This post originally appeared in my Techish newsletter on LinkedIn.

You’re the Coolest AI of All

From a young age, I’ve always loved the magical experience of going to the movies. Torn ticket stubs, big booming sound, giant screens, and popcorn fill my heart with joy. There is nothing in the world quite like sharing in the community experience of enjoying a blockbuster in a movie theater. I suppose it's no surprise that I’ve loved living in LA so much!

Since 2020, theaters have struggled quite a bit, and for good and obvious reasons. I’ve truly missed taking my family to the theater. I’m a bit of a digital packrat, with a healthy collection of Blu-Rays stored on my home NAS. About a year ago, I finished renovating my home theater, which was a big step toward recapturing the magic of the movies with my family. But, no matter how great the picture and sound are, I still felt something was missing.

If you’ve been following me, you’ll be unsurprised to hear that I decided to scratch my itch with technology. What better way to explore the emerging and promising power of GenAI while honing my skill with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and WebSockets?

Picture This

Part of visiting a movie theater is walking by a wall of big, colorful movie posters, which are, in my view, an underappreciated art form. A great movie poster creates a sense of excitement, anticipation, and wonder. A few months ago I stumbled on a project called Movie Posters Perfected, which was a huge inspiration for this project. While I could have gone down the path of just showing movie posters from this curated collection using a Fire TV stick, I wanted to create something even more magical. So, armed with inspiration, I set to the task of creating what I call my “Magic Poster.”

The hardware ingredients for the Magic Poster are simple:

• Samsung 43” Smart Monitor
• Raspberry Pi 5 and a case with a PCIe M.2 board
• HDMI Aware LED Backlight from AliExpress

Assembly was straightforward, thanks to double sided tape and zip ties. The one piece of hardware I wouldn’t use again is the Samsung monitor, which is a little too “smart” for it's own good. Getting it to be happy in portrait orientation was a nightmare! Still, I soldiered on and was able to mount the TV on the wall and drive the display with my Raspberry Pi 5, with the LED backlight matching the content on screen. Now, it was time to build some software.

Magic Poster’s Software Stack

While Raspberry Pis have become surprisingly powerful, they are still constrained computers with limited performance. I knew that I wanted to do more than just display static posters. I wanted to enhance the magic factor with animations, context awareness, and generative AI. When it comes to rendering performance, modern web browsers have decades of optimization, hardware acceleration, and features. I decided that my best bet was to use Chromium in “kiosk” mode, which displays websites in full screen, free of window decorations, toolbars, and tabs.

For the backend, I chose my programming language of choice, Python, along with libraries like Flask and SocketIO. Magic Poster is a JavaScript-powered frontend that communicates with a Python backend using WebSocket. I deployed modern CSS animations and transitions to create delightful views that can scroll, flip, and fade in and out.

After a few weeks of insomnia-fueled development, I had Magic Poster serving up beautiful posters from a hand-picked set of over 1,200 high-resolution movie posters, with four different styles: single poster, a “marquee” view with dozens of small animated posters, a “scroll” view that shows medium sized posters with a smooth scrolling animation, and a “flip” view that experiments with animation that really make the LED backlight sing.

Context Awareness

One of the benefits of powering Magic Poster with a network attached Raspberry Pi is that it can integrate with other systems on my home network. In my theater, I have an Apple TV 4K, a Zidoo Z9X and a gaming PC running ChimeraOS. Thanks to open APIs, I am able to detect when I am watching a movie or show, or when a game is being played. Using these APIs, I was able to have a small overlay appear on Magic Poster that displays information about the current activity.

Magic Poster was really taking shape, with a variety of different modes, context awareness, and even a simple REST API for controlling what is on screen at any given time. Still, I felt that there was something missing: interactivity. With the rapid and accelerating evolution of AI, there was an opportunity to take Magic Poster to the next level.

A Magic Sprinkle of GenAI and ML

Interactivity requires two-way communication. Attaching a keyboard or physical buttons to Magic Poster would be an easy path to providing input, but buttons are decidedly un-magical. I wanted Magic Poster to have a personality – to feel alive. Technology has an opportunity to become increasingly personal and interactive thanks to AI, and I concluded that the most magical way to interact with Magic Poster would be through conversation. Could I simply speak to Magic Poster, and more importantly, have Magic Poster respond?

Voice assistants have been “a thing” for quite some time. My experience with the three major players (Apple’s Siri, Google, and Amazon’s Alexa) have been mixed at best. All three assistants require “wake words” to begin an interaction, which feels forced. In the years since these assistants were developed, technology has evolved and advanced significantly. If possible, my goal was to have conversations with Magic Poster feel more natural.

As a longtime member of the Python community and a Fellow in the Python Software Foundation, I follow a number of prominent community members. Simon Willison is a Python developer that has become deeply interested in AI and LLMs, producing some great tools including Datasette, and more recently, Python LLM, which makes using both local and hosted LLMs from Python fun and easy. Through Simon, I discovered Vosk, which is an open source ML powered speech recognition toolkit with impressive accuracy and a very small footprint. I was quickly able to leverage Vosk to have Magic Poster passively listening to me in the background, ready to respond or take action based upon my feedback, including changing views, requesting specific posters, and more.

Now that Magic Poster could listen and take action, I wanted to give it the power to respond in its own voice. One of my favorite sites on the web is The Movie Database (TMDb), which is a free platform chock full of features, including an API with excellent Python client libraries. TMDb contains a lot of user-generated content, including a large number of reviews, with useful insights from a broad range of people. I decided to give Magic Poster the power to take hundreds of user reviews to generate a short summary of audience sentiment. When requested, Magic Poster reached out to The Movie Database, quickly pulls down all of the reviews for a movie, and then generates a summary using Ollama and the Llama 3 LLM. Finally, I feed the generated content to a text-to-speech system, and Magic Poster finally has a voice.

What’s Next?

It's been a lot of fun working on Magic Poster, and I am really happy with where it stands today. Of course, I have so many ideas about where to go from here, with additional voice features, display styles, and more. What do you think about Magic Poster? Do you have any suggestions for how to make it even more magical? Talk soon!

This post originally appeared in my Techish newsletter on LinkedIn.

This year, the LaCour family embarked upon a major home renovation, updating the main bedroom and creating an amazing home theater. While I was happy about the improvements to the bedroom, I'll be honest, the home theater was definitely the most exciting to me.

Fast forward to the end of our renovation, and we have an awesome place for the family to snuggle up and watch movies, or to catch a F1 race (Forza Ferrari!) with thundering sound on a big screen. Yet, the very first time my wife sat down to use the theater on her own, I got an annoyed text message: "Ugh, Jonathan, WHY do we have SO MANY remote controls?!"

Happy Spouse, Happy House

In my experience, there is no greater spark for innovation than an annoyed spouse. To her credit, my wife was absolutely right – we had way too many remote controls. Six, to be precise. Yes, I know, I have a problem.

My first instinct was to find a "universal remote," but the market is filled with ugly, difficult to use, under-featured options that wouldn't really make life any easier. So, I asked my wife: what is the best remote control you've ever used? She didn't hesitate: "our old TiVo remote control."

The Legendary TiVo Peanut Remote

When TiVo was first introduced nearly 25 years ago, it was a revolutionary concept. I remember the delightful experience of creating a "season pass" to my favorite show, LOST, and knowing that every week, I'd be able to sit down and enjoy an episode, zipping through the commercials.

While TiVo has faded into history with the rise of streaming services and pervasive "DVR" capabilities, its remote control, affectionately called "the peanut," is still a thing of legend. With its distinctive shape and smart button layout, it won awards for its ergonomic design.

Now, I was presented with a challenge. How could I replace six modern remotes and replicate my wife's experience with a non-programmable remote that has been out of production for ten years?

Thinking Like an Engineer

My first order of business was acquiring an old TiVo Peanut. Over the years, TiVo produced many different versions, but their "last hurrah" was the TiVo Slide Pro, released back in 2013. The Slide Pro slides open to reveal a full qwerty keyboard for text entry. More importantly, though, the TiVo Slide communicates to TiVo devices via RF (radio frequency), not IR (infrared).

RF is significantly more reliable than IR as it doesn't require a "line of sight" between the transmitter and the receiver. Late-generation TiVos featured built-in RF support, but older versions only supported IR. As a result, TiVo offered a dongle that plugged into the back of old TiVos via USB so they could use the Slide Pro.

Let's Go Down to Dongletown

I was able to score an unopened TiVo Slide Pro remote with a USB dongle for around $40. Once in hand, I made a discovery – in 2012, an enterprising developer added support for the TiVo RF dongle to the Linux kernel! So, I grabbed a spare Raspberry Pi 4, installed the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS, and plugged in the dongle.

After some tinkering, I was able to communicate with the dongle via the HID (Human Interface Device) API, capturing button presses, releases, and even the action of sliding the TiVo Slide Pro open and closed.

Six Devices, One Remote

Next up, I needed to figure out how to communicate with all six devices in the theater:

• Apple TV
• Zidoo Z9X Android Box
• Pioneer Elite Receiver
• AWOL Vision Projector
• Ceiling Fan
• Lutron Caseta Lighting

For the Apple TV, there is an outstanding Apple TV Python library that offers complete control over the network. The Zidoo Z9X, Pioneer receiver, and Lutron lighting are all able to be controlled over the network using Home Assistant. To control the projector and ceiling fan, I purchased a Broadlink RM4 Pro device, which can transmit arbitrary RF/IR signals, and trained it with their existing remote controls.

Introducing PNut

With all of the tools I needed in hand, I set to work writing some code to put it all together into a usable solution, which I call PNut. I made it general purpose so that anyone can use it, but I also included my own PNut configuration for reference.

I've been using PNut now for a few weeks, and it's pretty wonderful to be able to pick up a single remote and use it to dim the lights, turn on my ceiling fan, power up the projector and receiver, and control my Apple TV to watch the latest episode of The Righteous Gemstones.

Oh, and I'm pleased to report that my wife isn't annoyed anymore. Well, at least not about the remote controls...

Over the past few years, I've invested time and effort into extricating important data and content from external services, and bringing it into systems that I own and control. I've moved on from Facebook and Instagram, established tracking for my movie, tv, and podcast activity, automatically track my location in multiple ways, and much more. But, for years now, one type of data has eluded me: my personal health data.

As of today, that has changed! I'd like to share with you what I've built.

Overview of Enhancements

My website now features my personal health metrics in several places. First, there is now a health section which shows both daily health metrics and historical metrics. You can go backward and forward in time and compare my daily metrics to historical min, max, and average values.

For the daily metrics, I use the familiar Apple Activity Rings format, and include supporting metrics across a variety of categories, including activity, heart health, and sleep analysis.

For the historical metrics, I am particularly proud of the visualization. Each metric has a bar representing the minimum, maximum, and average values, and the gradient that is used to fill the bar adjusts to reflect the position of the average value.

In addition, I have augmented my monthly summaries.

Each day is represented by an Activity Ring and can be clicked on to view detailed, in-context metrics for that day.

Overall, I am quite pleased with how this project has turned out. Navigating through health metrics is snappy, the visualizations are attractive and useful, and it fits in neatly with the rest of my site.

Now that we've walked through what these features look like in practice, let's discuss how I gather the data and make it useful.

Unlocking HealthKit

I've owned an Apple Watch since the Series 2 watch was released, and have worn it fairly consistently ever since. As a result, I've got quite a lot of data amassed on my iPhone in Apple Health. That data is accessible through the Health app, and also via the HealthKit APIs. While I am a pretty strong developer, my skillset doesn't include much in the way of iOS development. I've made a few attempts at building an iOS app that will allow me to extract my HealthKit data automatically, but never made it far before I ran out of steam.

A few weeks ago, I discovered an app called Health Auto Export (which I will refer to as HAE for the rest of this post), which neatly solves the problem. HAE has many great features, but the key feature is "API Export," which allows you to automatically have your HealthKit data sent to an HTTP endpoint in JSON or CSV format, with control over time period and aggregation granularity. With this app in hand, I set about creating an API to store, index, and make that data searchable.

Introducing Health Lake

HAE uses a simple, but nested JSON data structure to represent health metrics. Because the data is structured, in plain-text, and will mostly sit at rest, a data lake is a natural target to store the data. Data lakes on Amazon Web Services (AWS) are generally implemented with Amazon S3 for storage, as it is well-suited to the use case, is deeply integrated with AWS' data, analytics, and machine learning (DAML) services.

In order to keep most of the complexity out of my website, I decided to build a microservice which is entirely focused on getting data into the data lake and making it useful. I call this service Health Lake, and the source is available on GitHub.

Sync and Store

Let's take a look at the first endpoint of Health Lake, which accepts data from HAE, trasforms it to align with the requirments for AWS's DAML services, and stores it in S3 - HTTP POST /sync.

HAE structures its data in a nested format:

{
    "data": {
        "metrics": [
            {
                "units": "kcal",
                "name": "active_energy",
                "data": [
                    {
                        "date": "2021-01-20 00:00:00 -0800",
                        "qty": 370.75
                    },
                    ...
                ]
            },
            ...
        ],
    }
}

As you can see, the data is nested fairly deeply. In order to simplify my ability to query the data, Health Lake transforms the data to a flatter structure, with each data point being formatted in JSON on a single line. On each sync, I create a single object that contains many data points, one per line, in a format like this:

{"name": "active_energy", "date": "2021-01-20 00:00:00 -0800", "units": "kcal", "qty": 370.75 }
...

Each sync object is stored in my target S3 bucket with the key format:

syncs/<ISO-format date and time of sync>.json

The prefix on the object name is critical, as it enables the indexing and querying of sync data independent from other data in the bucket.

Querying the Data Lake

Now that we have data being sent to our data lake and stored in an efficient, standardized format, we can focus on making that data searchable. Very often, I use relational databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL to store data and make it searchable with SQL. AWS provides a few great services which allow you to treat your data lake as a series of database tables that can be queried using SQL.

The first service we'll leverage is AWS Glue, which provides powerful data integration capabilities:

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics, machine learning, and application development. AWS Glue provides all of the capabilities needed for data integration so that you can start analyzing your data and putting it to use in minutes instead of months.

Data integration is the process of preparing and combining data for analytics, machine learning, and application development. It involves multiple tasks, such as discovering and extracting data from various sources; enriching, cleaning, normalizing, and combining data; and loading and organizing data in databases, data warehouses, and data lakes.

Using AWS Glue, I created a database called "health," and then created a "crawler," which connects to my data store in S3, walks through all of the data, and attempts to infer the schema based upon hints and classifiers. The crawler can be run manually on-demand, or can be scheduled to run on a regular basis to continuously update the schema as new fields are discovered. Here is what the configuration of my crawler looks like in the AWS Glue console:

Upon the first run of the crawler, a new table was created in my health database called syncs, which inferred the following schema:

I wasn't able to get the crawler to match the date format properly, so I ended up creating a "view" which adds a proper column that is a timestamp using the following SQL statement:

CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW 
    history 
AS SELECT
    date_parse(substr(date, 1, 19), '%Y-%m-%d %H:%i:%s') as datetime,
    *
FROM
    syncs

Now that our data lake has been crawled, and a database, table, and view have been defined in our AWS Glue Data Catalog, we can use Amazon Athena to query our data like using standard SQL. Athena is entirely serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

Daily Metrics

For our daily metric view, we need a summary of all metrics gathered on a specific day. To accomplish this, I added an endpoint to our microservice:

HTTP GET /detail/<YYYY-MM-DD>

In response to this request, the client will receive a JSON data structure collecting all data points for that day. Under the hood, the microservice is running the following SQL query:

SELECT * FROM history 
WHERE
    datetime >= TIMESTAMP 'YYYY-MM-DD 00:00:00'
AND
    datetime <= TIMESTAMP 'YYYY-MM-DD 23:59:59'

Because I pay for every query that I run on Athena, and to achieve great performance, I store the query results in the proper format for the client in S3 after I run the query. I then implemented some intelligence to decide if, for any given request, I should pull from the cache, or regenerate fresh data. Take a look at the source code for more detail.

Monthly Metrics

To show our monthly summaries, we need to get data for each day of the month. Rather than sending a request and query for every single day of the month, I decided to implement another endpoint to our microservice:

HTTP GET /summary/<YYYY-MM>

In response to this request, the client will receive a JSON data structure collecting all data points for the month, sorted by date. To accomplish this, I run the following SQL query:

SELECT * FROM history
WHERE
    datetime >= TIMESTAMP 'YYYY-MM-01 00:00:00'
AND
    datetime <= TIMESTAMP 'YYYY-MM-31 00:00:00'

The start and end range are actually calculated to ensure I have the proper end date, as not every month has the same number of days. Again, to save costs and improve performance, results are intelligently cached in our S3 bucket.

Global Metrics

Generating a global summary of all data points in the data lake was a bit more challenging. To make things more efficient, I created another view in my database with this query. Results are, again, intelligently cached.

Website Integration

With all of this great data available to me, it was time to integrate it with my website, which uses the Known CMS. I have created a Known plugin that provides enhancements that are specific to my website. Using this plugin, I simply send requests to the Health Lake microservice, parse the JSON, and create my visualizations.

Conclusions

Overall, I am quite pleased that I have been able to integrate this data into my website, and more importantly, to free the data from its walled garden and place it under my control and ownership.

#indienews

I just wish things would get back to normal.

Its a refrain we’ve all heard since the emergence of COVID-19. The world has been thrown into chaos, our way of life has been threatened, and many people have lost their jobs. The best minds in medicine and science are encouraging life-altering precautions like social distancing, wearing masks, and staying home. People are having to adapt to this “new normal” quickly, working from home, perhaps balancing the pressures of parenting children, or taking care of family members who are at higher risk. While its obviously the right thing to do to be cautious, and not re-open the country too quickly, protestors have taken to the streets to demand that things go back to “normal,” even if it puts others at risk.

Life in a global pandemic is not comfortable, convenient, or fun. We can all agree on that. The “new normal” sort of sucks.

But, what of the old normal? Well, consider George Floyd.

Last week, our chaotic world erupted into further chaos with the brutal murder of George Floyd by a Police Officer in Minneapolis. Make no mistake, I absolutely believe that this was a murder, and one that was the direct result of a fundamentally flawed system that demands reform. There must be justice for George Floyd, and it cannot just come in the form of punishment for the killers, it also must come in the form of radical, systematic change.

For many people, going back to “normal” is, on the surface, quite appealing. Returning to our privileged lives, where we feel safe to go out to eat, walk with our friends and family at shopping malls, gather in our places of worship, and to do it all with a strong sense of security – after all, the police, and all other systems of power, are there to protect us.

But, for a huge portion of our country, “normal” means avoiding the police because they cannot be trusted to protect you. It means less opportunity at work. It means overcoming an unequal system to fight for the same benefits that others readily receive.

You know what? The old normal sucks, too.

It is no surprise to me that many people who are calling to “re-open our country” in the midst of a global pandemic are also telling protestors to calm down, or to “tone down” their methods of protest. These demands often come from a position of privilege; of preserving a system that fundamentally benefits them at the expense of others. They like things just the way they were.

But, this time, we can’t let the cries for a “return to normalcy” win. As an ally, I cannot sit idly by, or demand that the oppressed respond to their generations-long oppression with calm, non-violent protest. It’s been nearly 30 years since the police brutalization of Rodney King, and it’s clear that nothing has fundamentally changed in that time. Peaceful protest isn’t enough. Voting isn’t enough. Patient conversation isn’t enough. Incremental change isn’t enough. Now, I am not advocating for violence, but I am advocating for persistent, enduring commitment to driving change.

We must listen to what Martin Luther King Jr. said in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in August of 1963:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”

So, fellow white people, it is time to step up. Acknowledge your privilege, speak up, and demand radical, fundamental change. Amplify the voices of people of color. Fearlessly support Black Lives Matter. Embrace the fact that creating a more just, equitable, and fair society likely means that you will need to sacrifice your own privilege for the benefit of others.

Let’s not go back to normal. Let’s create a better normal.

In the new world, where many of us are working 100% from home, it can be really difficult to find quiet and focus. Distractions abound, especially if you have kids. As I mentioned yesterday, closed office doors don't seem to get the message across to my children, so I thought it would be great if I could have a digital sign on my offce door. Well, I made it happen.

I'm really happy with how it turned out! How did I do it? It was pretty simple, really. I had a really old Amazon Fire tablet that hasn't been used in years, as the kids have both transitioned over to iPads. So, I charged it up, installed a "full screen browser" app and a hack that lets you keep the screen awake perpetually. Then, I wrote a quick web service to track state, and hooked it into HomeKit and Siri using Homebridge and this excellent plugin.

Tada! Now I can toggle the state of the sign using just my voice, or with automations. I can even automatically flip the status to "Don't Bother Daddy" when my calendar shows that I am scheduled for a meeting.

Update: the source code is available for the web service.

I have a small number of content creators that I enjoy following on YouTube, but I fundamentally dislike YouTube's shady algorithms, poor user experience, and invasive ads. These days, most of the content I watch is stored on my Plex server, so I decided to find a way to automatically download and add my favorite YouTube content to my Plex server. After a bit of searching, I found this guide from DIY Futurism which outlined a nice approach to the problem.

My approach is similar, and makes use of the excellent youtube-dl project, along with a personal media scanner and personal media agent for Plex. I run my Plex Media Server on my Synology DS1019+ NAS, which I absolutely adore, so that's where I set everything up. The process was quite simple:

1. Installed the aforementioned personal media scanner and personal media agent in my Plex server and enabled them in my Plex server settings.
2. Created a "TV Shows" library in Plex that uses the scanner and agent. I called mine "YouTube."
3. Installed youtube-dl on my Synology. I already have Python installed there, so it was as simple as running pip install youtube-dl.

At this point, I was ready to create a script that would download the content and add it to Plex. The key is to take advantage of all of the great features in youtube-dl, including the ability to provide a "batch" file containing target channels, the ability to embed metadata and download thumbnails, and an "archive" feature which tracks what has already been downloaded. My script is a variation on the one from DIY Futurism:

#!/bin/sh

cd /var/services/homes/admin/Media/YouTube
/volume1/@appstore/python3/bin/youtube-dl --playlist-reverse \
		   --dateafter now-2weeks \
		   --download-archive /var/services/homes/admin/Media/YouTube/downloaded.txt \
		   -i \
		   -o "%(uploader)s/%(playlist)s/%(playlist)s - S01E%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s [%(id)s].%(ext)s" \
		   --add-metadata \
		   --write-thumbnail \
		   --batch-file=/var/services/homes/admin/Media/YouTube/channel_list.txt

Let's walk through the script. First, I change directories to where I want all of my content downloaded. This is the same directory that I configured in Plex for my "YouTube" library that I created earlier. Next, I specify that I want to process the videos in the playlist chronologically (in "reverse"). I also specify that I only want to download videos that were published in the last two weeks using the --dateafter parameter. You can tweak this to download as much or as little of the content as you'd like.

Next, I point youtube-dl to a text file containing a list of all content that I've already downloaded using the --download-archive parameter, which youtube-dl will automatically maintain for me. Because I am limiting my downloads to the last two weeks, I did need to pre-populate this text file with all of the historical content to avoid having to scan through thousands of videos on each run of the script.

Next, I specify a format for where to store the downloaded content and what to name the files and directories, instruct youtube-dl to embed metadata, and to write a thumbnail image as well. This data will be used by the personal media scanner and agent to help Plex index the content.

Finally, I specify a "batch file," which contains a list of channels that I want to download content from. The format is simply one YouTube URL per line.

After an initial run that I performed manually, I scheduled the script to run every four hours, and now my Plex server is my central location for my YouTube content.

I had the great pleasure of spending this weekend in Portland, OR for the 2019 IndieWeb Summit. IWS is my favorite event of the year, as it gives me the opportunity to spend time with so many smart, like-minded, principled people who are interested in using technology to make a positive impact on the world. This year’s IWS was a runaway success, selling out for the first time ever, and featuring some truly great sessions, keynotes, and projects.

Day Zero: The Pre-Party

On Friday evening, a large subset of the attendees gathered at Pine Street Market to share in food, drink, and community. It was fun to reconnect with IndieWeb friends like David Shanske, Aaron Parecki, Tantek Çelik, Marty McGuire, Jacky Alciné, and Malcom Blaney. Much fun was had by all, and the post-party festivities carried on well into the night.

Day One: Keynotes and Sessions

Keynotes

The next morning, we kicked off the summit with coffee and breakfast, followed by some great keynotes.

First up, Tantek gave a brief state of the IndieWeb presentation, and shared details about the IndieWeb’s Code of Conduct, our use of color-coded lanyards to give people a choice about whether or not they should be included in photos, and our use of pins to enable people to display their preferred pronouns.

Next was fellow Micro.blog community member Kitt Hodsden who gave an inspiring talk on contractions and expansions, which really set the tone for the rest of the summit. Kitt should be very proud of both the content of her talk, and her wonderful, passionate delivery. Well done, Kitt!

Continuing the thoughtful keynote presentations was Jordan Brady, a native of Portland that I met several years ago at a Homebrew Website Club meeting at the DreamHost PDX offices. Jordan shared her story of changing her domain during her job search. Her experience shined a light on the challenges of being a woman in tech.

Marty McGuire followed, with an interactive keynote about his IndieWeb experience from his iPhone. It was very cool to see how far we’ve come in the past few years, with native mobile apps like Indigenous by Eddie Hinkle, and deep integrations thanks to iOS Shortcuts. Kudos to Marty for presenting the entire keynote directly from his iPhone.

Finally, Jacky Alciné closed the keynotes with an exploration of how to make the IndieWeb available for all. Jacky is a really thoughtful guy, and I enjoyed hearing his perspective.

Lightning Intros

After keynotes, all IWS participants were encouraged to give brief, 2-minute introductions, along with demos of their personal websites. During my introduction, I talked about the importance of preserving and owning your memories, and showed how my website helped me cope with the loss of my sixteen year old dog Winston earlier this year.

Sessions

After a group photo and lunch at local Portland food carts, we returned to the venue to plan out the rest of the day. IWS uses the BarCamp format for session planning, where attendees lead interactive session proposals, and build the schedule together. We came up with quite an impressive collection of sessions!

There were a lot of great conversations, but I’ll touch on three of my personal favorites:

1. “Follow That Bird” – This session was proposed by David Shanske, and addressed the problem of discovery. On platforms like Facebook and Twitter, it is easy to just click the “follow” or “friend” button, and following / friend lists help users discover other people. On the IndieWeb, we’re still figuring out the mechanics of how to improve this user experience, especially in social readers like Together and Monocle. Lots of great discussion all around, and this session ended up inspiring my project for day two, which I’ll talk about shortly.
2. Private Posts – I ran this session, and we talked about another problem that is neatly solved by traditional social platforms: sharing content privately. Again, some great discussion about how to solve this problem in the IndieWeb. Thankfully, there’s plenty of prior art out there to build upon. I’m looking forward to working on solving this for Known, which is the CMS I use for this website.
3. Possible Futures and IndieWeb – An extremely engaging and interactive session facilitated by Ariana Lutterman. Ariana guided the group through the process of exploring the many possible futures for the IndieWeb based upon emerging signals of change through the lens of growth, collapse, discipline, and transformation. We brainstormed on future implications across a number of axes – STEEPV (social, technological, environmental, economic, political, and values). Finally, we used our exploration to write headlines from the future. A really thoughtful and fun exercise. Many thanks to Ariana for guiding us.

At the end of a very long and engaging day, we split out into groups for evening activities. I joined a great group of nine for dinner at Jackrabbit, which featured an impressive and delicious 4-pound steak that we shared. Yum!

Day Two: Creative Hack Day!

On Sunday, we started things off with some tasty vegan breakfast options, and then I headed off to the first ever meeting of the Known Open Collective. It was great to finally connect, at least over video chat, with Marcus Povey, Jeremy Cherfas, and Paul Lindner. We definitely missed having Ben Werdmüller at the summit, but all send our best to him as he deals with this complicated thing we call “life.”

For the rest of day two, I focused on two things – helping other people and personal projects.

Inspired by the “Follow that Bird” session from day one, I decided that it would be extremely valuable to focus on the problem of discovery. I chose to update my site to make it easier to subscribe to my website, and to discover who and what I am following. The first, smaller part of the project, was to update my Subscribe page with more detailed instructions on how to subscribe to one or more of the feeds that are available on my website.

The second part of my project was to build a way for people to see what I am following. There is a wealth of information on “following” on the IndieWeb wiki, but none of the approaches discussed for documenting subscriptions really sat right with me. I am a fan of the DRY principle, and I don’t like the idea of manually creating “follow posts” when I have a perfectly serviceable source of truth for my subscriptions in my Microsub server. Thus, I embarked upon a project to automatically generate a page on my website that displays an up-to-date list of my subscriptions from Aperture.

Thanks to some enhancements by Aaron Parecki to Aperture, I was able to create a beautiful Following page that gives visitors to my website a way to see exactly what I am following in my social reader. They can use this to discover new content that they may enjoy. Even better, if you parse my Following page with a microformats2 parser, you’ll find that it is an h-feed containing h-entry “follow posts” with a u-follow-of property for each feed that I subscribe to. The only missing piece is that Aperture doesn’t yet provide me with the date and time that my subscription was created. Aaron has indicated that this is something he’d like to add, and once he does, I’ll update my page to include that data.

At the end of the summit, participants demoed their projects and progress before we closed out the summit. My personal favorite demo was from Malcom Blaney and Gregor Love, who demonstrated one of the first implementations of subscribing to private posts using AutoAuth. It was awesome to see private sharing in action, and it gives me confidence that 2020 could be the year that we solve this problem for good.

IndieKaraoke

Once the summit wrapped, a small group of us enjoyed what is becoming a wonderful annual tradition: IndieWeb Karaoke night! This year, we celebrated at Voicebox Northwest thanks to our wonderful host Lillian Karabaic. There was singing. There was laughing. There was a non-stop stream of incredible IndieWeb lyrical jokes:

• “Bow down before the Zuckerberg. You’re going to get what you deserve.” – To the tune of Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails.
• “If you want to destroy the silos (whoa oh-oh), POSSE first, and then walk away!” – To the tune of Undone by Weezer.

We’re a bunch of very lovable nerds. I’d especially like to call out Fluffy for her amazing energy at karaoke. She made sure that fun was had by all.

Conclusions

Thank you so much to all of the organizers of IndieWeb Summit for doing such a great job building an inclusive, fun, and enjoyable event each year. This year’s summit was the best yet, and I have no doubt that next year will be even better.

I love you #IndieWeb! 

#indienews

This past weekend, I took the plunge and purchased myself an iPad Pro, including an Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard Folio. Amazon had the iPad Pro on sale for 16% off of list price, which is an uncommonly large discount that I couldn’t pass up. I also had saved up quite a bit of Amazon rewards credit, so my out of pocket cost was quite low. I’ve had my eye on an iPad Pro for quite some time, and now that I have one, its time to share my impressions.

Which iPad Pro?

I chose to purchase the smaller 11" iPad Pro in Space Gray with 256GB of storage. Why? Well, the 12.9" iPad Pro was very tempting, but my primary use case for this device is to be a highly portable alternative to my MacBook Pro. What do I plan to use it for? Ideally:

• Productivity
  • Email
  • Documents
  • Task Management
  • Note-taking, as an alternative to my trusty paper notebooks
• Development
  • SSH’ing into my various Linux environments
  • Local development, preferably using Python
• Writing / Blogging
  • Publishing to my website
• Media
  • Streaming from my Plex server
  • Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, etc.
• Reading
  • Books
  • News
  • Comics
  • Web
  • My Social Reader

Given my constraints and desire to have something more portable than my MacBook Pro, I opted for the smaller size iPad Pro and Apple’s very slim keyboard case, with the Apple Pencil to help me replace my paper notebooks. I chose the 256 GB storage option because the base model only offers 64 GB, which is just not enough for my needs.

The Good: Hardware

So, what’s the good news? Well, there’s a lot to like. First off, the hardware itself is simply stunning. Its light, thin, fast, and beautiful. The screen is bright and crisp, and the bezel-less design is reminiscent of Dieter Rams' greatest hits. The last hardware design that I loved this much was the iPhone 5s.

The accessories are similarly well designed. The Smart Keyboard Folio attaches to the iPad Pro with ease thanks to an array of powerful magnets, and the Smart Connector means that I never have to worry about charging or pairing the keyboard. It just works. The Apple Pencil is similarly impressive, with an ingenious magnetic attachment to the side of the iPad Pro, and wireless charging that is effortless.

The Good: Software

iOS has come a long way in the past few years, adding rudimentary file management in the Files app, early multi-tasking capabilities, and iPad-specific features that enhance the overall experience. That said, there’s a long, long way to go from an OS-level to truly make the iPad Pro a professional tool. I’ll touch on that more later.

Now, there are some truly amazing apps that I have been enjoying to help me with my target use cases. They’re not all perfect, but I am encouraged by the vibrant and growing ecosystem of truly professional apps for iPad. These give me a great deal of hope for the future of the Mac as these apps begin to show up via Marzipan. Below is a list of apps I am using or experimenting with so far:

• Productivity
  • Email – Apple Mail. I am a heavy email user, and try out email clients often. For now, I am sticking with the built-in option, which is adequate.
  • Documents – Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and Drafts for personal projects. For work, we use GSuite, so I have installed Google’s Drive, Slides, Sheets, and Docs apps.
  • Task-Management – I use Things on my Mac and iPhone, and now I am using it on my iPad Pro.
  • Note-taking – This is an area where I am spending a lot of time experimenting. I have very much enjoyed note-taking in Drafts with my Smart Keyboard Folio attached, but am also trying out note-taking apps that are more Apple Pencil driven, including Notability and Nebo.
• Development
  • SSH – Panic’s Prompt and the emerging iSH, which adds an emulated Linux environment to iOS.
  • Local Development – The aforementioned iSH has been a revelation, enabling me to do local development in a very similar way to how I would on macOS, with vim, Python 3.7, git, virtualenv, and other common terminal-based tools. I’m also experimenting with Pythonista and have my eye on a few other editors to play with (Textastic, Buffer, etc.).
• Writing / Blogging
  • Blogging – Drafts with a custom Micropub action for publishing to my website.
  • Microblogging – Directly on my website, through Indigenous, or via the Micro.blog app.
• Media
  • Streaming – Plex, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, etc.
  • Local Video – Infuse, VLC, and Plex. To get video into Infuse and VLC, I tend to use youtube-dl inside of iSH.
• Reading
  • Books – Apple’s Books app works great for ePub content.
  • News – Apple’s News app is decent, but mostly I use Safari with my favorite news sites, or more likely I use my feed reader.
  • Comics – Chunky Reader is pretty solid, though I wish this entire category was more like Plex, with rich metadata indexing and organization on the server, with clients for reading.
  • Web – Safari.
  • Feeds – I have installed Together as a Progressive Web App on my home screen and it works well.

While none of the above apps are perfect, I have been quite impressed with them as a whole.

The Bad: Hardware

While the iPad Pro and its accessories are truly impressive hardware, they’re not free of issues. Because the bezels are so small on the iPad Pro, it can be a little uncomfortable to hold in portrait layout while reading. In the lap, the whole Smart Keyboard Folio and iPad Pro setup is a bit top-heavy, making it slightly unstable. Other than these minor nits, overall I think the hardware is top-notch.

The Bad: Software

While the app ecosystem is amazing, and iOS has made great strides, there are still some fundamental missing pieces that prevent me from viewing iOS as a true alternative to macOS:

• Keyboard – While the Smart Keyboard Folio is generally great to type on, in spite of its small size and low key travel, it is greatly hampered by software limitations in iOS. There is no ability to re-map keys in iOS, so I am stuck with a system-wide Caps Lock key, and no ESC key. Some apps, such as iSH, allow you to map Caps Lock to ESC, but this should really be handled system-wide. In addition, the Smart Keyboard Folio has a “globe” button in the bottom left corner which is infuriating. Pressing it pops up the Emoji keyboard on screen, and its right next to the control key, which I use heavily.
• Fonts – iOS comes with a small set of fonts, and there is no standard, built-in way to install additional fonts. I have been able to use an app called AnyFont to install fonts, including my preferred programming font, Dank Mono, but because the system itself doesn’t have support for font management, most apps don’t surface font customization. Kudos to Drafts, though, for allowing users to pick from any font available to the system, including ones installed through AnyFont.
• File Management – Apple added the Files app to iOS, and its a good start, but has so far to go to truly make it a pro-level file management tool. In addition, there isn’t any ability to plug in external storage to my iPad Pro, in spite of the fact that it has a USB-C port.
• Multi-Tasking – iOS has a very rudimentary multi-tasking system, which allows you to place multiple apps onto the screen at the same time, in floating panels, and in split views. It works, but is fiddly to use, with delicate gestures required to bring up the dock, drag apps over each other, and position them. In addition, there is no way to have multiple “windows” of an app used in different multi-tasking sessions. I think Apple is definitely innovating here, looking for new ways to approach multi-tasking than traditional window management. In many ways, iOS multi-tasking reminds me of tiling window managers, just… not as good. I’m hoping for good news on this front at WWDC.
• Web Browsing – Safari is an awesome browser. But, on the iPad, too often websites give you the mobile version of their site, rather than serving up the “full size” website. In addition, there isn’t any sort of download manager, or support for extensions other than content blockers.
• iSH – I have heaped praise on iSH above, and it really is pretty incredible. Its also an open source project, and is rapidly improving… but its not there yet. Things I’d love to see added to iSH that would greatly improve my experience: custom font selection, better performance, compatibility with additional software, tabbed sessions, and a choice of a different base operating system than Alpine Linux.

Conclusions

Overall, I am thrilled with my iPad Pro, and really excited to see where Apple is headed with iOS for “pro” users. There is so much to like, and massive potential for improvement. While I don’t see the iPad Pro displacing my laptop anytime soon, I think it will become an important part of my workflow.

As part of my continuing efforts to preserve and capture my memories, I’ve been spending some energy adding more capabilities to my website. I already capture photos, recipes, blog posts, status updates, and other more traditional types of content. In addition, I’ve been privately tracking my own location continuously for months now, including the ability to see some current details about my location and status. I also use the excellent OwnYourSwarm service from Aaron Parecki to record check-ins at specific locations on my site.

Last week, I realized that I was missing some data on my website that would add additional context when exploring my memories: my TV and movie watching history, and a record of what podcasts I listen to. As of today, I am now automatically tracking all of this data, and I’m happy to share a bit about how I made it happen.

Movies and TV

Let’s start with how I am tracking what movies and TV shows I watch. As it turns out, there is already a wonderful service out there for tracking this data called Trakt, which is a startup based out of San Diego. Trakt has done the hard part for me, with an extensive and complete database of movies and TV shows for me to pull from, and a host of great apps that use its powerful API to help users put data into their Trakt account. I am personally using the Watcht app for iOS to manually ad TV episodes and movies to my watch history on Trakt, and to show me a calendar of upcoming TV episodes for my favorite shows.

But, being an IndieWeb community member, I want to make sure that my memories don’t get lost in the event that Trakt goes away one day. In addition, I want to be able to see my TV and movie history in the context of the rest of my website’s content. So, I needed to find a way to automatically sync that data to my website.

At first, I thought about using the extremely capable Trakt API to periodically sync to my website, but then I noticed that Trakt Pro members get access to an Atom feed of their watch history. Working with a custom REST API takes a lot of effort, while integrating with a standard feed format is extremely easy. So, I happily paid for a Trakt Pro subscription!

I created a Python script which periodically parses my Trakt feed and then creates entries on my website for each movie and TV episode I watch. It only took me about an hour to put the whole thing together.

Sidebar: Automatic Tracking from Plex

As you may already know, I have a great collection of digital movies and TV shows. I use the outstanding Plex Media Server to enable me to stream and sync content to all my devices. As Eddie, my co-host from Two Dads Talking, recently mused, tracking activity automatically is much more reliable than remembering to manually track activity. Trakt provides a Plex plugin that automatically syncs your Plex history to Trakt, and once I had that installed, a significant chunk of my activity is now automatically synced!

I still have to manually track content watched outside of Plex, like live TV from Hulu, and content consumed on Netflix, but it’s a good start.

Podcasts

I’m not only a podcaster with a microcast and a podcast, I’m also an avid podcast listener. I listen to podcasts on my daily commute, to relax after work, and to kill time on airplanes. Wouldn’t it be great to have that history tracked on my website as well? As I mentioned above, tracking that history automatically is greatly preferable to manually having to log every episode I listen to. With that in mind, I set out to see if I could capture my activity.

I use the wonderful Overcast podcast app for iOS. Overcast is created by Marco Arment, who is also a prolific podcaster. It’s a fantastic and pleasant app to use, and is perhaps my favorite iOS app ever. Overcast has a sync service and web frontend available for users at overcast.fm. Not only can you listen to podcasts in your web browser on overcast.fm, you can also export an extended OPML file that contains all details about your account, including a listing of all podcast episodes you’ve ever listened to. Bingo!

I whipped up a script that logs into my account at Overcast.fm, then downloads a copy of this OPML file, and uses it to sync my history to my website. It works a treat, but I will caution that Marco seems to be rate limiting that OPML export pretty aggressively. For the time being, I’ve limited my sync to once daily, and I’ve also contacted Marco to get his input on how I am using his service. In an ideal world, I’d love to see Marco add a standard RSS, Atom, or JSON Feed for Overcast paid subscribers similar to what Trakt has done for Trakt Pro users. In the meantime, I’ll be conservative about how often I sync and await a reply from Marco.

Why Track Activity?

You may be wondering why I want to track all of this information. Eddie and I briefly touched on the topic in the last episode of Two Dads Talking, but it really comes down to the fact that our memories are precious, and the more context I have when looking back on my life, the richer my appreciation will be for the life I’ve been blessed to live.

During the process of adding these new types of memories to my website, I also have added a monthly “recap” feature which has been one of my all time favorite enhancements. I like them so much, I’ve added links to the last twelve monthly summaries to my home page to surface them. My favorite examples of monthly summaries so far:

• January 2018, which marked my departure from DreamHost, the beginning of a new chapter in my career, and my second viewing of my favorite musical of all time.
• July 2018, which includes travel all over the globe, some progress on my Indiepaper project, and outdoor movies in my front yard with my kids.
• November 2017, which includes a trip to Australia, the acquisition of the best car I’ve ever owned, and my son’s first ever NFL football game.

I’m delighted to continue enriching my database of memories, and really happy with the way my movie, TV, and podcast tracking is shaping up so far.

#IndieWeb

#indienews

I am not ashamed to admit that I love podcasts. In the early 2000s, blogs were the hot thing: an open publishing medium that allowed people to exchange ideas, converse, and share. Since then, blogs have faded, as increasingly toxic social media walled gardens have moved people off the open web. It’s a shame, really. I’m hopeful that blogs will rise again, but it’s going to take time.

Podcasts, on the other hand, have only grown in popularity, and are still blissfully free of central control from creepy ad-driven social media giants. We are in the golden age of podcasting!

I’ve had a personal microcast for a while now, and I’ve been pretty undisciplined about publishing it. Still, it has been a fun exercise, and I plan to keep at it for years to come.

Today, however, I’m excited to announce a new podcast project: Two Dads Talking. TDT is a longer form podcast featuring myself and my co-host Eddie Hinkle. Eddie and I have known each other for a few years now through the IndieWeb community, and we’ve found that we both have a lot in common, but also a significant amount of differences. This podcast is an opportunity for us to get to know each other better, and for our listeners to join us in that discovery.

Eddie and I are both parents, though at very different life stages, and both are people of faith, and technologists. I’m really looking forward to getting to know Eddie better, and I hope you’ll all join us in our journey of Two Dads Talking.

To subscribe, visit the Two Dads Talking website, follow us on Micro.blog, or subscribe in your favorite podcast client.