Week 19

Algae as a power source and ideas about IndieWeb publishing.

Declan Byrd

For the week starting 9th May:

  • I read an article on using algae as a power source for small devices. While the targets of this research focused on how it could be applied to IoT devices, it will be interesting to see how long these devices could be powered and in particular if the same technology could be applied to smartphones. It also had me thinking about Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and that maybe they should check how the sun is doing too.
  • I started reading The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman. It's nice to be able to pick up a book for 5 minutes without having to commit to an hour just to finish the chapter.
  • I started playing Rise of the Tomb Raider on Google Stadia.
  • I've been thinking about how I can publish shorter notes and bookmarks to this site. A limitation of my current stack (11ty + Netlify) is that I have to build my site every time I want to publish content. One option would be to have a separate static site that could create a pull-request on a form submission and then manually merge the commit in GitHub or even bypass the pull-request by creating a commit via the GitHub API. I also like the idea of making the publishing site a progressive web app so that I can use the share menu on my phone to simplify publishing bookmarks.
  • I've been thinking about whether or not my site's source code should be open. Recently my site's source on GitHub has been forked a couple of times which means they have copies of all the source files for this site, including the photos and posts. I wanted to keep the source open as this was something I've used to learn from in the past and being able to see how a feature was built on another site creates opportunities to learn from different techniques and perspectives. At the moment, the forks appear to be used as examples that people want to reference later but this feels like it should really be a bookmark. Closing the source would make it harder for a direct copy of my site to exist but would also remove it as a learning resource. For now it's staying open.