Notes for the Week #7 (2026)

This week note covers the week of 9th–15th February.

Life#

I was on vacation this week. We had been vacation-starved for last many years, so, now that we can, we are trying to fill the gap with consecutive vacations. However, I think there will be a while till I take the next vacation.

A and I spent a lot of time in parks running around chasing squirrels, and just idly walking on grass. As a child I used to spend a lot of time on grass that grew pretty much everywhere not road or buildings, but we don’t see much of it anymore. Only parks in our neighbourhood have large grassy patches, but most of them prohibit walking on them. It’s a bit sad for me to see A preferring to sit on benches than grass.

My wife is healthy again, though she has some leftover weakness from the antibiotics course. I’ve been finding it hard to take out time to go out for walks. I’m still trying to do enough to stay above 10k steps average per month, which is currently around 10180 steps for February.

Summer is almost here in Bangalore. That means heat and sun and dust everywhere. It feels like this year will be really hot. Reminds me that I need to get the ACs serviced.

Personal Projects#

My New VPS#

My new VPS setup is chugging along well. This week I fixed a minor bug in the backup script that was causing old Gitea dumps to be not deleted daily, leading to the backup increase in size over time. Other than that, I’ve not touched the setup, and I don’t have any current ideas or plans to do anything new. I’m just going to let it keep running.

The Cloudflare proxy that I set up in front of my website couple of weeks ago is still blocking ~30000 attacks every day. I have no clue why the crawlers find my websites so lucrative, but I don’t intend to let them get to it.

stic.earth#

This week I finally spent some time working on the stic.earth infrastructure, the community hosting platform that I moonlight sysadmining for. The outgoing mails had been broken for months since our Sendgrid account died. I switched it over to use Mailgun, and now I’m getting the various notifications again.

I used the momentum (and the free time) to set up Listmonk, a newsletter and mailing list manager for stic.earth members¹. This had been number one feature request for quite some time by our members who have blogs and want to build a newsletter audience. I have been using Buttondown for my own website’s newsletter, and it has been really solid. But it’s expensive and not everyone is willing to pay to send their blog posts to thirteen subscribers. Thanks to open source software like Listmonk (and NixOS that we use to run our server), we can now host such services for our community at a minimal cost. I also adapted the listmonk-rss script to add automation for sending new mails by following the feeds of the blogs. I’m yet to switch over my website’s newsletter to Listmonk because I found some issues in my feeds.

My Website#

While testing the Listmonk mails using the feeds of my website, I found that sometimes the hero images (like you see at the top of this post) were shown twice in the emails. This sent me on a yak-shaving chase the resulted in:

• Redoing the photo publishing pipeline of my website, moving it from thumbnail-plus, which uses the native GD Graphics Library and has not seen a release in the past 11 years, to JuicyPixels, which is pure Haskell and well maintained.
• Adding progressively loaded hero images for my posts, which start with low-res images and are upgraded lazily to their high-res variants.

It was harder than expected because my VPS does not have enough RAM to transcode hundred of images in parallel. The code worked on my laptop but was killed by the OOM-killer on the server. With some old-fashioned elbow grease, I figured it out in an hour.

I also added two new features:

• Nerd sniped by Jatan, I added a “On This Day” feature that shows posts published on same day in previous years on the homepage. It has not triggered yet because I have so few posts, but as I write more often, I expect it to be a useful and interesting feature.
• I added support for scheduling posts to be published at a future time. I originally thought of this idea to publish my pre-written weeknotes automatically when I don’t have internet access to push the post files. It turned out to be pretty difficult because:
  1. My post publish date format did not support specifying the time of day.
  2. I use the Shake build system as the foundation of my static site generator, and build systems do not take time as an input when deciding what to build, only the files present. Since I’d pre-write and push the scheduled post to the repo, Shake would just not built the pages even after the post’s publish time came to pass. I tricked Shake by adding a file that tracks the posts scheduled in future, and making it a dependency. The file changes after the post’s publish time passes, causing a build to be triggered.
  If everything goes well, this very post should be published automatically 1½ hours after I push it. Fingers crossed!

Watching#

I’ve been watching Tatsuki Fujimoto 17–26, a series of anime shorts by Tatsuki Fujimoto, the creator of the popular Chainsaw Man anime/manga. It is really wacky and weird, sometimes a bit too much, and I’m loving it. Season 2 of Frieren is progressing slowly, as expected, and I’m here for it.

Interesting Internet Links#

• The only correct recipe for making chai
• Stop generating, start thinking
• Towards Fearless Macros

That’s all for this week. You can subscribe to the feed of my week notes for updates.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below. If you liked this post, please share it. Thanks for reading!

Thanks for reading this post via feed. Feeds are great, and you're great for using them. ♥

This post was originally published on abhinavsarkar.net.

Like, repost, or comment on:

• Fediverse
• My website

Read more of my posts and notes.