Week Notes 2025-11

Week Notes for March 10-16

Things this week

I took a vacation day Monday, and used it to finish the diamond art project (finally!) and do other random small stuff around the house. And play some video games. Also wrote some blog posts (links below).
- Re: the Diamond Art project - looks like I started this November 30th
- There is a huge community on Reddit and I went down a rabbit hole. Going to pick up something to seal my project with and a frame this coming week.

Health Notes

I did a great job tracking my calories. Monday through Thursday are marked "complete". Calorie goals themselves are so-so between days. The beginning of the week was almost bang-on, the last half not so much.

Media

More Star Trek Online: I used Google's Gemini to generate a Lower Decks-inspired character for a TNG campaign. I got Miles "Sparky" Taggart. Here's what Google generated (first paragraph out of four):

Miles, or "Sparky" as he's unfortunately known, hails from a mid-sized Federation colony that specialized in, of all things, holographic recreational programs. Think immersive historical reenactments, complex puzzle simulations, and elaborate virtual pet experiences. Miles grew up tinkering with the programming, often accidentally causing glitches that resulted in, say, a Roman legion suddenly breakdancing or a virtual cat developing a sentience and existential dread.

Unexpectedly Gemini produced a generated image when I asked what his appearance was so I could recreate it in STO. That was weird. One last Gemini note:

He carries a worn-out PADD loaded with his personal projects, including a fully functional (but slightly buggy) holographic pet Tribble named "Fluffernutter."

And This was a fun Geordi-style tuck and roll out of engineering in one of the first missions. Look at that, more video game recordings on my YouTube channel!

Thursday night, I got the notion in my head to nuke my Spotify "Liked Songs" list; but I'm not sure if I'm able to do that without also losing or messing up playlists. I'm not entirely familiar with how Spotify adds songs to your library. At any rate it's something I started looking into.
- Why do I want to do this? When I first started using Spotify I added albums I own / have in iTunes to my library. This isn't how I want Spotify to work for me. In fact I think I now want to regularly clear out my 'liked songs' list (by creating other playlists to collect these liked songs).
- Aaaaand I did it. Just in case I created a backup of some playlists I didn't want to lose. I used this website that converts your playlists to a CSV file for future import: Spotify-Backup - Make your backup now!
I have Spider-Man (PS4) available for pick-up from the library; I plan on grabbing it Monday and giving it a go next week.
By happenstance I listened to one of the albums featured on Crucial Tracks this week before I read it! And it's a really good album!

Tech & Blog Stuff

Testing Niagara Launcher is going well (typing this on Wednesday). The toughest part was unlearning muscle memory for where I had everything laid out with Samsung OneUI. There are some things I wish I could do with Niagara but those are possible with a paid subscription - which I'm not sure is worth it for me yet. Will write up a blog post about it next week after the full 7 days.
I signed up for Raindrop; it's a bookmark manager. I've heard good things about both managers, and Raindrop specifically. It's allowing me to start my bookmarks from scratch. I like that there are apps and extensions. So far I like it a lot.
Currently working on setting up a self-hosted server. I followed Derek's Tech Independence Guide and now trying to work through Sylvia's guide for setting up Syncthing. Added this to my Now page (first update since October '24!).

srgower dot com

Week Notes 2025-11

Things this week

Health Notes

Media

Tech & Blog Stuff

Things I Made This Week

Links