Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

Replying to micro.blog posts, directly from my blog

posted this note on and tagged it with IndieWeb micro.blog

Lately I’ve started to use micro.blog more actively again. As part of that I’ve also started to reply more to posts and have stimulating conversations. That made me realise that those conversations might be of interest to have on my own site, so I should really try to set up my system so that I can reply to micro.blog posts directly from my blog. Yesterday some free time opened up during the evening so I gave it a go and it more or less works.

So first off, here’s my setup. I self host a WordPress blog. It uses a theme that I’ve made myself and quite a few plugins that I didn’t make. The important plugins in this context should be IndieWeb, Post Kinds, Semantic-Linkbacks and probably most important Webmentions.

There’s a help page on micro.blog about called ”Replies and @-mentions” that tells us that:

For an external blog post that is a reply to a specific Micro.blog post, the external blog can send a Webmention to Micro.blog. As long as the sending blog is associated with a Micro.blog user, that post will be copied to Micro.blog as a reply and threaded into the conversation. Micro.blog’s Webmention endpoint is: https://micro.blog/webmention

So that’s what I tried to set up. I created an iOS Shortcut for my iPhone and iPad that I can trigger from the ”Share” menu in the micro.blog app that creates the hyperlink and fills in the @username-part. It then asks me for my reply as input text and finally sends it off to my blog.

On the Mac I don’t have quite such a nice automation workflow yet. Instead I just have a TextExpander snippet to fill in the hyperlink a bit faster.1

I also mark up the hyperlink with class="u-in-reply-to", though from the help text I suspect that’s not fully necessary.

Getting things working

The thing I knew I had to tweak was the part about how ”as long as the sending blog is associated with a Micro.blog user”. I’ve had multiple people reporting to me before that my webmentions shows up as sent by anonymous rather than as me, so I figured I had to sort that out first. To do that I used the Indiewebify.me service and checked how well my blog did the ”Become a citizen of the IndieWeb” and ”Publishing on the IndieWeb Level 2 – 1. Mark up your content (Profile, Notes, Articles, etc…) with microformats2” parts.

They showed that I had some tweaking to do, mostly because I had mistakenly only marked up part of my h-card as such so a lot of things where missing.

When that seemed to work I made a test reply to one of my own posts on my blog and the webmention had my name attached to it, so that seemed like progress.

I then sent out a post asking for people willing to receive some test replies and John (@johnjohnston) and Ron (@ronguest) where kind enough reply. The first proper test almost worked. It did show up a a reply but it identified as sent by blog.henrikcarlsson.se instead of by @MrHenko, so some part of micro.blog identifying me as me didn’t work.

So I dug around some more and realised that I had inputed http://henrikcarlsson.se as my web site in micro.blog’s account settings. While that is technically true, as my blog posts comes from the subdomain http://blog.henrikcarlsson.se, so I tried changing to the latter in micro.blog and that worked. My replies on my blog arrives properly threaded in micro.blog and properly attributed to @MrHenko.

One glaring problem remained though. Every reply from me got double-posted. I assume that is because I technically do send two things to micro.blog. A webmention from the blog post and then the post itself because it shows up in my RSS feed that is used to feed micro.blog.

My solution was to post my replies in a special ”interactions” category that I use the Ultimate Category Excluder plugin to exclude from my main RSS feed. And with that in place things more or less worked as intended.

Some things that still need tweaking

Every time I make a new reply in a thread in a micro.blog conversation, that’s a new post on my blog.2 That is in itself not a big problem but the curious part is that every reply that somebody else makes in the thread results a webmention/comment to multiple of the posts that I’ve made that has been threaded in that particular conversation. So I get duplicate comments, but on differens posts on my blog.

Right now I deal with it by only approving the comment to the earliest post I’ve made in the thread but that doesn’t really quite work since my subsequent comments doesn’t show up as comments on my own first post on my blog. So I’ll need to look more into this.

  1. Litteral sidenote: The prospect of Shortcuts on the Mac is what makes me the most interested in updating macOS this fall. ↩
  2. I’ve tried to get it to send comment replies as webmentions but that doesn’t seem to work. ↩
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Rethinking my work tech – Part 1: My backpack

posted this note on and tagged it with Getting work done iPad for work Rethinking my tech 2019

This was originally planned to be a post about me trying out a new tech setup for getting work done, but as I kept on writing I realized that it would need to be broken up into multiple parts, so this is more of a prolog.

My backpack (Nerdy Log Lady for scale)

This is my backpack. (Nerdy Log Lady for scale.)

It’s not fancy or elegant but I like it. A lot.

Mostly I like it because it contains all the things I use to get my work done. Most importantly it contains my computer and its various peripherals.

When it comes to getting my work done, a real computer has always been my tool of choice and for as long as I’ve had my current job, that computer has been a MacBook Pro.

I also like my computer. A lot. It’s the last of its kind, really. It is the 2015 15″ Retina MacBook Pro model that was sold up until last summer, which was when I bought this one. It’s the tool that I use for most of the things involved in my job. I do carry a physical notebook and a pen quite often and use it to scribble down my thoughts but it is the computer that is the main work machine.

Pen and notebook

There are other things in the backpack that help me get my work done. In fact, I have a thirty-eight (38) items long checklist in OmniFocus for the things that should ideally be in the backpack. The notebook and pen I just mentioned are two of the items on the list. A charger for the computer is another one. There’s also an external hard drive, adapters for Thunderbolt to Ethernet, Thunderbolt to FireWire 800, a FireWire 800 cable(!), a FireWire 800 to 400 adapter(!?!?), Mini DisplayPort to VGA, Mini DisplayPort to HDMI, an Ethernet cable, all kinds of USB cables, a PowerBank and adapters for camera and microphone mounts. Oh, and an umbrella and various non-prescription medications.

Some of the clutter that I carry around on a daily basis.

(Just some of the stuff is actually in the picture.)

And that’s just the basic configuration of it. Some days I might carry another external hard drive, or maybe a iPad Air. And most days I carry my lunchbox in it as well.

In many ways this is a really good setup. The bag is heavy, but most days I sling it on one shoulder for the twenty steps walk to the car, dump it in the passenger seat next to me where it rests while I drop the kids off at preschool and then drive to work. Arriving at work I take a similar twenty to forty steps walk with the backpack on my back before arriving at my office and dumping it on the floor where it will rest until I walk back to the car and drive home.

The computer is also heavy, but it lives its life mostly either docked to an external display and keyboard and trackpad at my office at work, in a similar arrangement at my home office, or in the backpack being transported between work and home.

This setup is also good for travel, because as long as I have the backpack with me I have everything that I might need to get work done with me. There’s nothing1 that I need to do that I can’t get done.

However, or but,

This setup is also really bad for travel because it’s heavy and, even worse, bulky. It takes up a lot of space in the car. That’s not a problem when commuting to work but when I actually travel somewhere by car it’s often with the family and that always means there are a ton of stuff being packed already. My backpack just adds insult to injury, and for all kind of travel that’s not commuting, it is always just one of my bags. I’ll always need to bring at least one more bag for clothes and toiletries.

Heavy and bulky is also applicable to the computer unfortunately, which is why it is not a solution to get a smaller bag and pack less stuff in it, as long as the computer is part of the stuff being packed. If the computer should be brought, the backpack in question is the best way to bring it because even though it’s heavy and bulky it sits nicely on my back.

But maybe there’s different way to do this…

iPad Mini, Pencil and external keyboard
  1. Almost true. There are off course some special cases that requires that studio at work, or where I need to provide a student with a certain kind of equipment that is only available at work. ↩
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More progress on the music player for the kids

posted this note on and tagged it with The Kid's Music Player ΠiFi Music Player

Slightly simplified the music player for the kids has two jobs:

  1. Scan for QR codes using the camera and identify the ones that contains a Spotify URI (using zbarcam) and
  2. send that URI to the MPD that plays the music from Spotify.

At the moment I am able to set up separate tests for the two jobs and both works, on there own. The problem is that I’m currently not able to set up MPD with Spotify and the zbar tools at the same time. It seems to have something to do with different operating systems and/or other kinds of conflicting requirements that I need to lock into.

For the tests right now, I use standard Raspbian plus zbar for bullet point number one and Pi MusicBox for point number two.

For my own memories sake, this is the very simple (and probably quite brittle) shell script that I’m using for bullet point 1:

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A music player for the kids

posted this note on and tagged it with The Kid's Music Player ΠiFi Music Player

My kids, Iris and Ebbe, are four and a half, and two years old respectively. Both of them loves to listen to music and dance. Compared to when I was a kid they have access to tremendous amounts of music. If I wanted to listen to a song as a child, I had to have it on a cassette or later in life a cd. Today’s kids have access to ”all the world’s music” in Spotify, Apple Music or similar.1

The problem with the modern world in this regard is that a cassette deck and a box of cassettes is much more kid friendly than a smart device like a phone or tablet with Spotify and possibly also a smart speaker connected via bluetooth, AirPlay or a Chromecast.

Spotify has a nice solution for this in there Spotify Codes. It wouldn’t be to hard to make a whole box of cards, one for each album and/or playlist that the kids want, and teach them how to scan the cards with Spotify. The problem is that it requires them to use their iPad (or my phone, or their mother’s phone).

Why is that a problem? Because if they use the iPad they will undoubtable be sidetracked by YouTube or something similar. Sometimes having them watching videos is great. I’m certain that the reason Iris know quite a few words in English, despite being a Swede with Swedish parents, is that she’s watched a lot of English videos on YouTube. But sometimes I want them to just listen to music and not having to have a discussion about why they are allowed to use the iPad but not the apps they want.

So I’ve started toying with the idea of building them a music player that works as simple or simpler than Spotify Codes but that is a dedicated hardware device, a Raspberry Pi. The plan is for it to use either QR codes or NFC tags to control what is being played, so that way the kids can have a box of cards with artwork, similar to the box of cassettes that I had as a kid.

I think it will work.

Right now I’m going to test various setups for it and document my progress here on the blog, under the tag The Kid’s Music Player.

Some links to similar projects

  1. Yes, I am being Captain Obvious here, I know. ↩
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Strömstad 2019

posted this note on and tagged it with Strömstad 2019

Linn och jag är för närvarande i Strömstad, på en semesterresa utan barnen. Ebbe är hos Linns föräldrar och Iris hos min mamma.

Varken Linn eller jag har varit i Strömstad förut. Linn har heller aldrig varit på västkusten förut, undantaget Göteborg och för min del har västkusten mestadels varit synonym med Hunnebostrand. Så därför hamnade vi här, helt enkelt för att ingen av oss varit här förut.

Vi passade på som en del i vår Arvikaresa, så att vi kunde lämna bort barnen några dagar och åka själva. Det är sällan vi kommer iväg på saker utan barnen, så när det väl blir av är det jätteskönt. Tanken var från början att boka ett spahotell här men vi var för sega med att bestämma allt, så när vi väl fick tummen ur så var det fullbokat. Därför hamnade vi på Strömstad Camping, ett äventyr i sig eftersom jag inte varit på en camping sen jag var barn och Linn aldrig har campat. Hur som helst så bokade vi en stuga och det är där jag nu sitter och skrivet det här.

Idag har vi gjort själva resan hit från Arvika och sen har vi flanerat på ett shoppingcenter innan vi åkte till campingen. Sen satt vi länge på altanen i solen och drack vin, prosecco och öl och åt chips innan vi slutligen gick on mot Strömstads centrum, promenade bland pirerna och åt middag på The Dubliner at Skagerack. God mat och väldigt mysigt läge!

Under resans gång har jag meckat lite med att posta platsinformation tillsammans med bilder, så därför har det blivit lite extra blogginlägg vilket är kul. Exakt hur jag ska använda platsinformationen på sikt vet jag inte men det är kul att ha det sparat, särskilt när vi är på nya ställen som nu.

Jag försöker även tagga alla inlägg härifrån med Strömstad 2019.

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I’m back using Alfred

posted this note on and tagged it with Productivity

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but it was probably some time when I re-installed a computer or set up a new one that I decided to not install Alfred and instead try to get by using just Spotlight.

As far as I could tell it wasn’t a big downgrade, and it saved me one step in setting up a new computer. A few days ago though, I decided to try Alfred again and OH MY GOD.

While going from Alfred to Spotlight didn’t feel like a big downgrade, going from Spotlight to Alfred seems like one of the biggest upgrades ever.

So Alfred, I’m back. Sorry I ever left!

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Spider-Man: Homecoming

posted this note on and tagged it with MCU Movies

🎞 Watched: Spider-Man: Homecoming

This was exactly the kind of movie that I needed to watch right now. Light-hearted and very entertaining. I’d probably say it’s my favourite MCU movie so far. I loved the acting, the way Peter was characterised, the way the classical characters where changed and modernised. I loved the whole thing. Also, the sort-of twist with the identity of The Vulture took me completely by surprise.

My only complaint is that the action scenes themselves where sometimes hard to follow. It seemed like the director was inexperienced when it came to directing action.

I was surprised by the music, which seemed a step up from a lot of other MCU movies.

On a side-note, after the first scenes where we see the lead up to the fight between the heroes in the airport in Civil War, I had to paus this movie and go watch that fight once again. That’s quite amazing considering the fact that before I started watching the MCU movies from start to finish, in sort-of correct story order, that was the scene that I dreaded the most. I was absolutely certain that a scene where our heroes beat the crap out of each other would be just ridiculous in the Batman v Superman kind of way. I was very wrong.

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OMG, I actually started writing a song today!

posted this note on and tagged it with Daily photo 2019 snapshots

For the first time in a very long time I started writing a song today. Not an ambient chord progression experiment, not some synth fiddling, but an actual alternative rock song with soaring guitars, pounding drums and lyrics about heartbreak.

To be clear, nothing about it is done yet and long time (really long time) readers of the blog will know that the biggest hurdle for me is always the lyrics. My inability to write lyrics have resulted in a lot of thrown away melody lines and riffs, but this time I’ve got a very clear theme for the lyrics and a persona to write them from. I also have a basic melody, some guitar parts and the outline of an arrangement and instrumentation.

I guess this counts as my ”doing something fun at work” this week, since I worked from home today and the song writing happened when I was about to start working.

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First week of The Year of More Fun

posted this note on and tagged it with The year of more fun

First week of 2019 is coming to a close, so I thought it would be a good time for a quick report on my New Year’s Resolutions.

The easy part to report on is the photoblogging. I’ve been doing that every day, except today but I’ll soon get around to posting a picture for today as well. Probably while fulfilling the third bullet on my list, reading at least one evening/night every week.

As for the work stuff, things have not been going as planned but I blamed that on it being i week with only three work days, two of which were booked full with teaching. That means no work from home this week and no three hours for fun stuff.

I did build a ”self-playing ukulele”, but that was used in teaching the very next day so it doesn’t really count as a fun thing without a clear connection to the everyday grind of work.

That’s it for the first week.

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2019

posted this note on and tagged it with The year of more fun

Two days ago I took a fairly long walk with Ebbe on the ice of the lake just outside our house. I was rolling him in his stroller so that he could take his daily nap but instead of making as short a trip as possible I decided to keep walking in the beautiful whether and just enjoy myself. During the walk I found out that a few of the very small islands in the lake actually has houses on them, which was news to me. I also started thinking about the year that was almost over, and things to change for 2019. New Year’s resolutions, or Yearly themes if you are C.G.P. Greyish.

More fun at work

One thing that has been quite clear this year, especially during the fall semester is that I’m having less fun at work than I’ve previously had. I think much of it comes down to the fact that this August marked my tenth year as an employee of Dalarna University. I’ve had a lot of fun for those ten years, I’ve learned a ton of stuff and I’ve been able to work on a lot of cool projects. But I’ve also done a lot of the same teaching for most of those years. As I actually started thinking about the fact that it had been ten years, I probably got more sensitive to the daily grind and bore, and the fall are the more dull part of the year at work.

So I feel a strong need to do something about this, to make sure 2019 is a more interesting year at work. The yearly theme, if that’s the way it’s supposed to be framed, is therefore more fun or less bore or something. Please note, not less routine. Routine is important, especially for a one and a half year old and an almost four year old. So it’s not about throwing out routine or make dramatic changes. It’s about making room for fun stuff, even during the boring parts of life.

The first actual thing to do about this is probably also the simplest. It’s something that I’ve done before that I just need to get back into doing and that is making sure I work from home at least ones a week. When I work from home I approach work differently and it’s also very nice having the house to myself for a few hours. Some weeks it won’t be possible scheduling-wise, so it’s not a definitive promise but an important thing to aim for.

Another thing to do to make life, especially at work, more fun is to to make sure I set aside at least three hours every week to do something fun at work. It can be things like making a drum playing robot, making a silly guitar effects video, testing out things for VR/ambisonics, maybe building a midi pedal, fiddling around with our Eurorack synth or any other kind of thing that I have no idea about right now. Things that I technically aren’t payed to do but that tends to benefit my work in one way or another in the long run. I now I can make my schedule work so that I can do this, I just need to actually do it.

Outside of work

I also constantly want to get back into reading, so consider it a resolution that I should read at least once every week, preferable fiction. I am currently reading through Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series and am loving it. Hopefully I might get through a few of those books during the year.

Finally I want to get better at posting pictures from my life, so another resolution is that for the month of January I’m going to post a photo every day. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a photo of something that was a big part of the day, but at least it should get me into the habit of posting more photos.

In short

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Profile Photo © Henrik Carlsson