blog/indieauth/token', {
method: “POST”,
body: formBody.toString(),
headers: {
“Content-Type”: “application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8”,
“Accept”: “application/json”
}
}); 

const response = await fetching.json();

A Fetch Quest: Getting My Bookmarks

Okay, let’s get some bookmarks. Micro.blog has documentation on its bookmarks endpoints in its help center, so that’s the first place to go diving. This was all familiar to me since I put bookmarks in my side project Lillihub a while back.

let fetching = await fetch(`https://micro.blog/posts/bookmarks`, { 
    method: "GET", 
    headers: { "Authorization": "Bearer " + access_token } 
});
let results = await fetching.json();

This returns twenty-five of my most recent bookmarks. Nice. There was some trial and error but I figured out that you can use query parameter before_id to enable getting more bookmarks. For example, if the last bookmark id was 123123 then I could call https://micro.blog/posts/bookmarks?before_id=123123 and get the twenty-five after that last bookmark.

If you have tags you can get the by adding the tag with the name of the tag, like this: https://micro.blog/posts/bookmarks?tag=code and you will get the first 25 bookmarks with that tag.

Lost in the Woods: Bookmarks and What I Couldn’t Figure Out

What I couldn’t figure out is how to go backwards. The Micro.blog post API supports a since_id parameter and a count parameter allowing for a full paging experience. Those don’t seem to work on bookmarks endpoint. I tried grabbing the bookmarks via the micropub endpoint but I had no luck there, just getting the posts on my blog.

Nor could I figure out how to search for a bookmark. I figured this would be handy with the AI summarization or even to search part of the bookmark title. There is limited support for searching on the Micro.blog website but it mixes results together from the other related sections of links and highlights.

So two paths then. Load all the bookmarks on the HTML page and then use JavaScript to search OR load all the bookmarks on the server, search it, and then return the results.

Since I don’t have thousands of bookmarks… yet. I’m going with the quick and easy client side solution.

Search For Treasure: Enabling Search

The while loop was my weapon of choice for this part of the adventure. I iterated calling the bookmarks API and gathered the results. And I kept doing that until the request returned less than 25 results… signaling the end.

Then I put those bookmarks in a table with some styling and….

Nice.

The search box runs a little bit of JavaScript that hides table rows if they don’t contain the search term. Clicking on a tag, whether at the top or on a bookmark fills the textbox and retriggers the search.

One strange thing with the Micro.blog bookmark API is that it doesn’t have separate properties for things like title or reader link. It jumbles them all together in the content_html field.

{
    ...,
    "content_html": "Homemade Oreos sallysbakingaddiction.com
Reader: sallysbakingaddiction.com ",
    ...
},

So I’m displaying the bookmark title as what’s in the first paragraph tag and removing everything else.

Side Quest: Adding Bookmarks

This was actually something I figured out a while back, but I figured I’d actually list the code sample here for a more complete picture.

First you need to create the bookmark using micropub:

const formBody = new URLSearchParams();
formBody.append("h", "entry");
formBody.append("bookmark-of", url);
const posting = await fetch(</span><span class="token string">https://micro.blog/micropub</span><span class="token template-punctuation string">, {
method: “POST”,
body: formBody.toString(),
headers: {
“Content-Type”: “application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8”,
“Authorization”: “Bearer “ + accessTokenValue
}
});

and then you need to add the tags using the Micro.blog bookmarks API.

Get the bookmarks
The new one should be first one returned, grab it’s id
Add the tags (comma-separated list)

const formBodyTags = new URLSearchParams();
formBodyTags.append("tags", tags);
const postingTags = await fetch(</span><span class="token string">https://micro.blog/posts/bookmarks/</span><span class="token interpolation"><span class="token interpolation-punctuation punctuation">${</span>bookmark<span class="token punctuation">.</span>id<span class="token interpolation-punctuation punctuation">}</span></span><span class="token template-punctuation string">, {
method: “POST”,
body: formBodyTags.toString(),
headers: {
“Content-Type”: “application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8”,
“Authorization”: “Bearer “ + accessTokenValue
}
});
const responseTags = await postingTags.text();

Exploring the Dungeon: Highlights

Let’s circle back to that reader link in the content_html property. Micro.blog premium users can make highlights on bookmarks, assuming the website’s robot.txt doesn’t prohibit it being crawled and the content isn’t dynamic. A copy of the content is provided along with an interface to make highlights. This video at the 2:52 mark by [@manton](https://micro.blog/manton) shows the functionality I’m talking about.

First thing I wanted to change, I want the number of highlights displayed in-line with my bookmarks. So I fire off the request to get my highlights and the first problem becomes apparent. There is no id link between a bookmark and a highlight, or at least one that I could spot.

So…. what matches? The url of the bookmark and the url of the highlight. So I can match them up with that. Downside? I’ll need to get all the highlights and loop through to find matches on the bookmarks. That’ll work for my small collection, but probably not for someone with a lot of bookmarks/highlights.

With that I was able to add a little marker to tell me when I have highlights. 🥳… one monster down 🧟‍♀️⚔️

Now I’m getting to the tricky part.

One thing I don’t like with the highlights… is that you can’t highlight the underlying HTML. Which means that if you highlight some text with an anchor tag, you get the text of the anchor, but not the anchor link itself. Which means the handy web reader you can get from Micro.blog won’t work out of the book. First, here is a look at a different part of the JSON returned for a bookmark:

   {
      ...
      "_microblog": {
        "links": [
          {
            "id": 6888713,
            ....,
          }
        ],
      }
    }

You can’t use the id of the bookmark to get the Micro.blog reader. The endpoint is https://micro.blog/hybrid/bookmarks/123 , with the 123 being the id of the first object under the _microblog.links property in a bookmark response. This returns a text response that is an HTML page. Sweet.

Now I can start dissecting it!

In Which I Spend Way Too Much Time Staring At Source Code

This was the tedious part of the adventure. I needed to parse out what was being returned, rip it apart and then rebuild it. I’m on a personal mission to not use any JavaScript libraries, so….

Step one: Bye bye JQuery 👻⚔️

Luckily the contents of the web reader page has a div around it with an id

. This means I can get the content of the bookmark. A point in my favor, the inline JQuery script is outside that div. But by removing JQuery the two helpful script tags included by Micro.blog aren’t going to work anymore.
Step two: Fix the broken images 🧪🔨
So if the bookmark had images in it… they are all broken. Why? because where my app is running is not where the images are. Thankfully I have a base url to work with. It was included in the head of the HTML returned by Micro.blog. I grabbed the 
extracted the value and then prepended it to all the image src’s.
Step Three: Mark up the existing highlights 🖊️🧝🏻‍♀️
Another downside, using just the reader page I don’t have the highlighted text… or title. Micro.blog seems, I’m not sure on this since I can’t see their code, to generate the highlight inside a script, marking the start and end range of the highlight… like this restoreHighlight(0, 1132, 1225); with restoreHighlight being a custom function included on the page.
For now I’m to loop through my highlights and find the ones I need. But this a place where I may need to rethink my approach. Now that have the text of the highlight, I loop through each one and add a  tag around the matching text of the content. This very neatly adds a highlight, no additional CSS needed.
Step Four: Write new JavaScript to capture highlighted text 🐲🔥
Note: I’ve only tested this on browsers I use…
Okay, let’s get technical. I need to listen for a text selection event and then get what was selected. Plus I really only need to care if something was actually selected.
document.addEventListener("selectionchange", function(event) {
    const selection = window.getSelection();     
    if (selection.rangeCount === 0) {
        return;
    }
    getSelectionHtml();
});

the getSelectionHtml() function I wrote does all the nitty gritty calculating and saves the information in a hidden form on the page. This form appears in a dialog modal after a one second delay. If the submit button is hit, it posts the form and I save the highlight. This Micro.blog endpoint wasn’t actually included in the documentation… but it works:
const form = new URLSearchParams();
form.append("text", text);
form.append("start", start);
form.append("end", end);
const posting = await fetch(</span><span class="token string">https://micro.blog/bookmarks/</span><span class="token interpolation"><span class="token interpolation-punctuation punctuation">${</span>id<span class="token interpolation-punctuation punctuation">}</span></span><span class="token string">/highlights</span><span class="token template-punctuation string">, {
method: “POST”,
body: form.toString(),
headers: {
“Content-Type”: “application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8”,
“Authorization”: “Bearer “ + mbToken
}
});

Note, the id is the id of the reader, not the bookmark.
Okay, so the getSelectionHtml() is a bit of a beast. I haven’t really played around with widow.getSelection() before and I wanted to remove the JQuery dependency with the original code. Luckily it didn’t need too much tweaking to make it work.
First we want to make sure our selection isn’t undefined. Then we want to create a container (in this case a div) to hold our HTML selection. I then iterate through and clone the nodes into that container. Then I can get the innerHTML of the container and that holds the user selected HTML. For brevity I took out the calculateOffset portion and left comments where that code would go.
function getSelectionHtml() {
    var html = "";
    if (typeof window.getSelection != "undefined") {
        var sel = window.getSelection();
        if (sel.rangeCount) {
            var container = document.createElement("div");
            for (var i = 0, len = sel.rangeCount; i < len; ++i) {
                container.appendChild(sel.getRangeAt(i).cloneContents());
            }
            html = container.innerHTML;
            if (!sel.isCollapsed) {
                //save the HTML to the form
                //calculate the offsets and save values to form
                //trigger the 1 second delay
            }
        }
    } else if (typeof document.selection != "undefined") {
        if (document.selection.type == "Text") {
            html = document.selection.createRange().htmlText;
            //save the HTML to the form
            //calculate the offsets and save values to form
            //trigger the 1 second delay
        }
    }
}

To calculate the offset you need to gather up all the child nodes. Luckily this code was already included in the page. I just needed to remove the JQuery portion and port it over to vanillaJS.
function gatherNodes(startElement, results) {
    results.push(startElement);
    startElement.childNodes.forEach(function (e) {
        gatherNodes(e, results);
    });
}
function calculateContentOffset(findNode, offset) {
var e = document.getElementById(“content”);
var results = Array();
gatherNodes(e, results);
var current_pos = 0;
for (var i = 0; i «/span> results.length; i++) {
var node = results[i];
if (node.isSameNode(findNode)) {
return current_pos + offset;
}
if (node.length != undefined) {
current_pos = current_pos + node.length;
}
}
}

Whew….
It works!

And if I double check it on Micro.blog, I can see the link is saved. Yep!

Or maybe not…. 😱

As you can see, there is a mismatch between what’s in my UI and on the Micro.blog website. I wonder if the offset I’m calculating is different somehow… 🤔
There Are Monsters Yet To Slay🦇

Highlights saved with my app that have HTML in them… aren’t visible or in the wrong position in the Micro.blog reader on the Micro.blog website. They do show up correctly in the highlight list and when hitting the “New Post” button. Which was one of the reasons I started this adventure.
Highlights saved with the Micro.blog website that cover HTML elements (like anchors) don’t show in my reader.

So this isn’t ready for prime-time.
Conclusion
I now have my own little web reader for my bookmarks and I can mark up highlights. It has its drawbacks, but I’m going to use it for a bit and see how it holds up.
I think that’s all the adventuring I’m up for this week. I’m going home and having a nice cup of peppermint tea.

Idea: Mini-adventure cards

Sun, 14 May 2023 10:39:34 -0400

I’m rather excited to run a Dungeon Crawl Classics game in a couple weeks. I’ve been making some mini-adventure cards to have on hand for inspiration. After trying out a couple of card sizes I think I like the 5inx7in format the best.

Dungeon Crawler Classics - Trying Out Solo Play

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 15:55:25 -0400

I haven’t played a good table-top, dice slinging, rpg game in about six years. So the urge to play has been building for a while. But my schedule is absolutely packed to the brim and my old game friends also have schedules that are equally packed. There isn’t a way to fit in a gaming session with any regularity. Then Wizards of the Coast pissed off a huge portion of the D&D community with some rumored changes to their OGL and I decided to look around and see what else was out there. I came across several new-to-me rpg systems and I wanted to give them a try. Could I somehow play one by myself? Turns out many others have had the same thought and there are quite a few different ways to go about it.

I could look for a system geared towards solo play or pick up an indie pdf that “solo-izes” a typical group play system. There are also random tables galore on the web that I could roll against and techniques of using dice to answer “yes/no” or likert scale questions to try and run my own campaign… with myself.

But what I wanted was to play Dungeon Crawl Classics with the free pdf lite rules and the little adventure printed in the back. I did see another blog post of someone else trying this out. You can see it here Portal under the Stars – DCC RPG but I didn’t read much of the post since I didn’t want to spoil the adventure.

So I’m gonna give it a shot and jot down how I’m approaching solo play and what’s happening to my poor party as they enter the dungeon.

Solo Play Approach

Dungeon Crawler Classics uses a dungeon against a randomized group of level 0 peasants to generate characters. This process is called the funnel. I used the Purple Sorcerer - 0-Level Party & Tourney Generator to roll up 16 characters and then used a random fantasy name generator to give them names. Any character that makes it out alive can become a proper level one character and is ready to have more adventures.
I kept my characters grouped as they were on the random generator printout, which printed them out, four to a page.
I’m printed out the adventure and covered it with sticky notes. The only thing visible to start is the italicized player introduction text.
My initial approach is to write down a series of actions (max 3) for each group that they would do based off of the introduction text/room text. I’ll also roll and record the initiative at the group level.
- I determined the marching order for each group and assumed that the one in the lead is the one taking point on any action that is happening. I also am assuming that my group remains clustered together as they explore.
- Then I’ll reveal the next paragraph of text and try to resolve it with the actions I already planned out.
- Combat will interrupt my table of actions and take precedence. Based on what they characters were doing I’ll know if they are surprised or not (at the group level) and I already have initiative. If characters needs to make a decision, say to run one way or another or to attack back, I will roll a dice to determine what they do.

Session Play Logs

I expect this adventure to take me a bit to finish. Both because I’m juggling 16 characters and because I’ll probably only be able to fit in 20-30 minutes of play time here and there.

When I finish a session I’ll post them and then update this section with a link.

Session One - Area 1.1

Pieces on Hey Loura!

Blind to the Feeling of Advancement

Finishing up my Taijiquan Haiku

The Mask In the Mirror

The Mask In the Mirror

Micro.blog Discovery Ideas

My Ideas

Automated accounts

A roll call account:

A weekly or daily recommendation account:

Potential cons of this approach

Follow actions in the timeline

Sorting the “following # users you aren’t following”

Remove non Micro.blog accounts from the tagmoji feeds.

Conclusion

🐲 Seventh Grade for 2024/2025

Course of Study

Writing, Spelling, Grammar and Literature

Writing, Spelling and Grammar

Literature

In the House of the Seven Librarians

Artemis Fowl

Spinning Silver: A Novel

Howl's Moving Castle

Among the Impostors

Over Sea, Under Stone

Ocean: A Visual Encyclopedia

Nature's Best Hope

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (National Book Award Winner)

Ocean Anatomy

Nimona

The Left-Handed Fate

The Girl Who Drank the Moon (Winner of the 2017 Newbery Medal)

The Facemaker

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?

Science and Mathematics

Microbiology and Genetics

Astronomy

Pre-algebra

Interdisciplinary Studies

Art, Physical Education, and Health

🐯 Ninth Grade for 2024/2025

Course of Study

History, Writing, and Literature

History

Wild Swans

Barefoot Gen Volume 1

Foundations of Chinese Civilization

Islam

Lissa

It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime

Africa

Persepolis

The Ocean of Churn

Writing

Literature

The Return of the King

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Braiding Sweetgrass

Legendborn

The Count of Monte Cristo

The Taming of the Shrew In Plain and Simple English (A Modern Translation)

The Book Thief

Ashfall

The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, Book 1)

The Two Towers

Memory of Water

Life as We Knew it

Binti: The Complete Trilogy

Science and Mathematics

Honors Biology with a Lab

Understanding our Universe through Astronomy

Contributing to Scientific Understanding

Honors Geometry

Interdisciplinary Studies

European Portuguese

Mini-coding concept: An in-page editor for my blog posts

Backlinks on a Micro.blog hosted website

2024 Weird Web October

Eight Silk Brocades