A few months ago I wrapped up some work on a fun little project I developed for some teaching exercises. Let me tell you about it!

With all of these 4-H activities that I've been helping with, I've been in my car. A lot. That means that I don't always have access to great internet, great resources, and I can't always connect home to my servers, there. I've decided to combat that by building a single, portable network. A network in a box, if you will. Here's how I did it.

I've finally gotten around to getting some basic configurations with my Listmonk mailing list system going. I got started with configurations for the Idaho 4-H Roundup podcast (did I mention I've started a podcast?), but now I'm also getting one started for my blog site. Here's how I added the HTML to get it working here.

I'm quickly approaching the mark of 50 blog posts, which is wonderful! But it also means that finding that "thing" I wrote some time ago is becoming an increasing challenge. So... I need to add search to my blog site. But how? It's a static site, after all, there's not really a "backend" to do the search functionality for me... Luckily, there's some wonderful folks who've written tooling to add just this functionality. Here's how I added it to my blog site!

If you're a nerd like me, you can probably think of your favorite self-hosted application right now. Better yet, you can probably think of all the reasons you love it. You know, one of the staples of a great self-hosted application is its ability to make the configuration your own and do so easily! I've been working on a number of little applications lately and they all need configuration, so I've started setting this up with the help of Python and TOML!

Somehow, I've managed to build quite a few random Python package, and contribute to others. I've recently been working towards converting all of the Python projects I manage to the new pyproject.toml standards for packaging, and I've recently had to work through an interesting little challenge for some of the projects which only contain a sigle Python file. No module folder, no __init__.py. Just a single file.

We know that I'm something of an audio buff. I love having music around me all the time. But isn't that becoming more of a staple in the American home, anyway? I certainly think so. There's lots of folks who are also listening to music all the time. I have my own personal preferences, though. (Shocker, I know.) The thing is, I want my audio system to tie nicely into my home. I want play/pause buttons scattered around, and well... I've got more demands.

So, I've got an old (1992) Ford pickup, and it's got a newer-ish stereo. I love keeping my favorite tunes on a USB stick that I can play everything from, but I HATE it when the volume changes from one song to the next. I go from barely being able to hear the music to having my eardrums blown out in 0.5 seconds. So, I've come to the conclusion that I need to fix that. With PYTHON!

Finally! Python 3.11 is out! It's new, it's fast(er than previous Python versions), and it's got some dandy new features. And if you wanted to know how I go about putting it on a Windows machine, let me show you...

Well, I just recently converted to a new Nextcloud instance at home. Gosh, I sure hope I wasn't using any of those links externally on any important websites like a blog, or anything... Oh. I was? Awkward...