- (https://b-ark.ca/ksKKwg)
I’m riding in the 2025 Enbridge Tour Alberta for Cancer, raising money for the Alberta Cancer Foundation, and have so far raised $2,744, exceeding my $2,500 goal and surpassing my 2024 effort!
Help me by donating here
And remember, by donating you earn a chance to win a pair of hand knitted socks!
- (https://b-ark.ca/sGGMEO)
It is utterly ridiculous that Strava doesn’t have turn-by-turn navigation. Fortunately, Open Street Maps came to the rescue: export the route GPX from Strava on the web, import into OsmAnd, and voila! Turn by turn audio navigation in my Shokz. Absolutely amazing for riding new routes!
- (https://b-ark.ca/UGKuiq)
I just want to officially announce that, despite my liberal use of em dashes–a noble form of punctuation that’s being unfairly targeted as a sign of AI slop–nothing in this blog is, has ever been, or ever will be AI generated.
- (https://b-ark.ca/oySW_g)
You know, Habaneros make really nice (if messy, what with all the blossom dropping) house plants. And man are they tasty!
We did it!
Well that sure was fast. Just a few days ago I was still shy of 75% of my $2,500 fundraising goal for the 2025 Tour Alberta for Cancer, but thanks to a sudden rush of new donors I’ve hit that milestone!
For the fourth year in a row I’m excited to say I’ve hit my minimum fundraising goal for this year’s Tour campaign! After taking Lenore’s advice and doing some targeted outreach to folks in my network, I saw a sudden rush of donations–nearly $1,000 in the last three days!–that pushed me over the top and beyond.
But the work doesn’t stop there! As relieved as I am to have reached the minimum to qualify for the ride, I’m equally excited to see how many more dollars I can pull in for the ACF in these final few weeks before the event.
Continue reading...2025 Tour Raffle
Better late than never, right? Were you excited but disappointed when you didn’t win a pair of hand knitted socks last year by donating to my Tour Alberta for Cancer fundraising campaign? Well now you have another chance! Support my efforts to raise money for the ACF and earn a chance to own a pair of socks made by yours truly!
Or following the link to the post to learn more!
So the Tour this year is on July 19th and 20th, which puts it just one short month away. And this is the first post to mention the Tour Alberta for Cancer or my associated fundraising campaign. I am remiss.
There are certainly reasons for that–my life has seen some fairly profound changes as I ended my career break and re-entered the workforce–but it’s about time I wrote something given this is a particularly special Tour for me as my wife Lenore rides with me for the very first time!
But I also need your money!
Each year we riders raise a minimum of $2,500 for the Alberta Cancer Foundation, an organization to which I have a person connection given how cancer has impacted my family and friends. While my campaign this year is going surprisingly well despite a lack of effort on my part–as of this writing I’m at over $1,800, which ain’t bad!–I still have some work to do.
Continue reading...Back to work
Yup, it happened. Over nineteen months and two eclipses later and the career break is officially behind me. I still can’t believe that time came and went so quickly, but I can say honestly that I’m excited to start something new.
How do nineteen months fly by so quickly? In some ways it feels like just yesterday that I made the difficult decision to leave my old role and, after over twenty long and fruitful years with my first and only real professional role, simply stop for a while.
In the over year and a half that followed, the world around me changed dramatically. The AI hype cycle truly took off with an investment bubble that has seen untold billions sunk into startups, large established players, and the picks-and-shovels companies that underpin the industry. In parallel, we saw increasing evidence of a white collar recession taking shape, with the software industry no exception. While I don’t personally believe the former trend has played much of a part in the latter, these parallel trends have seen the software industry disrupted in a way it hasn’t been since the dot-com crash of 2000.
Meanwhile, the political landscape has been utterly transformed. As the alt-right continued to rise and eventually take power in our neighbour to the south, we’ve seen sustained pushback against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies and practices, and a decline in support for investing that takes into account environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, with some of that pushback taking the form of real changes to the legal and regulatory landscape in the US.
As if that weren’t enough, in the first quarter of 2025 we’ve seen a sustained attack on Canadian sovereignty, as the new American administration has begun to wage an economic war on this country while cozying up to strongman dictators across the globe.
I genuinely don’t remember the last time the world felt this… precarious.
As you can imagine, given this context, I was more than a little anxious about beginning the hunt for a new job.
So imagine my surprise, back in late November, when a former colleague reached out after noticing I was open to work…
Continue reading...PWAs on the Steam Deck
I wanted to try using Navidrome on my Steam Deck, but couldn’t find a good client. I realized I’d love to just use the web interface, but using Chrome for this is a pain. Then I remembered there’s a way to ‘install’ PWAs with Firefox, which would let me run any major web app (e.g. Spotify, Youtube, etc) right on the deck as though it was an actual app. Here’s how I made it work.
All I wanted to do was play music on my Steam Deck.
To be honest, I’m not 100% sure this will actually be useful to me in the long term, but it seemed like a fun thing to try, you know?
I hunted and hunted for an application that would work nicely on the deck and would integrate with my Navidrome installation, but nothing satisfied. The closest I got was Supersonic, but it didn’t play nicely with Gamescope
Eventually I concluded that my best bet would be to just run the Navidrome web application, but doing that with Chrome in gaming mode was clunky and a bit unsatisfying.
Then I remembered an experiment I ran a while back running web applications as a PWA with Firefox, and a light bulb went off.
Now, to be clear, this whole thing is a little silly, but it was fun and it worked well, so I figured I’d write it up just in case a) I needed it later, or b) someone else might want to give this a try.
Continue reading...