Weeknotes: Week 28, 2023

Here are the highlights of the week of July 10 to July 16.

• 🧰 I made a whole bunch of updates to my Now page generator this week:

  • I started by signing up for an account on Trakt.
  • I wrote a new Lambda Function to pull data for the “Watching” section from Trakt into DynamoDB.
  • I split the original Lambda function into two: one to pull data from the pastebin and another to read the recent items from DynamoDB and build the Now page contents. (Content ratings are converted from the ten star system to a five star scale, with half stars.)
  • The new architecture uses SQS messages to trigger the nowbot whenever the traktbot or pastebot find updages.

• 🎟️ I bought tickets to see King Lear, starring Paul Gross, at the Stratford Festival in a few weeks. I’ve always wanted to go to Stratford and this will be my first visit. I can’t wait!

• 🪚 I built a new passthrough to replace the window of my basement office. It is half acrylic and half plywood and gives me a clean way to run coaxial cables and ground connections to the outside without having to keep the window partway open. It also gve me a place to mount the new ground bus and lighning arrestors that I picked up at Hamvention. (I’ll post a pic or two soon.)

• 🌻 Maybe what we’re really looking for is a little more time away from our screens.

• 📺 I watched a lot of movies and TV this week.

  • Sweet Home Alabama - I came across this while flipping channels during a weak moment.
  • Slings and Arrows - One of my favorite shows of all time. Season 3 is set around a staging of King Lear.
  • Hijack - As others have pointed out, it’s not exactly good, but it’s not bad either.
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Finally caught up and now waiting impatiently for new episodes each week. This show is good!

• 📊 I played around with Tinylytics a bit. It’s pretty slick and it’s certainly easy to use, but I don’t really feel like I need web analytics for my site. Maybe I’m wrong.

Get the latest in near real time on my NOW page.