OK, after this morning’s depressing Warren Ellis post, here’s some lighter stuff. Just a mix of stuff I’ve been meaning to mention, for one reason or another.
Google AdSense
I added Google AdSense to my blog back in 2010 and removed it in 2016. But I never closed out my account. So I did that this week. Now, I can finally get the $15 that Google owes me. (Normally, they don’t pay out until you hit $100, but if you close your account, they’ll pay out any balance, if it’s over $10.) I wonder how many small bloggers like me are still bothering with AdSense. For a while, a lot of people thought they could make good money by running a blog and putting AdSense on it. I’m wondering if any of them really did.
New Toys
I haven’t made much more progress in setting up my new laptop. I was too busy yesterday to even turn it on. Hopefully, I’ll have time to do some stuff with it this weekend. I did also just get a new Amazon Echo Dot (with clock). I don’t really have a good excuse for buying it. I had an old iHome alarm clock / iPhone dock on my nightstand that I couldn’t really use anymore, since it doesn’t fit the newer iPhones. And that was fine, really, since I don’t really need a clock on my nightstand. These days, I just plug my iPhone in, and use Sleep Cycle as my alarm clock. But, I don’t know, I guess I just wanted a small clock there that could play music or NPR or whatever. And it was only $35. I already have some experience with Alexa, since it’s supported on my Sonos speakers, but I turned off the mics on those, since it was getting accidentally triggered too often, and I didn’t really find it that useful. I’m going to play around with it some more on the Echo and see if there’s anything fun or useful that I can do with it.
Learning New Stuff
I finished the SharePoint Framework course that I was working through. That’s given me a good start, but there’s still a lot I need to figure out. I’m almost done with the React course on SharePoint that I’ve been watching and working through. Most of that course uses an online JavaScript environment, found at jscomplete.com, so you don’t need to set up your own dev environment. But I’m now at the point where I really do need to set up a dev environment to get any further. I considered a lot of options, but settled on using Homebrew on my Mac to set up Node.js. And I’m using Visual Studio Code as my text editor. So that’s good enough for now.
I may need to play with Node Version Manager at some point, but for now, I think that would be an unnecessary complication. And, on Windows, I want to look into setting something up under WSL2 at some point. Microsoft, helpfully, has a guide on how to do that. But, again, I’m probably not ready to dive into that just yet.
So that’s my “odds and ends” post for today. I could write up a bunch of other stuff, but it’s probably best if I stop for now and go eat some lunch. Then maybe take a nap.