At the Chocolate Ox for January ice cream. Melting? Go outside! -9 °F.

Benefit of it being -11 °F? Easy to flash freeze a Rafferty’s Veggie Supreme pizza to bring home for Tammy’s sister.

I set up a Guestbook for my site copying @jimmitchell who saw it at @alexwolfe site. Thanks to Guestbooks by meadow! The CSS is default. Maybe @mtt will want to Tiny Theme it? 🤩
I could not care less about Tik Tok, and would consider it an upgrade to the Internet for it to be removed from the US, and frankly everywhere else. The fact people care so much is proof of its intentional addictive design.
What you do when you’re Up North and it feels like -24 °F.



We had a great time solving Granny’s Recipe Rescue at Copper Cat Escape in 48m 18s! We had five “rookie” misses that we caused us to “face palm”. 🤦 We are coming back tomorrow to do another room!


See list of escape rooms.
I suspect the reason Apple Intelligence mail categories are only supported on the iPhone is at least in part because of the difficulty with synchronizing that state across multiple devices. Feels similar to People identification in Photos at first, but Apple can’t control the backend on email.
After much debating I finally decided to get a new laptop and ordered a MacBook Pro with M4 Pro and configured nicely. This thing is going to be fast! Will be especially nice for photography. 😎

Vikings played so bad tonight. The last two games put a very sour ending on a season with fourteen wins. 😣🏈
I’m a big fan of Jay Farrar and Son Volt so it didn’t take much debate to become a member of the Electro Melodier Society, aka The Official Son Volt Fan Club. I dig that they are creating a channel to distribute new and old music to members.

Tammy made a batch of these Peppermint Bark Chocolate Chip Cookies and they are so good. 🤤

I love the scent and crackle of our Things 4 Good candles. For my birthday my sister got me a candle warmer. I didn’t know that this was a thing and gave it a go. It worked really well! The wax performed very similar to burning and the scent was great. Another way to enjoy our candles.

We had an incredible brunch with friends at Lynette. Tammy and I shared the Blackened Avocado Toast and Stuffed French Toast. The avocado toast was amazing! Tyler enjoyed the Burger and thought it was great. They also do custom lattes. I had the Potica Latte which was perfect! Will return!

Micro.blog Collection Exporter
I’m adding one more Shortcut to my Micro.blog Collections Shortcuts. One of the concerns I’ve had with collections is making sure that I have some way of undoing them. If I move to another blog service and it doesn’t support these I need to know which photos are in those collections. This is gracefully handled by micro.blog when you export your blog. It will replace them all at that time and your good to go.
However, I’m a bit of a “belt and suspenders” person and I’d like more than just that. Also, what if I just wanted to undo a single collection and I’m not exporting my whole blog? I’d like to be able to get at this data easier. Add to that that for very large blogs micro.blog export doesn’t work today due to file size limitations. I wanted another way.
This Shortcut gets a list of all your collections, then iterates through that list building a JSON data object that contains all your Collection names along with an array of the photos in that collection.
It can take a bit to run, and Shortcuts in general isn’t great with loops of loops and building larger data sets. Give it some time and it will finish just fine. It takes about 15 seconds to run for my over 60 collections.
Add Micro.blog Collection Exporter
The output of this Shortcut will give data like this:
{
"Collections": {
"Coffee": [
"https://www.thingelstad.com/uploads/2021/31d369a8f6.jpg",
"https://www.thingelstad.com/uploads/2021/c41923433b.jpg",
"https://www.thingelstad.com/uploads/2021/015df1a057.jpg"
],
"Iceland": [
"https://www.thingelstad.com/uploads/2022/799a9cb53a.jpg",
"https://www.thingelstad.com/uploads/2022/1822276426.jpg",
"https://www.thingelstad.com/uploads/2024/24df887cc9.png"
],
"Italy": [
"https://www.thingelstad.com/uploads/2023/020261c875.jpg",
"https://www.thingelstad.com/uploads/2023/269481db10.jpg",
"https://www.thingelstad.com/uploads/2023/43c4de5c52.jpg",
"https://www.thingelstad.com/uploads/2024/054ebe3a4d.jpg"
]
}
}
One of my favorite things on a weekend morning is a good cup of coffee and writing a blog post that I had no idea I was going to write when I woke up. My favorite writing environment: weekend morning, cup of good coffee, quiet house, words flowing.
I was emailing a friend about Drafts and how critical it is to my writing. It made me think I should share that there is a 50% off 1-year subscription offer until January 15! I do almost all of my writing in Drafts. Sync and automation are key features for me. “Where text starts…” 👨💻