Now @ 02-13-2025

What I am up to right now.

• I have been putting quite a bit of work into this site. The Media and Music sections have received the most attention. Music is just a feed of songs I favorite in Apple Music, which is then scrobbled by Last.fm, and then my site picks that up through the Last.fm API. I tried to do this directly through the Apple Music API, but Apple has not made that particularly easy to do. Last.fm also does not provide album artwork through their API, so I have to source that from MusicBrainz API (which is imperfect, and you will see a few mismatches in the feed, sorry!) Finally, the individual song pages will also host an embedded YouTube player for the music video, but due to rate-limits on that API it is going to take a couple of days to build out. The dates for everything are also a bit off, but will eventually settle out. Still though, this has been a really fun coding challenge to bring all of these data sources together.
• There is a placeholder section in /Media for books, but I haven’t quite cracked that one. I’m not really a Goodreads user, but there really aren’t many viable alternatives for book tracking which also have a usable API. I use Calibre for my e-book tracking, and it has solid integration with Goodreads, so I might just end up back there by default. They deprecated their API a few years ago though, so I don’t love the idea of building a whole system around it and then having the rug pulled out from under my site.
• We are deep into youth volleyball. Mercifully we only have four tournaments remaining!
• New Hampshire is a snow and ice-covered hellscape
• For exercise, I’ve been cycling nearly every day since January 2021. It’s a great low-impact activity, especially for someone my size and age. In November of last year, I started working in some light upper-body work, mostly with dumbells. I like the added variety, but it is definitely a drain on my daily energy! Eventually this starts to pay off, right?