Weeknotes 2022 W48:
Snow

Week of November 28 to December 4, 2022
What are these? These week­notes are a reflection on the past week. I write about anything from hobby projects and work to creativity and mental health. I publish my week­notes every Sunday morning. Consider subscribing via email or using the web feed!

Berlin has been white, covered in snow. It’s pretty. But also cold, gray, and dark.

This week has been stressful, for reasons that I can’t (yet) talk about in more detail. That has taken up a significant amount of my time and energy. The week­notes this week will be a bit sparse because of that.


I’ve been struggling with physical paperwork, and have set aside some time to go through it all and bring some order to it.

I feel mostly clueless as how to physically file documents in a way that I can retrieve what I need quickly enough. I can Organize electronic archives by year well enough, but physical documents are a different beast entirely. At this point, I’m considering creating archives for 5-year periods, so 2021–2025 would be the one we’re in right now. Then, every five years I can go through old archives and trash whatever is no longer relevant by then. Minimum effort, maximum effect.


I’ve been off Twitter for a week or two now, and focusing on Mastodon as my Twitter alternative. (You should follow me at @denis@ruby.social.) It’s been great: no advertising, and no random content pushed to me by a capitalist algorithm.

And no crypto/web3/NFT spam either.


I pushed two Nanoc patch releases, fixing a couple of bugs.

After the 4.12.13 patch release, one more issue surfaced that needed a fix. It turns out that File.write doesn’t work when you want to write lots of data, and the fix is to use IO.copy_stream to write a string (wrapped in a StringIO) to a file opened for writing. This used to be not a problem, because Nanoc was using Ruby’s PStore, which presumably deals with large files properly under the hood.

I fixed that, and then realized that compressing the data in tmp/nanoc/ would be quite sensible, so I did that too. Ruby comes with so much useful stuff, and zlib is part of that.


In Weeknotes 2022 W41: The Office, I wrote about the broken hard drive, which I’ve now replaced with a new one I bought. The new drive is used a backup drive, for both Time Machine and Arq Backup.

It’s still unclear what is broken about the old drive. Perhaps I’ll connect it to a non-macOS device so that I prevent the OS from mounting it as soon as it’s connected, and erase it so that I can use on macOS again. I’m fairly sure this is not a hardware error: I would’ve noticed a S.M.A.R.T. status change, and the drive is really not old anyway.


I gave denisdefreyne.com a new favicon. It’s prettier and cleaner. A bit more formal and serious too, which I think good.


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Week­notes for November 28 to December 4, 2022. Browse the weeknotes archive, get these week­notes via email or subscribe to the web feed.