From b5b85066bc8bfa6db6eaa33e3f14c0eaafafe5af Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Bill <bill@billserver.senders.io>
Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2022 21:14:51 -0500
Subject: RSS Blog and Generate RSS Feed!
---
www/blog/2022-12-31/index.html | 273 +++++++
www/blog/feed.rss | 1583 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
www/blog/index.html | 3 +
3 files changed, 1859 insertions(+)
create mode 100644 www/blog/2022-12-31/index.html
create mode 100644 www/blog/feed.rss
(limited to 'www/blog')
diff --git a/www/blog/2022-12-31/index.html b/www/blog/2022-12-31/index.html
new file mode 100644
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/www/blog/2022-12-31/index.html
@@ -0,0 +1,273 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html lang="en">
+<head>
+ <meta charset="utf-8">
+ <meta name="generator"
+ content="HTML Tidy for HTML5 for Linux version 5.6.0">
+ <title>senders.io - RSS - A Follow-up</title>
+ <link rel='stylesheet'
+ type='text/css'
+ href='/index.css'>
+ <meta name="viewport"
+ content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
+</head>
+<body>
+ <div id='header'>
+ <a class='title'
+ href='/'>senders.io</a>
+ <nav>
+ <a href="/blog">blog</a> <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://github.com/s3nd3r5">github</a> <a rel=
+ "external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://git.senders.io">cgit</a> <a rel=
+ "me external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://mastodon.online/@senders">mastodon</a>
+ </nav>
+ </div>
+ <div id="body">
+ <article>
+ <h1>RSS - A Follow-up</h1>
+ <p>Get an RSS reader and connect everything to it!</p>
+ <p>Between switching to Mastodon for my social media allowance, and using
+ a dedicated RSS reader has really cut down my overall consumption and
+ wasted PC time.</p>
+ <blockquote>
+ <p>this blogpost is originally posted to my gemini gemlog: <a href=
+ "gemini://senders.io/gemlog/2022-12-31-rss-a-follow-up.gmi">gemini://senders.io/gemlog/2022-12-31-rss-a-follow-up.gmi</a>
+ which is where I do most of my writing, converting some useful to share
+ things over here. It is also where the original RSS gemlog this is a
+ follow-up to was posted. For context, I wanted to cutback on a lot of
+ my web consumption, wasting time and just being mindless online. So I
+ looked to RSS to help centralize and solve this issue.</p>
+ </blockquote>
+ <h2>Recap</h2>
+ <p>So I am using <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://tt-rss.org">https://tt-rss.org/</a> as my RSS
+ aggregator. It’s a self-hosted RSS aggregator that, using profiles,
+ allows you to subscribe to multiple feeds and have them “synced”
+ between multiple devices (they’re not synced, you’re connecting to a
+ central server). I like this because I don’t ever have to worry about
+ dismissing, reading, or marking anything on my phone to have it still
+ present on my PC. And I don’t have to worry about feed subscriptions
+ or my phone pinging a bunch of feeds, or obviously, any third-party
+ hosting.</p>
+ <h2>How I’ve been using it</h2>
+ <p>So as always, please send me interesting RSS feeds! Or even your own!
+ I am trying to read more blogs, and if you have something you enjoy drop
+ me a DM or email! I’ll share what I am following throughout this section
+ <3</p>
+ <h3>Blogs</h3>
+ <p>Obviously, I am following blogs, one of the last holdouts of RSS. I
+ have a few that I follow, mostly other transfolk on Mastodon that I found
+ had their own blogs. Most non-trans folks I follow are using gemini and
+ still rely on the feed aggregators for that.</p>
+ <p>If you’re interested the two main ones I am reading right now are:</p>
+ <ol>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://erininthemorn.substack.com">Erin In The Morn
+ (substack)</a>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.selfawaresoup.com/">Selfaware Soup</a>
+ </li>
+ </ol>
+ <p>Which have been pretty insightful. Erin sharing a lot of US
+ transgender news, which is good since I have dropped off using Reddit
+ which is where I “got” my “news” from.</p>
+ <h3>Podcasts</h3>
+ <p>The other mainstay in RSS is podcasts. Some even say if a podcast
+ can’t be consumed via RSS, is it even a podcast? I would agree.
+ Everything else is just a show. I don’t <em>need</em> the content to be
+ consumable from my reader, but I’d really appreciate it if were. I am
+ always on the lookout for more podcasts though. With the only two
+ consistent listens being:</p>
+ <ol>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.relay.fm/penaddict">The Pen Addict Podcast
+ (relay.fm)</a>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.relay.fm/cortex">Cortex Podcast (relay.fm)</a>
+ </li>
+ </ol>
+ <p>And currently off-season:</p>
+ <ul>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.relay.fm/backmarkers">Backmarkers Podcast
+ (relay.fm)</a>
+ </li>
+ </ul>
+ <p>Which has a YouTube video format. Though, I honestly really don’t care
+ for Austin Evans, I just enjoy consuming some F1 content and pretending I
+ have friends I can talk to about motor racing.</p>
+ <p>While writing this section I added:</p>
+ <ul>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://inside.java/podcast/">Inside.java Podcast</a>
+ </li>
+ </ul>
+ <p>I have yet to listen, some of the topics seem interesting and being
+ infrequent gives me hope its quality over quantity. (And I like having
+ podcasts for chores to distract my brain)</p>
+ <h3>Tech News</h3>
+ <p>Right now I follow two main news sources in tech:</p>
+ <ol>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.debian.org/News/">debian.org/news</a>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://lwn.net/">LWN.net</a>
+ </li>
+ </ol>
+ <p>Running servers using stable debian - it’s good to know when security
+ updates come in, as well as distro updates. And LWN is fantastic, I’ve
+ been a subscriber for many years and while sometimes (Jake) can focus a
+ bit heavy on Python news, has been always interesting to read.</p>
+ <p>This is the section I plan on adding more and more to. I had other
+ tech blogs that just felt like clutter and were pushing out daily
+ articles that I couldn’t care less about (opensource.com cough cough).
+ But that’s just me. Tech news is mainly where I want to focus - since
+ fluff blogs are rarely my cup of tea.</p>
+ <p>LWN has some links in their weekly editions for other news feeds I
+ might consider directly subscribing too, but for now I have these.</p>
+ <h3>Music News</h3>
+ <p>Some folk have an RSS feed for their site updates, which I appreciate.
+ Some use sites like Squarespace but don’t properly connect up the RSS
+ feed which I do NOT appreciate.</p>
+ <p>So right now I have two bandsites that DO update it seems (as their
+ site aligns with the feed) - but the only one I’ll mention is: <a rel=
+ "external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://raisedbyswans.com/">raisedbyswans.com</a> I’ve spoken of
+ this artist in my Music Spotlight MANY times and is one of my
+ favorites. His site, while entirely simple, is setup with RSS and has
+ been publishing his updates consistently. I appreciate this. Always a
+ strong rec from me!</p>
+ <p>I’ve been toying with Music Review sites that talk about new releases
+ in the genres they specialize in, but I haven’t settled on anything that
+ is helping me discover new music.</p>
+ <h3>YouTube</h3>
+ <p>This is probably where the biggest change has actually come in. Having
+ my YouTube feed fed through RSS has been fantastic. I am able to not only
+ refresh and not miss any updates (since YouTube sometimes likes to pull
+ updates in out of order than I don’t see it because it’s buried between
+ some other videos that I’d already seen.</p>
+ <p>But this also allows me one further level of filtering on my YouTube
+ subscriptions. I can stay subscribed to channels I am interested in
+ watching <em>occasionally</em> but not every video, and keep those off my
+ RSS feed. And for the “I like to watch most if not all the new videos” I
+ can subscribe to those via RSS. So it’s like the “bell” but without the
+ app basically. And since on Mobile I do NOT use the YouTube app (so I can
+ take advantage of the Ad Blocker in Firefox) that’s great!</p>
+ <p>What sucks / is tricky is actually subscribing to the RSS feeds
+ because YouTube buried that feature now. You just need the channel_id or
+ the username and you can subscribe using the following URL:</p>
+ <pre><code>https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={ID}
+</code></pre>
+ <p>And you can obtain the channel_id either using the URL (though with
+ aliases now (@channelname) its rare to see a channel_id in the URL) if
+ present otherwise a little console JS can print it out:</p>
+ <pre><code>ytInitialData.metadata.channelMetadataRenderer.externalId
+</code></pre>
+ <p>A note however - you’ll need to clear the console if you navigate to
+ the next channel, at least in Firefox, it caches the result otherwise and
+ you’ll print out the duplicate value. There are some tools where you can
+ print your subscribers list into these feed URLs and bulk subscribe. I’ve
+ lost the link (and it’s what I did initially) but I recommend doing the
+ manual add at least to focus on the channels you WANT in RSS, since you
+ can always fallback to the main subscriptions page on YouTube.</p>
+ <p>But what this has given me is the ability to effectively ignore
+ YouTube almost entirely. Ideally, I’d script something with YouTube-dl
+ but I don’t REALLY care that much, and I’ve gotten into the habit of
+ closing the tab after the video so I don’t stick around and get sucked
+ into the algorithm.</p>
+ <p>What my morning looks like is sitting down, switching to my tt-rss
+ tab, seeing what’s fresh, and watching a video with my coffee maybe, then
+ just moving on and doing something else. I still lurk Mastodon, or get
+ sucked into my computer in some way or another, but it’s been really
+ positive! I can count on one hand how many times since dedicating to RSS
+ I’ve just clicked around YouTube.</p>
+ <h3>Hobby</h3>
+ <p>The last section which really is an extension of Blogs/News is “hobby”
+ RSS feeds. These feed a bit into the consumerist side of life and why I
+ keep them separate. Right now it’s almost <em>entirely</em> fountain pen
+ related (Who'da thought this community would still be writing blogs
+ :P) but since most of the blog posts are either about products or reviews
+ in some way, I try and limit how much I expose myself to them. I have
+ been working on a draft about consumerism for quite a while now and just
+ haven’t really worked it into a post that isn’t just DAE consumerism BAD?
+ low-effort Toot level. (But basically, I kinda hate how all my hobbies,
+ and hobbies in general rely heavily on a consumerism mindset, GAS, and
+ such). So I’ve been trying to be more appreciative of what I already have
+ and such.</p>
+ <p>But these blogs are nice, and often keep in the know about my hobbies
+ and can react to anything meaningful that’s being released. A good video
+ sorta on this topic was by Adam Neely(<a rel=
+ "external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.youtube.com/v/mHoljbkyAEs">Adam Neely - How In-Ear
+ Monitors are Making Better Musicians</a>), and how his band spend
+ $6000 on gear for their tour, but what it did was eliminate stress and
+ enable them to more easily fine tune and control how they monitor
+ their live performance. He touches on the fact that gear videos feed
+ into the consumerist mindset of music making, but gear is often
+ necessary to facilitate certain things, and setting up a portable
+ in-ear-monitor rig for their entire band is well… unavoidable. It’s
+ just a minor aside in a much deeper video about IEMs and touring and
+ FEEL. And quite the departure from his usual music education content.
+ But it sums up the main thesis of my consumerism gemlog quite nicely I
+ feel (or at least I am projecting my thoughts into a brief aside he
+ makes).</p>
+ <h2>tt-rss - in retrospect</h2>
+ <p>So tt-rss is <em>fine</em> honestly, I think I need to setup a better
+ theme, something that has a bit more contrast. I don’t REALLY read in it,
+ I just use it as the aggregator and then open the links directly. I don’t
+ mind the way it renders the full articles with images, but I do mind how
+ GREY it is by default (in “night” theme). It looks totally customizable
+ and I bet I can download a decent theme for it if I look. But I may spend
+ some time doing that and try and read more in application.</p>
+ <p>But other than that it’s been quite the improvement over my internet
+ experience. More RSS!!</p>
+ <h2>Conclusion</h2>
+ <p>I need more feeds, as I do enjoy reading. So I’m always on the look
+ out. I hate to throw in engagement-y things like “let me know” stuff but
+ I am genuinely looking for interesting suggestions for stuff you might
+ subscribe to over RSS. Even if it’s just “this is my webblog” :) I always
+ like reading people’s things. I should troll the aggregators and look at
+ folks capsule landings to see what is linked!</p>
+ <p>Anyway, you should look into getting an RSS aggregator setup. It’s
+ been really impactful on cutting down on internet scrolling and
+ mindlessness.</p>
+ </article>
+ <div id="footer">
+ <i>December 31, 2022</i>
+ </div>
+ <div id='copyright'>
+ © 2023 senders dot io - <a rel="license external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY-SA 4.0</a>
+ unless otherwise noted.
+ </div>
+ </div>
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/www/blog/feed.rss b/www/blog/feed.rss
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f41185e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/www/blog/feed.rss
@@ -0,0 +1,1583 @@
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
+<rss version="2.0">
+<channel>
+ <title>senders.io - Blog</title>
+ <description>senders.io's blog feed</description>
+ <link>https://www.senders.io/</link>
+ <copyright>2023 senders dot io - CC BY-SA 4.0</copyright>
+ <language>en-US</language>
+ <ttl>60</ttl>
+ <lastBuildDate>Sat, 31 Dec 2022 20:55:34 -0500</lastBuildDate>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
+ <item>
+ <title>RSS - A Follow-up</title>
+ <link>https://www.senders.io/blog/2022-12-31/</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.senders.io/blog/2022-12-31/index.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
+ <description>
+ <![CDATA[
+ <article>
+ <h1>RSS - A Follow-up</h1>
+ <p>Get an RSS reader and connect everything to it!</p>
+ <p>Between switching to Mastodon for my social media allowance, and using
+ a dedicated RSS reader has really cut down my overall consumption and
+ wasted PC time.</p>
+ <blockquote>
+ <p>this blogpost is originally posted to my gemini gemlog: <a href=
+ "gemini://senders.io/gemlog/2022-12-31-rss-a-follow-up.gmi">gemini://senders.io/gemlog/2022-12-31-rss-a-follow-up.gmi</a>
+ which is where I do most of my writing, converting some useful to share
+ things over here. It is also where the original RSS gemlog this is a
+ follow-up to was posted. For context, I wanted to cutback on a lot of
+ my web consumption, wasting time and just being mindless online. So I
+ looked to RSS to help centralize and solve this issue.</p>
+ </blockquote>
+ <h2>Recap</h2>
+ <p>So I am using <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://tt-rss.org">https://tt-rss.org/</a> as my RSS
+ aggregator. It’s a self-hosted RSS aggregator that, using profiles,
+ allows you to subscribe to multiple feeds and have them “synced”
+ between multiple devices (they’re not synced, you’re connecting to a
+ central server). I like this because I don’t ever have to worry about
+ dismissing, reading, or marking anything on my phone to have it still
+ present on my PC. And I don’t have to worry about feed subscriptions
+ or my phone pinging a bunch of feeds, or obviously, any third-party
+ hosting.</p>
+ <h2>How I’ve been using it</h2>
+ <p>So as always, please send me interesting RSS feeds! Or even your own!
+ I am trying to read more blogs, and if you have something you enjoy drop
+ me a DM or email! I’ll share what I am following throughout this section
+ <3</p>
+ <h3>Blogs</h3>
+ <p>Obviously, I am following blogs, one of the last holdouts of RSS. I
+ have a few that I follow, mostly other transfolk on Mastodon that I found
+ had their own blogs. Most non-trans folks I follow are using gemini and
+ still rely on the feed aggregators for that.</p>
+ <p>If you’re interested the two main ones I am reading right now are:</p>
+ <ol>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://erininthemorn.substack.com">Erin In The Morn
+ (substack)</a>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.selfawaresoup.com/">Selfaware Soup</a>
+ </li>
+ </ol>
+ <p>Which have been pretty insightful. Erin sharing a lot of US
+ transgender news, which is good since I have dropped off using Reddit
+ which is where I “got” my “news” from.</p>
+ <h3>Podcasts</h3>
+ <p>The other mainstay in RSS is podcasts. Some even say if a podcast
+ can’t be consumed via RSS, is it even a podcast? I would agree.
+ Everything else is just a show. I don’t <em>need</em> the content to be
+ consumable from my reader, but I’d really appreciate it if were. I am
+ always on the lookout for more podcasts though. With the only two
+ consistent listens being:</p>
+ <ol>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.relay.fm/penaddict">The Pen Addict Podcast
+ (relay.fm)</a>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.relay.fm/cortex">Cortex Podcast (relay.fm)</a>
+ </li>
+ </ol>
+ <p>And currently off-season:</p>
+ <ul>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.relay.fm/backmarkers">Backmarkers Podcast
+ (relay.fm)</a>
+ </li>
+ </ul>
+ <p>Which has a YouTube video format. Though, I honestly really don’t care
+ for Austin Evans, I just enjoy consuming some F1 content and pretending I
+ have friends I can talk to about motor racing.</p>
+ <p>While writing this section I added:</p>
+ <ul>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://inside.java/podcast/">Inside.java Podcast</a>
+ </li>
+ </ul>
+ <p>I have yet to listen, some of the topics seem interesting and being
+ infrequent gives me hope its quality over quantity. (And I like having
+ podcasts for chores to distract my brain)</p>
+ <h3>Tech News</h3>
+ <p>Right now I follow two main news sources in tech:</p>
+ <ol>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.debian.org/News/">debian.org/news</a>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://lwn.net/">LWN.net</a>
+ </li>
+ </ol>
+ <p>Running servers using stable debian - it’s good to know when security
+ updates come in, as well as distro updates. And LWN is fantastic, I’ve
+ been a subscriber for many years and while sometimes (Jake) can focus a
+ bit heavy on Python news, has been always interesting to read.</p>
+ <p>This is the section I plan on adding more and more to. I had other
+ tech blogs that just felt like clutter and were pushing out daily
+ articles that I couldn’t care less about (opensource.com cough cough).
+ But that’s just me. Tech news is mainly where I want to focus - since
+ fluff blogs are rarely my cup of tea.</p>
+ <p>LWN has some links in their weekly editions for other news feeds I
+ might consider directly subscribing too, but for now I have these.</p>
+ <h3>Music News</h3>
+ <p>Some folk have an RSS feed for their site updates, which I appreciate.
+ Some use sites like Squarespace but don’t properly connect up the RSS
+ feed which I do NOT appreciate.</p>
+ <p>So right now I have two bandsites that DO update it seems (as their
+ site aligns with the feed) - but the only one I’ll mention is: <a rel=
+ "external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://raisedbyswans.com/">raisedbyswans.com</a> I’ve spoken of
+ this artist in my Music Spotlight MANY times and is one of my
+ favorites. His site, while entirely simple, is setup with RSS and has
+ been publishing his updates consistently. I appreciate this. Always a
+ strong rec from me!</p>
+ <p>I’ve been toying with Music Review sites that talk about new releases
+ in the genres they specialize in, but I haven’t settled on anything that
+ is helping me discover new music.</p>
+ <h3>YouTube</h3>
+ <p>This is probably where the biggest change has actually come in. Having
+ my YouTube feed fed through RSS has been fantastic. I am able to not only
+ refresh and not miss any updates (since YouTube sometimes likes to pull
+ updates in out of order than I don’t see it because it’s buried between
+ some other videos that I’d already seen.</p>
+ <p>But this also allows me one further level of filtering on my YouTube
+ subscriptions. I can stay subscribed to channels I am interested in
+ watching <em>occasionally</em> but not every video, and keep those off my
+ RSS feed. And for the “I like to watch most if not all the new videos” I
+ can subscribe to those via RSS. So it’s like the “bell” but without the
+ app basically. And since on Mobile I do NOT use the YouTube app (so I can
+ take advantage of the Ad Blocker in Firefox) that’s great!</p>
+ <p>What sucks / is tricky is actually subscribing to the RSS feeds
+ because YouTube buried that feature now. You just need the channel_id or
+ the username and you can subscribe using the following URL:</p>
+ <pre><code>https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={ID}
+</code></pre>
+ <p>And you can obtain the channel_id either using the URL (though with
+ aliases now (@channelname) its rare to see a channel_id in the URL) if
+ present otherwise a little console JS can print it out:</p>
+ <pre><code>ytInitialData.metadata.channelMetadataRenderer.externalId
+</code></pre>
+ <p>A note however - you’ll need to clear the console if you navigate to
+ the next channel, at least in Firefox, it caches the result otherwise and
+ you’ll print out the duplicate value. There are some tools where you can
+ print your subscribers list into these feed URLs and bulk subscribe. I’ve
+ lost the link (and it’s what I did initially) but I recommend doing the
+ manual add at least to focus on the channels you WANT in RSS, since you
+ can always fallback to the main subscriptions page on YouTube.</p>
+ <p>But what this has given me is the ability to effectively ignore
+ YouTube almost entirely. Ideally, I’d script something with YouTube-dl
+ but I don’t REALLY care that much, and I’ve gotten into the habit of
+ closing the tab after the video so I don’t stick around and get sucked
+ into the algorithm.</p>
+ <p>What my morning looks like is sitting down, switching to my tt-rss
+ tab, seeing what’s fresh, and watching a video with my coffee maybe, then
+ just moving on and doing something else. I still lurk Mastodon, or get
+ sucked into my computer in some way or another, but it’s been really
+ positive! I can count on one hand how many times since dedicating to RSS
+ I’ve just clicked around YouTube.</p>
+ <h3>Hobby</h3>
+ <p>The last section which really is an extension of Blogs/News is “hobby”
+ RSS feeds. These feed a bit into the consumerist side of life and why I
+ keep them separate. Right now it’s almost <em>entirely</em> fountain pen
+ related (Who'da thought this community would still be writing blogs
+ :P) but since most of the blog posts are either about products or reviews
+ in some way, I try and limit how much I expose myself to them. I have
+ been working on a draft about consumerism for quite a while now and just
+ haven’t really worked it into a post that isn’t just DAE consumerism BAD?
+ low-effort Toot level. (But basically, I kinda hate how all my hobbies,
+ and hobbies in general rely heavily on a consumerism mindset, GAS, and
+ such). So I’ve been trying to be more appreciative of what I already have
+ and such.</p>
+ <p>But these blogs are nice, and often keep in the know about my hobbies
+ and can react to anything meaningful that’s being released. A good video
+ sorta on this topic was by Adam Neely(<a rel=
+ "external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.youtube.com/v/mHoljbkyAEs">Adam Neely - How In-Ear
+ Monitors are Making Better Musicians</a>), and how his band spend
+ $6000 on gear for their tour, but what it did was eliminate stress and
+ enable them to more easily fine tune and control how they monitor
+ their live performance. He touches on the fact that gear videos feed
+ into the consumerist mindset of music making, but gear is often
+ necessary to facilitate certain things, and setting up a portable
+ in-ear-monitor rig for their entire band is well… unavoidable. It’s
+ just a minor aside in a much deeper video about IEMs and touring and
+ FEEL. And quite the departure from his usual music education content.
+ But it sums up the main thesis of my consumerism gemlog quite nicely I
+ feel (or at least I am projecting my thoughts into a brief aside he
+ makes).</p>
+ <h2>tt-rss - in retrospect</h2>
+ <p>So tt-rss is <em>fine</em> honestly, I think I need to setup a better
+ theme, something that has a bit more contrast. I don’t REALLY read in it,
+ I just use it as the aggregator and then open the links directly. I don’t
+ mind the way it renders the full articles with images, but I do mind how
+ GREY it is by default (in “night” theme). It looks totally customizable
+ and I bet I can download a decent theme for it if I look. But I may spend
+ some time doing that and try and read more in application.</p>
+ <p>But other than that it’s been quite the improvement over my internet
+ experience. More RSS!!</p>
+ <h2>Conclusion</h2>
+ <p>I need more feeds, as I do enjoy reading. So I’m always on the look
+ out. I hate to throw in engagement-y things like “let me know” stuff but
+ I am genuinely looking for interesting suggestions for stuff you might
+ subscribe to over RSS. Even if it’s just “this is my webblog” :) I always
+ like reading people’s things. I should troll the aggregators and look at
+ folks capsule landings to see what is linked!</p>
+ <p>Anyway, you should look into getting an RSS aggregator setup. It’s
+ been really impactful on cutting down on internet scrolling and
+ mindlessness.</p>
+ </article>
+ ]]>
+ </description>
+ </item>
+ <item>
+ <title>RSS - A Follow-up</title>
+ <link>https://www.senders.io/blog/2022-12-31/</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.senders.io/blog/2022-12-31/index.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
+ <description>
+ <![CDATA[
+ <article>
+ <h1>RSS - A Follow-up</h1>
+ <p>Get an RSS reader and connect everything to it!</p>
+ <p>Between switching to Mastodon for my social media allowance, and using
+ a dedicated RSS reader has really cut down my overall consumption and
+ wasted PC time.</p>
+ <blockquote>
+ <p>this blogpost is originally posted to my gemini gemlog:
+ gemini://senders.io/gemlog/2022-12-31-rss-a-follow-up.gmi which is
+ where I do most of my writing, converting some useful to share things
+ over here. It is also where the original RSS gemlog this is a follow-up
+ to was posted. For context, I wanted to cutback on a lot of my web
+ consumption, wasting time and just being mindless online. So I looked
+ to RSS to help centralize and solve this issue.</p>
+ </blockquote>
+ <h2>Recap</h2>
+ <p>So I am using <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://tt-rss.org">https://tt-rss.org/</a> as my RSS
+ aggregator. It’s a self-hosted RSS aggregator that, using profiles,
+ allows you to subscribe to multiple feeds and have them “synced”
+ between multiple devices (they’re not synced, you’re connecting to a
+ central server). I like this because I don’t ever have to worry about
+ dismissing, reading, or marking anything on my phone to have it still
+ present on my PC. And I don’t have to worry about feed subscriptions
+ or my phone pinging a bunch of feeds, or obviously, any third-party
+ hosting.</p>
+ <h2>How I’ve been using it</h2>
+ <p>So as always, please send me interesting RSS feeds! Or even your own!
+ I am trying to read more blogs, and if you have something you enjoy drop
+ me a DM or email! I’ll share what I am following throughout this section
+ <3</p>
+ <h3>Blogs</h3>
+ <p>Obviously, I am following blogs, one of the last holdouts of RSS. I
+ have a few that I follow, mostly other transfolk on Mastodon that I found
+ had their own blogs. Most non-trans folks I follow are using gemini and
+ still rely on the feed aggregators for that.</p>
+ <p>If you’re interested the two main ones I am reading right now are:</p>
+ <ol>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://erininthemorn.substack.com">Erin In The Morn
+ (substack)</a>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.selfawaresoup.com/">Selfaware Soup</a>
+ </li>
+ </ol>
+ <p>Which have been pretty insightful. Erin sharing a lot of US
+ transgender news, which is good since I have dropped off using Reddit
+ which is where I “got” my “news” from.</p>
+ <h3>Podcasts</h3>
+ <p>The other mainstay in RSS is podcasts. Some even say if a podcast
+ can’t be consumed via RSS, is it even a podcast? I would agree.
+ Everything else is just a show. I don’t <em>need</em> the content to be
+ consumable from my reader, but I’d really appreciate it if were. I am
+ always on the lookout for more podcasts though. With the only two
+ consistent listens being:</p>
+ <ol>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.relay.fm/penaddict">The Pen Addict Podcast
+ (relay.fm)</a>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.relay.fm/cortex">Cortex Podcast (relay.fm)</a>
+ </li>
+ </ol>
+ <p>And currently off-season:</p>
+ <ul>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.relay.fm/backmarkers">Backmarkers Podcast
+ (relay.fm)</a>
+ </li>
+ </ul>
+ <p>Which has a YouTube video format. Though, I honestly really don’t care
+ for Austin Evans, I just enjoy consuming some F1 content and pretending I
+ have friends I can talk to about motor racing.</p>
+ <p>While writing this section I added:</p>
+ <ul>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://inside.java/podcast/">Inside.java Podcast</a>
+ </li>
+ </ul>
+ <p>I have yet to listen, some of the topics seem interesting and being
+ infrequent gives me hope its quality over quantity. (And I like having
+ podcasts for chores to distract my brain)</p>
+ <h3>Tech News</h3>
+ <p>Right now I follow two main news sources in tech:</p>
+ <ol>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.debian.org/News/">debian.org/news</a>
+ </li>
+ <li>
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://lwn.net/">LWN.net</a>
+ </li>
+ </ol>
+ <p>Running servers using stable debian - it’s good to know when security
+ updates come in, as well as distro updates. And LWN is fantastic, I’ve
+ been a subscriber for many years and while sometimes (Jake) can focus a
+ bit heavy on Python news, has been always interesting to read.</p>
+ <p>This is the section I plan on adding more and more to. I had other
+ tech blogs that just felt like clutter and were pushing out daily
+ articles that I couldn’t care less about (opensource.com cough cough).
+ But that’s just me. Tech news is mainly where I want to focus - since
+ fluff blogs are rarely my cup of tea.</p>
+ <p>LWN has some links in their weekly editions for other news feeds I
+ might consider directly subscribing too, but for now I have these.</p>
+ <h3>Music News</h3>
+ <p>Some folk have an RSS feed for their site updates, which I appreciate.
+ Some use sites like Squarespace but don’t properly connect up the RSS
+ feed which I do NOT appreciate.</p>
+ <p>So right now I have two bandsites that DO update it seems (as their
+ site aligns with the feed) - but the only one I’ll mention is: <a rel=
+ "external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://raisedbyswans.com/">raisedbyswans.com</a> I’ve spoken of
+ this artist in my Music Spotlight MANY times and is one of my
+ favorites. His site, while entirely simple, is setup with RSS and has
+ been publishing his updates consistently. I appreciate this. Always a
+ strong rec from me!</p>
+ <p>I’ve been toying with Music Review sites that talk about new releases
+ in the genres they specialize in, but I haven’t settled on anything that
+ is helping me discover new music.</p>
+ <h3>YouTube</h3>
+ <p>This is probably where the biggest change has actually come in. Having
+ my YouTube feed fed through RSS has been fantastic. I am able to not only
+ refresh and not miss any updates (since YouTube sometimes likes to pull
+ updates in out of order than I don’t see it because it’s buried between
+ some other videos that I’d already seen.</p>
+ <p>But this also allows me one further level of filtering on my YouTube
+ subscriptions. I can stay subscribed to channels I am interested in
+ watching <em>occasionally</em> but not every video, and keep those off my
+ RSS feed. And for the “I like to watch most if not all the new videos” I
+ can subscribe to those via RSS. So it’s like the “bell” but without the
+ app basically. And since on Mobile I do NOT use the YouTube app (so I can
+ take advantage of the Ad Blocker in Firefox) that’s great!</p>
+ <p>What sucks / is tricky is actually subscribing to the RSS feeds
+ because YouTube buried that feature now. You just need the channel_id or
+ the username and you can subscribe using the following URL:</p>
+ <pre><code>https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={ID}
+</code></pre>
+ <p>And you can obtain the channel_id either using the URL (though with
+ aliases now (@channelname) its rare to see a channel_id in the URL) if
+ present otherwise a little console JS can print it out:</p>
+ <pre><code>ytInitialData.metadata.channelMetadataRenderer.externalId
+</code></pre>
+ <p>A note however - you’ll need to clear the console if you navigate to
+ the next channel, at least in Firefox, it caches the result otherwise and
+ you’ll print out the duplicate value. There are some tools where you can
+ print your subscribers list into these feed URLs and bulk subscribe. I’ve
+ lost the link (and it’s what I did initially) but I recommend doing the
+ manual add at least to focus on the channels you WANT in RSS, since you
+ can always fallback to the main subscriptions page on YouTube.</p>
+ <p>But what this has given me is the ability to effectively ignore
+ YouTube almost entirely. Ideally, I’d script something with YouTube-dl
+ but I don’t REALLY care that much, and I’ve gotten into the habit of
+ closing the tab after the video so I don’t stick around and get sucked
+ into the algorithm.</p>
+ <p>What my morning looks like is sitting down, switching to my tt-rss
+ tab, seeing what’s fresh, and watching a video with my coffee maybe, then
+ just moving on and doing something else. I still lurk Mastodon, or get
+ sucked into my computer in some way or another, but it’s been really
+ positive! I can count on one hand how many times since dedicating to RSS
+ I’ve just clicked around YouTube.</p>
+ <h3>Hobby</h3>
+ <p>The last section which really is an extension of Blogs/News is “hobby”
+ RSS feeds. These feed a bit into the consumerist side of life and why I
+ keep them separate. Right now it’s almost <em>entirely</em> fountain pen
+ related (Who'da thought this community would still be writing blogs
+ :P) but since most of the blog posts are either about products or reviews
+ in some way, I try and limit how much I expose myself to them. I have
+ been working on a draft about consumerism for quite a while now and just
+ haven’t really worked it into a post that isn’t just DAE consumerism BAD?
+ low-effort Toot level. (But basically, I kinda hate how all my hobbies,
+ and hobbies in general rely heavily on a consumerism mindset, GAS, and
+ such). So I’ve been trying to be more appreciative of what I already have
+ and such.</p>
+ <p>But these blogs are nice, and often keep in the know about my hobbies
+ and can react to anything meaningful that’s being released. A good video
+ sorta on this topic was by Adam Neely(<a rel=
+ "external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://www.youtube.com/v/mHoljbkyAEs">Adam Neely - How In-Ear
+ Monitors are Making Better Musicians</a>), and how his band spend
+ $6000 on gear for their tour, but what it did was eliminate stress and
+ enable them to more easily fine tune and control how they monitor
+ their live performance. He touches on the fact that gear videos feed
+ into the consumerist mindset of music making, but gear is often
+ necessary to facilitate certain things, and setting up a portable
+ in-ear-monitor rig for their entire band is well… unavoidable. It’s
+ just a minor aside in a much deeper video about IEMs and touring and
+ FEEL. And quite the departure from his usual music education content.
+ But it sums up the main thesis of my consumerism gemlog quite nicely I
+ feel (or at least I am projecting my thoughts into a brief aside he
+ makes).</p>
+ <h2>tt-rss - in retrospect</h2>
+ <p>So tt-rss is <em>fine</em> honestly, I think I need to setup a better
+ theme, something that has a bit more contrast. I don’t REALLY read in it,
+ I just use it as the aggregator and then open the links directly. I don’t
+ mind the way it renders the full articles with images, but I do mind how
+ GREY it is by default (in “night” theme). It looks totally customizable
+ and I bet I can download a decent theme for it if I look. But I may spend
+ some time doing that and try and read more in application.</p>
+ <p>But other than that it’s been quite the improvement over my internet
+ experience. More RSS!!</p>
+ <h2>Conclusion</h2>
+ <p>I need more feeds, as I do enjoy reading. So I’m always on the look
+ out. I hate to throw in engagement-y things like “let me know” stuff but
+ I am genuinely looking for interesting suggestions for stuff you might
+ subscribe to over RSS. Even if it’s just “this is my webblog” :) I always
+ like reading people’s things. I should troll the aggregators and look at
+ folks capsule landings to see what is linked!</p>
+ <p>Anyway, you should look into getting an RSS aggregator setup. It’s
+ been really impactful on cutting down on internet scrolling and
+ mindlessness.</p>
+ </article>
+ ]]>
+ </description>
+ </item>
+ <item>
+ <title>CSS Themes Exist Now!?</title>
+ <link>https://www.senders.io/blog/2022-12-05/</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.senders.io/blog/2022-12-05/index.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 05 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
+ <description>
+ <![CDATA[
+ <article>
+ <h2>CSS Themes Exist Now!?</h2>
+ <p>Yeah news to me too! Seems like according to <a rel=
+ "external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href=
+ "https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-color-scheme#browser_compatibility">
+ the MDN</a> it’s been supported since 2019 for most browsers and
+ supported by all by now.</p>
+ <p>This is so wild!</p>
+ <h3>Why is this cool?</h3>
+ <p>Well you may have noticed this is in dark mode now (if you set your
+ preferences to dark in your OS/Browser). But this is cool because it
+ means we’re no longer restricted to using Javascript and custom
+ preferences for websites.</p>
+ <p>I had assumed this existed because sites like GitHub were defaulting
+ to darkmode despite me never setting anything in like my profile
+ settings. But I just assumed based off of my legacy knowledge this was
+ some custom render trick using javascript.</p>
+ <h4>Still no JS!</h4>
+ <p>I keep this blog JS free! While not all pages under the senders.io
+ umbrella are javascript free - everything in www.senders.io (this blog)
+ will always be.</p>
+ <p>I try to keep that, not only for my sake, but for your sake too - a
+ javascript free blog means the priority is reading.</p>
+ <h3>Examples</h3>
+ <p>So I achieve darkmode in this blog by doing the following:</p>
+ <pre><code>/* default / light */
+:root {
+ --background: white;
+ --font: black;
+ --quote: #eee;
+ --link: #0303ee;
+ --linkv: #551a8b;
+ --linkf: #f02727;
+ --articleborder: #060606;
+ --tableborder: #aaa;
+ --tablehead: #ebcfff;
+ --tablez: #eee;
+}
+@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
+ :root {
+ --background: #1e1e1e;
+ --font: #eee;
+ --quote: #444;
+ --link: #00d3d3;
+ --linkv: #cd78f4;
+ --linkf: #f02727;
+ --articleborder: #23ed9b;
+ --tableborder: #aaa;
+ --tablehead: #6f5a7e;
+ --tablez: #313131;
+ }
+}
+</code></pre>
+ <p>Essentially, I leverage <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href=
+ "https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Using_CSS_custom_properties">
+ CSS Variables</a> to define the specific areas I set theme specific
+ colors (my nav bar is static regardless of dark/light mode for
+ example).</p>
+ <p>Then if the media preference is dark - I overwrite the variables with
+ my dark mode values!</p>
+ <p>Whats tricky is originally most of these values didn’t actually HAVE
+ values set - I relied on the system default for things like links and the
+ page colors in an effort to use minimum CSS as well.</p>
+ <p>I still feel like I am honoring that since I don’t have to duplicate
+ any actual CSS this way, I just have a lookup table of color values.</p>
+ <p>That being said my CSS file is still only about 3kB which is not so
+ bad. And I’ve actually covered most themed properties already - links,
+ tables, quotes.</p>
+ <h4>Toggling Themes</h4>
+ <p>Something else I found out during this experiment is you can actually
+ toggle the themes directly in your developer tooling. By opening your
+ devtools and going to Inspector (in firefox at least) there are two
+ buttons in the styles section “toggle light color scheme” and “toggle
+ dark color scheme” using a sun and moon icon.</p>
+ <p>This made testing VERY easy and actually is what I noticed to prompt
+ me into looking up if this was a standard CSS thing or not. So thanks
+ Mozilla!</p>
+ <h3>Conclusion</h3>
+ <p>Yeah if you’ve never realized this check out the MDN guides on both
+ variables (I didn’t realize these got put in the standard either!) and
+ themes!</p>
+ <ul>
+ <li>CSS Variables: <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href=
+ "https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Using_CSS_custom_properties">
+ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Using_CSS_custom_properties</a>
+ </li>
+ <li>CSS Media prefers-color-scheme: <a rel=
+ "external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href=
+ "https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-color-scheme">
+ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-color-scheme</a>
+ </li>
+ </ul>
+ </article>
+ ]]>
+ </description>
+ </item>
+ <item>
+ <title>My Markdown -> HTML Setup</title>
+ <link>https://www.senders.io/blog/2022-11-06/</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.senders.io/blog/2022-11-06/index.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 06 Nov 2022 00:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
+ <description>
+ <![CDATA[
+ <article>
+ <h2>My Markdown -> HTML Setup</h2>
+ <p>A common way I see a lot of people blog, especially micro-blog, is in
+ <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/">markdown</a>.</p>
+ <figure>
+ <blockquote>
+ <p>Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted
+ text using a plain-text editor.</p>
+ </blockquote>
+ <figcaption>
+ <cite>— <a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown">Wikipedia |
+ Markdown</a></cite>
+ </figcaption>
+ </figure>
+ <p>It built itself on-top of common syntax prevalent on the web and was
+ designed to be converted into simple HTML output. Since it leveraged
+ preexisting syntax it was easy for new users to pick up, and is now found
+ all over the web and applications.</p>
+ <p>Since I started this website, I had been writing each page by hand
+ using a few tools to facilitate that - and for a while I had been looking
+ for a good way to try out using markdown to generate some lighter pages
+ and these blogposts.</p>
+ <h3>Writing HTML by hand</h3>
+ <p>When it comes to blogging a lot of platforms offer WYSIWYG editor –
+ allowing users to write in rich-text that then gets converted into HTML
+ in the style of the platform. But for my case, since I self host this
+ website, I decided to stick to my roots and write PURE HTML instead.</p>
+ <p>HTML is fairly simple and easy once you get use to the basic structure
+ of the system. And since I’ve been working in HTML almost two decades
+ now, at the time it felt like the best solution to make a clean
+ website.</p>
+ <p>I briefly touched on my design process in <a href=
+ "/blog/2019-01-21/">2019-01-21 - First! A New Years Resolution</a>
+ outlining that I wanted to make a very lightweight and simple website.
+ And at the time I believed the best way to achieve this goal was to
+ carefully structure and craft my website’s HTML by hand.</p>
+ <p>This article is making the process sound far more difficult than it is
+ – it’s mostly just tedious.</p>
+ <pre><code><article>
+<h2> Title </h2>
+<p>
+ Some paragraph....
+</p>
+<h3>
+<p> some subsection </p>
+</h3>
+<p> more text </p>
+... etc
+</code></pre>
+ <p>Is essentially what the website looks like - you can view the source
+ of this page to see – it’s very simple HTML.</p>
+ <p>The benefit I found doing this, mostly leveraging <a href=
+ "www.html-tidy.org/">tidy</a>, allowed a very easy to edit codebase. And
+ by leveraging the existing tags and their properties I also attempted to
+ keep the styling to an absolute minimum. Using existing tags to enforce
+ the styling I desired.</p>
+ <p>Only for certain areas (tables, code, quotes) where readability is an
+ issue do I setup custom CSS.</p>
+ <p>Most of this process is actually what will continue to happen but the
+ actual writing process will be unobstructed by the tedium of writing
+ HTML.</p>
+ <h3>Micro-blogging in general</h3>
+ <p>At the time of writing this, I have no ported over any of my <a rel=
+ "external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://gemini.circumlunar.space/">Gemini</a> micro-blogs. This
+ warrants a longer post, since I wrote consistently in gemini from
+ March 2021 through May 2021 – having only stopped due to a long move
+ leading to a lot of server downtime breaking the habit. My gemini
+ updated multiple days a week - mostly due to the extremely lightweight
+ and limited nature of the platform.</p>
+ <h4>Gemtext</h4>
+ <p><a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/gemtext.gmi">Gemtext</a>
+ was the gemini protocol’s standard MIME type. It was a basic markup
+ language that relied on line based syntax. It was purposefully as lean
+ as necessary because this was what was ACTUALLY being served to
+ clients – unlike Markdown which first needed to be converted to HTML,
+ gemtext was the actual text served and rendered on the viewers client.
+ You could customize the style of your client - but you could not, as
+ an author, dictate how your content would be viewed. This meant the
+ only aspects of your blog you had control over was the actual content
+ and it’s structure – which for a blog is really all you should care
+ about.</p>
+ <p>It’s syntax contained most of what I was actually using here already
+ from HTML:</p>
+ <ol>
+ <li>headings</li>
+ <li>paragraphs that were wrapped based on page-width</li>
+ <li>links</li>
+ <li>lists</li>
+ <li>quotes</li>
+ <li>preformatted-text / codeblocks</li>
+ </ol>
+ <p>Besides links - it also leveraged the same common syntaxes that
+ markdown did.</p>
+ <h4>Gemtext links</h4>
+ <p>From my brief time in the IRC and in geminispace in general - a lot of
+ the “recommendations” came from new users about providing in-line links.
+ The philosophy was that by forcing links to exist on their own line -
+ clients could configure how they wanted these to be seen and not have to
+ worry about links interfering with the text.</p>
+ <figure>
+ <blockquote>
+ <p>Like Gopher (and unlike Markdown or HTML), Gemtext only lets you
+ put links to other documents on a line of their own. You can’t make a
+ single word in the middle of a sentence into a link. This takes a
+ little getting used to, but it means that links are extremely easy to
+ find, and clients can style them differently (e.g. to make it clear
+ which protocol they use, or to display the domain name to help users
+ decide whether they want to follow them or not) without interfering
+ with the readability of your actual textual content.</p>
+ </blockquote>
+ <figcaption>
+ — <cite><a rel="external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href=
+ "https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/gemtext.gmi">gemini.circumlunar.space
+ – A quick introduction to “gemtext” markup | Links</a></cite>
+ </figcaption>
+ </figure>
+ <p>I felt that this provided a lot of useful limitations that removed a
+ huge barrier for me to actually write down ideas without feeling over
+ burdened. I also lurked in the IRC - as well as <a rel=
+ "external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://github.com/s3nd3r5/java-gemini-server">implemented my
+ own gemini server</a>.</p>
+ <p>As a quick aside – the java server was a lot of fun! The protocol was
+ very simple to work with for basic gemtext. I felt the ultimate downside
+ was trying to build something for basic gemini capsule hosting (like I
+ was using for a decent chunk of my time with gemini) - and something for
+ developers to use as a base application server. At the time in 2021 a lot
+ of talk was happening on IRC of users starting to look to provide more
+ complex experiences via the protocol and I wanted a way for those
+ interactions to be built out in Java - since most were in Go or Python at
+ the time. This decision lead to me burning out due to difficulties
+ splitting those responsiblities easily - where you could host along side
+ your application - since I lacked the experience with more complex Gemini
+ capsule applications.</p>
+ <p>But it was a good experience and I got hands on experience with Certs,
+ Netty, and SNI - which actually came in handy at my job!</p>
+ <h3>Wasn’t this about Markdown?</h3>
+ <p>A lot of what I liked about Gemini I found missing when I returned to
+ the World Wide Web. Writing a new post was tedious and I actually had a
+ few drafts sitting unposted. They’re probably checked into my git at this
+ moment! So I thought - why not just use markdown and convert to HTML?
+ That’s what it’s built for - and I already designed my site to work with
+ minimal customization of raw HTML tags!</p>
+ <h3>How I use Markdown</h3>
+ <p>Firstly, this blogpost was written in Markdown (with minimal HTML
+ sprinkled in). Then I render the markdown into HTML using <a rel=
+ "external noopener noreferrer"
+ target="_blank"
+ href=
+ "https://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/Code/discount/">Discount</a>.
+ Frankly, I don’t know how I stumbled across this markdown parser - I
+ think it came pre-installed on my KDE Arch system because another KDE
+ program used it. But I liked it, and it seemed extensible enough for
+ my needs.</p>
+ <p>This would produce the “body” of my articles - and I could then
+ prepend and append the template-head and foot to my html output to form a
+ blog post/web page.</p>
+ <h4>Customizations</h4>
+ <p>After I generated the output file, I replaced some placeholders in the
+ templates via <code>sed</code> and then <code>tidy</code>’d the HTML. The
+ only other major issue was Discount had no way of appending any link
+ attributes – so for external links I had <code>sed</code> append the
+ <code>rel</code> and <code>target</code> attributes - which work off the
+ assumption they’re not there. A lot of my home-server scripts rely on
+ assumptions…</p>
+ <p>This is all bundled up in a simple script file so I can just supply a
+ few arguments and the full page is re-rendered on command.</p>
+ <h3>Two Sources of Truth</h3>
+ <p>In the sytem I devised the markdown files are really the “source of
+ truth” but you could argue that the HTML files hold equal weigh - as
+ they’re what you’re reading right now. The markdown is only useful if I
+ render it as HTML. There exist nginx extensions to serve markdown as HTML
+ so I store everything as markdown. I could also provide some heading
+ information to the markdowns to remove the command arguments and have on
+ boot it generate the .html files in place before launching the site… But
+ these are all nice ideas for a later date.</p>
+ <p>Ultimately, this is something I contribute to ocassionally - I don’t
+ need something too complicated. I just need to output some HTML a few
+ times a year. So if I manually publish the HTML each time - that’s likely
+ far more efficent then re-rendering.</p>
+ <h3>Learnings</h3>
+ <p>This is the first post that uses this - though I’ve converted a page
+ over to this already. But once I worked out the kinks and built a flow
+ that works for me - this made the writing process a LOT easier. Another
+ issue was that once I <code>tidy</code>’d the HTML file - it became
+ frustrating to edit, and I didn’t always re-tidy it. Because the output
+ is always <code>tidy</code>’d by the script - I can edit the raw markdown
+ as needed. And the script generally will always output the same file
+ (with whatever changes I made of course). This makes the editing and git
+ history a lot clearer.</p>
+ <p>I would recommend writing in markdown - or even trying out gemini -
+ you can host your gemini capsule on the web even! (Most gemini webpages
+ are gemini capsules converted). I am sure other “blog focused markups”
+ also exist too.</p>
+ </article>
+ ]]>
+ </description>
+ </item>
+ <item>
+ <title>Manjaro Followup - Breaking things!</title>
+ <link>https://www.senders.io/blog/2021-01-05/</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.senders.io/blog/2021-01-05/index.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 05 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
+ <description>
+ <![CDATA[
+ <article>
+ <h2>Manjaro Follow-up - Breaking things!</h2>
+ <p>I wanted to write a quick follow-up covering how I managed to break,
+ and then recover, everything when I went to remove my old debian
+ partition.</p>
+ <h3>Recap</h3>
+ <p>To recap: I installed Manjaro alongside a Debian/sid and Windows 10
+ install. Each of those OSs were on their own SSDs. I went from a 128SSD
+ with Windows installed, to adding a 256 installing Debian. Years later I
+ split the Debian SSD into two parts - installing Manjaro on my new slice.
+ Since my last update I have been playing around with Manjaro and having
+ made my i3 keybindings for Kwin I've been pretty happy. But then I
+ started breaking things.</p>
+ <h3>Break stuff</h3>
+ <p>I broke my Manjaro by updating my Debian (apparently). To be honest
+ this is the one part I don't fully understand <i>why</i> it happened.
+ From what I could find online I didn't setup my system to handle two
+ separate Linux OS installs. But I was no longer able to boot directly
+ into Manjaro without using the initramfs failover boot option. I only
+ updated my Debian install because I was debugging something on my work
+ install, which both run Debian/sid. (Otherwise I would've used my
+ server which runs Debian/Stable). But considering I hadn't had any
+ need to boot back into Debian I decided to just get rid of it!</p>
+ <h3>GParted, Grub, Gotchas!</h3>
+ <p>I went in knowing I'd have to fix my Grub since I'd be
+ removing Debian, which was the OS that I configured when I first
+ dualbooted the machine, so I assumed they were linked somehow and I would
+ need to reinstall it. The process I followed was:</p>
+ <ul>
+ <li>Create a GParted Live USB</li>
+ <li>Launch GParted reconfigure my partitions</li>
+ <li>Open the terminal in the live USB and reinstall Grub</li>
+ </ul>The 3rd point being a bit of a "rest of the owl" I
+ wasn't sure what to expect. GParted thankfully warns you
+ "you're probably going to break stuff see our FAQ" which
+ had a section on reinstalling grub. Reading that the 3rd part became:
+ <ul>
+ <li>mount the linux OS</li>
+ <li>bind the live dirs that are needed: <code class='inline'>/dir /sys
+ /proc</code></li>
+ <li>chroot into the mounted folder</li>
+ <li>run <code class='inline'>grub-install <device></code></li>
+ </ul>But what I failed to realize (stupidly in hindsight) was the
+ "device" is the Master Boot Record (MBR) device. So in my case
+ Windows or <code class="inline">/dev/sdb</code>. I had assumed it was the
+ device of the linux install so I tried that and got notified my EFI boot
+ directory didn't look like an EFI partition... and from here it was
+ rabbit holes.
+ <h3>Where is my EFI partition?</h3>
+ <p>I have a fairly old Windows 7 install that has been upgraded to
+ Windows 10 during this whole journey. I've been meaning to reinstall
+ it (on a larger drive). But rather than having a few partitions on my
+ drive (typically having a boot partition) I just have the one (and a
+ recovery partition). Its marked as boot, and even mounted to <code class=
+ 'inline'>/boot/efi</code> I found when I was able to boot into Manjaro
+ again. But it made no sense to me. If I needed an EFI partition, why was
+ my efi pointed to the root of my Windows C drive? The rabbit hole
+ consisted of:</p>
+ <ul>
+ <li>Creating a 200MB Fat32 Boot partition</li>
+ <li>Mounting that as my efi-directory</li>
+ <li>Reinstalling grub (again on my Linux device)</li>
+ <li>Eventually getting it to boot straight into Manjaro</li>
+ <li>Modifying my <code class='inline'>/etc/fstab</code> to mount my
+ boot/efi to the new partition (oops)</li>
+ <li>Repeating the above steps 5 times hoping something would be
+ different</li>
+ <li>Eventually finding in a forum that grub should be on the
+ MBR...</li>
+ </ul>
+ <h3>The Fix and Final Steps</h3>
+ <p>The fix was to basically follow the steps above but use the MBR:</p>
+ <ul>
+ <li>Boot GParted Live USB</li>
+ <li>Properly configure any partitions (this case delete the
+ "EFI" partition)</li>
+ <li>Mount the linux device</li>
+ <li>Bind the necessary live dirs to the linux mount</li>
+ <li>Run grub-install to the MBR device</li>
+ <li>Reboot</li>
+ </ul>It was that misunderstanding about the MBR that sent me on a path,
+ but now I at least feel semi-confident in changing around my OSs knowing
+ how to fix Grub. But what bout the Fstab?
+ <p>Like all true movie monsters, my stupidity came back for the final
+ scare. I booted into Manjaro, from Grub! to have it crash on me. It
+ couldn't mount one of the devices! The deleted partition! I was in
+ the recover shell and was able to modify the Fstab to point back to the
+ correct boot/efi device. (Thankfully I was familiar with Fstab to begin
+ with). But editing two files in a super-low-res terminal is not my idea
+ of fun (okay, maybe it is).</p>
+ <h3>Conclusion</h3>
+ <p>One of my new years resolutions was to learn more about my system. So
+ lighting a fire I had to put out was a great way to get some more
+ knowledge on maintence for grub/dualbooting.</p>
+ </article>
+ ]]>
+ </description>
+ </item>
+ <item>
+ <title>Manjaro Experiment</title>
+ <link>https://www.senders.io/blog/2020-12-17/</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.senders.io/blog/2020-12-17/index.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 17 Dec 2020 00:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
+ <description>
+ <![CDATA[
+ <article>
+ <h2>Manjaro Experiment</h2>
+ <p>After years on Debian, running i3, I decided to try out a more
+ traditional Linux setup, and take a stab at gaming on Linux. I chose
+ Manjaro for a few reasons:</p>
+ <ul>
+ <li>It's not Debian based (it's arch btw /s)</li>
+ <li>It's still on Systemd so I won't lose that familiarity</li>
+ <li>For gaming it comes with pretty up to date drivers and setup for
+ running Steam games</li>
+ <li>It has a KDE installation which is what I wanted to run</li>
+ </ul>
+ <h3>Why "not Debian"</h3>
+ <p>Debian is home for me. I have used it for years on both work machines,
+ servers, personal desktop. But it comes with its own quirks. Starters - I
+ am running base Debian, not a Debian based system, which generally means
+ some packages are out of date. To get around this I run Sid/Unstable.
+ This hasn't been a particular issue, but sometimes there are version
+ conflicts and other just nuisances and no real <i>easy</i> way to get
+ every package in the proper version configuration. This was a particular
+ pain-point with getting Steam (nonfree too which adds another layer of
+ configurations) Wine and a few other packages all set up. Plus
+ 32-bit!</p>
+ <h4>i3</h4>
+ <p>I have been using i3 as my window manager and without really any other
+ desktop environment programs. My login is the typical tty debian login.
+ But running i3 and then having windows appear, especially game windows
+ which can be tempermental, getting tiled to have to break it out again is
+ just a hassle. While I could've gone with another Debian base running
+ a proper desktop environment + window manager I figured that'd be
+ boring and I'd just be trying out the programs and not the Linux,
+ which is half the fun.</p>
+ <p>That being said. i3 <i>is</i> Linux for me. Being able to just move
+ between windows with a macro and every bit of it just being intutive
+ (after you've learned!) is a productivity booster. Which is why I
+ still use it on my work machine, and can't see myself ever switching
+ off.</p>
+ <h3>KDE</h3>
+ <p>I've used Gnome and XFCE as desktop environments before, and
+ they're fine, but I've always like the customability,
+ flexibility, and polished look of KDE.</p>
+ <h4>Setting up KDE for an i3 addict</h4>
+ <p>By default KDE isn't really too hard to "get used to"
+ since it feels like any other OS, especially a windows setup. But the
+ main thing I needed to change is the <code class=
+ 'inline'>meta+<key></code> commands.</p>
+ <ul>
+ <li>Remapping the Virtual Desktop changes</li>
+ <li>Remapping the KWin window focuses</li>
+ <li>Remapping the KWin move to desktop</li>
+ <li>Installing DMenu</li>
+ <li>Shrinking the "start bar" panel</li>
+ <li>Removing Pager</li>
+ <li>Changing Task Manger to Window List</li>
+ <li>Configuring Desktop Layout to "Desktop" (this removes the
+ icons)</li>
+ </ul>Doing this helped make me feel at home so far, and not have to
+ retrain my brain.
+ <h4>Some of the key remappings</h4>
+ <p>Setting up the KWin window keymapping was really what made me feel at
+ home. For the first few hours with it, I felt as limited in my
+ productivity as with Windows. KDE and Windows share by default a lot of
+ the same keymappings around window manipulation and virtual desktop
+ changes. <b>Switch to desktop N</b> setting this as <code class=
+ 'inline'>meta+<N></code> where N is the dekstop 1-10 (0). <b>Switch
+ to Window to the Left/Right/Up/Down</b> This was one I was nervous
+ wouldn't exist as a keybind. But What was <code class=
+ 'inline'>meta+alt+<dir></code> was mapped to without the alt. This
+ allowed for the very annoying lack of ability to just jump between
+ browser and terminal, or especially two separate terminals. <b>Quit
+ Window</b> with <code class='inline'>meta+shift+Q</code>, <b>Tile
+ Window</b> command to use the Shift key rather, especially as
+ <code class='inline'>meta+<dir></code> was overwritten by the focus
+ switching.</p>
+ <h3>Manjaro</h3>
+ <p>So I went with KDE Manjaro. Manjaro aims for the gaming desktop
+ experience. Arch is new for me, so I feel that would be something to
+ adjust to and learn.</p>
+ <h2>Gaming</h2>
+ <p>It has only been a day with it as I am writing. But I was able to get
+ a fair amount of the fighting games I wanted to play work.</p>
+ <h3>Proton + Steam</h3>
+ <p>So far my main focus has been running the fighting games I noodle
+ around on in Steam. To do this I launched Steam and installed the proton
+ and setup to run all games, regardless of compatibility. None of the
+ games I hoped to run had worked this way. I then opt'd into the beta
+ for Proton running the experimental builds, which should generally have
+ the more up-to-date tunings for games. With this setup I was able to get
+ Soulcalibur VI to work. Battle for the Grid and Dragon Ball FighterZ both
+ had launching issues. So I looked around and found <a href=
+ "https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom/">Proton Ge
+ Custom</a> which is a custom fork of Proton that contains custom settings
+ and tweeks for various games. One of which is Battle For the Grid which
+ is how I found it. Using this I was able to play every game except Dragon
+ Ball FighterZ! A callout for Dead or Alive 6 which is performing
+ questionably. It can run and isn't actually too bad, but in windowed
+ or borderless it stutters and drops frames.</p>
+ <h4>Other issues</h4>
+ <p>Even on Windows there are issues with some games and your standard
+ configurations. Disabling Steam Overlay and adjusting the Steam Input
+ Setting on some games helped get some games working.</p>
+ <h3>Conclusion</h3>
+ <p>Gaming on Linux is still not great. Its MILES ahead of where it was
+ even a few years ago when I setup this PC. And I think it will take some
+ adjustment getting a feel for an i3less workflow.</p>
+ <h2>Update!</h2>
+ <h3>NTFS mounting</h3>
+ <p>Update! I got DOA and a few other games to run a bit smoother by
+ remounting my NTFS drives properly. I ended up using the following for my
+ /etc/fstab configuraiton for my NTFS drives: <code>UUID=<drive-id>
+ /mount/path ntfs
+ uid=1000,gid=1000,rw,user,exec,async,locale=en_US.utf8,umask=000 0
+ 0</code> I had noticed that both steam and mount.ntfs was running at
+ 20-40% CPU while not really doing anything. And then upwards of 80%
+ during gameplay.</p>
+ <h3>i3 Compatibility</h3>
+ <p>As I spend more time using the OS I made a few more adjustments:</p>
+ <ul>
+ <li>Removed everything except the Clock and System Tray.</li>
+ <li>I added KRunner to <code class='inline'>meta+space</code> to ease
+ running KDE specific programs that I can't be bothered to memorize
+ the name of</li>
+ <li>Back and forth on forcing "No border" on all windows.
+ Part of the reason I moved away from i3 was so that I had better
+ floating window management. And doing this would basically put me in an
+ equally hard to manage system for floating game windows. So until I
+ find a plugin that makes small taskbar/borders for the windows I'll
+ be sticking with the default.</li>
+ <li>On Manjaro at least: UNINSTALL mesa-demos! <code class=
+ 'inline'>sudo pacman -R lib32mesa-demos mesa-demos</code> This package
+ had the annoying "fire" demo which made dmenu opening firefox
+ a pain in the ass.</li>
+ </ul>The biggest difference was removing the Application Launcher from
+ the main panel. Having it there really felt like a crutch for running
+ programs. It is equal I would say to running apps as dmenu via
+ <code class='inline'>meta+d</code> vs just <code class=
+ 'inline'>meta</code> to launch the Application Launcher. However, the
+ bulky UI of it, even using just Window List, took away from the look/feel
+ I was going for.
+ </article>
+ ]]>
+ </description>
+ </item>
+ <item>
+ <title>Bread Blog (First post)</title>
+ <link>https://www.senders.io/blog/bread/</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.senders.io/blog/bread/index.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 17 Feb 2020 00:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
+ <description>
+ <![CDATA[
+ <article>
+ <h2>Bread</h2>
+ <p>I decided to make a singular dedicated page to my recent bread bakes.
+ I am trying to at least keep a log of each bake, what went wrong/right in
+ hopes of nailing a recipe that works best for me.</p>
+ <h3 id="2020-02-17">February 17, 2020</h3>
+ <p>First post! I have done four bakes in 2020 that are worth mentioning.
+ Three that ended up rather successful and one lesson learned. Because
+ this is my first post its containing three very similar bakes that were
+ effectively the same recipe</p>
+ <h4>Boules</h4>
+ <p>I have made two very good boules in 2020. I first made a pate
+ fermentee using the following ratio using 50% of my total flour weight:
+ (500g, so 250g).</p>
+ <table class="bake-info">
+ <caption>
+ Pate Fermentee
+ </caption>
+ <thead>
+ <tr>
+ <th>Item</th>
+ <th>%</th>
+ </tr>
+ </thead>
+ <tbody>
+ <tr>
+ <td>Flour (Bread)</td>
+ <td>100%</td>
+ </tr>
+ <tr>
+ <td>Water (Room temp)</td>
+ <td>70%</td>
+ </tr>
+ <tr>
+ <td>Yeast (Instant)</td>
+ <td>0.55%</td>
+ </tr>
+ <tr>
+ <td>Salt</td>
+ <td>10%</td>
+ </tr>
+ </tbody>
+ </table>To make the pate, I mixed all the dry ingredients together, then
+ added the room temperature water. I let that loose mixture rest for 15
+ minutes. Once it was rested, I wet my hands and bench (lightly) and
+ kneaded for roughly 8 minutes. After kneading I tightened the dough into
+ a boule and let it sit in a plastic wrap covered greased bowl for an
+ hour. After an hour I placed it into the friged, as is.
+ <p>The next day, basically in the AM when I had time to bake I took the
+ dough out of the fridge, cut it into smaller bits (four), and let it come
+ to room temperature (ish, about an hour). I prepped the same ratio above
+ except with warmer water (~108°F). When I added the water to the dry
+ ingredients I added the pate along with it. I used the curved edge of my
+ scrapper to cut into the pate and incorporate it fully. Once I felt it
+ was all one loose mess I let it sit for 15 minutes. After the 15 minutes
+ I wet my hands, and bench, and began to knead the dough for 8 minutes.
+ After kneading I formed the dough into a boule and placed it into a
+ greased bowl covered in plastic wrap. I let that sit on my bench for 90
+ minutes or so. After the first proof I dampened my bench and took the
+ risen dough out of the bowl and lightly pressed it into a thick circle. I
+ then took the, what would be, corners of the mass and folded them into
+ the center, rotating after each fold. This process creates a boule shape
+ while creating tension. I would continue to do this about 8-10 times
+ really until it felt like I couldn't grab anymore/it wouldn't
+ stick. Then I flipped the dough over and tightened the boule in a
+ scooping motion as I rotated it. Then placed it into my floured banneton.
+ I let it rise again for about 45 minutes. Around the 30 minute mark I
+ would preheat my oven to 500°F. Once the oven was preheated and its been
+ at least 45 minutes. I flipped out the dough onto the peel (dusted with
+ corn flour) and scored it. I then misted the top with a spray bottle of
+ water and slid it onto my baking stone. While preheating the oven I also
+ set a kettle to boil some water which I poured into the preheating baking
+ sheet on the bottom rack. I set the timer for 10 minutes and every two
+ minutes or so I would add more boiling water. After 6 minutes I rotated
+ the dough using the peel (careful not to damage it). And misted the
+ facing side with the spray bottle (I found the back is lighter so this
+ helps make the entire steaming more even). After the turn and mist I add
+ twenty minutes to my timer and drop the temperature to 450°F.</p>
+ <p>This produces a nice, well risen boule with a golden brown crust.</p>
+ <p>I skipped the pate in my most recent bake and just did 100% (500g)
+ starting from "day 2". I also subtituted 100g with AP
+ flour.</p>
+ <h4>Baguettes</h4>
+ <p>I actually did the boule recipe first for my baguettes. I did aiming
+ for 1000g flour so my pate was with 500g and a 50/50 AP/Bread mix. I
+ screwed up the ratio for yeast and added almost double. The recipe is
+ essentially the same with the final steps being the difference.</p>
+ <p>After the first proof I sliced the dough into three chunks. Then I
+ formed those into boules and let them sit for 5 minutes. After resting I
+ then rolled them into batards and let them sit for 10 minutes. After 10
+ minutes I then rolled them into baguettes and placed them on the baguette
+ sheet. And then baked them. After letting them rise for 45 or so
+ minutes.</p>
+ <h4>Accidents</h4>
+ <p>Baguette rolling is hard. And I need to let the dough rest longer
+ between each shape.</p>
+ <p>1000g for three ~15 inch baguettes is too much. I would do 750g next
+ time.</p>
+ <p>Proofing on the sheet is not recommended in the future as the rose
+ really well (probably all that extra yeast!) and ended up sticking
+ together.</p>
+ <p>I broke my oven light with my spray bottle. And I ruined my cast irons
+ seasoning usnig that for the boiling water.</p>
+ <h4>What to do next time</h4>
+ <p>Next french style boule, I want to do a pate again. As I've only
+ done it for one boule loaf. And I want to try making two loafs from
+ it.</p>
+ <h2>Resources</h2>
+ <p><a target="_blank"
+ href="https://bakewithjack.co.uk">Bake With Jack's Youtube
+ Channel</a> really helped me shape up my shaping up. And the core of
+ the pate+french bread recipe is based on that from <a target="_blank"
+ href=
+ "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39910.The_Bread_Baker_s_Apprentice">The
+ Bread Baker's Apprentice</a></p>
+ </article>
+ ]]>
+ </description>
+ </item>
+ <item>
+ <title>remember/recall - what could’ve been a command line tool</title>
+ <link>https://www.senders.io/blog/2020-01-13/</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.senders.io/blog/2020-01-13/index.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
+ <description>
+ <![CDATA[
+ <article>
+ <h2>remember/recall - what could've been a command line tool</h2>
+ <p>During a meeting at work when I realized I often forget useful
+ commands. So I had the bright idea to create a command line tool that
+ would basically append a file with the command you wanted to remember
+ that you could search over later if you wanted to recall a certain
+ command. I figured I could it could just be a simple bash script that
+ recalls your bash-history and appends it to a file, all things that are
+ incredibly easy to do... or so I thought.</p>
+ <h3>Look before you leap</h3>
+ <p>This article is a reminder to myself to test the core functionality
+ first, before decorating your program/script with all those bells and
+ whistles. While I did learn a lot in the process it is always a good to
+ check the basics first.</p>
+ <h3>What went right</h3>
+ <p>I actually ended up learning a lot during the development of the
+ (never finished) tool. I had never used <code>getopts</code> inside a
+ script before, which turned out to be extremely intuitive. That was all
+ that went right...</p>
+ <h3>What went wrong</h3>
+ <p>Literally, everything else that could've went wrong did. The
+ "project" was a single bash script roughly 160 lines long
+ before I found out it wouldn't work. It was a series of flags that
+ enabled actions that called functions, some of which ended the script
+ either successfully or not. It wasn't necessarily a mess to read (I
+ tried to make it that every function ended up in an exit so I knew if I
+ entered I would need to assume it terminated) but it was hard to follow
+ when writing. I tried to allow it so you could default an action to make
+ the CLI intuitive which lead to a messy set of if/elses and switch
+ cases.</p>
+ <h4>You can't access un-committed bash history</h4>
+ <p>History command in a bash shell commits the history at the end of the
+ session. This makes sense once you know this, there are a lot of reasons
+ saving the commands to file after every execution is probably not the
+ best idea. However, it can be enabled with a flag when you enable a shell
+ session. But I didn't want to build a tool that required me to
+ remember I had to add something to my bash_profile before it would work.
+ I wanted something I could just copy onto a new machine and have access
+ to its functionality.</p>
+ <h3>Lesson learned</h3>
+ <p>While developing a tool to help me remember things, I learned
+ something I cannot forget: Test the core, simplest functionality first.
+ Before you do anything validate what you're trying to do will work.
+ Because after building all of these fancy bells and whistles, if it
+ can't do the basics, there is no point.</p>
+ </article>
+ ]]>
+ </description>
+ </item>
+ <item>
+ <title>Lisps, Assembly, C, and Conlangs</title>
+ <link>https://www.senders.io/blog/2019-12-09/</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.senders.io/blog/2019-12-09/index.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 09 Dec 2019 00:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
+ <description>
+ <![CDATA[
+ <article>
+ <h2>Lisps, Assembly, C, and Conlangs</h2>
+ <p>I had originally hoped to do more blogging as a way of practicing my
+ writing and an incentive to do more hobby programming. The intent was
+ never to make this site solely programming, I had actually a few scrapped
+ posts about baking and guitar that just didn't get anywhere... but
+ that being said I did have a fair amount of hobbying in 2019 that I can
+ share some unfiltered, semi-structured thoughts on.</p>
+ <h3>Racket, 80x86, and even more C</h3>
+ <h4>Racket</h4>
+ <p><a target="_blank"
+ href="https://racket-lang.org">Racket</a> is a general-purpose
+ lisp-like language. I had began messing around in it with the
+ intention of creating a similar language to <a target="_blank"
+ href="https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/">Scribble</a> a document
+ authoring language written in Racket. I made <a target="_blank"
+ href="https://xkcd.com/1205/">the classic mistake</a> of trying to
+ create a productivity tool rather than just do the task I had
+ originally intended to do. It was interesting messing around in a
+ lisp/functional language which I haven't really used in a long
+ time. I wish I had more insightful things to say about it or project
+ to share. Either way its very worth the look.</p>
+ <h4>6502 -> 80x86 -> Commander X16</h4>
+ <p>I wanted to play around with writing some assembly language programs.
+ I looked back at the NES tutorials and tried writing some basic
+ hello-world programs for it, but never really came out with anything
+ worth while. I booted up dosbox and tried experimenting in some DOS
+ programming to get a kick of nostalgia. On my way over to a friends
+ apartment I stumbled across an 80x86 reference book which I took home and
+ dug into. I made some decent progress in, relative to my 6502 learning.
+ But this was in the summer, and I was preparing for what would turn into
+ a pretty time consuming move. After my move, my puppy, and some youtube,
+ <a target="_blank"
+ href="http://www.the8bitguy.com">The 8-Bit Guy</a> made a video about
+ his 8 Bit computer project <a target="_blank"
+ href="http://www.commanderx16.com/X16/Ready.html">Commander X16</a>
+ which I started looking into. Like all the other assembly language
+ projects they never amounted to more than a few print statements or
+ colors on the screen. But X16 is something I am going to keep an eye
+ on in 2020.<br>
+ <a target="_blank"
+ href="https://eater.net/">Ben Eater</a> also started a <a target=
+ "_blank"
+ href="https://eater.net/6502">6502 video series</a> which was amazing,
+ and thankfully my learnings from earlier in the year made the content
+ very understandable. In summary, I spent a lot of 2019 reading and
+ watching a lot of content about assembly language programming, but
+ never really did anything with it.</p>
+ <h4>Never ending C</h4>
+ <p>Without much to really say on the topic, I kept writing small programs
+ in C throughout the year. I spent a lot of time debugging and
+ troubleshooting a prefix terminal calculator with the intention of making
+ it a full utility to use on the command line / from within scripts. You
+ could do simple math without opening up x-calc, which I find myself doing
+ to check some quick math. Example code: <code class="inline">calc "+
+ 1 1"</code>. To me this was far cleaner than writing: <code class=
+ 'inline'>echo $((1+1))</code>. The big ideas I had for it was adding a
+ REPL and making it a command line calculator tool where you could get the
+ features of a standard calculator with store and recall functions. This
+ project involved making two stacks: the operations and the numbers.
+ Implementing two stacks from scratch was interesting and I may upload the
+ source and link it in an update. Overall it was full of breaks, bugs,
+ wrong turns, and bizarre memory issues. So needless to say it was a fun 3
+ days of programming.</p>
+ <h3>Non Programming Writing</h3>
+ <p>The project that soaked up a majority of my writing time, which sadly
+ should've been documented here, was my conlang / world-building
+ project "Tyur". This project spawned out of sci-fi story ideas
+ that, of course, never went anywhere (due to my poor dialog writing, and
+ writing in general) and my interest in language history. I have been
+ reading <a target="_blank"
+ href=
+ "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1831667.The_Horse_the_Wheel_and_Language">
+ The Horse the Wheel and Language</a> by David W. Anthony, which goes into
+ the history around Proto-Indo-European. It can be a bit dense so I had
+ been reading it on and off, and during the off times also started
+ <a target="_blank"
+ href=
+ "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18635317-the-origins-of-language">The
+ Origins of Language: A Slim Guide</a> by James R. Hurford, which tries
+ to provide insights on the evolutionary concept of language. Both of
+ these provided some fodder for the idea of creating my own <a target=
+ "_blank"
+ href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language">conlang</a>.
+ My conlang is "Tyur" the language spoken by the Tyur people.
+ This process has really been a mix of world-building around the Tyur
+ and some fun fantasy mini story ideas similar to The Lord of the Rings
+ and old Warhammer Fantasy worlds. This however began my adventure down
+ the rabbit hole of trying to figure out how to create a font so I can
+ write more here about it. The documentation on this conlang is a mix
+ of loose-leaf folded in my bag that I scribble on when I get an idea.
+ So figuring out a proper way of building the alphabet and some root
+ words to start a dictionary are my current goals for the remainder of
+ the year/ start of 2020.</p>
+ <h3>Closing</h3>
+ <p>In closing, I think despite not writing much here, I messed around
+ with some interesting languages this year, and hope I can hobby more in
+ 2020.</p>
+ </article>
+ ]]>
+ </description>
+ </item>
+ <item>
+ <title>Venturing back into C</title>
+ <link>https://www.senders.io/blog/2019-02-17/</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.senders.io/blog/2019-02-17/index.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 17 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
+ <description>
+ <![CDATA[
+ <article>
+ <h2>Venturing back into C</h2>
+ <p>For the past two weeks or so I have been diving back into C
+ programming. I've found it to be a very fun and refreshing experience
+ coming off of a slog of Java 11 updates at work. I've found comfort
+ in its simplicity and frustrations in my "I can do this without an
+ IDE" mindset.</p>
+ <p>I started C programming in College during a 8 AM course of which all I
+ can remember is that it was at 8 AM. I loved programming in C, dealing
+ with memory, pointers, no strings, structs, no strings, linking, no
+ strings. It was a really interesting difference from the web and Java
+ programming I had done previously. Obviously the lack of the
+ "string" type made things interesting and initially a challenge
+ for me back then. In my most recent endevour I found <code class=
+ 'inline'>char *</code> to be perfectly suitable for every case I came
+ across. It was usually a separate library that was failing me, not a
+ fixed char array. This was mostly due to the types of programs I was
+ writting in college were text adventures where all of what I did was
+ using strings. And my lack of understanding of what was actually
+ happening in C was really what was causing all the issues.</p>
+ <h3>The Project</h3>
+ <p>I started working on an application I had been meaning to develop
+ called <a href=
+ 'https://github.com/s3nd3r5/reminder'><b>reminder.d</b></a>. This daemon
+ would monitor for reminder notifications I would send via a CLI. It queue
+ them up based on some time set to send the notification. I ended up
+ writing both the CLI and the daemon in this past week, both in C.</p>
+ <h4>The Beginning</h4>
+ <p>This project started with an outline (as a README) which I think was
+ the reason this ended up as an actually successful project. I had been
+ thinking about this for a long time, and had begun using a calendar to
+ keep track of long term reminders/dates etc. First, I outlined the
+ architecture "how would I actually do want to send myself
+ remidners". Since half my day is spent infront of a computer, with a
+ terminal open or at least two keystrokes away, a CLI would do the trick.
+ Then how do I actually send myself notifications... writing them down. So
+ I can use the CLI to write to a file and have a daemon pick up the
+ changes and notify me once it hits the desired time posted.</p>
+ <h4>The CLI</h4>
+ <p>The CLI <b>remindme</b> took in messages and appened them to a file.
+ This file would be monitored by the daemon later on. Each reminder
+ consisted of three parts:</p>
+ <ul>
+ <li><i>Message</i> - The body of the notification.</li>
+ <li><i>Time</i> - This is either a datetime or a period for when the
+ notification should send.</li>
+ <li><i>Flag</i> - The Flag was set by the CLI when written to the file,
+ this marks the status of the reminder</li>
+ </ul>After a notification is written the daemon will pick up the
+ notification and notify if the time set is now/past.
+ <h4>The Daemon</h4>
+ <p>The Daemon <b>reminder-daemon</b> opened and tailed a file at
+ <i>/usr/local/etc/reminder.d/$USER.list</i>. It would tail the file
+ monitoring any incoming lines parsing them into reminders. The syntax of
+ the reminder is <code class='inline'>FLAG EPOCHSEC MESSAGE</code> .
+ Tokenizing on spaces it was then added to a linked-list sorted by time.
+ Every second it checks the file for any new lines, adding reminders as
+ they come in, then check the head of the list. If the reminder at the
+ head is ready to be notified the daemon pops it off the list and sends
+ the notification. After a notification is sent successfully the daemon
+ modifies that line in file updating its <code class='inline'>FLAG</code>
+ to 'd'. This is so when the daemon starts back up it skips the
+ reminder. Notifications are sent via <i>libnotify</i>: <code class=
+ 'inline'>Reminder - $DATETIME</code> with the message body. They are also
+ set to last until dismissed manually, this way if were to walk away, once
+ I sat down I'd see the stale reminder waiting.</p>
+ <h4>Future Plans for Reminder.d</h4>
+ <p>Having a system to create and send myself notifications is incredibly
+ useful but having them limit to just the computer I sent them on makes
+ them a very limited. I have been using them at work for the last few days
+ and its nice to be able to tell myself to remeber to email a person after
+ lunch. But I would like to be able to tell myself things later in the
+ day. I have planned since the beginning to have a remote server I can
+ sync the reminders through. In addition having an application running on
+ my phone that also gets and sets reminders.</p>
+ <p>Remote syncing would change entirely how I deal with reminders in the
+ file.</p>
+ <pre>
+<code>
+ struct remnode {
+ long fileptr;
+ struct reminder* reminder;
+ struct remnode* next;
+ };
+ </code></pre>
+ <p>Is currently the struct I use to keep track of the reminders.
+ <code class='inline'>fileptr</code> is the line of the file where the
+ reminder is, so I can <code class='inline'>fseek</code> back to the
+ location and overwrite its flag. I cannot currently think of a way to
+ keep the files perfectly identical without introducing countless
+ edgecases. What I do think might work is providing some form of UUID.
+ When a remote pull tells the systems daemon that a notification has been
+ cleared it can mark it by ID. Right now the fileptr is effectively its
+ ID, but that will not work anymore. A composite key of the daemons own id
+ (generated at install?) with a new ID of each incoming message would help
+ ensure uniqueness across ID generations across multiple systems.</p>
+ <h3>What I've learned</h3>
+ <p>First off, I probably could've done this in bash. With
+ <code class='inline'>date notify-send git awk cron</code> and a few other
+ useful commands I could very easily keep track of file changes and push
+ notifications at a certain time. But seeing as I scrap together bash
+ scripts all the time I though C would make things more fun.</p>
+ <p>Writing manpages was the probably the most fun I had working on the
+ project. They have a simple elegance to them, similar to C. That being
+ said you could FEEL the age of the language. Every single decision is
+ there to make things simple to parse. Even compared to modern markup the
+ explicit direct nature of the language made it so easy to learn. Every
+ tag served a specific purpose and each objective I had had a flag to do
+ it.</p>
+ <pre><code>
+.TH REMINDME 1
+.SH NAME
+ remindme \- Send yourself reminders at a specific time on one or more devices
+.SH SYNOPSIS
+.B remindme
+[\fB\-t\fR \fITIME\fR]
+[\fB\-\-at \fITIME\fR]
+[\fB\-i\fR \fIPERIOD\fR]
+[\fB\-\-in\fR \fIPERIOD\fR]
+ </code>
+ </pre>
+ <p>Libnotify was insanely easy to work with, from a programming
+ perspective.</p>
+ <pre><code>
+ NotifyNotification *notif = notify_notification_new(title, rem->message, "info");
+ notify_notification_set_app_name(notif, APP_NAME);
+ notify_notification_set_timeout(notif, NOTIFY_EXPIRES_NEVER);
+
+ GError* error = NULL;
+ gboolean shown = notify_notification_show(notif, &error);
+ </code>
+ </pre>
+ <h3>In closing</h3>
+ <p>Overall, this was an extremely fun first week of engineering. I look
+ forward to what I am able to do syncing and sending notifications on
+ android.</p>
+ <p>For the zero people reading, grab a beer and outline your project.
+ Full through. Think about the how, then write it down. Don't worry
+ about getting in the weeds of how to write a manfile, thats what is fun
+ about programming. I thought I botched my debian/sid environment
+ uninstalling and reinstalling a notification daemon. Infact I think its
+ caused me to take a stance on the whole systemd thing. Either way, start
+ a private repo (they're free now) write a README and a LICENSE file
+ and iterate on the README until you realize "oh shit this is
+ something I can do". Then do it. This project still needs some work,
+ but for an MVP, its actually done. And now I can dive in the deep end of
+ trying to actually make it easy to setup on a fresh PC. Or dive into
+ modern android development and server syncing...</p>
+ </article>
+ ]]>
+ </description>
+ </item>
+ <item>
+ <title>First! A New Years Resolution</title>
+ <link>https://www.senders.io/blog/2019-01-21/</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.senders.io/blog/2019-01-21/index.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 21 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
+ <description>
+ <![CDATA[
+ <article>
+ <h2>First! A New Years Resolution</h2>
+ <p>I like to write small hacky things from time to time when I have a
+ weekend to myself, or a day, or an hour... But I never had a place to put
+ them or the push to complete them beyond their initial hack. So I decided
+ I should write a blog about it.</p>
+ <p>Also for work I had to write some prose about myself, something beyond
+ a technical document or RFC and I realized I am shit at writing my
+ thoughts outside of a very direct specific technical way.</p>
+ <p>I am not sure if it is the age of the internet I grew up in where most
+ of my written communication was informal or for school. But my personal
+ writing skills are trash and this is my attempt to kill all the birds
+ with one stone</p>
+ <h3>What can be expected here</h3>
+ <p>My intentions for this site beyond just a landing page with my resume,
+ I hope to upload some code-snippets from things I found interesting,
+ ideally some recordings, drawings, and model-painting.</p>
+ <h3>How often do I intend to update this blog</h3>
+ <p>Ideally, whenever I have something that I feel is worth sharing. But
+ for the sake of my resolution I want to do at least one post a month, and
+ if I am keeping my other resolutions I should have content to put
+ here</p>
+ <h3>Designing my site</h3>
+ <p>Designing this blog actually took way more time than it should have.
+ It began when I wanted to tackle a <i>javascriptless</i> website. And I
+ found that a bit difficult if I wanted to have code with syntax
+ highlighting. So I wrote a python script to generate <code class=
+ 'inline'><pre></code> tag wrapping Java code with partial syntax
+ highlighting.Possibly mistaking <code class='inline'>highlight.js</code>
+ usage documentation. But I would like to prevent having javascript on my
+ main website keeping it as simplistic as possible.</p>
+ <p>I test the site using both <code class='inline'>tidy</code> and
+ <code class='inline'>nginx</code> via <code class='inline'>docker</code>.
+ Using tidy I can validate the html (making sure I didn't miss any
+ tags etc) and tidy up any odd spacing. And then visually test it running
+ nginx. Having it served up similarly to s3 all the paths will work, and
+ is insanely easy to setup! If you're reading this and have anything
+ beyond a simple html file I recommend running docker + nginx over any
+ javascript server.</p>
+ <p>Then I deploy the site through <code class='inline'>s3-cli</code>
+ Which is simple and to the point.</p>
+ <h3>In Closing</h3>
+ <p>I wanted to include more but I ran out of time today to write more, I
+ will probably update this article with more information (and an updated
+ timestamp). Or just make another post of my code highlighting task.</p>
+ </article>
+ ]]>
+ </description>
+ </item>
+</channel>
+</rss>
diff --git a/www/blog/index.html b/www/blog/index.html
index d2252ea..d266b8e 100644
--- a/www/blog/index.html
+++ b/www/blog/index.html
@@ -32,6 +32,9 @@
<article>
<h1>Blog Index</h1>
<ol>
+ <li>
+ <a href="/blog/2022-12-31/">2022-12-31 - RSS - A Follow-up</a>
+ </li>
<li>
<a href="/blog/2022-12-05/">2022-12-05 - CSS Themes Exist Now!?</a>
</li>
--
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