Ideas seem to be flowing a little faster when I start writing them down on a notecard with a 6B pencil. Even though a 6B pencil is the arch enemy of a left-handed person, the line it makes is a thing of beauty. It's like if writing with a pencil felt like writing with a Sharpie marker.

Getting ideas off the notecard and to the posted stage has a couple extra steps. After the first time I tried it though, I am seeing how valuable they are.

The first is scanning the notecard with the camera app and getting the thought to the laptop. I thought I would hate this step by I am now seeing the light about it. This barrier of entry is keeping a lot of mental clutter out of my laptop. Some people keep every thought as a trigger to make connections for new ideas. I tend to find the old ideas distracting and having them around makes me tidy files instead of generate ideas.

The next step is cleaning the borked text after I scan it. This step forces me to read what I wrote. Self-editing is the least fun thing for me so this dreaded step actually happens when I use analog and digital together instead of one or the other.

This is a work in progress but hopefully it will help with the trouble I was having yesterday.

I am supposed to be promoting our show on Saturday. Don't know why but I'm just not feeling talkative or creative this week. Add to that three more shows coming up in three weeks. It's daunting (for me).

It might be the multiple spots to post on. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least nine places that I need to post show info.

Not posting is not an option so I am trying to brainstorm a way that will make doing all this feel like more magical. Clearly some sort of automation is needed.

I am a big fan of the Modern CSS blog. Whenever there is a new post, I schedule some time and dig in. It's easy for me to get into a comfortable groove/rut with CSS and Stephanie Eckles's blog gets me out of it every time. It's a great place to level-up your CSS skills.

I saw in a blog post somewhere about a search engine Kagi Search where you pay $10 a month and it is completely ad free. They offer a free trial version so I signed up to check it out.

I used "1000s of cats" as a test search in Kagi Search, Duck Duck Go, and Google to compare the results. It was very jarring...very jarring.

With Kagi Search, I got a ton of links I've never seen before or haven't seen in a long time. Felt like I was  doing a search on a library computer.

With Duck Duck Go, I got a lot more links I haven't seen before or in a while. Felt like Google of old.

With Google...yeesh. Felt like I was in a shopping mall after searching with the other two. Not a good experience when you compare it to the other two at the same time. It's just missing the random smell of pretzels, cologne/perfume, and some generic dance music.

A client who has multiple locations needed an Appointments contact form where people can select a location. The form submission then needed to go to that location.

We had luck getting it to happen with our Drupal sites. Not sure if this is the best way but it worked for us.

We have a Place content type with an email field with a unique email address for each Place. We set up a View with an entity reference with all the Places. In that entity reference, the two fields are Title and Email (which is hidden).

In the Appointments contact form, you need to set up a new contact email (/structure/contact/manage/appointments/emails). There is a selector for Recipient Type which should be set to "The value of a specific field in an entity reference". There will then be a selector for Recipient Reference which you set to "Place: Email (field_email)" or whatever you named your Email field.

Your forms should now send to the correct location.

I just turned off auto-capitalization on my Macbook. It is wonderful.

I had to go to the nearby electronics store to help my mother-in-law pick out a radio. While I was there I went to the Apple section to kill time. I was typing nonsense on one of the new MacBooks and it made me realize how squishy the keyboard is on my current M1 laptop.

When I went home and typed some stuff, it was like typing on a sponge keyboard.

They all wear out in their own special way. Considering how many hours I put in on each one, it's kind of amazing they last as long as they do.

Our robot Eufy vacuum hates the sun. When it hits a sunny spot on the floor, it thinks it is a drop off and reverses course.

I've spoken with Eufy support and they know off this quirk. The solution seems to be "vacuum when it isn't sunny" which works for me. Yoof was under $100 and does more than its share of the dust removal.

We put googly eyes on it to anthropomorphize it like any self-respecting robot owner does. If it hates the sun then I am wondering if some vampire teeth are in order.

When I got to the end of recording 150 sentences into my iPhone, I was a little hoarse. Also not knowing 100% what I would use my Personal Voice for.

It took a looooooong time for it to finish process because your phone needs to be on a charger and locked.

When it was done I typed a random sentence for it to read as Me and it sounded like me for sure.

My first reaction to hearing it was that it's cool that if I ever have a problem with my voice, I have a backup now.

My second thought was I can have it read all the content I want to do on a possible YouTube channel I am teetering on doing.

The great flattening is happening. I am moving away from a folder for each context (home, work, drum, etc.) with a text file for each thought. Now there will be one context folder with a text file for each context.

The plan is to start the thought in Drafts, tag it with the context (ex: @drum), and prepend it to the @drums.txt file.

The hope is having a handful of context files will be less temptation to waste time in than a ton of files organizing.