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macOS Monterey was released yesterday and it brought Shortcuts (formerly Workflow) from iOS to macOS for the first time. Shortcuts is a powerful yet simple to use automation framework, and along with the Day 1 release of Monterey my image editor of choice Pixelmator Pro introduced 28 new Shortcut actions. Time to have some fun! Since introducing the photo lightbox component of this website a few weeks ago, I have explored ways to layout the photos inline to a post without a disjointed layout. This is what I mean by disjointed. ...

Was watching this video the other day and it took my thoughts down a familiar rabbit hole of infrastructure maintenance! Always a fun one. When I go out and purchase a car or a bicycle or even an axe, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about “how am I going to maintain this thing?” The car will need oil changes and tire rotations. The bicycle will need chain lubrication. The axe will need its blade sharpened. All of this periodic maintenance can be called the “total cost of ownership” of the thing itself. A bicycle doesn’t cost $1,000 one time to purchase; that is the cost floor. The small bits of required maintenance add up over time and the true total cost of ownership can be a fair bit higher. ...

Getting There, and Skyline Drive About a week ago, I checked the weather forecast for Front Royal, Virginia. Since passing the basic rider course and acquiring a motorcycle last month I had been anticipating an opportunity to take it on a single trip this year. My first inclination was Vermont to enjoy the fall foliage and cruise some winding back roads, but the predicted weather in Virginia made the decision for me. ...

There’s a saying in the cycling world: n+1. Having loved math in college, I immediately recognize the meaning of n+1 to mean “current plus one more” and for cycling it means you will always need/want/desire one more bicycle than you currently have. And it’s true! I would love to own, and have room to store, an electric gravel bike, a mountain bike, a cargo bike, etc. The latest iteration of n+1 is a bit…different. ...

The spot we choose to embark on the Lehigh Gorge Rail Trail starts just outside of Jim Thorpe, PA. It splits Carbon and Luzerne counties as it winds along the Lehigh River south to north, tracing a not-so-old railway which still operates to this day. (Although perhaps just for the tourists.) The Jim Thorpe area is a popular tourist-y destination and the proximity to Lehigh Gorge only augments the allure (great for family activities or bringing a pet). I have not been up here since a few years back, hiking the Glen Onoko trail before they sadly closed it for good. The bike path is a decent substitute as you can still experience some great waterfalls, and if you’re after a good hike there’s certainly a few more in the area. ...

Went camping last weekend! Location was Timberline Campground out in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. The Pine Barrens has been a favorite spot this summer since we picked up a few low-end Pelican kayaks, because the rivers in that region are a lot of fun to float down. Our friends enjoy stand up paddle-boarding, so we all converged on the campsite with kayaks and boards in tow. The initial expectation was to put them out on the “lake” at the campsite…but it turned out to be a bit more of a tiny pond than a real lake. ...

This post is my first published using GitHub Actions. It was remarkably easy to setup, and now the instant I write a new post and push to main, I’ll be seeing it on here within 30 seconds. Below I’ll explain how I got this working. Laying the Groundwork The first step is ensuring the hugo site can be deployed somewhere. In my case, it’s a home server and the stack is: ...

Welcome! This is a new cut of mattedwards.org, built using the static site generator hugo. I had been experimenting with static site generation on-and-off for the past eight months; and I finally set aside the time to put this new site together. Static site generation has been on my mind since the Stacktrace podcast introduced it to me via John Sundell’s Publish, which is built using Swift. The simplicity of a website built using nothing but HTML and CSS is awesome (plus a tiny bit of Javascript which is baked into the theme but which I plan to remove). Combined with my fascination around the Go language, I settled on using Hugo. ...

First day of vacation!...

Some favorite photos from the first two days of our adventure. × 1 / 17 2 / 17 3 / 17 4 / 17 5 / 17 6 / 17 7 / 17 8 / 17 9 / 17 10 / 17 11 / 17 12 / 17 13 / 17 14 / 17 15 / 17 16 / 17 17 / 17 ❮ ❯ ...