Betting odds are interesting to know while watching a sporting event. Often, the bookkeeper (the betting site) has good data to size up the matchups to set a good betting line. This betting line is useful as a spectator to help assess who is the favourite/underdog, and by how much. How to interpret betting odds Example from the 2024 BKT Tires World Women’s Curling Championship Draw 1 Matchup…
Once you know the rule and the flow of the game, crib is a lot of fun. There is enough luck involved so that anyone can win if you are dealt favourable hands and good cuts — but good crib players will win more often through good decision making to optimize their chances. There is more to a good cribbage player than picking the right cards, though. Beyond strategy, flow-of-play and style add to the…
I love Song Exploder . It’s a podcast show that features an artist telling the story of how a song was created. It breaks down the musical layers and writing process to give listeners a behind-the-scenes experience and a deeper appreciation of the song. Key aspects: The audio mixing is excellent. The way they introduce and mix in early versions, demos and tracks for the song into the episode audio…
"I can feel your anger. It makes your focus" In a pivotal scene in the Star Wars saga, senator Palpatine highlights to Anakin Skywalker the power that can be derived from negative emotion. It is a powerful focusing tool. Negative emotions are rich with energy. They animate the body, mind and spirit. When fuelled by anger or frustration, you create a vivid picture in your mind of what you do not…
During a last post , I outlined some of the delivery woes I've been experiencing since moving my email to my own domain and self-hosting. Today, I heard back from Mailjet with a fix for the Gmail deliverability issue and it seems to be working! Here is a breakdown of the fix: Our deliverability team is aware of this issue , and are working actively on the issues with temporary deferrals of emails…
I'd like to eventually be able to support the organization of posts into tags, and automate the generation of feeds specific to tags of interest. How it could look: An "all tags" page which listed tags with the number of related posts. "tags pages" that show all posts for a given tag, organized by newest to oldest and showing thumbnail previews of each (e.g.title, date, subtitle, image) "posts"…
Since I've started self-hosting my email, I've had constant problems with deliverability to various domains. On the first iteration of TI , I was sending via my server on port 25 (which had to be opened on special support ticket request to Vultr). Then, I discovered that emails were bouncing off of Live, Hotmail, and Microsoft 365 Accounts. Solution there was to send a request to the Microsoft…
This website, my email, contact and calendar are all self-hosted. This page is a commentary and supplemental guide for Derek Siver's " Tech Independence ". Follow the instruction on that page for detailed setup instructions. Overview The servers are run on a virtual machine from Vultr . The OS is OpenBSD. I use ssh to login to the server from my laptop. All work on the server is conducted via the…
About 3 weeks ago I decided that it was a good idea to start running nightly backups of my server data. If it wasn't for this decision, I may have lost all of my email, contacts, and calendar data. What happened? While experimenting with another VM to test out Immich as a photos backup alternative to Google Photos, I accidentally "reinstalled" my brandontoner.ca server rather than the experimental…
I've discovered a set of standard pages to include as part of a personal website that I really enjoy. These are: "uses" page (/uses) "now" page (/now) "feeds" page (/feeds) /uses A place to list the various tools, services, configurations, etc. A place to showcase and share tool stacks to help others. Here is a collection I stumbled upon to showcase concept (very tech-centric): uses.tech /now…
Overview Web files are served from my Vultr VM. New files and changes are published by mirroring a directory on my Mac to a directory on the VM. Web files are edited directly (html, css) using VSCode & iA Writer. Posts are added to RSS feeds manually by adding an "entry" to the /blog.xml file. Publishing Process Copy template file Rename file and headers Write the post in iA Writer in Markdown…
Making kombucha at home is very easy! It's also more fun and much less expensive than buying it at the grocery store. Here is the process that I use: Supplies Kombucha Brewing Kit (I bought this one , but you could gather these supplies on your own) 3L glass jug cloth to cover the top string, elastic, shoelace, etc (to attach the cloth to the jar) Ingredients 6 tea bags (mix of black and green…
The Garmin Connect app will allow you to create a custom workout, but it does not allow you to share that workout with someone else. Fortunately, there is a workaround for this using a Google Chrome web extension. Steps to Export: Download "Share Your Garmin Connect Workout" from the Chrome App Store Visit the Garmin Connect web application. Create a workout (Training & Planning → Workouts →…