Weeknotes 2025-W8

This week I transitioned away from Django’s built-in flatpages app to my own version. The built-in version only has one “body” so whenever you save changes, those edits become public immediately. I like to be able to save and preview changes before making them public.

My page model has two “body” fields. I write and make edits in body_markdown. I have a view and template so that I can see how it will render without publishing. When I’m ready to publish, I render the contents of body_markdown into the body_html field. The public-facing view and template display body_html.

Having the option to edit and preview a draft version let me feel comfortable re-doing my /now page. I could experiment and test and didn’t have to worry about publishing partially finished edits.

I set up my second automation in Home Assistant this week, too. I have a tendency to leave the light on in the closet, but now I don’t have to worry about it.

When the closet sensor detects motion, it starts a 5-minute timer. When the timer reaches zero, it turns off the light. If the timer has started and motion is detected again, the timer restarts at 5 minutes.

In my post about the light-up map, I included a short video. I downloaded DaVinci Resolve and watched a one-minute tutorial on YouTube for how to blur sections of the frame. It was surprisingly easy considering I’d never used the program before.

While tabbing through the handful of sites I visit regularly, I came across Sober Ringtones. My phone is on silent 99.9% of the time, but I decided to use one of these anyway. Setting up a custom ringtone is kind of a pain. I had to download Garageband to my iPhone, figure out how to import the MP3 clip, trim the length of the “song,” and then I could export it to use as a ringtone. I’m glad I don’t expect to do this very often.