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In Ruby on Rails, the software ecosystem I predominantly work in these days, yarn has been the default package manager for the javascript side of things for a long time. (See my big write-up of the timeline & current state of frontend asset management in Rails ). When many of the apps I regularly work on were written, that was a pretty reasonable choice! Yarn had some solid advantages over npm…
Instead of showing you a picture that does not at all do the bright yellow cover and red ink justice, here it is in greyscale. Recently I enjoyed a very good zine called "Clipart Crypt: a clipart fanzine", by Lee Arden. Lee is a zinester and small press runner I've gotten to know over the last few years. The zine was excellent; I encourage you to purchase a copy and enjoy it, too! Physically, the…
We have some friends visiting us here in Ottawa soon and I wanted to share a few ideas of things they might want to check out while they're here. I may have gotten a little carried away. This list is curated based on my own particular perspective and knowledge; there's certainly some cool stuff I didn't include because I don't know about it or because I haven't made it there yet myself. It's…
I really like riding bikes as a way to get places. I like doing it with my kids, too! There aren't quite as many books for kids about bikes as there are about say, cars and trucks and construction equipment, but there are some out there. Here are a few I like a lot! Picture books: 🔗 In paper pages (picture books; preschool-ish age), we have: "Bikes for Sale" by Carter Higgins . This one is my…
I’m currently sitting at the highest library check-out count of my whole life: 22, some of which are a couple random nonfictions for myself I was hoping had many more pictures than they do (looking at you especially, “Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion”), and a couple poetry books for myself. A lot of them are kids books, though: a few okay board books, and a really good current roster of…
2025 is now over. I don't exactly know why, but I never, even the very last day of the year, could remember what year it was with certainty. That data point just never stuck, and I found myself, over and over again, annoyed that when I pulled down the top menu thing on my phone to check the date, it doesn't show the year too, and I wanted to remind myself of that, too. Time felt a little slippery…
In this post I will be sharing a few short reviews on children's books (board or picture books) that I've read with my kids lately. Both kids are under 4, so we're talking about books for the preschool, toddler, and infant audience specifically. My thoughts are specific to my own political values; you might not have the same concerns as me when looking for books. And some of the books are highly…
This week my household attended an open house event for the French public elementary school we are considering enrolling our child in to start Junior Kindergarten next fall. Ottawa has four separate school boards covering the same geographic area, that are each managed entirely separately: French secular, English secular, French Catholic, and English Catholic. In the French boards, all…
My current immigration status is: saw a really pretty cloudy, still bright sky over a cornfield while riding my bike here in Ottawa, and cried. For a while in the last year we've been in Canada, I kept having a dream that we had to return to Lincoln for something, maybe a wedding, or even just a visit, and then we realized we didn't want to go back to Canada at all, even though all our stuff was…
Recently at work I undertook a project to migrate a client's decade-old Rails app from using Webpacker to compile & bundle frontend assets, to using jsbundling-rails with Webpack. The app is big and fairly complex, and the project ended up taking much longer than I had originally anticipated. But it's done and I'd like to document a few of the gotchas I ran into a long the way! migrate who to…
Updated 2025-09-02: Added Wike, Burley Hopper, Specialty Cargo Add-ons section I can haul a lot of stuff on my cargo bikes (one front bucket style, one midtail; both electric), but I'm always interested in ways to haul even more when necessary. In particular, I'm curious about how I might be able to haul the front-loader home with the midtail, should the front-loader break down somewhere.…
Recently at work, our weekly company Talko Tuesday meeting once again became Talko Toothsday when the conversation turned to teeth and dental care. I don't entirely know why this topic even comes up so much in this particular workplace, and over time I've made a show of attempting to opt out as much as possible. Please, spare me the details! This time, however, I brought it on myself, joking about…
I just read a friend's post about the unique aspects that makes certain cities feel like uniquely that city , and I wanted to write down a few things that come to mind for me for cities I'm familiar with. 2021, Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln Like Comfect/The Quad Urbanist says in his post, these aren't necessarily things that are truly unique for that place, but just uncommon enough, or maybe…
Recently I returned to a Ruby on Rails project I hadn't worked in for a while, and found that every time I ran the migrations, I would get a bunch of unrelated changes in the schema.rb file for tables that weren't changed by the migrations I just ran. The changes were usually on the line defining the table, and contained different values for text encoding related keywords like char set and collate…
We've now been living in Ottawa for a full year. Annual events that were happening last May when we came to visit before moving have happened again, and ones that happened shortly after we first arrived to live here are happening again, too. Summer flew by somehow; I'm still a bit in denial that it's now August. One way I've been marking the end of our first year here is with a flurry of paperwork…
Over the last year or so I've been moving many of my static site projects (including this site) to the free tier of Cloudflare hosting, from their former homes at Netlify. Why Cloudflare 🔗 I've been pretty happy with Cloudflare, and it's what I often recommend now for people looking for a static site host. I like the AI/LLM crawler defenses I can turn on with a single toggle, and the confidence…
Over the last few years I've been thinking more and more about how consumerism affects my life, and, finding the effects are mostly not great, thinking about what I can do to resist it. By consumerism, I mean all the societal and cultural forces (from government policy to what big companies do, all the way down to how I gather with and engage with my friends) that come together to reinforce the…
Recently I was working on a Rails app that previously had two entirely separate log-ins using Devise , one for external customers and one for internal users. We wanted to remove the login ability for external users. When there were two separate logins, the app would open up to a Login Selector page, where a user would indicate if they were a client or an employee, and then log in on a specific…
Fair warning, what follows is somewhat gross. Hopefully it is at least somewhat entertaining though, and will give you a little snapshot of the everyday trials of parenting a baby, and if you have a flaky-head baby of your own you're responsible for, maybe it will help you. When my first kid was first born, we didn't really do much about the flaky bits on her scalp that people call "cradle cap".…
I am working with a Rails app where I want to add a configuration setting to disable some behavior that interacts with a third-party API, which may not be available for real in the local dev environment, but will always be enabled & actually being hit in production and staging. This app is using the dotenv gem to manage configuration via .env files, and at first I was going to do that. But I…
I find myself pulling up this page from a Minitest Ruby Style Guide on the argument order for assert_equal all the time, but I always have to squint at it longer than I'd like to see what I need to see. And yes, I'm aware that I could put a sticky note with this information on my desk. Anyways. Do it like this: assert_equal ( expected , actual )
As a Ruby on Rails developer at a consulting agency who works with a wide variety of legacy apps, there have been many times where I need to change the JavaScript or CSS in use on the site and have to start by figuring out where those assets are currently coming from and how they are getting where they need to go. Rails is all about convention over configuration, so there has typically been a…
Recently I was helping update an app built in Ruby on Rails. It's an internal tool, so has been sitting for a while, running along happily on somewhat outdated tech. It was updated to Rails 7 already, and is already using jsbundling-rails for JavaScript, but a lot of the code for each page hasn't been touched in quite a while. We decided to remove Rails UJS which was standard in Rails 6 in favor…
Recently I've seen people talking about various devices full of offline-accessible info that are marketed to people who are worrying about the end of the world. These things like the "Prepper Disk" have been around a long time, but usually you only hear about them in fairly fringe forums or as ads on sites serving people who want to stockpile guns and canned beans for their end of the world bunker…
At a play group we attended recently for queer families with little kids, we were asked to fill out a new form for participant tracking by the host organization. Beyond some basic demographic questions you've probably been asked before, one question asked: how does your child describe their gender? For the new baby, we simply wrote: baby. But, we have never thought to ask our three year old this,…
Enjoying: Games and Media 🔗 I recently received my new copy of The Encyclopedia of Radical Helping , and it's so delightful. I wish I had the budget to gift it to all my most caring friends who are part of movement & activism spaces - the two I have gifted it to so far have enjoyed it, too! Games 🔗 I've still been greatly enjoying Fallen London , a web-based game that I wrote about a few months…
Say you've got the visa or work permit (no small feat), and you're ready to embark on a move from the US to Canada. The rest should be easy, right? HA HA HA no, you fool. Pretty much every step of the process of moving, not just the immigration-related ones, has been so much harder than it seems like it should have been. I am a person who I'd say is pretty good at navigating bureaucracy and…
My family arrived in Canada as new permanent residents towards the end of this past summer, having moved from Nebraska in the US. We knew coming here that Ontario (and elsewhere in Canada, but I'm most familiar with Ontario & that's where we live now) is having a crisis in healthcare access and especially in primary care. We now have a little bit of our own experience navigating this system, so I…
Over the last several years in the activist and community circles I've been in, people have talked occasionally about getting licensed as amateur or "HAM" radio operators so we would have an alternate means of connecting to one another in an emergency situation when cell or internet networks may not be available. This summer I did some research on what is actually required to do that. I started…
This week I designed & built a new 11ty site to support an advocacy effort among primarily Canadian zine creators opting out of a major Canadian zine festival due to the founder's genocide denial. It's called Can't Zine . This is the first Eleventy site I've hosted on Cloudflare Pages, and there were a couple small hiccups to work out. Overall though, the setup process was pretty painless, and now…
This summer I started playing a web-based, fairly casual game called Fallen London . I think you should play it, too (not least because I need more friends to help me reduce my menaces when I've done too many dangerous or scandalous deeds) and here's why! You can start playing Fallen London by going to the website from your phone or desktop browser. There's no app to install; it's all in the…
Today I would like to sing the praises of parenting a two year old. I am having so much fun, and my kid is such a joy to be around. Sometimes the narrative around parenting a toddler is all about the Terrible Twos or having a Threenager and how your life is dominated by tantrums. Every kid is different of course, and some kids are more difficult to parent than others. But I think it's also an…
Hello. Let me take you on the journey I went on tonight, because I had a can of caffeinated soda this evening which I really know I should never do, because now I will be wide awake until far too late, when usually I would be hours asleep by this time. The journey begins earlier this evening (after the soda, but before the rest) when I saw a new post from Bess Kalb, called "Passive Aggressive…
The other day I came across the results page for a "Back to School" Community Code Jam hosted by 32-Bit Cafe , an online community for website hobbyists & professionals. The Code Jam was a challenge to build a webpage about "a complicated concept you love explaining." Browsing through the pages/sites people had submitted was really inspiring - so many cool designs that broke out of the boxes I've…
Since getting an iPhone, I have started receiving notifications that say things like “Light Rain Soon: Expected to start at your location at [time], and last for X minutes”. And the thing is, on days when I get these notifications, I know that I will be getting them at some point. The sky has already made it very clear that today will be a day that it will rain at some point, and the rain might…
I have been working to learn over the last decade or so to reject binary frameworks: very little (but probably not nothing, I note with irony) is an all or nothing proposition; very little is as black and white as the convenient narratives and theories of my childhood made it seem. Instead, I am seeking to embrace life beyond the binary: both things can be true. Sometimes many things, even many…
Here are some useful settings in my Zsh profile and a few other dotfiles. See also: some useful snippets for programming, and keyboard shortcuts I like and all my other tech resources posts . Docker stuff 🔗 If you have an M-series (Intel) Mac, put this in your .zshrc right now to avoid bad times later on with docker stuff export DOCKER_DEFAULT_PLATFORM = linux/amd64 Aliases 🔗 I work for a…
Today A month ago (this took a bit to finish writing, it turns out) I read a blog by Lou Plummer about the town he lives in: Fayetteville, NC . I thought it was a nice little look at his view of what makes his town nice to live in, and I thought I'd share my thoughts on my own town, too. I've lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, since coming here to start college in 2012, so over a decade now! And I…
Two of the splashiest tech products on the market these days for kids (especially younger kids/under 10 or so) are the Yoto Player and the Toniebox . Both are screen-free (ish, the Yoto has a tiny screen that displays a single icon), microphone-free, video-game-free audio players designed for kids to be able to control on their own. Lots of people really like one or the other, or both! But a…
The following are notes I took from the "Where to Live" chapter of David Pogue's book "How to Prepare for Climate Change". If you are thinking about what life in your area may be like in the coming years of climate chaos, or are considering where it might make sense to move in the US with climate as a consideration, I'd highly recommend picking up the book and actually reading the chapter.…
An answer to a question someone asked recently in a walled-garden, unwalled for the open web. Accessibility testing tools tend to be browser extensions or bookmarklets because the accessibility of a webpage is context dependent. Accessibility is not an inherent feature of the website's code; accessibility is dependent on interactions between the website and the browser it's being viewed in, as…
See also: my cheat sheet/personal FAQ when working with static site generators , and all my other tech resources posts . Here are some shortcuts or short snippets I often find myself searching for. Expect this page to be updated over time as I think of more useful snippets or shortcuts! A regex to find all trailing whitespace & tabs in a file 🔗 [ t]+$ Open the character viewer on Mac to type an…
Sometimes people with a body type similar to mine want to wear a suit to some fancy event, and don't know where to shop. They may be looking for a more masculine or androgynous look, or they may just want something that fits a body with hips/butt/boobs nicely and shows their curves. (Can't relate, but I degress.) Here are a few links I've bookmarked over the years where such folk can find suits.…
Do you love board games, and can't wait to play with your kid? You may be happy to learn you can start playing board games before you might think! No need to wait for 3 or 4 or 5 - there are games you can start playing with a 2 year old! (Mine is still under the 2.5 mark.) If you are a board gamer, you may know today's board games are way better than the games we (most of us) knew as kids . (I…
It's been a pretty nice last few weeks for me, all things considered. Here are some things recently that have brought me joy. Music 🔗 I got to see Spencer LaJoye in concert. Spencer performed at the campus ministry church I was deeply invested in in college, but the show was open to the public. To be honest, I had not heard of Spencer LaJoye before learning about the upcoming show, but I checked…
Updated 3-26-2024: Added timestamp to date to make my RSS feed better I have been thinking for a long time that it would be nice to have a script that would easily scaffold out the frontmatter for a new post on my blog (aka this site). I thought I'd need to write a node script or something, and so haven't done it. But, I realized there is a much simpler way to do this in my code editor of choice,…
I came across this essay in the Paris Review titled "A Well-Contained Life" . I appreciated the reflection it offered on how sometimes the containers we buy for our endless amounts of stuff can sometimes become just more stuff in themselves. I have certainly been seduced many times in my life by the promises The Container Store seems to make about what my life could be like if only I had just the…
For most of my childhood, my parents owned a small meat locker in my hometown called C&C Processing. The business grew over the years from just a small grocery store, to doing deer processing, then beef and pork processing for local farmers, then specialty meat products and private label production of various snack sticks and jerky. Several years ago, they sold the business they'd been growing in…
While we were in Kansas City recently primarily to visit Great Wolf Lodge (read my review !), we did some shopping. We hit some of our usual spots: IKEA, Retro Vixen where my partner likes to shop for cute dresses, Prospero's Books just down the street. My toddler met a dog and learned its name, which is somehow also becoming a Kansas City tradition for her. But, since I am getting in to sewing,…
This week my family stayed at Great Wolf Lodge in Kansas City for 1 night. It's a hotel that has a variety of kid activities like laser tag and some sort of magic wand game you can pay for, but mainly, a nice-sized indoor water park that's open year round and seems to serve as a local oasis for Midwestern families. There's an outdoor pool too, which obviously was not open during our stay. Overall,…