This week note covers the week of 12th–18th January.
Life#
Bangalore is slowly getting warmer. The city seems to be coming out of the winter; I don’t require heavy blankets at nights anymore. This week has been a usual mix of work and personal. I attended the Indieweb club Bangalore meetup on Saturday. It was a tech-focused session in which all of us worked on our respective websites. I write about it in a later section.
It has been 6½ years since I took a proper vacation. I’m hoping that we find some time this year.
Health#
I’ve still been walking 10000 steps a day (on average). After doing it for 12 days straight, I decided to take a day off to rest, on which I walked only 6000 steps. The rest definitely help me recover from the muscle soreness. I hope to continue this habit for the rest of the year.
Personal Projects#
I finally fixed the Opengraph preview images for posts on my website by changing them from SVGs to PNGs. Turns out, none of the social media platforms support rendering SVG previews correctly, most likely because that’d required a full browser. So I switched to PNG which is well supported.
Generating images was a fun problem. I wanted to keep the solution as lightweight as possible, so that ruled out converting SVGs to PNGs. I thought about using a Haskell solution using the diagrams library, but that requires a huge dependency chain. Since my website generator is statically compiled, I didn’t want to add hundred of MBs of dependencies to it. Finally I settled on a hack: using Plotly to create a chart that is only annotations! I already use Plotly for rendering charts in my blog posts, so no additional dependencies were needed. I created the image as an empty chart with post title and metadata as annotations, and it worked great. See the preview image of this very post for an example.
Later in the week, I added support for showing backlinks in post footer, which is a small but nice feature. At the Indieweb club meeting, inspired by Jatan, I improved the post Atom feeds to add a footer in the post bodies. For now, the footer links to my posts and notes pages, but I’ll enhance it later.
I also upgraded all services on stic.earth including Mastodon to NixOS 25.11. Everything went smoothly except Netdata, which is now broken. Unfortunately, it is too complex and bloated for me to understand and fix it. I’m thinking of switching to an alternative. If you have any suggestions, please send them my way via comments.
Recent Posts#
I finally finished my Implementing Co series of posts. It took me only four years and nine months. I had been sitting on the draft of the last part for over two years, and by some cosmic inspiration, I suddenly had an urge to finish it this week. With one day of work, I polished and published it, finally concluding the series. It feels great to get it over with. Unfortunately, it was not as big a hit as the last week’s post.
Watching#
I watched some more of The Ancient Magus’ Bride anime, almost finished now. Wife and I watched The Thursday Murder Club movie, split over three days because life kept getting in the way. It was a decent watch, but the mystery was okayish.
My most listened to track was again Dreams Tonite by Alvvays. It’s stuck in my head now.
Interesting Internet Links#
That’s all for this week. You can subscribe to the feed of my week notes for updates.
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