🗃️ The analogue dashboard is working better than expected! This is how it started.

I love that micro.blog hosts blogs as static websites. But if I were ever to need a non-blog static website, FastMail would be my number 1, 2, 3… host of choice. They’ve managed my email for a decade and have been nothing but outstanding. ↬This day’s portion

Infrastructure Saturdays continue with some minor tweaks to the link underlining, which should reduce visual clutter. I have also spent an unreasonable amount of time moving the infinity symbol a few pixels down. Point of diminishing returns reached!

I vaguely remember learning about The Curator’s Code from Marco Arment’s blog and sharing his lack of enthusiasm: I still don’t quite grasp the difference between “via” (ᔥ per the Code) and “hat tip” (↬). But 10 years later, why not give it a shot? ↬Tedium.

If you want my eyes to glaze over while reading your cold email — provided it even made it through SpamSieve — please make sure to:

• misspell my name
• use HTML, preferably with varying colors and font sizes
• mention a 10% discount if I ACT NOW

🗃️ I am unreasonably enthusiastic about @chrisaldrich’s index card journal, having forgotten my Hobonichi Techo at work and spending this weekend noteless. Index cards seem to be as senility-proof as it gets. The article itself is brief, but the comments add some color.

My dad is visiting from Serbia, and maybe I am getting old and less tolerant, or maybe not seeing him for two years has made me more sensitive to how he does things, but I have been noticing more and more an unusual tendency of his which I imagine to be the consequence of his post-WW2 1950s Yugoslavian childhood.

There is the habit to save everything: every scrap piece of lint, every empty container, every cardboard box. This, I can understand. We don’t necessarily have the space to set aside every octagonal glass jar or a quirky spice container he encounters — and I cannot begin to imagine the packing process for his flight back — but these are at least pretty and/or may have a future use.

But then there was a pile of broken kinder surprise toys waiting to be mended with a glue that will inevitably be more expensive than all the trinkets combined. Or the shattered $15 IKEA picture frame ⊕ The frame in question is the RIBBA, which I am absolutely positive had cost less than the current $15 and had a glass front instead of the current plastic one. So it goes…, “because do you know how much this would have cost back home”. Or, back home, a bottle of white wine received as a gift from someone decades ago and saved for a special occasion only to turn to vinegar. And in parallel, the urge to never, ever use anything up to its last bit.

Chocolate? Leave last few squares in the foil until they turn white and inedible. Pot of coffee? Drink until there are about to fingers left, keep at room temperature overnight, then pour down the drain. Dinner? Purposefully eat around the best bits, then whether or not you are full place them in a glass container — preferably one you salvaged from the recycle bin — and leave in the deepest, darkest reaches of the refrigerator until other family members start wondering about the funny smell.

So to my list of standard Latin phrases I should add Ne quid nimis — nothing in excess — even when the excess is in saving.

And in what’s turned into a weekend ritual, I have tweaked the blog template some more. Per Jason Becker’s recommendation, the Archive page now only has titled posts. Cleaning those up will be a task for another weekend.

Through much trial and even more error, I have finagled @pimoore’s wonderful Tufte theme to organize itself into a scripting.com-like chronological/reverse-chronological format. The next step is to fix everything I broke in the process. And to find ever better fonts, of course.

I would have found this stalking sales playbook utterly unbelievable if I weren’t on the receiving end of several campaigns. SpamSieve and silencing unknown callers are my friends.