Milestones on Leon Mika

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 11:22:43 +1100

Have finished a working version of my game for my niece. It’s only the free typing mode for now, which is essentially a basic text editor, with some colour options mapped to keys F1 through to F8. I’ve deployed a browser-based version of it if you’re curious.

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 11:27:21 +1100

Released version 1.4.0 of Postlist for Micro.blog. New feature is the ability to turn off summaries in favour of the post’s body when using content display mode. This is achievable with the added content-options parameter:

{{< postlist display="content" content-options="no-summary" >}}

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 22:02:26 +1100

Released version 1.3.1 of Postlists for Micro.blog. Notable changes in this release are:

A new title-matches attribute, which can be used to filter the list of posts to those with titles that match a regular expression. Check out the documentation on this for some examples.
Fixed an issue where using the shortcode without any attributes resulted in an empty list. The cause of this was Hugo returning some strange things when a shortcode is called without arguments.

I also clarified the documentation a little, particularly around the use of the alpha sort order. Basically, if you have a collection of posts without titles, the alpha sort order may look a little strange, as it only uses the title when ordering posts. I’m not sure what I’m going to do to improve this — there’s no real way to sort based on post body — so in lieu of a fix, I just made sure to explain that. It’s not a great solution, but hopefully it’ll clear this behaviour up.

If you’ve got the Postlists plug-in installed, you should be able to upgrade to this version by going to the Plug-ins section in Micro.blog.

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 22:40:55 +1100

Released version 1.1.0 of Postlist. Featuring more sorting options, such as sorting by date or sorting in descending order:

<!-- Oldest to newest -->
{{< postlist order="date" >}}

<!-- From Z to A -->
{{< postlist order="alpha desc" >}}

See docs for details.

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 22:07:14 +1100

Built a new Micro.blog plugin: Postlist.

Adds a short-code which will display a list of posts, optionally filtered to a specific category, and ordered either alphabetically or reverse chronologically. Similar to Bear Blog’s post macro, although not as fully featured just yet.

I.S. Know: An Online Quiz About ISO and RFC Standards

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 23:22:52 +1100

About a week ago, while I was trying to lookup the ISO standard for dates, I got confused and looked up the ISO standard for character encodings. This brought to mind all the ISO and RFC standards I have to deal with as part of my work. I thought it would make for an interesting quiz.

So I made one, call I.S. Know.

It’s an online quiz for software developers, primarily those dealing with web technologies, to see how well they know their ISO and RFC standards. It’s meant to be just a bit of fun, although given the subject matter, I wonder if I’ve made it a little hard. It was also a good excuse to try out full-screen web transitions which I think I’m starting to like (for some things).

Anyway, hope you enjoy it.

P.S. This is a server-rendered website but nothing’s being stored or tracked on the backend. I just wanted to use Go templates without having to make a full-on Hugo site.

Making A Small Two-Letter Country Code Lookup Page

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 08:57:14 +1100

Made a small thing yesterday.

I’ve been seeing links to the uchū color pallette and Atkinson Hyperlegible font on Mastodon this past week and I wanted to give them a try on something. With little else to work on, I thought I’d spend yesterday evening building a small thing I’ve been wishing I had at work for a while.

My tasks at work has me looking up the two-letter country codes a lot recently. My goto is the ISO-3166-1 alpha 2 page on Wikipedia, but getting there involves a few clicks, a web-search, and a “find on page.” I wanted an easier way to get to this list, and a much easier way to filter it. I also wanted something that could work as a Vivaldi side panel, so that I can call it up while I’m looking at something else.

What I ended up building is this, which I’ve called 2LCC, which stands for Two Letter Country Codes.

Start entering a country name or country code to filter the table.

Because two-letter codes will appear as letters within country names, any exact match in either the code or the country name will highlight the row in yellow.

How it looks in Vivaldi's sidebar.

It was built using Hugo, which some might think may be a bit overkill, but Hugo does has some nice utilites for reading JSON data and running it through a Go template to produce static HTML. And that’s all this is: a static HTML page with a big table of country codes with a smattering of CSS and JavaScript. The JavaScript is just vanilla, and is simply used to power the filter, which basically walks the table, hiding rows which don’t contain the filter string. I was originally going to have the filter logic test the inner text elements of the table cells, but I decided to have the template spit out the country code as data- attributes instead. It’s easier to fetch in JavaScript using the dataset property list and since the values are spat out by the template in lowercase, it makes case insensitive slightly easier.

We’ll see how often I end up using this: there’ve been instances when I’ve over-index needing something for my job, only to build it and find myself using it less than I imagined. It probably wasn’t a great project to choose for trying out uchū colour scheme, seeing that I only ended up using two colours. But I’m happy with how the two colours I used turned out, and the the font looks great. And I do like that I took on more of the layout styling myself, rather than simply defer to simple.css.

Here’s a link to it should this be useful to you: https://2lcc.lmika.app/.

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 17:32:05 +1100

Released a new plugin for Micro.blog: Sidebar for the Bayou theme (yes, another sidebar plugin). Thanks again to @Mtt for making changes to the theme to support adding the sidebar. Can be installed from the plugin directory (please ensure you have Bayou version 1.1.3 or later).

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 15:25:43 +1100

Thanks for my new found fondness of buying mainstream music instead of streaming it, I needed a way to get these albums into Alto Catalogue. There exists a feature for fetching and importing tracks from a Zip referenced by a URL. This works great for albums bought in Bandcamp, but less so for any tracks I may have on my local machine.

I’ve managed to get Alto Catalogue building again after updating Webpack and a few NPM packages, so in theory, I could add an Upload Zip file action. But there’s more to this than simply accepting and unpacking a Zip file. I have to read the metadata, maybe even preview the tracks that will be imported, just in case I’m importing something I rather not (I did see this once, where zipping a bunch of tracks in the Finder introduced duplicates). This already exists for Zip files that are downloadable online.

I had a though about what my options are, until I remembered that I had a Gokapi instance running in Pikapods. So I tried using that to temporarily host the Zip file with a publicly available URL that could be read by Alto Catalouge.

The only problem is my internet upload speed is sooooo sloooooow. The Gokapi instance is hosted in Europe, and I suspect the instance itself is a little underpowered. So uploading 100 MB Zip files would take a fair bit of time: maybe 15-30 minutes. When I tried doing this via the web frontend, the connection timed out.

Fortunately, Gokapi has an API and one of the methods allows you to upload a file in “chunks,” which Gokapi will assemble back into the original file. Even better is that this chunking can be uploaded in parallel.

So I built a CLI tool which made of this chunking API to upload the Zip files. Once the upload is complete, the tool will display the hot-link URL, which I can copy-and-paste into Alto Catalogue.

The whole process isn’t fast (again, slow upload speeds). But it works, and I can use this tool to queue a bunch of uploads and let it do its thing while I’m doing something else. I really like tools that do this, where you’re not forced to babysitting them through the process.

There are a few limitations with it. It doesn’t allow for an awful lot of customisations on the lifecycle of the uploaded file. And the tool stalled out once when my computer went to sleep, and I had to start the upload from scratch. I could probably add something to track the chunks that were successful, allowing one to continue a stalled upload. If this happens frequently, I may look more into adding this.

But even so, this could be a useful addition to my use of Gokapi for transferring temporary files. If you think this might be useful to you, you can find the tool here.