Scribbles and ditherings

Ing and I took a walk on the rakpart today. It’s usually a road that is full of fast moving traffic (or sometimes due to volume not fast - but then it’s lots and lots of cars). Right now it’s closed to cars and so it’s full of people walking, biking, rollerblading, etc.

It’s strange to be in Budapest on a cool April Sunday and for their to be very few people around. Ingrid noted the lack of boat traffic as well - I hadn’t even noticed but she was right. Without the Danube cruise ships and the tour boats it was so quiet out there. We parked near Elizabeth bridge and walked all over on the Pest side. We saw the George Bush statue for the first time and spent a good while just taking in the parliament building. It really is so incredible that even after all these years I can’t look at it without it just pausing my thoughts. It’s beautiful.

It’s hard to say goodbye to a place under the current conditions but we’ll do our best

I’ve started using spotify. It wasn’t available in Hungary for a long time and I was able to put together good playlists on youtube. So most of my music listening happened with youtube open in a tab so I could listen in the background. I had google music as well though that’s ended and been pushed over into youtube. Which was fine as long as I’m functioning around a desktop/laptop. But from mobile devices it doesn’t work well.

Ing and the kids all use spotify a lot so I decided to try it out. I’m really happy with it. I’m still getting used to the interface and some of it doesn’t seem to work as I would expect but I’m happy with the music and a lot of the stuff it will play with a very small amount of prodding on my part. I feel like Pandora was very similar but I’m pretty sure it’s still not available here (I have not checked in a while).

As a nerd in the 80’s I got to watch a lot of cool things happen and participate in a small way. When I say nerd I’m not kidding. Like a lot of kids I had quite a few posters up in my room - including a couple of developers from Electronic Arts. I spent a lot of time on my Vic-20 at home and the Apple IIe’s at school. As a teen I remember seeing my first CD and I was reading better and better books that gave me glimpses of what was coming. I was fully on board.

By the 90s, more of it was taking shape. I had stepped out of the computer scene for quite a while. I’d spent some time living on a ship for my uncle and the I think the highest tech I used that whole time were sound powered phones and the electric weight selector on my Mk 7 Mod 3 arresting gear engine. (And I didn’t touch any of that electric stuff if it broke - we had ‘smart’ people for that equipment. I was strictly a grease and wrench guy.) But when I got out, got to school (bought a typewriter for my freshman year) and moved into my dorm, there was a guy on the floor that owned a PC. I got sucked back in a bit. It was a while before I could get my own but I still remember well going to Montgomery Ward and getting a Packard Bell 386SX. My first personal computer since that Vic-20. It ran MS-DOS 5.0.

Sorry, I get all nostalgic lately. I need to work on that - the point is stuff was moving at a breakneck pace and I was loving it. It’s fun to watch reality catching up with your fiction and in some cases surpassing it. Much like R.A.H. missed personal computers ( Slipsticks!!!! in SPAAAACE!!!!! ) I really didn’t see the web coming.

I was buying massive copies of computer shopper - even back in those Vic-20 days, just to get phone numbers for local BBS’s. I loved the idea of connecting - but the web and what it would mean, I just didn’t anticipate it. But once I got on, it blew me away. In the late 90s I went back to school to get an Information Technology degree. I got my first laptop and I discovered FOSS. It all came together for me. Anybody with a computer and a connection could change the world. You didn’t need to pay thousands of dollars to Microsoft, IBM or anyone else just to have the tools for change. All you needed was a machine and your brain. Linus, the GNU folks and others like them had laid a foundation that made anything possible. I was so pumped.

So I think you can understand my consternation as I look around me today. I mean it’s all still true. The tools are all there. FOSS has won in a big way on some really key levels. At the same time we’ve traded one set of dangerous giants for another set and the laws are as stupid as ever. But what concerns me more and what I didn’t anticipate (too much of an optimist I guess) is just how many bad actors would absolutely thrive on the web. I didn’t anticipate how many people would be absolutely horrible at filtering or using any kind of discrimination about the information they take in. It’s just so discouraging.

The ability to have a global platform for your ideas is exciting - I just didn’t know so many bad people would be so well received by so many people. I should have I guess. I figured the internet and web would make us smarter, not dumber. The whole thing is a bit depressing. I try not to worry too much. A year of isolation and dealing with the pandemic have really thrown off my sense of scale but it’s still just overwhelming. I see people I know and care about spreading the most vicious lies and misinformation. I get to actively choose every day between confronting damaging content or keeping relationships that are important. It’s sad.

My big hope is that I’m a part of communities that are outliers. I’m hoping that I just know a lot of people that are part of a minority that will increasingly have less impact on the world. My hope is that the problem just isn’t as big as it feels to me. Probably more optimism that’s misplaced but I’m gonna role with it for now.

And me - I’m still trying to find (or build) the lever that will multiply my contribution to moving things the right way. For the last 10 years my contribution has primarily been helping others get their hands on the right tools. And I’m sure that’s gonna stay a focus for the rest of my life as long as I have the gift of a functioning mind and body but I still have a seed of hope about the limitless possibilities. I’m pretty sure I wont be an astronaut, rock star or best selling author at this point. But I might do something.

I’ve been using the Blackburn theme for this site for a while. I’ve made some small changes and I’ve struggled a little to know where I should make those changes - in the theme or in the core of my site. Probably this struggle is more an issue of my getting my head around Hugo but it also comes from the fact that while separating content from how it is displayed is an awesome idea, it’s never as easy as it seems to completely keep the two apart all the time.

Regardless as I contemplated some bigger changes and how I would manage those, I decided to fork Blackburn. So starting today the site is using Pureburn, my fork of Blackburn.

I looked at the github repo for Blackburn and it looks pretty inactive. There are some pretty old pull requests and I could have maybe tried to get in touch with the author, but it has a very permissive license so I thought, “Why not?”.

I’ve got a link to my sourcehut repo for the theme but it’s not public yet. I’ve got some more things to do before I can make it available. I need to finish working on the example site, get some new screen shots and put in place some other changes I intend to make. As it is now the site is really not much different but I think I’ll be making more significant departures from Blackburn in the near future.

It’s been a great learning experience. I have a lot more to learn but digging in like this has been much more helpful than just reading documentation. Again, I’m sure it’s just me, but I find a lot of the Hugo docs hard to understand. Practically messing around with it is helping it to click more in my head.

I’m hoping I can hit a point where I can produce some tutorials that are a little more advanced. I see tuts developed for absolute beginners ( “Create your first Hugo site in 5 minutes” and so on) all the time but I see a lot less content for what to do when you want to go beyond installing Hugo, a theme and then deploy.

I was reading Hacker News and I came across this post. It’s about a blender plugin that procedurally builds space ships. I have never used blender but I thought it looked cool. I downloaded blender, I needed to download a fork of the plugin that would work on the latest version of blender and then I started playing with making ships.

It was fun and frustrating. Blender is a tool that can do amazing stuff which means it’s not trivial to use. Yet with google, and just poking around in a few hours I could get it to generate a ship, move it around and then render an image based on a view that I liked. Once I could do that I sucked it into Gimp (where I am much more comfortable) and I took my ship and put it into space. This gimp tutorial on youtube was critical to my success.

The results are not anywhere close to what a professional could do - but considering that I’d never used some of the software before and I’m really not a graphics arts person, I’m pleased with the output. If I put more time into it, I bet I could really improve it as well.

Here are the results.

It reminds me of the special effects in the Dr. Who episodes I’d watch in the 80s.

Making things takes work and I feel myself wanting to make something but unable to focus long enough to do the work. I have so many ideas and I stumble on execution. I feel like if I could turn the corner on that I could make something of this last quarter.

For years I ran a bog standard setup. I changed hosting companies a couple of times but it was all pretty much the same. Shared hosting that provided PHP and MySQL running Wordpress sites for the most part. I dabbled with Drupal and maybe some other CMS packages but that was about it.

Some time, I don’t know how long ago, I decided I wanted more flexibility. I wanted access to the OS and the ability to try out things outside whatever box the shared hosting put me in. I did some looking around and landed on Digital Ocean. I think I was drawn to them over the other options based primarily on 2 or 3 things.

They had plans in my price range. This is essential. They could have the most awesome setup ever but I can only put so much towards these kind of efforts in good conscience. I get all kinds of ideas that never go all that far and I’m fine with it as long as I don’t blow a bunch of cash on these things. Finding out I could spin up a droplet at a lower cost than I was paying for shared hosting was huge. I could make the move, and save money instead of spending more. (Over time I have ended up being pretty close price wise to what I was spending on the shared hosting. I added some more features so I’m about even with where I was before.)

The second thing that pushed me towards DO was their documentation. Long, long before I considered this move, whenever I had issues with Fedora or CentOS and googled those issues, I found answers quite often in Digital Ocean docs. It was crazy how often this happened and this made me have a very positive view of them in my mind. I knew I’d be able to run my preferred OS. I knew they’d have a lot of good documentation on how to get things done. That’s probably the biggest motivator outside of price.

Those two things were 90% of my decision. There may have been other things like posts on hacker news or something that helped me make my choice but I’ve been very happy with it since I made the switch. I was able to migrate all my stuff over, take care of the OS myself, install what I want and do it all very economically.

The one issue I ran into was trying to run 5 wordpress sites on my droplet was not fantastic. MySQL would get shut down on a regular basis when the machine ran out of ram. If my primary goal were keeping those sites alive, I’d have probably moved back to my old model. But that wasn’t the case so I started trying to dig in and understand what was happening. I was slowly making progress but I realized not too far into the process that WP was overkill for a lot of what I had going on. I didn’t really need all that it brought to the table for sites that had little traffic and not a ton of content. (I say little traffic but all my public facing content on WP was getting constant hostile traffic. This uses resources even though it’s no one viewing the site.)

This lead to 2 realizations on my part. The first was that the shared hosting was a better value than I had thought. They had kept a lot of WP sites up and chugging along with zero issues for a great price. When it was up to me on my own I was having a lot more down time than I’d ever had in that environment.

The second was that I didn’t need comments or a ton of other features that WP brought and so this took me to trying out static sites. That was what finally solved my resource issues for good. It wasn’t only the resources, but that was a lot of it. The other facet to this was GDPR. As I was learning more about GDPR and how to deal with it, I realized for my own sites I had no good reason for analytics, cookies, etc. Going to a static site made everything super clean and easy with that regard.

So this is the first part of my stack - a droplet on Digital Ocean. I love having it and it’s worked out really well for me.

I use sourcehut for version control and storing my code. That includes this blog.

My workflow until today was pretty simple. I make changes to the blog, commit and push those changes to the remote repo and then I would build the blog and use rsync to copy changes over to my host. I have everything set up to do this on the two main machines I use. It’s really pretty easy.

But I keep seeing articles about people who use github actions to make stuff happen and this made me think that I could do the same over at sourchut. I figured I’d need a combination of builds and dispatch. So I started with builds first.

I decided to use a Fedora image. I did so just because this is the environment running on my server and the system that I know best. But really, it isn’t necessary for it to match the server. My laptop runs MacOS and works fine for building the site. Any OS that can run hugo will work. But for a first run I figured I’d go with something I know.

The steps are simple, pull over the code, run hugo, rsync the public directory contents that get created. This took me a little time as I had to sort out what ssh key I needed, how to set up the commands properly, etc. I plan on doing a full write up of the whole process with code and what not.

I didn’t need to worry about dispatch. Builds will automatically run for commits to sourcehut git repos if there is a .build.yml file so I just put my config for the build there and it just works. Super nice.

This post will be my first where the blog is updated via the new method.

We are blessed to have our whole family back together this Christmas. Our girls were able to fly in from the states and we all have some special time to spend together. I hope this Christmas as wonderful and full of love for you as it is for us.