Clarity through writing

Really random everyday thinking. Not everything needs to be a formed thought.

Highlights from this weekend!

13 Nov 2023

I need a new blog post? Really? Yea, cause if you're going to put your blog on the front of your site. Can you at least write an updated post?

  • Setup TubeArchivist in the homelab. Pretty slick way to avoid the endless scrolling on YouTube.
  • Poker and pizza with the guys. Super rusty, lost on the flop twice!
  • Kid's had some activities so it was Uber drivering on Saturday. Was still able to check out Hon's noodle soup to see if it was the same from the old days. (spoiler: it's the same!)
  • Ok, Fitness+ is pretty good. Have been mindlessly following their workouts and this particular one made me taste blood.
  • Updated this website.

I wonder if it's worth putting a commenting system on this.


Dealing with some setbacks

26 Feb 2023

Ignore me just trying to get back into shape. Wait, round is a shape right?

Struggling runner, this isn't me but man it sure looks like me.

Not gonna lie. The last two years has not been good for my body. Let me see if I can quickly catch you up on my non-exercise excuses. I ended 2020 running a marathon and being in (arguably) relatively good shape and hopeful to sign up for a long distance triathlon.

  • Work from home really screwed up my workout routine. I used biked to work. There really isn't a need to ride a bike to commute when your office is 'down the stairs and 2nd door to the left'.
  • Events don't carry the same level of 'you must train' level of anxiety. Events have been going virtual. I sign up for events to kick my training into gear and I'm not as excited when I can do my half marathon over 4 days of 5km.

So there you have the excuses.

Now rebuilding isn't completely new to me, but rebuilding used to involve taking a few months of break not two years. Generally, the build phase of a rebuild is painful but pretty short. I've been able to get to the point where a 7km session doesn't feel like running with an elephant on your back.

Either the motivation isn't there, my physical capabilities aren't there (I am 40+ years old) or the mental fortitude has withered away.

The reality is that I'm probably just dealing with getting old and dealing with my body's limitations. This process has been slow because I've had to adjust over time.

  • My cardio is not there anymore = more intervals and I hate intervals; so I avoid it.
  • I started with a 10% weekly increase, but had to trim it down a lot more (2-5%) because -- see next bullet point.
  • Ankle and foot issues, seem to be getting injured easier than what I remember. Are things going to be this brittle going forward!?

Is this what getting old looks like? Maybe I should join an aquacise class instead of running.


Getting caught up

31 Aug 2022

Completely admitting that I am procrastinating this evening. It was a pretty long day at work and there was a big need to unwind.

Didn't feel like reading any of my books tonight.

To occupy the time, here are some random thoughts knocking around:

  • I wonder who would be interested in my homelab setup?
  • There is a need for processing emails faster. Unfortunately, collecting my thoughts take a while before I can write.
  • I am really liking my Nuphy Air75 and my Mad Noodle MacroPad.
  • Usnea (a type of moss) is a barometer of pollution. Where it grows = clean environment. I guess that is why a city that can only be accessed via boat / airplane has a crap tonne of it growing.
  • Incredibly useful self-hosted tool? HedgeDoc. I use it every day to take notes.
  • Impostor syndrome is a pain in the arse.
  • I'm on one of those command-line ONLY kicks. I've re-setup NeoMutt, imapfilter, offlineimap and msmtp for my email; how do I sort messages into mailboxes again?!
  • I should aspire to write better README's for my projects, even the private ones.

sigh


Vacation in our own back yard

03 Sep 2021

I always wonder how many people have actually been a tourist in their own backyard. I mean, buy a guidebook learn weird obscure facts, see the sights in your own city.

We are Vancouver, British Columbia locals, and we can do these things at any time. The reality is closer to the fact that we probably only become tourists when we have out-of-town visitors and we're forced to research things to take friends out.

Since this pandemic came, our family (like most people) followed travel restrictions and stayed within our own province. That usually means: Harrison Hot Springs, Kelowna, Osoyoos or Vancouver Island. This time around, it was Victoria.

We've been there before but we only limited ourselves to walking around downtown, looking through a few shops in Chinatown and the hotel's pool.

We ended up in a hop-on hop-off double decker bus. Things we saw:

Highly recommend doing the bus tour! Just in-case you didn't know (because I didn't) the bus had voice over that explains the area that you're in, the history, with some interesting facts (and cheeky commentary) peppered throughout. You are not just sitting there staring into the abyss of landmarks without any context.

The next day, we went to see those kids, a treasure hunt in the castle and a boatload of Beaver tails (courtesy of Groupon).

BTW, if you're close to 328 Taphouse + Grill you have to try the black and blue pizza!

For next time? Well, it's a very bike friendly city. I think we'll bring our bikes next time and explore the city using bike paths.


Simplification

26 Aug 2021

You know when your smart phone has that 'unread' notification badge on an App? That really irritates me! If you have more than 3 unread messages, don't show me your phone. I might explode with anxiety.

I've always been a fan of minimalist CMS systems. This isn't a slam against platforms like Drupal or Wordpress. I like them but for a personal site as small as mine they're all overkill. They have a time and a place. If you're a content creator who also has a blog, and will eventually sell merc to your 1M followers. Go nuts with those larger platforms. It isn't for me.

I moved this site to Grav a few years back, and it has been great! It's biggest selling point is that it uses Markdown files and doesn't require a database. It isn't perfect (- it still requires PHP), but it was a good enough.

My biggest is challenge is really my own doing. You see, I host this website on a shared server. Why? Because I'm too cheap to pay for a dedicated server. This essentially means that I'm at the mercy of the sysadmins of the providers. Normally this isn't a big deal, however a few months back Grav changed their minimum PHP version requirements. I'm sure for good reason. I do what I normally do. I wait for my provider to upgrade the required version of PHP.

Since then, the number of notification badges looking to update Grav has slowly piled up and it has been slowly driving me crazy. I just got tired of waiting.

Enter Jekyll

Jekyll is a Ruby and Markdown powered static site generator. What does that mean? You install some stuff on your desktop (or laptop), you write your content in markdown (like I usually do) and it generates a website for you. This website is plain 'ol HTML, CSS and JavaScript, like a website from 1998. The files are uploaded (in my case via FTP) to a webserver.

The requirements to "run" the site is ultimately simplified. All you need is a plain 'ol vanilla webserver; not PHP, not a MySQL database either. I use my local computer to write content in Markdown and publish the site.

Jekyll isn't the only tool that does this (I'm not even sure if it is the best -- I didn't do much research) but I'm a Ruby guy at heart and it seemed simple enough to use.

A few ruby versions installation, a Jekyll version change, a strong contemplation of my life choices later and I got everything up and running.

Workflow?

So what does the workflow look like?

The initial setup installs Jekyll, and uses the jekyll new command to generate a skeleton of the website. This is captured in the 'get running in seconds' on the front page of the Jekyll site.

Once you've created that skeleton. My high-level workflow looks like this:

  1. Create the .md (Markdown) file (and populate with content)
  2. This part generally differs if you're writing a blog post vs a static page
  3. Clean up the published folder (by default it is _site) using the jekyl clean command
  4. Run the built in web server (jekyll serve -D -H 0.0.0.0) to see your work on http://localhost:4000
  5. Check everything is good
  6. Run a clean build (jekyll clean && jekyll build)
  7. Upload the files from _site to your hosting using an FTP client like FileZilla

It isn't the most optimal, I admit. Which leads me to my next step.

(An) Automation

I used Rake, Dotenv and ncftp to smooth out parts of the workflow above starting on the last two steps. Thanks to the good 'ol Google, I found an article that had most of the commands already defined.

I added the following commands: rake clean # this really just calls jekyll clean rake build # this calls the clean command, and then builds the site rake serve # this calls the clean command, and the the jekyll serve with -D and -H switches (I like to be able to access the site from different devices) rake publish # calls the rake build, and uses ncftpput to FTP the _site folder to whats been defined in the .env file I will probably add more as I continue to use this new tool. So if you'd like to continue to follow along my website shananigans, here is the github repository.