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Trying out a bit of an experiment. I’m going to start accenting a few posts here with a small image in the form of marginalia, similar to what Dave Winer does on Scripting News. We’ll start with a classic for this post: a “website under construction” sign (this won’t appear in the RSS feed, so click through to see it).
This has been something I’ve been thinking about trying for a while, and I’ll be honest, I have no idea how it’ll look here. In fact I’m a little nervous about this. Would it enhance the post in any way, or be the blogging equivalent of clip-art on a Powerpoint slide? Would it make the site look dated, or even work with the type of posts I write here? I personally like the ones that appear on Scripting News, but I do wonder if that’s because they’re more likely to sit beside comments about the status quo, rather than the “today I did this” or “struggling with that” posts I tend to write here (this unbalance of topics is an anxiety I have about this blog that’s best suited for another time).
I guess we’ll find out together. I’ll try them for a bit and see how I feel in, say, a month. If I don’t like them, or I find myself never adding them, then I’ll pull them down and consider the experiment complete. Hopefully by then I’d have some answers.
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Really enjoyed the conversation between Sam Harris and George Saunders. I’ve not read anything from Saunders, but they had quite an insightful discussion about writing and culture (and a hint of politics) that it might be worth looking at some of his fiction. 🎙️
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Almost didn’t make it to the gym this evening. Glad I had a change of heart. Also glad that it came while the gym was still open.
(I say “change of heart”, as if the decision was made in the abstract. But it was the bad, guilty vibes that actually drove me to go.)
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Gave the sample Storytime episode for my train line a try, and it’s not for me. Aside from being something not available wherever I get my other podcasts, the sample was really overproduced, with backing audio and cheesey sound effects. Not a fan of those sorts of podcasts.
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The nature of AWS is that, even with things like ChatGTP, there are still traps laying about for those poor souls that don’t know what they don’t know. For example: did you know that you cannot immediately delete a secret value? You can only “schedule” it to be deleted at a future date that’s no earlier than 7 days from now. The secret won’t show up in the console, but you can’t use the same secret ID until it’s actually gone.
So good luck recovering from any mistakes you’ve made creating a secret via the AWS console instead of using Cloud Formation, like I did today. I guess some things’ll never change.
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Been working on a Cloud Formation stack that defines IAM resources: roles, policies, profiles, etc. I can do a little bit already, like change policy documents, but writing this all from scratch is beyond me. ChatGPT has been a great help here. Would’ve been bothering my coworkers all day otherwise.
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Code merged and artefacts prepared. Now to deploy it on brand spanking new infrastructure.
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Might be the only way I’ll learn another language is I put the spoken training audio to music, preferably something that can pass as a entry to Eurovision.
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Linux administration is quite fun. I don’t usually get an opportunity to do it as part of my day-to-day, so it’s always a joy having a task that involves SSH and interacting with a shell. 🐧
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👨💻 New post on Linux over at Coding Bits: Packaging Services With Systemd
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More Tools For Blogging Tool
Spent the last week working on Blogging Tool. I want to get as much done as a I can before motivation begins to wain, and it begins languishing like every other project I’ve worked on. Not sure I can stop that, but I think I can get the big ticket items in there so it’ll be useful to me while I start work on something else. I do have plans for some new tools for Blogging Tool: making it easier to make Lightbox Gallery was just the start. Continue reading →
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Oof! These mornings have been really cold this last week. Had to bring out my wool and possum fur gloves for the walk to the cafe in 0.5°C weather.
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🔗 Adding Github-Style Markdown Alerts to Eleventy
GitHub has alerts (aka callouts) Markdown support where the syntax looks like [Obsidian’s.]
So apparently, if we were using Github instead of Gitlab, I could’ve had it all. 😏
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One other thing I found this morning during my exploration of Markdown and Asciidoc is that many tools have a problem with JSON code blocks containing JavaScript-like comments. They’re reported as syntax errors, and sometimes they break the syntax highlighting. They’re still included in the rendered HTML, but it feels to me like the tools do so begrudgingly. Gitlab even marks them up with a red background colour.
Why so strict? The code blocks are for human consumption, and it’s really useful to annotate them occasionally. I always find myself adding remarks like “this is the new line”; or removing large, irrelevant chunk of JSON and replacing it with an ellipsis indicating that I’ve done so.
I know that some Markdown parsers support line annotations, but each one has a different syntax, and they don’t work for every annotation I want to make. But you know what does? Comments! I know how to write them, they’re easy to add, and they’re the same everywhere. Just let me use them in blocks of JSON code, please.
Oh, and also let me add trailing commas too.
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Asciidoc, Markdown, And Having It All
Took a brief look at Asciidoc this morning. This is for that Markdown document I’ve been writing in Obsidian. I’ve been sharing it with others using PDF exports, but it’s importance has grown to a point where I need to start properly maintaining a change log. And also… sharing via PDF exports? What is this? Microsoft Word in the 2000s? So I’m hoping to move it to a Gitlab repo. Gitlab does support Markdown with integrated Mermaid diagrams, but not Obsidian’s extension for callouts. Continue reading →
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Eight months in and I’m still enjoying writing technical documents in Obsidian. I’ve never really appreciated how well it works for this form of writing. I wish we were using this for our knowledge base, instead of Confluence.
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It’s always after you commit to a deadline that you find the tasks that you forgot to do.
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I think if I ever created a Tetris game for the TI-83 graphing calculator, I would call it “Tetris Instruments.”
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My Position On Blocking AI Web Crawlers
I’m seeing a lot of posts online about sites and hosting platforms blocking web crawlers used for AI training. I can completely understand their position, and fully support them: it’s their site and they can do what they want. Allow me to lay my cards on the table. My current position is to allow these crawlers to access my content. I’m choosing to opt in, or rather, not to opt out. Continue reading →
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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… 🪫).
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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.
