myles' garden

I’m speaking at Python Toronto’s July 23 Meetup on Personal Data Archaeology with Python. Almost every platform you use holds a slice of your life, all locked behind an API. The Dogsheep pattern (pioneered by Simon Willison) pulls that data into SQLite, where you can actually query it. I’ll share what I’ve learned building these tools. Come say hi.

Finished my first day at Relay today.

Just finished reading Fiona Marchbank’s Ladies of the Knight, it was so good.

Saw these flowers on my walk to 1RG this morning.

A photo dump of Theo at the farm. He was a little camera shy, but I managed to get a few good shots of him.

Spent last week at the farm. Took a lot of photos. These are the keepers.

I really want to like HyperTexting (an iOS app that will turn feeds into a scrollable social media interface), but when I first opened the app, it auto-subscribed me to 20+ feeds I have no interest in, and now the first post on the list is an ad to buy a sponsorship for their app. I get that good software requires people to actually make money, but this is a little much for an app that hasn’t even shown me it’s worth using.

I started reading Witch Hat Atelier, a manga by Kamome Shirahama.

He saw a chipmunk on the bird feeder once and now he just assumes they live there.

Went to see InterAccess’s, Toronto Made, The World in a City Illuminated exhibition at the Canada Malting silos tonight.

Nobody planted this. Gardeners call these volunteers: seeds that show up, pick a crack, and commit.

Tarot’s had me for a few years. So I built Yarrow, a three-card reader. Most spreads run past, present, future. Yarrow runs Root, Stem, Bloom: what’s beneath, where it stands, what it’s becoming. Past, present, future never sat right with me. It treats time like a straight line you’re stuck on. A reading should feel like growth, not a sentence being read out. So I stole the structure from a plant. Root holds what you don’t see. Stem is the part doing the work right now. Bloom is the thing…

Interesting tutorial by Jonas Hietala on designing a personal Pebble watchface. I like the idea of using a watchface to display personal information, and this tutorial provides a good starting point for creating one.

Built a docs site for astro-jsonfeed, powered by Starlight. Setup was painless. Took an afternoon.

Love these koi in Graffiti Alley.

I built a new website, Yarrow. It pulls a three-card tarot spread every time you visit. A fun side-project built with Astro, Svelte, and Tailwind. I’ve got a bunch of ideas for it, but wanted to get a basic version out first.

My current jam is Love Yourself (1999 Electronic Demo) by Sufjan Stevens.

Spent the evening in High Park at 1RG’s Art in the Park event. Drew some trees. A squirrel came by to critique.

I redesigned my Neocities site to lean harder into a GeoCities look. While I was in there, I wanted a deploy process simple enough to run from my iPad. Neocities is dead-simple hosting for static sites. Bret Comnes already built a GitHub Action for deploying to it, so the hard part was done. I just wanted a clean test run before pointing it at the live site. ci.yml runs Prettier over the code and builds the site. It fires on any push to main, any pull request, or a manual trigger. name: CI # I…

Summer in Toronto.

Saw this raccoon outside the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.

Love this poem I found: They/Them (dedicated to Nex Benedict) If God created night & day & dawn, of course & dusk & the tangerine rosepink sunset & the deep amethyst twilight & the infact bright of morning the to perceive the world in binary is to forgo knowledge of the divine.

Love this Basquiatist graffiti.

Mechanical Pencil is a collection of illustrated tear-downs of everyday products by Bryan Macomber. The Zippo tear-down is particularly impressive.

Photo dump from a weekend at the farm.

I’m hosting Silent Reading Club at 1RG on June 16 starting at 6pm. Bring whatever you’re reading, find a comfy spot, and enjoy a few hours of quiet company with friends old and new.