Journal

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.

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap Up (11.19.2023 to 11.25.2023)

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Oh look, I fell into the “Trap of Not”. I am pretty sure I mentioned it before. It’s just a little phrase I think about sometimes when I want to do something but I just, do not. Specifically, in this case, writing and blogging. Like these little Saturday write-ups, I wanted to at least keep up with them, but I ended up, well, not. I also feel stupid jealous of people who blog and write regularly right now.

Look at Cynni’s Blog here, she writes daily. Long detailed posts, daily, with her dog and her little neat cartoon images spiced in. I’m jealous of that. My excuse is often that I don’t have the time, but the reality is, I kind of DO have the time. I just keep falling into Not. Another one that I’d love to be more like with Lameazoid is The Figure in Question. Not so much daily reviews, just more a long daily catalog of “here is this figure and this is why I like it.”

A while back I picked up this massive ball of blogs from a Hacker News posts. I’m still, still going through them, months later. There are so many that seem to have died for one reason or another. I mean, writing regularly, or even semi-regularly I suppose, is not for everyone. The process of going through them is slow, but there has been a fun accidental mechanism in my RSS reader that has helped. Basically, the feeds never update all at once. I get maybe 10-15 new ones showing up daily, but I think it’s timing out otherwise. So I skim through the ones that do show up and see if any of them are interesting, if not, I dump them. If they are interesting I throw them in a new category to better look at later, or if they have an obvious theme, I categorize them accordingly, since it’s Hacker News, it’s MOSTLY “Personal Blogs – Tech Enthusiasts”.

It’s also weird how some of these people organize their blog titles. Some people give useful information, and some just have these weird one-word titles that feel completely meaningless. Some of these blogs seemed completely themed around some extremely obscure tech topic (I usually drop these). You can tell when someone started a blog because they picked up some goofy random new coding language. Most of these I find, are also dead blogs. I guess they got tired of the topic or didn’t find an audience or something.

I always tell myself I don’t care about having an audience, and I keep plugging away at it anyway. For decades now. It’s a little crazy maybe. And I just write whatever comes to mind. I’ve been sitting here for an hour or two, having eaten my breakfast, done some daily quests in Sky, and browsed my RSS reader. Everyone else in the house is still asleep except the cats, so it’s nice and quiet. Anyway, I tell myself I don’t care about an audience, but also I don’t understand why everything seems to go nowhere.

Which brings up some of my activities this week. Working a bit to better understand the whole Search Engine Search Console thing. I set up a plug-in to give both blogs a mobile theme because I know Google complains about that. It’s boring and ugly, it gets the job done, I guess. I also have no idea why some of the issues listed are simply, “Page discovered but not indexed”. Like, ok, that’s on you, why are you not indexing them? No other explanations were given. I’ve also found it wants to index pages for individual images and such.

Which is another thing I should do. I need to flip through the gallery adding alt text to images. For accessibility. I am all for accessibility, but honestly, most of the images, don’t super matter or are meaningless if you can’t see them. Sorry people with bad or no sight, it sucks I am sure, but me describing a random concert photo, is not going to help you get the feeling of the photo. Most other images amount to something basic, “Python Logo”, “XXXXX Album cover.” You are not missing anything not seeing it. I think there is actually a way to get screen readers to ignore those images. A picture is worth a thousand words, and those thousand words already exist in the Blog Post the picture is in. There is one blog I read in my RSS reader with a dude who is absolutely obsessed with alt text. Like, it’s literally probably something he should see a shrink or something over because when I write obsessed, I mean OBSESSED. If I were a person who needed alt texts, I would be upset with how wordy and insanely long this dude makes his alt texts.

Other fun this week, it is, of course, Thanksgiving. We went to my parent’s house and had a very basic turkey, potatoes, corn, and green beans, style Thanksgiving dinner. My brother and his family were busy. It was enjoyable.

Side note, I typo-ed the word green. Are you OK there Spell Check? The obvious word is not there at all.

I’ve decided to dump the whole “What I Got” part of these. I might do the toys and games stuff on Lameazoid if I ever started regularly posting there again, but I did want to throw in that I bought some more memory for my gaming PC. It came with 16GB, which is decent, but I’ve been doing some AI stuff and I may move my Video Editing to that PC from my old PC, so I added another 32GB of RAM. Total of 48 now, which is probably a bit excessive. Nothing fancy, I was looking at fancy but realized that it wouldn’t do any good because it’s just going to clock down to match the speeds of the current 16GB, which was plenty fast enough already.

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