Tech, life and everything else
Welcome to the Thoughts section of my blog. Thoughts are better kept on my blog than on Twitter or other online platforms.
Today I have dealt with WordPress for the first time in a long time. I’m not planning to move my blog to WordPress (I’m in the process of developing my own content management system), but have set up a site for someone else and migrated a few articles.
Today, I learned that it’s possible to “vendor” Hugo modules. By vendoring Hugo modules, Hugo will add all required module files to your site directory and use them when building your site instead of trying to download them first. No need for me to use a module cache on Drone anymore and two seconds less build time. (But 3000 additional files in my blog repo.)
Next to my Microsoft Surface Go with Windows on it, I often take my Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga S1 with me, when I visit my family over the weekend. The ThinkPad let’s me do some development things on a Linux machine (with Ubuntu 20.04) during the long train trips (6 hours each direction). So I always try to get everything up-to-date before. It’s always amazing how fast it is to do this.
Shortly after the official announcement I pre-ordered the 12 GB version of OnePlus Nord on Amazon for 499€ minus 30€ Prime discount. It should have been shipped tomorrow and arrived at my place on Wednesday. However, I cancelled the pre-order today after I came across an article about display problems with this and other OnePlus devices (this is apparently not a rare problem with 1+).
After trying to write my own static site generator as an experiment, I now started to write my own CMS. Written in Go, SQLite as database (SQLite is awesome!) and focused on performance and simplicity. Currently I’m using Hugo with a number of dynamic additional services (for Micropub, Webmentions, ActivityPub, …), so it’s almost questionable why I use a static page generator at all. If I use my own lightweight and high-performance CMS, I could save myself all this extra stuff or at least reduce it in complexity.
I just dropped a lot of feeds (mainly news) from my feed reader. I can’t scroll through about 900 new entries every day and then have 60 bookmarks that I spend all my time working through. Even though there are no algorithms that want to get me addicted to never ending timelines, I have to set limits.
Recently, there has been a lot of talk in my blog bubble about email self-hosting again (here is one example, here is a second one). I myself switched to a self-hosted mail server over a year ago, only to switch back to a hosted version a few months later.
I use hnrss.org to follow Hacker News and stay up-to-date with the tech and developer community. I followed the /frontpage feed, so that my feed reader would collect all submissions that reach the front page of HN. However that’s a lot of stuff and it got too much for me. I then noticed that one is able to filter the feed to just include submissions with more than 50 points (https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=50). That removed a lot of stuff and left me with only the top voted submissions.
This might sound like a post by a Microsoft fanboy, but honestly, WSL 2 on Windows 10 2004 is really great. It allows me to use Windows on my Surface Go, but at the same time use Linux (Ubuntu 20.04) on it, in a small optimized VM. For example I can run Hugo inside WSL 2 at Linux speed (fast) instead of Windows speed (slow). I just need to take care to save the Git repository with my site files inside the filesystem of the VM and not on Windows (passthrough is really slow). And it’s easy to start Visual Studio Code from inside WSL 2 by just tiping “code .” and the current directory will be opened in Code. I’m really waiting for official GUI support so that I can even use graphical applications under Linux. The best of both worlds.
It sometimes happens that I fall down a rabbit hole. Suddenly a subject catches my attention and excites me very much. The latest topic where this is the case is the software Sonic Pi and making music by code, basically “music programming”. I played the recorder for many years, but I do not have a real feeling for beat and rhythm. I like to listen to music, especially electronic music, but I couldn’t make music myself, I would miss the musical feeling.