PSA: Something ripped a big hole in the Milky Way, and we have no idea what it is. This happened “recently”. www.newsweek.com/huge-hole…

When you get to the gym and realize you forgot your headphones at home 😞

This new composite photo of the Large Magellanic Cloud created by amateur astronomers is gorgeous! lowell.edu/astroaler…

Last weekend we went hiking at Coyote Wall. Jenni and I had never been to this hike before but our friends were familiar with it.

There are multiple trails that meet each other at various points. Some are gentle slopes, while others are steeper. One can pick and choose paths based on how much of a workout one wants and switch that around as needed.

There are beautiful vistas all along the way to the top of the wall. I could see myself bringing family and friends here that are not used to hiking much, to just go for a bit, enjoy the views, and head back.

There are cute little waterfalls and streams as well along the way.

Spring flowers, sunny weather, and spotty clouds, made everything look a lot more beautiful.

At the top, we hung out for a bit to have snacks and enjoy the views some more.

On the way down we took the steeper route for a bit. Some folks were mountain biking along the cliff and down the steep trails, which was incredible to watch but not something I see myself doing 😅

I can see myself coming back to this hike again in the spring, and probably in other seasons as well.

Activity stats:

Distance: 7.5 miles
Elevation Gain: 1662 ft
Time (including breaks): 4h 45m

Friends, especially those in Portland, this is great project by good people. Back them on Kickstarter and let’s get them to the finish line! www.kickstarter.com/projects/…

It’s that time of the year in the neighborhood.

PSA: It’s about time to cancel Apple News+ if you signed up for the free trial at launch and haven’t used it enough.

I just did.

Got some yard work done on this lovely day.

A short break on a muddy spot. From a few weeks ago.

I’ve been journaling in Day One for some time now. I like it for a lot of reasons, and it’s working out great. So far I’ve been using it as a plain old journal, where you write what’s on your mind. Recently, I decided that I wanted to get my digital history into it as well. One of the first things that came to mind was my Foursquare/Swarm checkin history which goes back to 2009. I decided to start there.

I exported all my data and wrote a script in Python to extract what I needed from it to make journal entries. The two relevant files were checkins.json and photos.json. You can get my script on Github by selecting here if you’d like to use it, or dig into it. It should also appear embedded at the end of this post. First the script pre-processes the data to get all the photos attached to checkins. Then it goes over the checkin history to extract most of what I want, but since the exported data doesn’t include venue coordinates, it has to do a little more.

It makes calls to the Foursquare API to fetch the venue coordinates for each checkin. Then it puts everything together and makes the actual entry using Day One’s command line utility. I had several thousand entries but the free plan for the API has a daily limit of 500 calls, so I manually ran it a few times over the course of a couple of weeks until they’d all been imported. I could’ve automated that but I wasn’t keen on spending the time on that.

Day One does allow one to link it to IFTTT so that all new checkins get logged automatically, and I enabled that a while back, but I’ve not been happy with that integration. Now that I’m familiar with the flow of data, I plan to create new entries every couple of months or so, perhaps with a new script that works entirely with the API.

I’d love to hear if you have automated any journaling as I’m keen to explore other ways of doing so myself.