Hello world!

The title of this weeknotes were once again inspired by my cycling. My new bike is starting to just feel like “my bike” and I’ve been getting a bit faster as I ride — even uphill. It’s very exciting to get PRs semi-regularly on sections of trail that I’ve ridden many times. I expect this to continue as I become more comfortable pushing myself on this bike and as my conditioning improves.

This cat lives a few doors down and has been greeting me after my workouts on foot lately: cute!

🔖 My Favorite Stuff from the Internet

• Honker
  • honker adds Postgres-style NOTIFY/LISTEN semantics to SQLite, with a durable pub/sub, task queue, and event streams on the side, without client polling or a daemon/broker.
• Using the internet like its 1999
• Friction-In-Design Regulation as 21st Century Time, Place, and Manner Restriction
  • The abstract is super compelling!
• How to reason about reliability risk

🧰 Tools

I’d been meaning to give Linkdy (a linkding client for Android) a go. While I maintain a linkding instance, it is not something I use very frequently. Now that there’s a linkding instance for omg.lol, I am interested in linkding once again.

• 🔖 Check out later.place.

🌱 Gardening

My new gardening gloves arrived and I’m so grateful for them. My old ones had glochids from prickly pears inside from seasons past.

I moved a few sunflowers from the very first batch of seedlings into the containers that they will bloom in. We had a bit more chilly weather this weekend so I didn’t start any more seedlings this week. Given the coming forecast, I will probably wait until May to start any more seeds. I typically start seeds into the first few weeks of May so this is fine.

🎧 Music

💿 1001 Albums

I started listening to some 1001 Albums. I feel more free to skip an album than I did at first. None of this week’s albums were especially noteworthy.

• Tuesday: Paul Simon - Hearts And Bones
  • Rating: ███░░
• Wednesday: The Sugarcubes - Life’s Too Good
  • Rating: ████░
• Thursday: Björk - Debut
  • Rating: ███░░
• Friday: Depeche Mode - Violator

📊 Stats

I listened to 508 tracks this week.

🦄 Unique tracks: 277 | Unique albums: 68 | Unique artists: 44

Top Artists

• Jimi Hendrix (137 plays)
• The Offspring (116 plays)
• Melissa Auf der Maur (52 plays)

Top Albums

• The Offspring - Ignition (113 plays)
• Jimi Hendrix - Valleys of Neptune (57 plays)
• Melissa Auf der Maur - Out Of Our Minds (45 plays)

📘 Reading

• Books Finished: 1
• Books Started: 1

Both books are for book club.

• Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
  • finished on Sunday
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
  • started on Monday

I have had The Count of Monte Cristo on my TBR list for 17 years. I am very excited to choose it for book club.

Social Reading

🙌 The list at brie.dev/books is up-to-date. I went back and rated every book read in 2026. I’ll continue back-filling ratings. See Hardcover for my ratings.

I keep track of my reading in various places across the Internet. I track every book I read as @bbrie on Hardcover and as brie on Rambling Readers. I also track each IRL Book Club pick.

🕹️ Gaming

🕵️ Ingress

An unexpectedly large (2,500+ MU) field very early in the septicycle made me the #1 agent in the AM01-KILO-10 cell.

I am continuing to collect Orion Tokens. The Orion Anomaly season started this week.

🎮 Steam

⏸️ I want to get back to gaming on Steam but I suspect gaming is essentially paused for me at the moment. I am too busy reading, biking, writing and working to spend much time gaming.

🐾 Movement

• Time Split: Foot 56% ███████████░░░░░░░░░ Bike 44%

• Distance Split: Foot 29% ██████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ Bike 71%

• Tuesday:

  • ☀️ Old Trolley Trail 🚲
  • ☁️ Around Town 🐾

• Wednesday: ☀️ Hello Coraopolis 🐾

• Friday: 🤭 Started my watch late but whatever: I love to ride my bike 🚲

• Saturday: ☁️ Cloudy Caturday 🐾

• Sunday: ☀️ Montour and Panhandle! 🚲

My part of Pennsylvania has some really cool trails. I decided to check out a trail that a friend had told me about and found that it connected with the Rachel Carson Trail (which discourages cycling):

I enjoyed the miles I got in on my bike. I find myself cycling more often during the evening than in the past. (Last season, prior to my ankle sprain, I favored cycling in the mornings.)

📯 Social

I continue to be very happy with the lovely interactions I have in my corner of Mastodon.

🐈‍⬛ brie biker-ranza 🚲

I posted on Mastodon this week about:

• good things coming to an end
• a cute tuxedo cat
• book club stats
• Plop sitting in the window

Plop

• 😸🔪 Caturday
  • I posted a few photos of Plop and an adorable pin I got of a cat with knife.
• aww to eww
  • This sequence of photos of Coraopolis Carl show just how little time it takes to go from “aww so cute” to “omg yiiiikes”.
• “brother eww”
  • This photo of Plop mid-yawn made me think of the “brother eww” meme.

Thanks!

— Brie