I talked last week about how I planned on doing this weekly wrap up thing. I’m calling it a newsletter so that I can be pretentious about it. No sense in not being snooty about it. All of my fellow bloggers do “wrap ups,” I do a “Newsletter.”

Work⌗

This was the week I found out that I’m likely not to have a job on January 1st. My company is moving most of its editing to AI, so it doesn’t need as many managing editors. I drew the short straw apparently (i.e. I make more than the other guy), so I’m done after Christmas. It’s not official yet, but it’s going to happen.

I’ve already started to look for other gigs. I’m not unwilling to go back to writing, which is what I did before I got promoted onto the editing staff a few years ago. There aren’t a ton of gigs out there for freelance historians, so we’ll see how this goes. I have enough money saved that I can be okay for a little while, and my YouTube money will supplement things while I search. I’ll put some effort into my own history blog/YT channel as well, and see if I can make a go of that. Something that I wrote about wanting to do ages ago.

As for things I did this week, we’re wrapping up the publishing schedule for the rest of the year. The last edits are due November 15, and after that it’s all about layout and media, which I only play a role in once it’s all selected. Frankly, I’m not putting much effort into things. I’m a bit sour over the entire experience, as you might expect.

Programming⌗

I’m not a developer, but now that I’m in the waning days of my day job, I’ve gotten back into a project I started over a year ago. It’s called lTunes, and is meant to be a full-fledged FOSS re-imagining of iTunes.

ltunes for Linux

I’ve got it working pretty well for my ass not knowing how to code. I have music, movies, and TV shows all working. The videos now play inside the main window instead of spawning a separate window, and I’ve gotten playlists to work finally. I also managed to get the damn TV seasons to display together, and for the metadata fetch from TMDB to work finally. I’ve never done API work before, so that was an adventure.

I’m not really ready to share the code yet. It’s still very rough, and I want to get it more polished before I send it out into the world. But I’m pretty proud of what I’ve done so far. I haven’t worked on it much in months, but these last few days, I’ve quashed quite a few bugs that were bothering me before.

Blogging⌗

I’m still blogging every single day. I’ve not missed a day since I stared this little quest, and I’m super proud of that. This week, I added in a new “special post type” on this blog, so I can share videos. I shared my first video a couple days ago. Now I have links, images, and videos that are all styled a bit differently in the main feed.

I also went over 10,000 total views for this blog today. I’m shocked at how quick I got here given I didn’t think anyone would want to read my stuff. I use umami for tracking, which is open source and seems to be mostly inoffensive. You can see all my stats here.

Potpourri⌗

  • I haven’t posted a real video on TLC since October 13th. That is crazy. I did break that streak tonight. I don’t expect the YouTube algorithm to be kind to me. Often when you take prolonged breaks, it takes months for the algorithm to pick you back up.
  • I’ve been working on rebuilding my local music library one album at a time. I’ll probably write about this at some point.
  • I’m re-reading Ready Player One again, this time for The Bookies Book Club. I’m already 32% of the way through. I love this book.
  • My Dactyl Manuform is dying. A few days ago I wrote about how I was resisting buying a new keyboard, but I don’t think I mentioned how my Dactyl is double printing random keys. I do not know if this is a switch problem, a board problem, or if it has something to do with the kvm switch I use. I’m hoping it’s the last one, but I’m going to have to test it. I’m still not buying a new one. Even if I really want to.
  • I’ve been using the Platinum Preppy fountain pen for a couple weeks now. I really like it. I’ll write a blog post about it soon.

Small Web Links⌗

I don’t do a good enough job of saving the blog posts I enjoy to share them here. That will have to change.

Goals For This Week⌗

  • Publish move videos on YouTube.
  • Finish Ready Player One and move on to another book on the TBR
  • Keep working on the local music collection.
  • Rewrite the README for the theme I use for this blog. Maybe give it a rename since it is no longer close to what the original theme was.
  • Minimum effort at work, they deserve nothing more.