Recent content on shom.dev
Aside from being a cyclical hobbyist I don’t blog as much as I potentially could because I end up posting something on Fedi and repeating myself feels weird unless it’s something completely bonkers that I want to capture for posterity. Last week I thought about writing an application that did just that and link it to this here blog. But the last few days I’ve been preoccupied…
The Fediverse is exciting, I’ve formed genuine connections with interesting people. GoToSocial got me hosting my own presence. And I hope littleFedi is what gets to hosting a community.
I’m NOT a morning person, never have been. I’m at my best from 10 pm to 2 am! Somehow morning larks get all the glory when historically it was us night owls who kept your butts unmonched by wolves! But, there are a few things I like about the morning…
… and I’m finally okay with it!
The story of The Hummingbird and The Hound, originally told in a series of posts on the fediverse .
So without making a conscious choice I’ve been using and loving some excellent Go-lang software: Hugo , GoToSocial , and Readeck . I don’t know Go but I’ve picked up some templating from customizing Hugo (which powers this blog), is it time I learned more? Let’s Go !!!
In an EPIC bout of yak-shaving I have reduced the build time for this static site infrastructure running on a puny VPS by a factor of 5. Come along on this undiagnosed journey.
Phanpy is an excellent front-end client for Mastodon compatible Fediverse instances that I use with GoToSocial . Here’s how I build the Progressive Web App (PWA).
I have a blog post titled “Photos meta data: the disjointed state of EXIF, XMP, IPTC in tools” that’s been a draft with talking points since June. The whole landscape is maddeningly inconsistent and eventually I’ll sort out my thoughts and harmonize my little part of the world and rant blog about it. But until then I finally have a workable solution.
From the very get go, this site has been written in markup and then built and deployed via CI/CD. As of today, through several iterations, the exact same thing is happening but all of it is happening on my own infrastructure via Forgejo.
I wrote about my bookmark management journey and ended up writing a glowing mini-review of Readeck . Well, it’s been almost a couple months and not only am I still using it (more than any of the previous solutions) but also still delighted despite the hedonic adaptation .
See what had happened was, I accidentally saw my Fedi profile not in dark mode (basically how all adventures begin). Now I’ll tell you about a fairly small rabbit hole, in comparison to the other Yak-shaving chronicled here. GoToSocial allows customization through CSS at the instance and profile level. I had customized a few small aspects (borders, layout tweak) but decided to try on a new…
I have been on a prolonged bookmarking/reading-later/digital-archiving solution journey. Here’s a quick run-down of my experience, this is not a review of these tools.
Emacs undo is one of those things that never clicked for me, I used vanilla undo-fu until I discovered vundo via Sacha’s post .
I joined the Fediverse via Mastodon five years ago and it has been a really good experience. So I guess this is a love letter to human connections on the internet in the face of bots, trackers, and ad-tech.
I went away this weekend to visit a friend and to experience hanami (the appreciation of the transient beauty of cherry blossoms, a cherished memory from living in Japan). A perfect scenario to bring only the PineNote on this five day trip. TL;DR: PineNote was exactly the right device for this and I have no complaints.
A year ago (April 3rd, 2024) I started a webring with the System Crafters Community, building the web I wanted to see instead of lamenting its absence. Craftering has motivated others to write and share more, which in itself is very rewarding, but what I didn’t anticipate is how it improved my self-hosting and FOSS contributions.
I was looking into how Caddy serves pre-compressed files (html/css/js), it’s pretty straightforward, I just need to generate the compressed files after Hugo builds the site. However, that is small fraction of the total payload since a lot of my posts have images. So I’m tackling that first.
I’ve been eye’ing the PineNote for years and recently decided to check up on it. The community has been hard at work it starting to look ready for prime now. I would LOVE an ebook reader and note taker but do not want to be tied into proprietary walled gardens (tempted most by the Remarkable 2 / Paper Pro ). I didn’t find much review type information on the PineNote since…
I wanted to save my barely passable Python scripting from total extinction and write something quick/useful. So what had happened was…
I’m not that big on marking milestones but I’m also realizing that I don’t always remember, appreciate, and am grateful for the seasons of life. So a little retrospection is in order.
One of the best parts of being a self-hoster is being able to host a game server for your friends, right? Well, yes but also it can go sideways and not only because you’re a system admin for more than yourself. There are many ways but Podman, docker-compose, and Syncthing can help!
This post alleging extortion from CloudFlare is plausible/cautionary. Market monopolies/tech mono-cultures suck so it’s tempting to just be outraged at CF.
Like many others, I am frustrated by corporations that have ingested immense amounts of user generated content and are using/selling it to train LLMs 1 . However, deleting the content now is counter productive, let’s protest more effectively by building a better web.
I’ve seen several posts and threads lately on the fediverse that take a rather pessimistic view of podcasts and advocate for written media instead. I guess here’s my hot take about it because no one asked!
I’m happy to see that a lot of people, both regular and “content creators”, are relying less solely on commercial social platforms. But discoverability is still an issue, maybe taking back the web requires using ancient tools like webrings.
Partial eclipse from SFO 2017 The total eclipse is tomorrow, I’ve known about it since the last one I missed in 2017 , so of course I started preparing (earlier today). Here’s some handy information for myself and it might help you too.
Two little neighborhood kids MADE my day! I’m rolling in my small Subaru hatchback and these kids run to the edge of their yard and give me the trucker/train conductor honk fist pump hand signal! I tapped out a festive sequence of mini honks and everyone was happy. Joy is free and comes in small packages! I shared this on Mastodon but wanted to remember it, it was awesome!
Kanata logo You can jump straight to Installation or Configuration . Computer keyboards were designed with historical baggage and for entirely different workflows than we use today and with very little regard for usability. Ergonomic keyboards are great and I personally use a 42-key Corne keyboard with my desktop and that’s what got me to learn to fully touch type and significantly aleviated…
Redis went from an open source license to a source available license . This is not a new pattern of trying to protect share-holder value against large cloud providers extracting value they didn’t create. Corporate finance discussion aside (since that’s a really sad can of worms), it’s interesting to see what the FOSS community did about it.
I created my online Avatar in the early 2000s using a Flash tool that someone made and I really wish I could remember more about it. It’s been my online presence for over 20 years and it’s almost like my real face. Fun fact: One of my co-worker’s husband recognized me at a company social event solely from having seen my avatar on caller ID.
Fundamentally automation is being smart about being lazy, I like that. Writing scripts to do small tasks is an easy way to be lazy but there are times when you don’t want to run the script and remember to start it each time you log in. That’s where services come in handy, a lot of applications install their service to automatically do things. As an user you can do that too without…
I like and use the Alacritty terminal emulator, but it does not automatically follow the system theme. The issue tracker discussion made it clear this feature won’t be supported, fair enough. And after switching to TOML and discovering partial imports , I knew I could scratch my own itch. Someone wrote a rust tool which was helpful as a guide but I wanted something with low dependency. So I…
I don’t like seeing the scrollbar until I want to see it. I want to see it when: I’m scrolling with an indication of how big the page is I want to grab the scrollbar with the mouse to move it to specific location When I want to grab the scrollbar, I want it to be a big target to hit, not something I’m chasing around trying to click accurately on a 4K monitor.
I didn’t have a good process to add film photos to my Hugo static site with consistent tags to serve as metadata for camera, film, developer, format, etc. so I cobbled together a small Bash script to collect some input and create a folder as a Hugo `page bundle` but it was a very manual process still and the tag template soon became tedious to maintain. I discovered Gum and decided to play…
Sometimes it’s hard to get started with something new. Sure there are so many resources, almost too many resources, distilling just the essential information is difficult. Here I’m collecting the things I’ve learned over time, so if I were starting from scratch today, I could just jump in and get started. These are not blog posts fixed in time so if something changes I hope to…
I have written before about using Alacritty as my terminal and I’ve configured it using YAML. I’ve been a general fan of YAML, I like the way the syntax looks and there aren’t too many brackets of any kind, if it had a line terminator, that’d be great. The downside is that it is indent dependent. But for the most part I’m comfortable with YAML and wherever an option…
This blog post can also be found at 1ba87346. This short URL is designed to make sharing online more compact without having to use an external URL shortening service. The permalink for this post is 62 characters (plus base URL, everything following discounts the base URL), while the short URL is 11 characters. Every post will predictably be 11 characters since I’m using CRC32 hash of the…
A great thing about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is that anyone can create a thing, share it with others, and anyone else can contribute and make it better. It’s also great to solve a problem for yourself and just share it with the world just in case it helps someone else. I know I have benefited from both those modalities, so I have tried to share a few tools and knowledge on this…
There’s a new section on the website for Film Photography that is being built by Hugo but independent of the blogging workflow. I’ll create a new entry documenting how that is setup in a follow-up post. I’m not sure if the film photos should be a on the main blog feed but without realizing it I have flooded the RSS feed, perhaps it should be on it’s own feed (don’t…
I went back to look for eagles again and found that the lake/pond/ditch had frozen over but there were still a couple of eagles milling about and several black birds. Lessons learned: 1/1600 of second still pretty slow for capturing even a big bird in flight. ISO 400 is pretty reliable on my camera and darktable matches the noise profile, doing a decent job of noise removal. Busy backgrounds are…
Took some photos of bald eagles fairly close to my house, thanks to a tip from a friend. I never think to go exploring around home whereas I would have hiked miles on vacation to see wildlife. This is a great proof and reminder to see your “backyard” with fresh eyes. Photos captured with a Sony A7C with a Sigma 100-400. ILCE-7C 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG DN OS f 6.3 400mm 1/400 s ISO 400…
I just saw this post from VKC about updating the footer of your website, meaning the copyright section. It occurred to me that it’s a manual process for my fully auto-generated blog, so I never think about the copyright info in the footer. Static sites do kind of have a shortcoming of sort. I still have my photos on a WordPress blog and it automatically updates the copyright, which came up,…
I have access to webhosting through the generosity of a friend and his hosting provider used CPanel and offers paid SSL certificates but does allow for SSH access. So, the best and free way to get SSL certificates is getting certificates from Let’s Encrypt using acme.sh. While I’ve had this setup for years and it works great, it’s a real issue if it breaks because I do the sad…
I built a small table this weekend and realized that the thing I desperately need if I’m going to build more stuff is a workbench. There are a TON of workbench options to pick from, which is great. But, I didn’t want to get into picking and choosing dimensions and features on the fly, that was asking for a disaster. So I decided to take the plunge and learn FreeCAD. There are excellent…
Haven’t done any water coloring in months and this fiddly fig wasn’t the easiest one to start with. My friend had a book of botanical watercolors and the fiddly fig was one of the choices. Turns out I have a hard time drawing non standard leaves🍃 that overlap. I hadn’t originally planned to sketch the outline but after I finished (messing up) coloring the leaves, it all looked…
Just came across this excellent post: Poor mans mind mapping tool with just the terminal from @fullstackthaumaturge (account no longer exists) toot on Fosstodon. The whole premise is that you can do a lot things with the UNIX philosophy of using files for everything and manipulating them with simple tools that do one thing but do it well. So if you wanted a mindmap then just touch files in a…
I’ve been using org-transclusion for an “inverse literate” Emacs config and tangling all the config chunks on save and exporting it as a markdown file. This has worked fairly well except for the fact that org-export creates org-export regenerates ids for all the headings which creates noise in the git commit history and also in-page anchors can’t be reliably linked to a…
I was privileged to visit Bonaire in the Dutch Caribbean last week. While the whole reason for the trip was scuba diving (the entire island is essentially a dive site, just walk out into ocean in any direction), I also enjoyed the downtown area and found the art very charming. Here are a few pieces that caught my eye: Bonaire My favorite mural was definitely this whimsical scene of this mural of a…
Gnome Terminal and fish I have been using the default Gnome Terminal with the fish shell for a long time and it has served me well. Since fish provides a lot of functionality out of the box (including meta information about git repos in the prompt), I have stuck with it for the convenience. However, there is ONE major downside to fish; it is not POSIX compliant. Why ditch fish? See what had…