Category: Meta-Shit

• …And, We’re Back.

  After eight months,¹ I have got round to setting up my website again, and laboured, over the last month, to repost the archive of old articles which I had, in a fit of optimism, converted to Hugo format. Hugo, it turns out, requires coding skills to use, despite the YouTube ‘walkthroughs’ that assure you it’s as easy as picking a new hipster flannel shirt. I could have had a standard, moody, sans-serif photography portfolio blog, with google integration and serious off-the-shelf attitude baked in, but I want something else, and so I have returned to WordPress.

  I gave up my commercially hosted website because I was on an economy drive after quitting the job that was driving me to ill-health. That chicken actually came home to roost in October, when I had a mild heart attack, but that’s another story.² Anyway, this current version is home-hosted, thanks to a wonderful piece of software called Yunohost, which I mentioned in another post.³ If you are reading this, you have accessed it on a little ThinkCentre computer that sits in my office in my home. I am very happy about this. I love having a blog, but I cannot justify paying for hosting. In this version, it is merely a side-project on a server that performs other functions, including hosting my Nextcloud instance. It is, effectively, free.

  The previous few iterations of my blog have been on the domain danceswithcats.uk. However, I had over a year’s worth of email service paid for on that one, and didn’t want to transfer it to my server, so I have returned my blog to its original domain, danceswithcats.net. Given that the U.K. may not survive as a political entity to the end of my contract with Gandi, I think this is a clear-sighted move on my part.

  It is likely that the next few posts will be about computers and software and, in particular, my server. It is a real triumph, limited only by my inability to properly integrate a network attached storage, so I haven’t yet been able to set up any media, apart from a Calibre server to host my ebooks, which are small files and don’t take up too much space. At the moment, the ThinkCentre has a 1TB ssd. My Nextcloud setup takes about a third of that, and this blog barely touches it, but if I were to host all my music and a music streaming server, it would need over a TB just for that, before I started looking at video. I have a NAS of 4TB in a Raspberry Pi box I put together. However, it doesn’t allow for direct attachment and Network links are symbolic links, which the server software doesn’t like. I’m sure there are ways around this, but they involve deep coding knowledge and maintenance. I need simple.

  However, a 4TB ssd is not such an exotic beast now: there are unbranded ones available for £150⁴ and I’ve even seen a Crucial ssd available for £195.⁵ I’m tempted by the cheapo. I have good backup strategies, and, by the time even a delicate ssd fails, replacements will be much cheaper, if the decline in the price of 1TB discs is anything to go by.

  The process of transferring the server to a new disc will require a bit of careful study. I know how to clone a disc, in theory, and have actually done it with sd memory cards, for my Raspberry Pi. On that occasion, I used a command line program called dd.⁶ It requires a bit of care, but I am fairly confident.

  So, adventures await and I now have a blog where I can boast about them.

  The other topics I want to write about are more personal. I have given up work, partly because I felt bullied by my supervisor and was constantly stressed, but mainly to be free to become a carer for my mother, who will be moving down to the Island very soon. I expected to get a part time job, and had all sorts of ambitions in that direction, but then I had the heart attack. It is entirely possible I have had my last day of employment. That deserves reflecting upon. I also want to write about my heart attack. It was a bit of a big deal. I took notes and I’d like to preserve those.

  And, I still want to write about books. I had a bit of an obsession with Thomas Mann a couple of years back.⁷⁸⁹ I’m not sure what that says about me, but my writing about him is all wrapped up in my sense of doom surrounding Russia’s atrocity against Ukraine. Since then, I haven’t read a great deal of ‘literature’, but I have listened to audiobooks, some of which have been fascinating. Over the last few years, starting in early 2022,¹⁰ I have listened through most of The Witcher books, by Andrzej Sapkowski.¹¹ Fantasy they may be, but they have a truth to them, and they strike me as superior, in every respect, to any fantasy that I have ever read. I’ve bought the ebooks and am planning to read them more closely because, masterful as Peter Kenny’s readings of them are, listening to a book is a sort of grazing. It colours one’s experience at the expense of detail.

  So, if you are reading this, well done you. I am the most amateur of bloggers. I do not attempt to optimise my experience or try in any way to manipulate people into coming to this website, clicking through it, or staying once they are here. You are special. Thank you.

  1. The Times They Are A-Changing. [↩]
  2. The Sorrows of Old Peter [↩]
  3. The Times They Are A-Changing. [↩]
  4. https://www.onbuy.com/gb/p/ssd-sata-4tb-hard-drive-disk-high-speed-hard-disk-internal-solid-state-drives-for-laptop~p87758802/?variant=87758803&color=green [↩]
  5. https://www.onbuy.com/gb/p/crucial-mx500-25-4000-gb-serial-ata-iii-3d-nand~p53896541/?exta=idealo&lid=121232422&stat=eyJpcCI6IjE5NS4wMDAwIiwiZHAiOiIwLjAwMDAiLCJsaWQiOjEyMTIzMjQyMiwicyI6IjMiLCJ0IjoxNzA2MjgzNDkxLCJibWMiOiI1LjAifQ==&clickId=2401261709229130314&iclid=1-2152fecd-5759-324a-804a-825957cdfe52-a79610 [↩]
  6. https://linuxconfig.org/Dd [↩]
  7. Politics, by W.B.Yeats [↩]
  8. Death In Venice, by Thomas Mann [↩]
  9. Top Marks For Me [↩]
  10. Misted Spires, Silver Cobwebs And A Joyful Dog [↩]
  11. https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/series/the-witcher-4 [↩]

  January 30, 2024

  Andrzej Sapkowski, Blogging, Books, Carers, Computers, Heart Attack, Thomas Mann

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• The Times They Are A-Changing.

  I can’t stand that song.

  Nevermind. This site will be down from 15th June, for as long as it takes me to get myself sorted out. I’ve disabled automatic renewal on my hosting, and have started the process of creating a home server, using Yunohost,¹ on which I plan to host a static version of this website. That excellent project seems more accessible now, thanks to my having learnt a fair bit about networking recently, and to the fact that the Yunohost documentation has been refreshed and is now rather excellent, in my opinion.

  I’ve already installed Yunohost onto the SD card of my Raspberry Pi, fired it up and been able to access the admin page.

  

  

  At the moment, it is just a box under my desk, transmitting very little to my local network. It’s the Raspberry Pi, box, incidentally, that I mentioned in a recent(ish) post.² However, come the end of my hosting contract, I hope it will be the new home of danceswithcats.

  Doesn’t the naive hope break your heart!

  My task list towards this goal is long and fussy, as all computer projects are. I’ll also need to make backups of backups of my Nextcloud data as I’m planning a new instance, rather than a migration of my existing Nextcloud. I want to bring all my digital stuff under one domain name, so that I can cut costs. At the moment, I am paying for three domain names. That wasn’t such a problem when Gandi offered free email with a domain, but now they’ve whacked a £3/month charge on that, it adds up. Getting rid of hosting and two domains with associated email will save me around £300 a year.

  I’ll need to think about domain management. I’ve already created an A record on my domain, pointing at my home IP address, and I’ll change the CNAME on the 15th, assuming I have the time: annoyingly, it’s a Thursday, which means I’m teaching. Anyway, there has to be a Yunohost admin page, but I’m not clear whether that hogs the top-level of the URL. I hope not, as I’d like to keep this website as the main domain. Nextcloud³ will be a subdomain, of course, and I’d like a Calibre server,⁴ a Matrix server⁵ and a music server. At the moment, I’m favouring the idea of using Navidrome⁶ for that. Quite how much one can tax a Raspberry Pi with is an open question at the moment. No one in the forums seems keen to talk about hardware limits, but they must be a factor. I won’t, for instance, be installing the Nextcloud Talk app: video conferencing is not a thing when you’re using an ARM processor, I wouldn’t have thought. However, the Matrix server should be entirely practical and will allow me to, maybe, also install other Fediverse-linked services in the future. Let’s see how the initial setup goes: I’ve got port-forwarding and storage configuration to get through before I get any more ambitious.

  As it is, I’m a little bit stuck until my domain is ready, and I’m tight enough to not want to waste the cost of the hosting for which I’ve already paid. However, it gives me time to focus on becoming used to using a static blog application. I’ve chosen Hugo, because it’s well supported and has lots of themes. Once this post is up, I will use the WordPress to Hugo Exporter⁷ to download a copy of this website and start playing with Hugo on my local machine. I hope that, in the week-and-a-bit until the 15th, I will have a site ready to upload.

  Hugo builds a website on your own computer, so that you have a site to simply upload to your web server, complete and independent of databases and other complications. The program uses Markdown as its composition language, which is fine: I use that on the excellent Nextcloud Notes app.⁸ The only snags I really anticipate with Hugo, having read a very helpful overview,⁹ are formatting my theme with a serif font, which doesn’t seem popular with the Hugo community, and my use of footnotes. I really prefer them to direct links in a blog, but I haven’t yet worked out whether they are available in a static site generator.

  There’s a chance that I will have to troll through all my posts, converting my footnotes to conventional in-text links. That will be a chore, but it might discipline me to do some editing and pruning.

  Anyway, enough of this. I’ve got my task list. Onwards and downwards.

  Wish me luck.

  1. https://yunohost.org/#/ [↩]
  2. Linux: A Love/Hate Story ^[↩]
  3. https://nextcloud.com/ [↩]
  4. https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/server.html [↩]
  5. https://matrix.org/ [↩]
  6. https://www.navidrome.org/ [↩]
  7. https://github.com/SchumacherFM/wordpress-to-hugo-exporter [↩]
  8. https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/notes [↩]
  9. https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/wordpress-to-hugo-scripts/ [↩]

  June 4, 2023

  Computers, Hosting, Hugo, Linux, Wordpress, Yunohost

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• A Spanner In The Works

  The Leviathan, whose spotted history I outlined at tedious length¹ not two months ago, has died. It has passed on, ceased to be, is no more, etc., etc. I have fused the motherboard by plugging in things with batteries, apparently. Said gizmos draw power that is not supposed to go through motherboards. Thus, it is an ex pooter.

  

  My feelings are mixed. I had it pretty much as I wanted it, and it was wonderfully fast. Using it felt like driving a luxurious 1950s saloon, with more power than you could ever need and seats that both supported you and moulded around you.

  At the same time, it was huge, ugly, quite noisy and used a lot of electricity. Also, a lot of the pleasure I had in using it for writing was thanks to the size of the monitor, and that is working perfectly well. The joy of a decent sized monitor, when you are a person of a certain age, is being able to have documents at a perfectly reasonable size on the screen, without taking up the whole of it. For instance, uploading the images for this post, which I did a moment ago, was a real faff on my laptop screen: I had to click between applications, minimising one to get another, and couldn’t drag and drop, but had to copy and paste, which is no hardship, really, but feels like an embuggerage when you’re used to having ample acreage of screen space on which to play.

  

  I am going to take The Leviathan to Just PC’s (sic) in Newport and get him to assess whether it’s worth putting a new motherboard and processor in, but I’m not optimistic. Also, I wonder whether I wouldn’t be better served by getting hold of a mini computer and using that. My Nextcloud server box, a Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny, is an excellent machine that would do the job well. Slightly newer, more powerful versions are to be had, refurbished, from ebay, for around £130. That’s £130 I’d rather not spend this month, but I’m keeping it in mind.

  The Rolls Royce option is to go for a brand new computer, with whistles, bells and a warranty, but that would be an even longer-term proposition. The one I have is mind is this little beauty:

  

  It’s called a Star Labs Byte,² and it’s got an AMD eight core processor, built in Radeon graphics, an open-source BIOS and is supported as a Linux machine. No rubbish cost for a Windows license I don’t want. I’ve been mooning over their Starlite laptop³ for some time, since my experiment with replacing parts on an old Thinkpad went awry.⁴ I thought it might make an excellent travelling laptop, if I ever do get round to bicycle touring. Idle dreams. Anyway, the attraction of Star Labs is that they are British, which means there are no problems with trying to sort out import duties on machines coming from Germany or America, which is where the majority of Linux-focussed computers come from.

  However, the Byte starts at £700, with a fairly small SSD and less RAM than I’d want for my main computer. And that is a competitive price for a well-specced mini-computer. It’s academic, anyway, as I’m not spending the best part of a grand on a computer when I’m planning to give up my job. The consumerist nag has got into my head, though. I wants it. It’s shiny.

  

  But, for now, I thought I’d try a bootstrap method. We have two mini computers which I have tried to use for media centres, with mixed success. One, a Zotac, serves a useful ongoing purpose. With Peppermint Linux⁵ on it, we can watch iPlayer, ITVX, and other catchup services on our non-smart TV through it. very nice. We also used to stream video from the media server, but we haven’t missed that enough for me to struggle to revive it.

  

  The other one is this oddness. It’s an Acer Aspire Revo 3600, from around 2009. It has a single core Atom processor and a curious onboard graphics arrangement called Nvidia Ion, that is a bugger to get going with Linux but does make up for some of the CPU’s shortcomings. It was taken quite seriously in its day.⁶ It’s basically a netbook but in desktop form, so it wasn’t powerful when it was new. Fourteen years on, it’s feeble. However, thanks to the graphics setup, it does manage a little better than my little Dell Netbook from around the same time, of which I was so fond.¹

  I thought it might just do as a stopgap measure though, so last night I brought it upstairs and put Lubuntu on it. This was not a success. It froze at boot and hadn’t got anywhere after ten minutes of struggling, so I pulled the plug and downloaded copies of antiX and Bodhi. antiX was ready first, so I stuck that on a memory stick and installed it.

  

  Result? A working computer, just about. This morning, gingerly, I tried setting up Nextcloud sync client on it. It managed that, although updates brought it to a screaming halt for ten minutes or so. However, the two screenshots here were saved into Nextcloud on the Acer and appeared, dutifully, on the Thinkpad when I wanted them, so all is not useless.

  The email client packaged with antiX, Claws,⁷ is okay, but the calendar app is incomprehensible, so I uninstalled Claws and put Thunderbird on and, again, it coped, with a bit of a wheezy struggle, being linked to my Nextcloud calendar, task lists and contacts. I’m keeping things fairly minimal, but I could, I think, write on this machine, without being completely frustrated. LibreOffice Writer, after taking quite a while to start up, seems to work smoothly on it. It doesn’t like Firefox, though. Blogging on it would be a painful process.

  It feels touch and go, as if it could freeze at any moment if I absent-mindedly ask too much of it. It has conky on the desktop as standard, giving lots of system monitor readouts, and the processor indicator spends a lot of time solid blue, which is not optimal. It’s been quite a while since I’ve had to walk on egg-shells with my computing, and I’m not sure I’m going to adapt to it.

  

  So, I’m writing this on my laptop, the good old Thinkpad that seems to cope with anything. The keyboard is not as comfortable as the one I use on desktops, and the screen means I have to lean forward and wear my reading glasses, but it is still quick and responsive.

  I think I will buy a second-hand Lenovo Tiny, probably after payday. A new computer, whizzy as it would be, is an unjustified extravagance and an environmental misstep. I was planning to buy a year’s subscription to Presto music’s streaming service⁸ this month, but, instead, I shall put aside the money to get as good a refurbed computer as I can.

  And The Leviathan shall be consigned to the depths, not unmourned, but not without a certain relief, either.

  1. Linux: A Love/Hate Story ^[↩]
  2. details here [↩]
  3. https://starlabs.systems/pages/starlite [↩]
  4. *Sigh!* [↩]
  5. https://peppermintos.com/ [↩]
  6. https://www.cnet.com/reviews/acer-aspirerevo-r3600-review/ [↩]
  7. https://www.claws-mail.org/ [↩]
  8. https://www.prestomusic.com/ [↩]

  May 13, 2023

  AntiX, Computers, Linux, PeppermintOX

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