Wed, 29 Dec 2021

I’ve got a bunch of little scraps of things that haven’t earned their own blog post, so I’ll try to categorize them here.

Wifi embroidery machine project

I’ve got a new version of the “put your USB embroidery machine on wifi without any hardware modification” thingy in beta-test, and both my machines are running on it, so if you downloaded the one on Github and it isn’t working for you, let me know and I’ll link you to the new one. The chip shortages have impacted Pi availability so I may poke around and see what other single-board computers can handle Mass Storage Gadget mode. Many places are out of Pi Zeroes until July at the earliest, and some models are out of stock until 2023. Yes. Over a year.

You can still pick up Pi Zero W’s as part of more expensive kits, which is still cheaper than replacing your entire embroidery machine to get wifi. And it’s realllly convenient.

TaskWarrior

I’m still using it to deal with ADHD organizational issues. Not much new to say about it, other than I’ve written a few little scripts to help with different presentations, making sure recurring tasks don’t just pile up in the overdue color and desensitize me, things like that. I try not to waste time rearranging tasks too much though, and TaskWarrior seems to be just the right level of simplicity vs. flexibility for me.

WordPress

I try to minimize the plugins in WordPress, but I installed Editorial Calendar so I could be more organized, especially about times I promise follow-up posts. That was pretty recent, but I think it’s helped already.

I recently “stickied” a revised post – the snap tab supply one, for folks who just got a new embroidery machine for Christmas and are just now discovering that the machine itself is only the first investment. I hate blogs that don’t have dates, and I also didn’t want to have an undifferentiated June post at the top of the blog. So I poked around in the CSS; it’s been years since I messed with it but I think I have it right. Depending on your version, this may be different, but for me it’s Appearance > Customize > Additional CSS. I didn’t want to change the appearance of the post too much so that future theme changes are less likely to break it. So I just put this in, which tucks a bit of text in after the post title on the front page. If you want to do it but would prefer putting something before the title, try the second line.

<pre class="wp-block-preformatted">.sticky .entry-title a:after{content:" (Updated!)"}

.sticky .entry-title a:before{content:"Updated: "}

WooCommerce

I finally broke down and turned off WooCommerce earlier this month. It just feels too spit-and-baling-wire, layered on top of WordPress. I’ve experimented with Ko-Fi a little bit, but its shop features are a little underdeveloped so far. The real problem is that I’ve been afraid to start doing my own advertising, which is what Etsy has done (mediocre-ly, but better than nothing) for me in the past.

What’s next?

I guess I have to do a forward-looking post to match this one, huh?