Running
It was a yaktrax run day today. Late last night the weather was 40°F and then we’ll below freezing this morning and throughout the day making for slick sidewalks and roads 🤷♂️.
Took advantage of the nice weather today and convinced a friend to join me for a longer run 🏃🏻♂️.
There is Light at the end of the tunnel. Kept dragging my feet about running today but glad I got out there as I think it helped get me out of todays funk. 🏃🏻♂️
Decided to use my time wisely and get a quick run in as I was waiting for my son to finish his pre-bowl for the week. 🏃
Such a sunny day that I had to get outside and enjoy the positive temps. Also, I love that in Minnesota we create outdoor Ice Rinks everywhere 😁. Just watch out for that fire hydrant.
Mac Mini 🍏
This is something I should have done years ago honestly. However, as I have been moving more stuff to the old computer I used to use for some of my most recent projects. I realized that it was very slowwwww… In fact, slow enough that now with the new to me Mac Mini up and running I can finally connect to it remotely and go through all my old files and not get frustrated and walk away. Finally it will be more than just a dumping ground that I never wanted to touch and might have some real order. To be clear, the old one did a great job of just backing up what was on it and the HD connected to it but other than that trying to log in and do something was a huge pain.
A couple weeks back I got this idea and saw a great deal for a used Mac Mini Late 2014 2.6GHz Dual Core i5. I decided to consulting with my new go to tech person, who gave it a thumbs up in agreement so I pulled the trigger. Not sure if he was just trying to get me to buy more Apple devices or if he really believed it was going to be better for me🤷♂️. Either way, fast forward to earlier this week and it is fully setup and functioning. I am so happy with the setup and it takes up such a smaller footprint than the iMac 24-in early 2008, 2.8Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo 😱.
A big thanks again to Jason Burk for helping me figure out how to set all this stuff up in the best way possible. In fact right now I am connected to it on my iPad from my kids school analyzing some horrifying results of Gemini in the amount of duplicate photos I have (note I am trying it out via Setapp).
Logged in to the Mini from my iPad, such a big win!
Old Computer 😱 We can discuss it’s location at another time
”New” Mac Mini which I still need to put it in a better place 🙄
Finally feeling a lot better running and even with the wind I decided to add a couple more miles… 🏃🏻♂️
I like the little rink cut into the lake here and the snowman is pretty impressive as well. I do enjoy running to find interesting things ⛄️🏒🏃🏻♂️
In between kids activities I took advantage of the beautiful weather today and got out for a run. Still feeling the lingering results from COVID but much better as the week has gone on. 🏃🏻♂️
Second run back since the virus got me and it felt much better than the first. Not great but better 🤨🏃🏻♂️
It has been over a week since I have worked out and I think the lingering COVID virus made this 3.3 Mile run feel like it was much longer. Might have to keep easing back slowly this week. Didn’t help my attitude out there as I kept running into Trail Closed signs 🙄🏃♂️
This is really nitpicky but honestly, the worst part of being stuck inside with COVID is I am missing my outdoor running time. I probably could go do it but I think the smart decision and with the current weather… I should stay inside and find something else to do 🤔😂.
Not sure about you but I can see the open water from here… 🤔 I guess I should go across it right? 🤦♂️
I really do enjoy the signs I find running 🏃🏻♂️
I think I missed the better day to run yesterday but needed to move a little today. Also once I got out there in the 2°F weather it didn’t seem so bad 🏃🏻♂️
Today seemed like a great day to update my profile picture so I went for a run. At the end of the run Strava told me the weather was: Few clouds, -11°F, Feels like -21°F, Humidity 69%. I knew it! The humidity was killer today 🤣🥶🏃♂️
Making fresh tracks today in the fresh snow. It was a cold one and I actually broke out the spikes for the first time this year but not sure it was needed. 🏃🏻♂️
All in on Micro.Blog
I can’t say for sure this will be my final solution but it has made sense so far. A little while ago that I wanted to give this a try as I don’t like having too many different places on the internet to hold where my stuff is. I had been stuck for a while thinking of a new domain name and in the meantime I bought about 10 (yikes!). Maybe I will point some of them to some specific stuff on Micro.blog but my main one now for this domain is going to just be EricMWalk.blog. I think I will make a simple static site that my EricMWalk.com can be pointed to and there I can point people to other projects I have worked on. However, right now it just goes to my old WordPress blog so still need to get that changed.
So I finally did it and moved all of my old posts from my self hosted WordPress blog to Micro.blog so I would have finally one source of information (well not exactly more on that later). Overall the import process in Micro.blog worked flawlessly except, I did find some issues but they were self inflicted for many reasons. The one I assumed I would run into was any links I had in my posts to other posts on my site which would not get updated correctly. I was right on that but luckily I didn’t have too many posts with that issue and I could correct that problem somewhat quickly by doing a search in the Micro.blog post section for my old site name. However, the two bigger unknowns to me that I probably should have expected but didn’t think about were having too many tags and that pictures didn’t import.
Tags - This was nightmare. I guess though the years on WordPress I got very Tag happy as it didn’t seem hard to just add them as you went and honestly I probably didn’t use them too much but to find related things or maybe others did. However, all of them got imported into Micro.blog and I quickly realized that my one off tags were very messy. So I went though and painfully deleted as many as I could. I still have more than I like but it was a good start to see how I can use tags going forward. I think the interesting thing for tags in Micro.blog is that they are their own feeds so I might do something with that at some point.
Pictures (Root Cause - Old Domain Names 🤦♂️) - This is a problem of having various domain names over the years. Micro.blog did an exactly what it was suppose to do and did an excellent job importing the photos to Micro.blog when it could “find” the photos. However, since some of the domains I don’t have anymore I had broken links on my WordPress site that I had not really realized so Micro.blog couldn’t find the photo to import. I am not sure if there is a quicker way to fix it on the Micro.blog side of things but honestly if I would have maybe thought about this before I exported everything I more than likely could have cleaned it up to make it work more seamlessly.
Other than those two minor hiccups I am glad to have gone full in on Micro.blog and with that I am hoping to be posting more photos, thoughts, and other things I find interesting all in one spot.
Next up…
Since I have not been using Facebook (forever really), and Instagram has been less and less. I stoped really posting to Facebook specifically a long time ago and just did instagram and my WordPress blog but since the beginning of 2021 I have been really using Micro.blog to post the quick photos I would have done there. So next up I am thinking of pulling all of my historic Instagram posts to Micro.blog after I ran across this help post.
Back to work tomorrow but actually to the office too. New employee is starting so might be there a couple days this week. Today was nice as the kids were at school so I just caught up on things and went for a run with a friend. Not a bad way to start the but now on to day 2 😁