Finally did something today that I should’ve done a long time ago: buy a UPS. Hopefully power outages will no longer bring down my Mac Mini server while I’m away (power is usually quite reliable when I’m home, but as soon as I leave for any extended period of time… 🪫).
Sometimes I wonder how and why my work email address got onto various B2B marketing email lists. “Want to buy some network gear, or setup a meeting with our account manager?” What? No! Even if I wanted to, that’s not a decision I’m authorised to make.
In today’s demonstration of the gulf between taste and ability, may I present my attempt at fixing the fence extension:
Part of the challenge was getting to it. I had to hack out a path through the overgrown beds:
Trust me when I say that this is an improvement. 😅
Checked out of the Cockatiel Cafe and heading home to Melbourne. Always a little melancholy leaving Canberra, but I’m sure to be back soon enough. As for the “residents” I was looking after, I’ll be seeing them again real soon. More posts then I’m sure.
One of these days, I’m going to make change to a Dockerfile or a Github workflow, and it’s going to work the first time.
🔗 How the “Nutbush” became Australia’s unofficial national dance
It’s amusing to grow up thinking everyone did this up until a few years ago, when someone from overseas told me they never learnt this dance. Anyway, this is totally a thing. Last wedding I attended, we absolutely did the Nutbush. 😄
Been asked to do a routine task today. This is the fifth time I’ve started it, the fifth time I said to myself “hmm, I should probably automate this,” and the fifth time I just did it manually. Now wondering if that was time well spent.
Blogging Gallery Tool
Oof! It’s been a while, hasn’t it.
Not sure why I expected my side-project work to continue while I’m here in Canberra. Feels like a waste of a trip to go somewhere — well, not “unique”, I’ve been here before; but different — and expect to spend all your time indoors writing code. Maybe a choice I would’ve made when I was younger, but now? Hmm, better to spend my time outdoors, “touching grass”. So that’s what I’ve been doing.
But I can’t do that all the time, and although I still have UCL (I’ve made some small changes recently, but nothing worth writing about) and Photo Bucket, I spent this past fortnight working on new things.
The first was an aborted attempt at an RSS reader for Android that works with Feedbin. I did get something working, but I couldn’t get it onto my mobile, and frankly it was rather ugly. So I’ve set that idea aside for now. Might revisit it again.
But all my outdoor adventures did motivate me to actually finish something I’ve been wanting to do for a couple of years now. For you see, I take a lot of photos and I’d like to publish them on my Micro.blog in the form of a GLightbox gallery (see this post for an example). But making these galleries is a huge pain. Setting aside that I always forget the short-codes to use, it’s just a lot of work. I’m always switching back and forth between the Upload section in Micro.blog, looking that the images I want to include, and a text file where I’m working on the gallery markup and captions.
I’ve been wishing for some tool which would take on much of this work for me. I’d give it the photos, write the captions, and it would generate the markup. I’ve had a run at building something that would do this a few times already, including an idea for a feature in Photo Bucket. But I couldn’t get over the amount of effort it would take to upload, process, and store the photos. It’s not that it’d would be hard, but it always seemed like double handling, since their ultimate destination was Micro.blog. Plus, I was unsure as to how much effort I wanted to put into this, and the minimum amount of effort needed to deal with the images seemed like a bit of a hassle.
It turns out the answer was in front of me this whole time. The hard part was preparing the markup so why couldn’t I build something that simply did that? The images would already be in Micro.blog; just use their URLs. A much simpler approach indeed.
So I started working on “Blogging Tools”, a web-app that’ll handle this part of making galleries. First, I upload the images to Micro.blog, then I copy the image tags into to this tool:
The tool will parse these tags, preserving things like the “alt” attribute, and present the images in the order they’ll appear in the gallery, with text boxes beside each one allowing me to write the caption.
Once I’m done, I can then “render” the gallery, which will produce the Hugo short-codes that I can simply copy and paste into the post.
This took me about a few evenings of work. It’s a simple Go app, using Fiber and Rainstorm, running in Docker. Seeing that the image files themselves are not managed by the tool, once I got the image parsing and rendering done, the rest was pretty straight forward. It’s amazing to think that removing the image handling side of things has turned this once “sizeable” tool into something that that was quick to build and, most importantly, finally exists. I do have more ideas for this “Blogging Tool”. The next idea is porting various command line tools that do simple image manipulation to WASM so I can do them in the browser (these tools were use to crop and produce the shadow of the screenshot in this post). I’m hoping that these would work on the iPad, so that I can do more of the image processing there rather than give up and go to a “real” computer. I should also talk a little about why I chose Rainstorm over Sqlite, or whether that was a good idea. Maybe be more on those topics later, but I’ll leave it here for now.
MacOS has cat, but not tac. Fortunately, Vim came to the rescue with this command:
:global/^/move 0
Source: Superuser
Thinking About Plugins In Go
Thought I’d give Go’s plugin package a try for something. Seems to works fine for the absolutely simple things. But start importing any dependencies and it becomes a non-starter. You start seeing these sorts of error messages when you try to load the plugin:
plugin was built with a different version of package golang.org/x/sys/unix
Looks like the host and plugins need to have exactly the same dependencies. To be fair, the package documentation says as much, and also states that the best use of plugins is for dynamically loaded modules build from the same source. But that doesn’t help me and what I’m trying to do, which is encoding a bunch of private struct types as Protobuf messages.
So might be that I’ll need to find another approach. I wonder how others would do this. An embedded scripting language would probably not be suitable for this, since I’m dealing with Protobuf and byte slices. Maybe building the plugin as a C shared object? That could work, but then I’d loose all the niceties that come from using Go’s type system.
Another option would be something like WASM. It’s interesting seeing WASM modules becoming a bit of a thing for plugin architectures. There’s even a Go runtime to host them. The only question is whether they would have the same facilities as regular process would have, like network access; or whether they’re completely sandboxed, and you as the plugin host would need to add support for these facilities.
I guess I’d find out if I were to spend any more time looking at this. But this has been a big enough distraction already. Building a process to shell-out to would work just fine, so that’s probably what I’ll ultimately do.
It’s easy for me to say this now, but I would pay a non-zero number of dollars for a set of well designed and well curated sites that can replace Know Your Meme, Fandom, and all these song lyric sites. I’d be fine it they also host ads, so long as there’s one or two, and none of them are video.
I’d be curious to know if there’re any Go apps that are using the plugin package. I’m not aware of any myself; most seem to use things like shell-outs or embedded languages. It seems like the package itself is little more than an experiment so I’m not that surprised, but it’s a little disappointing.
I’m a little suspicious of using project starter kits for learning something new. Sure it can whip up that React or Svelte web-app in a few seconds, but then you’re left with maintaining project infrastructure that you didn’t build yourself. Might be best to start learning projects from scratch.
One of these days, I’m going to write a long form post, and do the narration in a single take.
Word Cloud
From Seth’s blog:
Consider building a word cloud of your writing.
Seems like a good idea so that’s what I did, taking the contents of the first page of this blog. Here it is:
Some observations:
- One of the most prominent words is “just”, with “it’s” not far behind. I though it’s because I started a lot of sentences with “it’s just”, but it turns out I’ve only used that phrase once, while the individual words show up around 10 times each. I guess I use “just” a lot (apparently, so does Seth). I am surprise to see the word “anyway” only showing up twice.
- Lots of first-person pronouns and articles, like “I’m”, “I’ve”, and “mine”. That’s probably not going to change either. This is just1 the tonal choice I’ve made. I read many blogs that mainly speak in the second person and I don’t think it’s a style that works for me. Although I consciously know that they’re not speaking to me directly, or even to the audience as a whole, I don’t want to give that impression myself, unless that’s my intention. So it’ll be first person for the foreseeable future I’m sure.
- Because it’s only the first page, many of the more prominent words are from recent posts. So lots about testing, OS/2, and Bundanoon. I would like to cut down on how much I write about testing. A lot of it is little more than venting, which I guess is what one does on their blog, but I don’t want to make a habit of it.
- I see the word “good” is prominent. That’s good: not a lot of negative writing (although, this is a choice too).
- I see the word “video” is also prominent. That’s probably not as good. Might be a sign I’m talking a little too much about the videos I’ve been watching.
Anyway, I thought these findings were quite interesting. One day, I’ll have to make another word cloud across all the posts on this blog.
Cracked open Acorn to come up with a new wordmark for Apple:
Yes, I know I’ve got work to do. 😜
Caught up on the WWDC announcements (did Ars Technica have a live blog this year? Must’ve missed it). The scratch maths feature for the iPad looks pretty good. If my Apple Pencil wasn’t always flat, I’d definitely make use of it.
The view from the top of Mount Rogers Reserve.
To get to Bundanoon from Canberra you have to drive past Lake George. I’ve always seen it empty but yesterday I saw it with water, so I had to stop and take a photo.
Day Trip to Bundanoon
Decided to go on a day trip to Bundanoon today. It’s been five years since I last visited and I remember liking the town enough that I thought it’d be worth visiting again. It’s not close, around 1 hour and 40 minutes from Canberra, but it not far either and I thought it would be a nice way to spend the day. Naturally, others agreed, which I guess explains why it was busier than I expected, what with the long weekend and all. Fortunately, it wasn’t too crowded, and I still had a wonderful time.
The goal was to go on a bush-walk first. I chose to do the Erith Coal Mine track, for no particular reason other than it sounded interesting. This circuit track was meant to take you to a waterfall by an old coal mine. However, the track leading to the actual mine was closed, thanks to the recent rain. In fact, if I could describe the bush-walks in one word, it would be “wet”. The ground was soaked, as were the paths, and although conditions were lovely, the paths were still very slippery.
After completing that circuit in probably 45 minutes, my appetite for bush-walking was still unsatisfied, so I tried the Fairy Bower Falls walk next. This was not as steep as the first one, but it turned to be a much harder track due to how wet and slippery everything was.
I stopped short of the end of this one too, as it seems the path was washed away. But I did manage to get a glimpse of the waterfall, so I’m considering that a win.
After that, I returned to the town for lunch and some train spotting. The train line to Goulburn runs through Bundanoon, and the last time I was there, there was probably a freight train every hour or so. So I was hoping to get a good view of a lot of freight traffic. Maybe shoot a video of a train passing through the station I could share here.
I had lunch outside and walked around the town a little, always within sight of the railway line, hoping for at least one train to pass through. But luck wasn’t on my side, and it wasn’t until I was on my way home that I saw what I think was a grain train passing through Wingello. I pulled over to take a video, and while I miss the locomotive, I got a reasonable enough recording of the wagons.
Being a little more hopeful, I stopped at Tallong, the next town along the road. I bought a coffee and went to the station to drink it and hopefully see a train pass through. Sadly, it was not to be. So I decided to head back home.
So the train spotting was a bust, and the bush-walks were difficult, but all in all it was quite a nice day. I look forward to my next visit to Bundanoon. Lets hope the trains are running a little more frequently then.