Summitt Dweller's Blog

An old fart's memory dump: Lots of code, some life experiences, and a little humor. No politics!

Time for a Test Page

2021-03-07

My daughter, Mackenzie, and I have been using this blog for testing new features lately. If you’ve been following me here you’ve seen some of them pop-up on the home page. Now that we have a host of them working, I need to move some out–of-the-way so they don’t clutter things up too much. However, I don’t want to discard them, in some cases we didn’t implement them anywhere else so this is the only working copy we have.

One of Many Challenges

2021-02-21

For 2021 I’ve signed on to be a member of the steering committee for Toledo’s 2021 Community Visioning (CV) project coordinated by Tree’s Forever and Iowa’s Living Roadways , Iowa State University Extension and Outreach , and other partners. Tama is also a Community Visioning participant in 2021. I Like to Walk I try to get outside and walk as much as I can, but I especially like walking with a purpose… not just walking for the sake of exercise or stress-relief.

My MQTT Weekend

2021-01-31

Now that I’ve cleared the driveway of the latest snowfall, I am officially declaring this to be “My MQTT Weekend”. It actually started on Friday night, the weekend, not the snow. Rather than posting a lot of gibberish here, I’ll just point you to my project repo at https://github.com/SummittDweller/Motorized_MQTT_Blinds and especially the Additional Resources portion of the README.md file there. If/when I get this all working maybe I will post some photos, maybe.

Thanksgiving 2020

2020-11-26

Sorry, I’ve posted and experienced too much sadness in the last two weeks, and more. Two members of our immediate family, Sully and Stitch, passed away on November 14th and 20th, respectively. Sully was our male kitty, only about 6 years old and his passing was a real shock. He was an ornery, sometimes grumpy cat, but very loveable at times. We miss him very much. Stitch was the matriarch of our cat family, about 18 years old and a gorgeous long-haired kitty.

New Announcement Feature

2020-09-13

Quite some time ago I added an Announcement feature to the Rootstalk website that I helped design and maintain for Grinnell College . Events of the past week have driven me to implement this feature as part of this blog and one other site, with some minor improvements. The original Rootstalk version of the feature is very simple, it works around this logic: The site’s content/_index.html page invokes a shortcode named announcement.

Last of the Clean-up? - Derecho Follow-Up for September 6

2020-09-07

Tomorrow is Labor Day 2020, but it also will mark 4 weeks since the August 10 derecho. Thankfully, I believe today marked the end of the clean-up, at least on my own property. I was going to write this post yesterday after another 6+ hours of work outdoors, but last night we had another storm roll through, and all day the winds have been blowing upwards of 40 mph, so I put in another 6 hours or so cleaning up even more debris.