Journal

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap Up (11.17.2024 to 11.24.2024)

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I started posting these, a while back but they kind of fell by the wayside. I guess some of it just got covered in regular posting, and some of it ends up on the other blog, if I bother. Probably, I decided I didn’t really care. But maybe I should care. So here we are.

I have actually done a few of my “wishlist todo” projects this week. I have recently been hardcore digging through my too many bookmarks problem in Firefox. This has been an ongoing effort for a few months now, but I started on a phase two of this project this week. Specifically, I set up a separate bookmarking app, for some of these bookmarks. After some looking at options, I very lightly started using Raindrop.io, but I also remembered that I really want to not rely on other services that may randomly raise prices, limit features, or just plain close.

So instead, I set up LinkAce, in my docker set up. It was, surprisingly simple. Some of my attempts at docker set ups fizzle out. The biggest thing I have to watch for in the docker-compose files is for port use. Everything thinks its alone and wants to exist at port 80 or 8080. I have them numbered up now, 8080, 8081, 8082, etc.

The long term sort of idea.

  • Link Ace will be a sort of, well sorted repository of things that could be useful when I want to go look for them.
  • Anything that is a text or article gets clipped and dumped to my text archive.
  • It needs clean up, but I have been working on a series of markdown files that work as a sort of wiki for coding information.
  • Various bookmarked todos get put on a proper list. “To Read”, “To Watch” “To Play” etc.
  • Anything I may want to buy gets put in a big spreadsheet with pricing etc. I have actually already done this, since these bookmarks were already sorted together.
  • I have a zillion little projects bookmarked, these will all go in a list as well, or possibly (Probably) get sorted put into a Joplin notebook for each project. Like, sometimes I research a bit of a coding idea, them bookmark several different code snipped I may want to use.
  • Things I actually regularly use, will just stay in Firefox. The idea is to get Firefox itself down to maybe, 50 actual bookmarks. Not, 10,000. I am not sure I am exaggerating with that 10,000.

Anyway, projects this week, I got side tracked. I hung up an antenna on the side of the house today. I may put it on a proper mast later, but for now, I just stuck it on the leftover DirecTV mast that hangs off the back of the deck. I have not tested it yet. I doubt I get a ton of channels, but I should be able to get WAND and WBUI, which are both in town.

Everything else is like 40 miles away. I doubt I can get them with the antenna where it is. I literally have done this sort of thing for a living as my job for almost 20 years now. I have a “pretty good idea” of how well this placement will work. For now, it will work for what I want, which is the occasional need for local news, The Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, and maybe The Super Bowl.

I am not even going to be here for the Macy’s Parade, so that is… Kind of a bust.

Anyway, in the past, I could get a few channels just laying the antenna out in the deck and hooking it up. If I were super cool I could use some of the spiffy work tools I have to peak the signal etc. But I am not cool like that, also, the position won’t let me actually swing the antenna all the way around to point AT 90% of the towers in the area.

Another project I made a lot of headway on, because I can do it easily while playing Throne and Liberty. Years ago I purchased a bundle of Piano courses from a teaching website. I have been, for many years, meaning to go through and capture them with OBS for offline use, and just, archival in case that teaching website ever goes offline. YT-DL did not work annoyingly. Even using browser cookies. So a manual OBS recording, then clipping them apart in Clip Champ is the way.

In other less exciting news, I got new shoes. My old ones had a big hole in one side and I threw them out. I went to three whole stores, then bought some boring Sketchers, because I almost always buy Sketchers. Then today, I went to put on my old old old shoes to go work outside and discovered my “old old old work shoes”, are the same as my new shoes. Except the work shoes are all gross and filthy.

This wasn’t intentional.

What I Listened to This Week

Journal Linux & Open Source

Linux Post Install Clean-Up

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So, now that I’ve returned to Linux again, I’ve come across several sort of, clean-up tasks that needed to be completed to get things working fully.  A lot of my activities are, by design, machine agnostic.  That is to say, they run off “the cloud”, either through a service or something I am hosting.

One big one I use is One Drive.  I don’t NEED one drive running locally, but it’s convenient and nice to have.  Aside from just syncing and backing up all my writing through it, I also use it to do things like, sync blog graphics files and screen shots.  I’ve found this One Drive Linux Client, which seems promising, I’ve gotten it set up easily enough, but I have not quite worked out how to get it fully working with a selective sync.  I don’t need everything off my One Drive, and don’t have the drive space for that anyway.  So this one is pending a bit.

That hasn’t really slowed me down, I already also use GitHub for a lot of my writing as a secondary place with versioning, etc.  I made sure everything was up to date in Windows, then did a pull from the three remote repositories I care about, my Journal, my Digital Notes library, and my Web Clips library.  I made a few updates and made sure I had the workflow down for keeping things synced.  This also prompted the creation of a simple script to push everything at once.

#!/bin/bash  
git add -A  
git commit -m "Updated via Simple CLI Push"  
git push

I thought about adding the option to add a custom commit message, but these are all private repositories so I don’t really care about what the commit messages are. I also added this to the shell so I can just run it with “gitpush” from anywhere.

This also meant properly setting up SSH keys in Github, so I could actually pull the libraries. I also realized I would need to set up my SSH Keypairs for my web server space, which wasn’t hard but was mildly inconvenient because account based SSH is disabled. The simple solution was to reenable it using the Digital Ocean console, add the keys, then disable it again.

Probably the biggest hassle I had was getting the two NTFS partitions, one on the old primary Windows Drive, and a second on the same physical secondary drive as the system. I mostly use this drive for “working files”. Ebooks to read, monthly file dumps off my phone, programming projects, etc.

It’s just files.

I could manually mount both drives when I started, but any reboot would unmount them. I went out and looked up the fstab settings to use, and had no luck. In fact, I had the opposite of luck because at one point, I couldn’t mount the secondary storage drive at all in Linux. Only in Windows. I tried many options in both OSes, and finally just, backed everything up and wiped the partition in favor of a native ext4 format.

Since I had all this space now anyway, I remapped my /home/ folder to it, which is kind of good practice anyway, then copied everything from the old working files drive into a folder in my own home folder.

This ended up being a weird hassle too, because at one point I had “pre copied” the working files, before the migration, only to discover they had vanished when the /home/ folder was moved. I think what was happening, was they were not part of the encrypted blob, so the system simply, ignored them. So I had to unmount everything, reboot, which failed because now there are no user settings, drop to a recovery console, move the files OUT of the personal home folder, remount it all, then copy the files, again, from inside the OS, so they would receive the proper encryption and show up properly.

What a hassle, but it’s done.

The only real missing element here is that my copy of Affinity Photo is only licensed for Windows, so I’ll need to buy the Linux version. I don’t mind, I have been meaning to upgrade to version 2 anyway. I think Version 2 even has a new sytle liscence that is OS agnostic.

Another last one I’d like to do is automount the network shares from my NAS and file server on boot, if present. I don’t always use the laptop at home though, which means this could be weird when it can’t access them. But I also have an Open VPN tunnel to get to my home network, so there is probably a way to set it up in a way that connects through that always.

Journal

On the Doing of the Things

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Long time no post, or, sort of, I have been posting on Lameazoid as part of Blaugust, but even that has sort of fallen apart completely. I wasn’t planning to do the full 31 days, then it just started happening, but then it just… wasn’t.

I think mostly I have just still been in a weird funk lately and I was sort of shaking it for posting but not really. I have also been busy off and on with life stuff. My wife and daughter have rented a shop space. My daughter is opening a vintage shop in the front half, something she has wanted to do for a while, and they will be able to run all their online sales stuff from the back and be better organized and productive with it.

The shop isn’t open but there is a website full of links for the online stuff at RTThrift.com.

The shop itself has needed a bit of clean up and work to get set up, and though they have been doing a lot of that, I still get recruited to do things like, haul hundreds of totes from storage to the shop, and sand the entire upstairs with an upright floor sander. Let me tell you, using that thing was surprisingly fun. Highly recommended.

It’s heavy as fuck though, bring a friend to lift it into the car, even if you split it into two-pieces like we discovered in time for the return trip.

There has already been a lot of interest in it through the locals in town promoting it coming and people we talked to at one of our many garage sales.

For my various hobbies I write about here instead of there, There hasn’t been much exciting going on.i have not done any code or electronics projects recently, like blogging, this whole endless funk has me slacking on learning and other things. I have been listening to a ton of music, but nothing I had any impulse to write about.

The garden is going pretty meh, both my lemon and lime trees died, and I am barely getting any peppers or cherry tomatoes. And no regular tomatoes. My basil and oregano aren’t doing great. My mint is going pretty gangbusters but I don’t really know what to do with it. I mostly planted it as a pest deterrent.

I do have a fun Kickstarter device finally shipping that I will have to write about once I receive it and get a chance to play with it some.

I will also add that it’s not really writing that I am down on, just blogging. I have been writing personal journals to Joplin pretty regularly. It’s just not stuff I intend to share.

Journal

This Year’s Garden

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I meant to post when I planted but did not because, “reasons.” More specifically, a lack of motivation to do so. It’s not exactly anything impressive anyway, but that isn’t really supposed to matter anyway. My 2024 gardening is underway, and if it’s anything like the past several years, it will not be very fruitful.

At our old house, we had a pretty decent garden. I built a nice tiered raised bed pyramid thing, we grew plenty of peppers and tomatoes and the plants were super large and full. We had so many tomatoes we made a ton of salsa and I think I still have hot peppers frozen somewhere, though I doubt they are any good years later now.

The new house has been, not so successful. We get a lot more backyard animals here, and generally speaking, they eat all the fruits and vegetables. We have tried a few things to discourage it from keeping them up high on the back deck, to rubber snakes and other things.

I am trying again this year. I moved all of the plants (everything is is pots or buckets) down to the lower deck area, the pots still have the useless rubber snakes. I put my wind chimes down there as well, I am hoping the noise deters the animals a bit. In the past, we could not really use this lower area because we had our dog outside down there fairly often and she would get into things. She passed away a few years ago (like 20 years old, we thought she was immortal). So the lower area is available.

Anyway, also for deterrent, I have planted a bunch of garlic in the bottoms of all the pots, and a few mint plants in small pots nearby. Both are supposed to deter animals due to the smell, or so I hear.

As for what, it’s nothing super fancy, a tomato plant, a cherry tomato plant, a green pepper plant, a poblano pepper plant. I also have some oregano and basil. I also had a cilantro plant but something has already come along and snatched it up completely. Most of the plants I picked up from a sale at the local college agriculture building. They did not have any mint there though so I picked those up at the Kroger. They were conveniently on sale in the vegetable department later the same day I had gone to the college sale.

I also had my leftover plants from last year. Sadly, none of those had made it. We took them inside for the winter but they don’t seem to be coming back at all. Something took and ate my oregano and basil from last year anyway. I also had a Lemon and a Lime tree I had bought on clearance at the end of the summer last year. Both just seem to be dead sticks still.

I don’t have enough plants to make any huge batches of salsa or anything, but hopefully I can start getting some vegetables to eat occasionally.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Journaling in Public and Journaling in Private

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Over the years, I’ve used a lot of different methods for writing. Pen and paper way in the past. Microsoft Word for a while, because, that’s what Word is for right? Windows Live Writer was a good one for a while, though it’s been discontinued, there is an open-source iteration called Open Live Writer. Sometimes I’ll just write right in the WordPress editor. I was writing into OneNote for a while.

These days I’m much more into controlling my data, well, I’ve kind of always been into that, but lately, it’s about formats. I am constantly trying to reorganize my files into the best format for the long term, and more recently, I compiled all my writing together into one blob in a folder called “Journal”. Well, some of it is just under “Writing”, but things like, well, this post, off-the-cuff, free flow of thought random writing about nothing, are in the Journal folder. A lot of it came from some old blog archives and WordPress exports. I wrote a little Python Script that would spit out a series of Markdown files with appropriate file names from a WordPress XML file a while back.

It’s not perfect, it converts some of the most obvious syntax changes, but others are just, left as HTML code. The spirit of the writing is there, and that’s what matters. Plus, I don’t use a ton of fancy formatting, so those leftovers are not that common. During this time I also comb through and collected and sorted all my reviews and other writings from over the years. These are the things that don’t go in “Journal”. A lot of them I reposted to Lameazoid.com in a cleaned-up format, which took a while, especially when gathering up the images again. Some stuff like my shitty lame fan-fics from the early 2000s and other little stories aren’t currently posted anywhere.

After getting it all organized, I reworked my flow around the new system. Which is probably the best one yet. Everything is sorted by year, the files have my usual, YYYY.MM.DD – Description format I use all over for file naming. I have an additional folder called WIP, for “Work In Progress” writing. Vague ideas that have not been fleshed out, sometimes they are just empty files with a description to remind myself “I wanted to write about that.”

Step one is to come into this WIP folder, and create a new Markdown file with a name, sometimes a date, or a vague date like YYYY.MM.

Markdown is the format of choice here. It allows for some formatting, which makes it more useful than a text file. But it also it’s just raw data, like a text file. No proprietary formatting, no funny characters, no extra hidden returns and paragraphs and line breaks or code. The most formatting I do is bolding headings and italicizing titles when appropriate.

Once written, I can easily copy and paste it into WordPress and throw in a few images if needed.

I also have started using Joplin for notes, and more secure private writing. It’s something I started last year, I think. Joplin is just a note-taking app that uses Markdown as its base. I keep a lot of what I used to use One Note for, though I still also use One Note. It’s nice because it syncs through One Drive, so I can access it across devices, but it’s all encrypted. Joplin contains ideas, lists, and journals made on the go, or sometimes just, on the toilet, where a phone is more handy.

The lists are pretty basic. I have lists of log-ins for various games, especially games where I have more than one account. There are lists of media to look into, sorted by type, music, books, movies, tv shows, video games, etc.

The journal part is just like any other journaling, but a bit more… we’ll say personal. Dumb dream notes, venting of frustrations, and some WIP blogs here and there. I keep anything I don’t really care about anyone else ever reading in the Journal folder, I keep things I might care about people reading in Joplin. Occasionally I clean out some of the regular Journal writing into my folder system, just to keep the Joplin list cleaner.

The real key to all of this is two things. It’s all in a simple clear format, Markdown. It’s also all backed up, in this case, through the NAS, through One Drive. Since it’s all small text files now, it also means I don’t care about just syncing this One Drive folder to everything. I converted quite a few .doc files and the space savings were pretty substantial, especially since it’s all just basic text that doesn’t need everything that Word has. The backup is the most important part though.

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