I finally decided it was time to move away from Nova Launcher. I purchased Nova Prime probably 10 years ago for like $6, so I think I got my money's worth. I wasn't thrilled when it was sold and even less when Kevin left back in September. I just needed to take the time to try stuff out.

I landed on Lawnchair. It isn't as customizable as Nova, so there has been some muscle memory re-training this week, but I'm happy overall. I'm glad they're actively developing and I think it's the next closest fit for me.

So long, Nova. You were good while you were good.

I started toying around with a little side microblog because I miss being able to open a browser and make a post. I've used Pelican to generate this static site for a couple years now and I think I'm ready to move back to a web publisher.

I wanted to try and revive Anchor CMS, but I don't have the PHP skills to refactor something so large. I'm comfortable in Python, so I'm extending my homepage, which already uses Flask, to have a blog path. There's a lot to do, but it's something I can pick away here and there in the evenings. It's fun to rethink this space every now and then. I think this will be a good move overall.

My wife's parents are moving next year. She and her dad built a gazebo when she was younger and today, it moved to our house.

We'll landscape this in and turn it into a nice litte weekend coffee spot.

I had never seen sideways door handles. My cousin Kristie's Civic felt like the coolest car I'd been in. I wanted it. I wanted to drive a car like it when I finally could drive myself.

A wire snaked out of the tape deck. I hadn't seen that either. We weren't limited to cassettes anymore. Now we could listen to One Headlight from the CD itself.

I wanted that, too. I craved the freedom represented by the Civic.

Hoo boy the blog hasn't gotten much in it this summer. I think this is becoming a more annual tradition, where it goes dark from May til late August. We're outside a lot and I don't really have much happening in my mind while I take a break from school.

I'll be on a camping trip next week, so there will be a post following that with pictures. Then, I get back into school mode the third week of August and I'm sure that will propmt some writing.

Anyways, I'm still here. This isn't dead. I'll be back...eventually.

This world can often be overwhelming.

In a previous lifetime, I worked as a summer camp counselor. One of the things we did to make the morning flag routine fun was to dress up in different themed costumes. Each day had a color theme and all the counselors would put together a goofy costume on that theme and then winners would be picked by the leadership staff.

Another counselor and I, Caleb, realized we could combine our creative powers to come up with more elaborate - and hopefully more impressive - costumes to win points for our team.

I give you, the Don Quixote, and probably one of my favorite pictures ever.

This summer formed several core memories and even though Caleb and I fell out of touch, I still think back to this morning fondly. I'm glad I have such a great picture to remember it by.

Well, I did it. I started working on my fork of Anchor CMS to get it up and running with PHP 8. Honestly, most of the work so far has been updating the build system with new versions of the JS packages used to bundle everything up. I haven't needed to do much with the PHP yet.

Anyways, I can set up a new instance from scratch, create the admin user, and write some posts. I've fixed a few CSS errors and I'm going to start working on updating the Sass files because they have some deprecations since they were first written 10 years ago.

The repo is on Github if you want to take a peek.

I've been thinking about moving back to a small CMS for the blog. Specifically becuase I would like to be able to just log into something and write rather than using my current static site flow.

AnchorCMS is an old blog app I've opined about in the past and I decided to take on another project and work on a fork. The maintainers shut down the original codebase back in 2020 and it's been sitting since.

The plan right now is trim down the installation flow and tailor it for myself - it'll be updated for PHP 8 and use SQLite for a database to keep my server running with low overhead.

I have no idea what I'm in for because I haven't touched PHP in a minute. We'll see how it goes.