Beau Lebens

Building the web, enjoying the wild.

  • Dabbling in Home Automation and The Internet of Things

    Now that I own my own house, and some of the technologies involved are a bit more stable, I’ve gotten into the idea of home automation a bit more. Here’s a quick run down of my current configuration.

  • Spring Plantingpalooza

    Last year, Erika and I planted our first ever vegetable garden. We quickly became obsessed with it, and this year we’ve upgraded from 2 beds with approximately 50 square feet, to a total of 6 beds, with over 285 square feet (more than 5x the growing space)! We’re pretty psyched to see what we can produce this year, and will be trying a bunch of new vegetables, in addition to more of the varieties we liked from last year.

  • Recent Social Importer Updates

    I’ve been trying to make small improvements to the Keyring Social Importers package (and People & Places) that I maintain, and have made a number of them over the last few weeks. Here are some details of recent updates which you may have missed:

  • SaaStr Annual, 2017

    I attended the SaaStr Annual conference in San Francisco last week, and here are some of the notes I took in amongst the different sessions.

  • Peak Design Everyday Backpack 20L Review

    Towards the end of last year, I jumped on the Kickstarter bandwagon for a new backpack. They blew their goal away, and it turned out to be a really professional release that went smoothly, and delivered on time. Major kudos to the folks at Peak Design.

  • Amazon Echo (Alexa) vs Google Home (Assistant)

    I have both of these devices at home, and have had them each for a few months (at least now). I got the Amazon Echo first, so have had it for a lot longer. I grabbed a Google Home because they were on sale and I wanted to compare the 2 systems. Here’s an outline of my experience thus far.

  • Social Importer Upgrade

    Today I pushed some updates to: People & Places Keyring Social Importers These updates make it so that the Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram importers are now dynamically identifying and indexing People and Places, and marking them with a taxonomy within WordPress. I’ve also added a new system for “reprocessing” old posts which Keyring imported, so that you can go back and perform some function on those posts without having to import them again. You’ll find reprocessing tools under Tools > Import > Reprocess Keyring Data.

  • People & Places

    Over the years, I’ve been working on a system to aggregate data that I publish to other social networks/sites back into my control, on my own WordPress install. Thus far, that has resulted in the creation of Keyring (plugin) to provide an abstracted interface to all of the web services I’m interested in, Keyring Social Importers (plugin) to do the basics of importing the data from different places, and Homeroom (theme) to display it all. Today, I’ve been working on a system that will detect people who are mentioned in an interaction, and link them across posts using a custom…

  • Snow-shoeing in Breckenridge, CO

    Yesterday I went up to Breck with Erika. She went snowboarding, and I tried out my new MSR snowshoes. I started out at the Breck Nordic Center, and hiked for maybe 3 miles or so, before heading back to Peak 8 to meet up for bloody marys and fries. It was a gorgeous day, and snowshoeing was fun. I ran into a few people who said there were moose around, but I didn’t see them unfortunately. Being out there made me really curious about what it’d be like to do with a full pack on, and be going backpacking in full winter. That’s still…

  • A Clean Slate

    I’m pretty excited to be setting up a brand new website here on my brand new domain, beau.blog. As part of being the company managing the new .blog domain name, we were able to reserve a single domain each, and I grabbed my own name, which I think is pretty darned neat. My plan is to move my personal blogging over here to beau.blog, and keep Dented Reality as something of a lifestream/aggregation tool. I’ll probably experiment with some really non-traditional-blog display of the data over there, and keep this one pretty “bloggy”. Anyway, here we are, at the dawn…