Cold Morning Clear Lake

Camping at Clear Lake State Park and I have to admit it’s cold. My phone says the temp is 37°F and my little space heater appears to be broken. It gets warm but the fan doesn’t work so that’s all. Heading to the shower, then breakfast at TJs, then to Menards for a new space heater!

PCA Weekend

Departing for the PCA (Peoples’ Choice Awards) weekend in Clear Lake / Mason City. Got The Some IT in tow. First camping of the season.

Sold Mower and Bunk Bed

Both my EGO self-propelled mower and old twin-over-full bunk bed sold and taken away today. Yay! Next up, The Rolling Stone camper and Ecotric eBike.

Implementing Pagefind Here

Last evening I followed Using PageFind with Eleventy for Search to try and implement robust search capability in this blog. I’m working in a new pagefind branch of the code to pull this off.

Barb Sprayed the Snow-on-the-Mountain

Barb came in this afternoon and sprayed broadleaf control on the out-of-control “Snow on the Mountain” around the house.

Another MS Soccer in the Books

Completed my third soccer officiating assignment tonight… STC middle school girls and boys doubleheader, plus two B-games, vs. Williamsburg. Another 2.5 hours total play, but again, not too bad. I still have so much to learn!

Reduce Spaces Stored Image Sizes

Ok, I get the sense that constantly pulling enormous digital images from DigitalOcean Spaces to rebuild this blog is unnecessarily chewing up lots of bandwidth. Today I’d like to begin fixing that by creating a utility, probably in Python, to grab all those images one-by-one, make a smaller copy of each, and put those copies back into a web-ready subdirectory in Spaces, or something like that.

There’s a wealth of probably pertinent information to be had in https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/api/spaces-api/. Unfortunately, Spaces isn’t compatible with DO’s own command line utility, doctl, but it is compatible with s3cmd and the link I’ve provided documents how to get started with that. 🙂

Update: See Engaging s3cmd to Download and Resize Images from DO Spaces for my solution.

New GPX Merge

Last evening I rode my bike to/from soccer so this morning I wanted to “merge” those two track logs before publishing them to https://hikes.SummittDweller.com. So, I found and forked https://github.com/locked-fg/gpxmerger to https://github.com/SummittDweller/gpxmerger and after tweaking my own code IT WORKS!

The command I ran to make my first “merge” was: python3 gpxmerger.py "/Users/mark/Downloads/2023-04-14 16:32 - 3m 11s.gpx" "/Users/mark/Downloads/2023-04-14 20:40 - 3m 27s.gpx". I think I might tweak the script soon to just pull all of the .gpx files from a specified directory.

Update: My fork of the project now accepts a single target_directory argument and uses “glob” to grab all the .gpx files in that directory.

First Varsity Soccer Officiating

My knees and back are definitely feeling better than 2 weeks ago.  Tonight I was AR2 for a varsity women’s match with Independence at STC.  Final score was 11-2 on a very windy night, and it showed.  The crew of TJ and Dustin did a great job and I feel like I learned a lot from them tonight.  Thank you, gentlemen.

Filing 2022 Income Taxes

Tonight is the night we file our 2022 income taxes.  Got nice little refunds from both Federal and Iowa, but all of my Fed refund is going toward first quarter estimated payments for 2023.  😕