🎈There are still a few (a lot) of people in the family that tinyMovieStar hasn’t met. The size of both our families, the pandemic, our lives, all added up, it’s only natural. Even so, this Saturday she met a few more cousins, when we all gathered at my in-laws. It was a busy, hectic, afternoon. But I was reminded of how happy I used to feel when I was a young boy, and the whole gang got together. It was brilliant, and still some of the happiest memories I have. Hoping she feels the same.

🎈(Part II) Sunday brought another couple of cousins and a great uncle. We had almost forgotten how this house was, or is: always filled with people. Wherever my in-laws happen to live, that’s where the action is. The whole family gets together at their place. This stopped for a while, during the worst months of the pandemic, but now they’re back in business. Food, laughs, people all over.

🔐 Keeping my crypto investment safe is the new project. I was never hacked, or stolen, and the amount I have in crypto is laughable anyway. Still, a hardware wallet is a gadget, and I was curious about this one. The Ledger Nano S is not that expensive, and has been favourably reviewed a lot of times. It sounds like the perfect one for a wallet newbie. Ordered. There are a LOT of pages to read, a LOT of YouTube tutorials to keep me busy for a few days, or weeks, depending on the work load I have.

🧐 One thing that makes me slightly anxious about these technologies, YubiKey and Ledger, is the fact that I am in charge of the whole show. I’m a responsible person, as much as the next one, but the What Ifs with these is harder for me to embrace. If I let a company, like 1Password, or Coinbase, in charge of the whole security, I know I might get hacked. But that will probably never happen, or the chance is rather small. On the other hand, if I have the keys to the whole kingdom, I can’t shake the feeling that the probability of something happening, losing the key, or the seed phrase, is real. I also don’t expect this to happen, but do I trust myself more that the hundreds of engineers who devote their lives to preventing exactly that? Until I get a duplicate key, like I have for the car or house, I’ll tread lightly.

📺 Finished The Billion Dollar Code. Enjoyable. I have some thoughts, but they would probably fall under the Spoiler category, so I’m not writing them down. It’s time to pick another one…

🎉 I also topped my OMG.LOL account with an extra 2 years this week. It’s a 5USD a year service that provides so much, I couldn’t help it. The developer behind it is lightning fast on support, and I’m always trying to figure out new things to add to it. Easy fun. And organised a giveaway, trying to spread my love for it. Congrats to @r. I had a lot of fun with it, hope he enjoys the prize.

🛵 My motorcycling days are not as frequent as before. The bike is in the garage, the battery is dead, I don’t have the time to ride it. It’s not great. Sometimes I miss it, but on most days I just think about it when I’m trying not to hit it with the car when backing up into the garage. I thought about selling it, but then never did. This weekend my father-in-law asked me to take his motorcycle for a spin, as he hadn’t in a while. It was great! The roads around their village are beautiful, winding, plenty of trees on both sides of the road, not a lot of cars on a Sunday. Perfect for an hour. Looking forward to the next time we visit already.

🏝 This week we had a friend visiting our favorite island, and we were surprised one evening when he video-called us from my godmother’s place. It was lovely to see her after all this time. The following morning one of movieStar’s colleagues also called, and she had one of our dearest friends by her side. He grabbed her phone and went around the whole village. We got to see everyone, and everyone got to see us. They kept asking about tinyMovieStar (they haven’t met her in person yet), and it was one of the coolest, and sweetest, moments of the whole week. We miss them A LOT, and can’t wait to go back. Maybe in 2022. Hopefully in 2022.

🎉 (OMG.LOL Part II) After I finished the Giveaway (I’ll have to go with Original Giveaway from now on), the developer of the site got in touch, and filled my heart. He really is the nicest person, and so we are doing another giveaway. You’ll find out who wins this one in a few hours, but too late for this edition of thingsThisWeek.

👶🏻 tinyMovieStar is still getting to grips with the difference between week days and weekend, and now we have tantrums every Saturday morning, when she finds out she’s not going to kindergarten. She soon gets over it, when it dawns on her that we’re having lunch at my parents place, but it makes for a very noisy morning. Music seems to help, but only to a certain point.

💻 My short lived experiment with a newsletter ended even before it started. I saw the integration of Revue on a Twitter profile, and wanted to give that a shot. Saw no real reason to do it, as I have nothing to add to these posts, and the rest I publish on Micro.blog. Even so, I signed up. They had an Instagram integration that could be nice, but are using a deprecated API to enable that, so that’s not working. It’s been like this for months, they haven’t updated it on their end, and don’t reply to requests for help. Not a great sign, so I turned the thing back off.

🔑 Yubi News: still enjoying the geekiness, but I have yet to delete the TOTP codes from 1Password. The new 1Password for Safari extension makes everything even more convenient, as the codes are pasted into the proper field, as everything else. If more sites supported the keys protocol, instead of the regular TOTP, I’d probably feel the urge to use it more often. But, at this time, I only have the key working for Fastmail, Coinbase, Wordpress (and I don’t even use that account), GitHub, and Twitter. The other accounts have those TOTP codes, and those can be handled by 1Password, as well as Yubico’s own Authenticator. With 1Password you just log in, no hassle. With the key you’ll have to open the app, log in with username and password, get the key, go to Authenticator app, tap the key, copy the code, go back to the app where you’re trying to log in, and paste the code. How long before I just quit and stick with 1Password? The static password feature on the second slot is handy, I’ll tell you that much.

🎂 On Sunday we went to a birthday party, a children’s birthday party. I guess these will become more common as tinyMovieStar grows up, but at the moment we’re still getting away with the parties for our friends and family. We’re not yet at the school’s friends level. I fear those.

📷 Work wise, a busy week. Portraits, a food fair/market with yummy things all over the place, an art installation, and a beach cleanup. Busy, and varied, week. Lots of editing too, that’s the downside of the whole thing. Truth be told, the time I spent at the beach made my week, and I’ll edit every last one of those photos without crying. I can promise you that!

📺 Finished Fauda (and eagerly waiting for season 4 now), looking forward to a little Seinfeld binging, and trying to figure out if Billion Dollar Code is worth our time. Picking a new series to watch is always a stressful activity, as we don’t have a lot of free time, and must be enjoyable for both of us. We saw the first episode of The Squid Game. Everyone seems to be talking about it, but movieStar wasn’t thrilled. If I want to keep watching, I’ll have to do it on my own. I don’t see that happening.

👶🏻 We’ve been avoiding it for a long time, lucky us, but we knew it had to happen, sooner or later. It did this week: tinyMovieStar up at midnight, not feeling the urge to sleep any longer. She wanted to draw and, of course, Papi had to help. This lasted well into the night, up to 5AM. We’d draw a bit, I would then try to explain the difference between day time and night time, using the darkness outside to prove my point. She wouldn’t get it. We tried food, we tried storytelling, we tried everything we could think about. Maybe it was too early in the morning to come up with better ideas, nothing worked except exhaustion. She finally broke down and we managed a couple of hours before it was time to get up and go to work.

🌮 Eating out is something we’re doing again, albeit a lot less than before. We do go out to our respective Mom&Dad’s places, and movieStar has been meeting with her friends for lunch sometimes, but it’s still something out of the ordinary. I could probably count the number of times I’ve been to a restaurant in the past year with movieStar, and the number would be pretty low. This week, prompted by the constant tacos photos @mpmilestogo posts, we decided to have some at Coyo Taco, our local Mexican. It was delicious.

🤵🏻Right after I posted last week’s report we went for our regular Saturday lunch with Mom&Dad. My brother was also there, as on most of the weekends. This past couple of weeks he’s had his bride with him, finally, after many MANY months apart due to Covid-related travel difficulties. The news: they got married this Wednesday!! It was a simple event, but a sweet one.

📷 Sunday was election night and I was asked to shoot one of the mayoral candidates in a city next door to Lisbon. I hadn’t done an assignment for a newspaper in ages, and it felt great to be back at it. The excitement was short lived though, as the candidate I got assigned was a loser, and also one I did not care for. At all. We spent hours doing nothing, while she figured out what she’d say, locked behind a closed door with her minions. She came out after a LONG while and acknowledged her defeat. Home by 2AM.

👶🏻 It had to happen, sooner or later, and this was the week it happened: tinyMovieStar had a small fever. Teething is still ongoing, and it was not pleasant. A lot of crying, a lot of drama. She skipped a few days at kindergarten, and we spent them trying to make her feel a little better. Bonus points: we also caught something, so the whole family is feeling a little down. I’m sure it will go away soon.

💻 Revue. I saw someone with a newsletter on their Twitter profile and thought “Why not?”. I have nothing to write about in a newsletter, truth be told. I could repeat every little thing that shows up here, but that’s not really the intended use. I wanted to check how things would work. Found out you can integrate Instagram, but I keep getting an error. I guess I might turn that off in a couple of weeks. I’m not even sharing the link…

💻 Two of the services I’ve been using for longer sat on the proverbial tree, and K I S S E D… 1Password + Fastmail joined forces and started offering masked email. There are other ways to get a similar service, but this implementation seems really smooth, and was very quick to set up. Having it available inside two apps that I already use daily is just brilliant. Check it out here, and here.

🔑 Yubikey, oh, Yubikey, where are you? I still remember when packages came rushing home. It was not that long ago. Something would be ordered, and I’d spend the following days getting a ton of notifications, the package would go into an airplane, then the next one, hopping quickly from country to country. These days, at least with this DHL delivery, it seems to be doing a lot of walking, and a few slow bus rides. That’s the only way I can understand this. Leaving Germany and getting here four days later? How?? Right now the package is in the country, but god knows how long it will take to make it to my door.

🔑 Yubikey update: it’s here! Now to the fun part: using it.

💻 Something I wanted to do for a while: Install Sublime Ads on the blog. Taking advantage of the cool service developed by @Vincent, and the sweet offer he made to us Micro.blog users. I couldn’t get my head around the Hugo templates, and gave up. Woke up on Friday and felt this was the time to try again. I’d been testing the waters on a static page, and was so invigorated when I saw that working, that I gave it another try. Happy I did.

📷 This week was a multi-assignment one, as I was asked to shoot an event on Thursday. I hate doing these, but it was a very short affair, and so I did it anyway. Met a couple of old friends I had not seen in a few years, so that was cool too. Seriously doubt I’ll work for them again, though.

📺 Finished the second season of Fauda, and we’re starting the third one. Yesterday we figured out one of the things that we like about this one: the actors are (were) unknown to us, and that makes it so much more believable. They look like regular people.

🍺 Disappointment coming from the least expected place, our usual beer place was closed again on Monday. It’s the second time we find them skipping a day, but we probably missed a few more when they didn’t bother to open. They’re having trouble finding staff, but I also believe they are about to close for good. They are now running a second location, and this one seems to be about to go. No warning though, on social media (that they use extensively) or a simple sign at the door. That’s what really made me mad. It’s the lack of respect for patrons that has me looking elsewhere. Maybe I’ll just stop going out for beer and drink them at home.

📺 Watched Tokyo Trial. Not because I really wanted to, but it was there, and looked ok enough. It’s… ok enough. Still on the To Watch List: the second season of Ted Lasso. I’ll have to sign up for Apple TV (or is it Apple TV+??) again, so we’re waiting for the whole thing to be available, and try to binge watch it.

📺 While we wait for Ted, Fauda will do. I guess I needed a little action after the quietness of Tokyo Trial.

📱 iOS 15. It’s been over a week now, and I still have to read the MacStories review, I still have to find out about a ton of new stuff this update brought. I was running the beta for a few weeks now, so I’m familiar with a few of the novelties. Back in the day I would even find a way to get a day off from work, so that I could watch the ??? And then spend the rest of the day trying things on the beta. I would be running Beta 1 as soon as it launched too. Not anymore. I just don’t care about it that much. My iPhone is never the latest model now, my laptop is old too, so a few of the new features are not even available to me. I wasn’t expecting Live Text to be one of those, for sure…

🔑 I have a Yubikey coming. Surely I don’t need this sort of solution, but can’t hurt either. Still a little afraid it might be overkill and add a nuisance that I’ll find too much of a pain point, but GitHub had them for sale with the octocat stamped on them, and that’s something I can’t resist. Also, you can now build your own octocat! I’ll probably get back to this one in the future, as it’s been almost two weeks now, and still not here. The whole process of setting it up and figuring out how to use everything should be worth a post or two as well.

🪑 IKEA. Ouch. I know there’s no escaping, at least every six months, but it’s still hard. We spent Tuesday morning there. At least this time both of us managed to go, while tinyMovieStar was having fun at the kindergarten, so I didn’t have to suffer through the whole thing alone. It always less painful this way. We came home with the things we needed and, as usual, a couple we didn’t. And a lovely orangutan for tinyMovieStar. Everything is already assembled, and that’s a win. Took a couple of days, but it’s done.

📷 Got a couple of messages regarding work. Looking forward to see what comes out of this. Tomorrow I’m working. That’s great, even though it’s Sunday.

🎙 I’ve added Hacked to my list of podcasts, after listening to a couple of episodes. It’s not as great as Darknet Diaries, but worth a listen if this subject interests you.

📚 Still on This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, by Nicole Perlroth. I’m not making a lot of progress, this was a busy week. Most days I’ll try to get some reading done when it’s time for bed, but the podcasts have replaced reading.

👶🏻 tinyMovieStar is getting used to kindergarten. Friday was the first time she didn’t shed a tear when I dropped her off, she just looked a little sad. But no tears, and that’s great. It’s also getting easier for me, thanks for asking. No tears for me as well, but still hard.

⏰ I’ll try to keep the weekly report going. I like the format, the longer post. Also gives me time to reflect on the week, and maybe edit the posts a bit. But it takes longer to write, and time is something hard to find on a Saturday, when I’d like to do it. I’ll try, that’s my promise.

💡 I was inspired by @jamesvandyne, who in turn was inspired by @pyrmont, who got it from Paul Mucur.