Dan J’s Website

First, I love the title and the cover art. Basically any reference to "black sun" gets me, because as a teenager I loved Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun, and one of my favourite books was Black Sun Rising by C.S. Friedman...

So there's some aspect of nostalgia there. And, indeed …

I've been a long-time user of Plex, and a happy one. I have a lifetime Plex Pass from back before it was a subscription. There are great client apps for Plex, like Prologue for managing and listening to your audiobook library.

And yet... Plex is closed-source, and some things about …

As I gradually rebuild this website up from nothing, it amused me to have no stylesheet for a while, and just see black text on a white background with blue links that turn purple when you visit them. Talk about a throwback!

But now it’s time to add some …

It’s so funny, all the ways I come up with to hold myself back from just making stuff and sharing it with the world, to wit:

I’ve written, or drafted and half-written, lots of posts over the last many, many years that I never posted on my various …

“The most important thing to remember is this: To be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.”

— W.E.B. Du Bois

(via @patrickrhone)

Setting up Visual Studio Code for F#

• Cool: you can open a Terminal in VSCode with ^ + `
• Do I need to install an extension to use F#? Syntax colouring is built in, looks like
• Let’s try creating an FSX script file
  • Ok, I can do that, it has syntax highlighting …

It gets complicated.

I wanted to read some Hellboy comics, after watching the first movie last year¹.

So, the other day, I got myself some comics and tore through the first half of the main Hellboy set of stories. I usually like reading my comics in print, in trade …

I want to switch away from CloudApp to a host/domain under my control, and DropShare looks like a great alternative, because it lets you pick a back-end.

They have instructions for setting up SCP/SSH using your own server via nginx on DigitalOcean. I’ve already got danj.ca …

I've been wanting to take up gardening for a long time—in particular, growing some of the veggies I use in my everyday cooking. This is both a health thing, a sustainability thing... and just a nerd thing. There's a lot about the idea of growing crops that appeals to …

I love both of these, but I was particularly drawn by the one about anxiety, that being one of my things.

Anaïs Nin on Love, Hand-Lettered by Debbie Millman – Brain Pickings

"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might. When a drowning …

I've had a tab for this 2014 Ars Technica article open for ages, let me collect the series here:

1. How to run your own e-mail server with your own domain, part 1
2. Taking e-mail back, part 2: Arming your server with Postfix and Dovecot
3. Taking e-mail back, part 3: Fortifying …

You don’t “succeed” because you have no weaknesses; you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them.

-- Tim Ferriss, Tribe of Mentors

There's no good reason I should build my own site generator, instead of just using Jekyll (as I am at the time of writing this post.)

No good reason, other than I want to, other than I miss software development and, more specifically, have never really done a big software …

I just downloaded the caption files to a bunch of video clips, and wanted each one to go in a folder with its same name (minus the file extension), cos that’s where the work on each clip is going to happen. I found a script to do that all …