Five for Friday (Friyay!)
One of my personal goals for 2017 is to write more often. I set out to write and blog something every week for the whole year. I missed my second week trying to take on too much, so I thought I’d write about what’s on my mind. I have seen a few other bloggers do an x for Friday type of post and it sounded fun. So here’s mine.
My experiment of the month
I have searched for a good dashboard for my home and office for many years, but I never quite found the right solution. That is until I stumbled on MagicMirror².
Over the weekend I decided to just go with it and I ordered a Raspberry Pi 3 (non-affiliate link) to drive a spare monitor at work. I could not be happier with the results!
MagicMirror² has several built-in modules and is extendable through third-party plug-ins. I found modules for most of the services that I wanted to run on it including Dark Sky, Todoist, Trello, Twitter Trends, and the built-in Calendar.
Their documentation stepped me through writing my first two plug-ins using Vue.js which makes writing plug-ins a breeze. My JS skills are pretty rusty but I wrote a quick markdown to dashboard module which works for me but is not quite ready for public consumption.
Now that I’m a few days into using it, I wish I would have had this years ago.
What I’m Kickstarting
I absolutely love Tracy Osborn’s (@limedaring) Hello Web book series. This week Tracy announced that she is writing a third book called Hello Web Design which just launched on Kickstarter.
Hello Web App (non-affiliate link) is my goto recommendation when someone asks me for help for how to get started with Django. When friends reach out to me with that next great idea that they want to build themselves, but they aren’t sure where to get started, then Hello Web App to the rescue. I have given my copy away at least half a dozen times.
Some of Tracy’s Kickstarter reward levels include a copy of Hello Web App and her follow up book Hello Web App: Intermediate Concepts (non-affiliate link). This is an excellent deal if you don’t already own the set or if you just want an extra copy to give to a friend when they ask next time :)
What I’m listening to
I listen to a lot of music but I’m pretty bad at not paying attention to who I’m listening to. Every once in a while I’ll check out a band only to realize that I’m already familiar with most of their music catalog. Most recently, I had this discovery with the The Head and the Heart. Their Spotify sessions are a great way to get to know them. I’m always a sucker for recordings of live music.
What I’m watching
An Unfortunate Series of Events on Netflix is one of the most fun series that I have watched in quite some time.
I had high expectations with Neil Patrick Harris as Count Olaf who did not disappoint. I was also blown away by Malina Weissman (Violet) and Louis Hynes’s (Klaus) performances as the Baudelaire children.
Patrick Warburton plays Lemony Snicket, the narrator, which some of you might know as a voice actor appearing as Brock Samson in Venture Brother and Joe Swanson on Family Guy. Some of you might also remember Patrick as Elaine’s boyfriend on Seinfeld.
Quote I’m pondering
“I always say that the only thing that is the end of world is the end of the world.” – Barack Obama
Thanks to Heather Luna 
for advice on and corrections to a draft of this article. She’s amazing.