Scribbles 'n Bits
Hi, I'm John! đź––

I'm a chronic technical tinkerer, and I scribble a bit about my small technical projects, discoveries, and learnings.

Longer deep-dives at runtimeterror.
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Publishing my Obsidian Vault with Quartz

I've been using Obsidian for managing my thoughts and notes and references for a few years. I've toyed a few times with using Obsidian Publish to share some of those notes publicly, but I wasn't sure I'd get enough benefit from that to justify the $8/mo subscription just for Publish.  Plus I'd rather host on a system I control. Well yesterday I stumbled across Quartz: “Quartz is a fast, batteries-included static-site generator that transforms Markdown content into fully functional websites. ” Hugo, Jekyll, and 11ty are also SSGs which convert Markdown files into functional websites, but Quartz is optimized for the...
May 4th, 2024

Adding MusicThread to My /now Page

It's been a few months since I shared how I had integrated (near) realtime weather station data into my omg.lol profile page. I've since done a little bit more work to start managing that (and the related /now page) with GitOps. Not only has that allowed me to update my pages from my terminal, but it's also made it easier (and safer) for me to tinker with the presentation. So today I knocked out something I'd been intended to do for ages: I set up my /now page to pull the latest album or track from my "Now Playing" thread...
May 1st, 2024

I Just Hopped to Bunny.net

Last night, a wild hare took hold of me, and I decided to leap from Cloudflare to bunny.net for my runtimeterror.dev blog's DNS and CDN. I've been cozy in the burrow of Cloudflare's offering for years, nibbling on their services that go beyond DNS and CDN, like Cloudflare Tunnels for serving internal resources externally and Cloudflare Workers and Crowdsec Bouncers as a sort of distributed fail2ban setup. So while I thought I might burrow into Bunny on a spare domain, I didn't really intend to hop providers for the main blog. Yet bunny.net whiskered its way into my favor surprisingly...
April 26th, 2024

I'm Tired

So very tired.  Our 10-year-old Boston Terrier, Pippin, developed a nasty honking cough back in October, and that turned out to be caused by a tumor growing at the base of his heart. He got radiation treatment in December and hasn't been coughing since. He had a follow-up CT two weeks ago and that confirmed that the tumor has stopped growing and has been slightly reduced in size (apparently it's a type of slow-growing tumor which means it's also slow to die), but the docs determined that he had some lung inflammation from the radiation. He was prescribed a round...
April 24th, 2024

Trying Tabby Terminal

A recent toot from Jack Baty introduced me to the lovely Berkeley Mono font. One thing led to another and, well, I purchased the first font I've ever paid for (seriously, it's that good). Installing the font for use in VS Code didn't take too much effort; I just dropped the relevant TTF files into `/usr/fonts/share/truetype/` and then updated my VS Code config. Being able to use the new font in my terminal emulator posed a more difficult problem. You see, my primary computer is a Framework Chromebook, where I do most of my work in the "Crostini" Linux development...
April 19th, 2024

From Scribbles to Gemini, with EchoFeed

I posted almost a month ago that I was pausing my Scribblesing while I focused on further adventures in Geminispace. But then Robb Knight went and released the much-anticipated EchoFeed, and I thought it might be fun to see if I could feed my Gemini capsule from Scribbles. After tinkering with it quite a bit today, I think I've got a working (if not particularly elegant) solution. Now, when EchoFeed sees a new post on my Scribbles feed, it copies the post to a Markdown file in the GitHub repo I use for deploying content to my capsule. A GitHub Actions...
April 14th, 2024

Dear Driver

“There are some things I'd like you to know before you get back on the road (with me).” I've seen a lot of dumb, dangerous stuff on the road around me, yet I haven't been involved in so much as a parking lot fender bender in over 20 years. That may come down to luck, but I think some of my driving habits have also helped keep me safe. In any case, I'd like to keep that streak going. Here's how you can help me (and help yourself in the process). • When you're driving, you're driving. That's it. Period....
April 13th, 2024

On Using GenAI Responses to Explain Things to Others...

“Just don't.” Nobody benefits from an AI-generated explanation of $topic copy-and-pasted into a chat, email, discussion forum, blog post, or other communication. Such explanations are often incomplete or inaccurate, and sharing them in that way comes across as a low-effort attempt to show everyone how smart you are(n't). It doesn't help anyone, and probably annoys everyone. If you want to explain something to someone, do it in your own words! Not only does that allow you to tailor the explanation to the audience and context, but it will usually help you develop a better understanding of the topic as well....
April 6th, 2024

Unnecessary GitHub Profile Eye Candy

While futzing around a bit yesterday, I came across a GitHub profile which showed a purple "snake" eating its way through the user's contributions grid. I laughed at how unnecessary this was, and then promptly set about adding it to my own profile page. It turned out to be really easy to do, thanks to the snk action from Platane: • Platane/snk on GitHub Here's the workflow I worked up to implement it on my page: name: mek snek on: schedule: - cron: "0 */12 * * *" workflow_dispatch: push: branches: - main jobs: snek: permissions: contents: write runs-on: ubuntu-latest...
March 29th, 2024

Discord Is Not A Forum

“And get off my lawn.” Over the past several years, there's been this trend for new companies to stand up a Discord server instead of hosting a discussion forum where users can exchange ideas, offer feedback, and provide support to each other. And I hate it. For decades, if I had a problem with a software product I could search the internet for the symptoms/errors and could generally find someone else who had encountered the same issue. Often, the results would lead me to a thread on a company's community forum, and that thread would include helpful troubleshooting tips, workarounds,...
March 26th, 2024

Habits of Bad Domain Registrars

I have a small-but-growing collection of domains. Some are used for public projects like this capsule, some find purpose for internal personal projects, some are used primarily for email addresses, and several more just sit idle waiting for a use. Assembling this collection has taken me through many different domain registrars, with varying levels of user-unfriendliness. If you, as a registrar, do any of (let alone *all* of) the following, know that your business model is hot+wet garbage: • Parking 1000 CNAMEs on newly-registered domains, which then have to be manually removed because you don't offer a user-facing API.* •...
March 19th, 2024

Parking Scribbles, For Now

I'm really impressed with the simplicity and polish of the Scribbles platform, but the more I've used it the less I'm convinced that it's the right fit for me. I love the idea of being able to scrawl out quick posts in a web browser, but that's not actually how I manage my writing workflow. I came to Scribbles so that I wouldn't have to worry as much about things like formatting and CSS, but I miss the control (creative and otherwise) that self-hosting provides. I think I've found another approach that fits my style a bit better: a self-hosted...
March 14th, 2024

BOOX Note Air 3 C E-Ink Writing Tablet

I recently picked up a BOOX Note Air3 C color e-ink writing tablet, with the intention of using it for reading ebooks, taking notes, sketching out diagrams, and marking up PDF documents. I've now spent just shy of two weeks using it on a near-daily basis. I'm not looking to write a full-on review, but I thought I'd share some thoughts on how the Air3 has been working out for me. And it's been working out very, very well. One of the things that initially attracted me to the Air3 is that it is an Android-based e-ink tablet (with full...
March 12th, 2024

GitOps for omg.lol

I've been active on omg.lol ("the best internet address that you’ve ever had") for several months now, and have really been enjoying my stay. omg.lol provides a number of delightfully-simple services, and it ties them together with a friendly API. Last month, I made use of the Pastebin API to power near-realtime weather information on my omg.lol profile page.  Last night, I crafted some quick GitHub Actions workflows to talk to the Now Page and Web endpoints and make updates to those pages with simple git commits. BenefitsThis brings a few benefits: • I can make changes without having to...
March 8th, 2024

Self-Hosting a Search Engine

I've lately been playing a bit with a self-hosted instance of SearXNG, an utterly-unpronounceable privacy-respecting open-source metasearch engine. Rather than maintaining its own index or running its own crawlers (as something like YaCy does), SearXNG simply asks other engines for their results to a given query (remember Dogpile from back in the day?). The really cool thing with SearXNG is that it also gives you, the user, a whole lot of control over what engines it uses to create its aggregated results.It's pretty neat, and the results so far have been fairly decent. If you'd like to give it a...
February 21st, 2024
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