Tech, life and everything else
There are Corona news all the time. Kindergartens and schools in Lower Saxony are closed until the second half of April. Also, presence lectures at universities no longer take place. That means no lectures for me but studying from home.
In addition to better hygiene (wash your hands!), this is probably a good way to contain the spread of the disease and not overburden the health system. However, panic also seems to be spreading:
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Today I wanted to check if my blog contains some broken links and it actually did. I used the Go-based tool muffet which crawls a website and checks for HTTP errors when following links. To speed up the process, I started a local Hugo server and used the following command for muffet (after installing it):
One way to start the day well: a croissant for breakfast. 🥐
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Ashwíṅ Víshnú asked how I created the audio version for my latest post. Here’s a way how you can use the Google Text-to-Speech API to create MP3s from text. A simple way to try this API without a Google Cloud account is to follow these steps:
When was the last time you watched a 90 minute movie without drifting off with the thoughts, pulling out the smartphone or doing something else in between than watching the movie? I often cannot even manage to watch a 30 minute video without being distracted.
Ben Evans created amazing pieces of art. He “draw” a sunset, a still life and a portrait. But instead of images, he created CSS style sheets. All those images are made with just CSS. It is very impressive!
Phil Eaton wrote a really cool article. He documented how he used Go to write a rudimentary SQL database including a CLI. It is very interesting to read how commands are parsed and analyzed. The whole thing probably has no practical use (there are already countless mature database systems), but it’s still exciting. I remembered some of the math lectures in the first semester about formal languages.
Reply to: A question by Jan Boddez
No, my implementation (it’s still a WIP) doesn’t support sending “Update"s and “Delete"s yet. It’s one thing that bothers me about ActivityPub. Webmention is so much simpler in that regard. There also seems to be no way of forcing Mastodon to refetch an activity object other than sending an “Update” or “Delete” activity.
Just a small note: I deleted my Microblog.pub instance. I liked this piece of software and it’s a nice single-user alternative to Mastodon, but I don’t need a Fediverse instance anymore. My new fediverse strategy is to use my normal blog to post stuff (you can follow me via @en@jlelse.blog and @de@jlelse.blog) and Miniflux to follow people (Mastodon offers RSS user feeds).
If you reply to posts or mention my user handle in a public post on Mastodon, I will receive a notification and your reply will appear in the “Interaction” section under the post. If you interact with a post on your website and don’t automatically send Webmentions, you can also submit the URL in the form below each post.
By removing Microblog.pub from my server it also reduces the need for resources a lot. Python as well as MongoDB don’t seem to be that resource friendly. I currently use the cheapest VPS option from Hetzner and for the few remaining things hosted there (my website, my blog and some Go tools etc.), it’s more than enough.
I live in an apartment building with neighbors in all directions. But some neighbors don’t seem to care at all whether they disturb their neighbors with very loud music. At the moment I don’t have to study, but with this noise I couldn’t study at all. It’s not an exaggeration, but I hear the neighbors’ music as loud as if I were listening to music myself either through speakers or headphones. By now I have come to terms with the almost daily nightly screaming of their child, which wakes me up as a result. Maybe the child is in pain or something? But I find this loud music simply outrageous.