Author: Nels Lindahl

Author of Graduation with Civic Honors. Avid writer. Tech chaser. Sports card collector. TensorFlow fan. Occasional speaker. Doctor of Philosophy.

All that go forward

Writing a conclusion post for the Lindahl Letter weekly newsletter series should have been bittersweet, but instead it was just another block of content. I wanted it to be more and better. It should have said so many things, but it ended up being less than 500 words and will close out a 3 year writing effort. I might pick it up again later after transitioning to the Ghost platform for the newsletter. We will see what happens. My main focus will be producing two weekly nels.ai posts, writing code, and generating some academic articles. Today was one of those all that go forward days.

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Learning the Ghost platform

All the cool kids have moved from Substack to Ghost these days. The thought of moving from one platform to another for my weekly email newsletter sounded tedious. It seemed like a good idea to go ahead and move my nelsx domain over to Ghost to get things setup in the event I wanted to make the big move. The custom domain process involved setting a CNAME record and an @ record with your host. After that you just have to click a big button within the Ghost admin screens to start the custom domain process. It was not a hard process to achieve. The waiting for the records to update as always was the hardest part of the whole process. It’s a pure mystery of how long it will take the internet to actually update a record. Seriously, the update process just takes however long it does which is generally under 24 hours, but certainly not instant. 

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A day of coding adventures

Things got off to an interesting start today. I was rocking and rolling some code development instead of writing the opening missive of the day. That means here after recording the penultimate episode of Coffee with Nels I sat down to begin the writing activity for the day. This switcheroo does have the added benefit of some extra caffeine. I’m probably going to spend some extra time today writing some more code. It is one of those days where my mind is really focused on the next steps for this particular package of code. 

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Rambling about writing

Things are moving along. Sometimes, I wonder what type of prompt it takes to start the writing process every day. At the very start of things, it takes something to spark that very first part of the writing process. Today for example things are moving along, but the process of tipping the pile of things forward really involved writing about the pile. It’s the process of typing and feeling the keys move and the words begin to flow that makes the entire process work. Writing generally begets more writing and that is the thing that needs to be sparked. Now moving from the process of just going through the motions to finding that true spark of innovation is what makes the magic happen compared to a mundane writing experience. 

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A computer hardware refresh

This morning I had some thoughts about maybe doing a refresh of my main computer system. That series of thoughts quickly dissipated. Custom computer building has gotten more complex over the years. At least, it feels like things have gotten more complex. It might be getting easier at some point here in the next couple of years [1]. Within my current computer setup two potential changes are possible. First, I might swap out the hard drives at some point for larger ones depending on how much video editing I end up doing over the next year. Second, now that the price of the RAM this system uses has gone down it might be time to add more. None of that required me to put on my thinking hat this morning to get going. 

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A focus on research notes

Right now I have a rubric of all the content that is scheduled for creation each week. My commitment to produce things has grown to 15 blocks a week. Gearing up to creating that stream of content was not really that interesting of a process. Things just started to get added a little bit at a time. Now that the framework exists the content writing part is really just about persistence. That is a far cry from the activities of all those content farmers right now that are flooding the world with content. My content is really very targeted to the things that I personally tend to enjoy. Maybe that creates a natural limit on what will get created. A lot of that content creation is based on maintaining two different backlogs of content that I’m going to build block by block. 

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A backlog without any order

A lot of news stories are picking up the news about Platformer moving off of Substack this weekend. I’m still looking at Ghost and trying to figure out if I just need to watch a couple videos about getting started on that platform. I’ll be really curious to see what happens here in the next 90 days. Yesterday, I shared my 3 year recap of publishing on Substack as both a podcast and a post. Right now I’m looking at the backlog and trying to figure out what order I want to set for the next few posts. I committed to writing my 2024 predictions post, but outside of that I just have over 100 topics in a backlog that are not really in any particular order. 

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All that Substack drama

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been following the drama on Substack and things are starting to become more fluid on that front. It turns out that the Platformer publication is going to leave this weekend and move over to Ghost. I did set up an account on the Ghost platform, but the setup is a lot more complex and involved than what Substack requires. I’m going to have to do some research about how the Ghost platform handles RSS feeds for podcasts as well. More updates will be provided on what I end up deciding. 

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The best writing adventure

They day accidently started out with a demo video of the NUX B-8 guitar tuner/boost pedal. The guitar singularity that is Rob Chapman stole 10 minutes of my most productive window this morning with that review [1]. Perhaps it is better to remember to turn on some music at the start of the day instead of letting YouTube be a part of the start. Sometimes one of those videos will just pull my attention to it instead of being background noise. That is exactly what happened today. 

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