🆕 blog! “eInk Display for Octopus's Agile Energy Tariff”
I'm a little bit obsessed with building eInk displays. They're pretty cheap second hand. They're low energy, passive displays, with good-enough performance for occasional updates. Here's a new one which shows me what the current cost of my electricity is: Background After installing solar panels, a …
I've been trying out several userscripts for Kbin recently, which have made the website way more enjoyable than it already was. I wanted to share them with my fellow Kbin users....
I am enjoying playing with the eInk Watchy. It is a cute package and is everything I want in a Smart-Watch; geeky, long battery life, and not obnoxious. But - fuck me! - the documentation is atrocious! Well, that's a lie. There is no documentation. I has the "Chat to us on Discord" anti-pattern that […]
🆕 blog! “Server-Side Rendering of Embedded Markdown Code Snippets in WordPress”
Because I'm a grumpy old man, I don't use Gutenberg or Block themes on my WordPress. Instead, I write everything in Markdown. When I write code snippets in Markdown, they look like this: ```php $a = 1; echo $a; if ($a < 5) { // Do Something return thing( $a, true …
I feel like a highlighted basic "kbin how to" on the frontpage would really help kbin in the beginning, I still feel like I don't know exactly how all of this works, didn't knew what things like "boost" means, the difference between adding a new article/ post/ photo is still not clear to me. Just a really simple 1 minute how to...
Since the question came up, here's how I achieved the look that some have compared to "Wes Anderson" or "Edward Hopper" since I posted my recent batch of early morning photos. (see https://strangeobject.space/@esther/110918033401974458)
The photos were shot on an OM-D E-M10 mk3 with the Olympus 17mm/1.8 wide angle lens at f8, ISO 200 and 1/25 s shutter. Sharpness and getting the center perspective right was crucial so I shot on a tripod.
After the usual lens-correcting on the RAW file, I added a gradient map adjustment layer with a red tones in the shadows and yellow-greenish tints in the highlights, set it to a mid-range opacity to not over-do it and adjused the blending curves to control the balance between shadow and highlight toning.
Getting there took quite some time but once figured out the process is not too hard and can be quickly applied to other images by copying the adjustment layers and making only small tweaks to them for each photo.
I recently read Darek Kay's excellent post about styling RSS feeds and wanted to do something similar. So, here's my simple guide to styling your WordPress blog's RSS / Atom theme. The end result is that if someone clicks on a link to your feed, they see something nicely formatted, like this: Prerequisites This involves […]
As people are asking, here's the drill I went through to configure my Mac to allow my Apple IIe (and other vintage systems around the room) to "dial in" to it via WiFi232 or other WiFi modem devices.
It's 2024. If you're still designing websites or email like you would design an 8.5x11" promotional hand-out on a sheet of paper, you really haven't been paying attention to how people use the internet over the past decade.
I've recently started using Mosh. It's a clever bit of software that keeps your SSH sessions running, even if your client goes offline or changes IP address. But I find the syntax used to launch it a bit verbose and easy to forget. A typical command is something like: mosh --ssh="ssh -p 1234" myname@example.com Within […]
🆕 blog! “Making a better audio shortcode for WordPress”
If you use WordPress, you can get a fairly basic embedded audio player by using the audio shortcode: [audio mp3="/path/to/sound.mp3"] I didn't particularly like how it was styled so - because WordPress is so hackable - I changed it! Now my embedded audio looks like this: It gets a nice border, a title, displa…
For @mitch_deadberg - we wanted to show you how we make South Indian Filter Coffee! This coffee (a 80:20 mixture of coffee / chicory) is made with a metal filter. This filter makes enough for about 2 times but can be found in bigger sizes. You put about 2-4 tbsp of coffee depending on how strong you want it. You place the metal plunger on top, pour the water and then let the decoction brew. It usually takes about a half hour.
I’m currently using the web interface of mastodon.social [edit: on Apple devices] —
Do I need to use an app, or switch instances, or a different Fediverse alternative?
I don’t really need much, I would be okay with just bold and italics.
I have a headless server - one without a GUI - which I use as a NextCloud client. My laptop, phone, tablet, and server all sync with a cloud-based NextCloud instance. But, sadly, NextCloud don't offer a way for servers to speak to servers. If you try to run apt install nextcloud it will try […]
One of the best HTTP clients is the open source tool curl. With ongoing development and continuously new updates, it is worth getting everything out of this powerful tool!
In 2009, @lego and #Japanese retailer Muji collaborated to create innovative building sets that combined basic #LEGO bricks with Muji’s minimalist #design principles. Despite the concept failing to gain popularity, the team at Studio Playfool in #Japan has revived the idea, creating fun and unusual combinations of LEGO and paper using a hole punch and a template. 🧱📄🤖
If Substack is perfect for your needs then use that. Your problem with substack prolly isn't who else uses it, but rather, that you yourself are calling a proprietary, privacy disrespecting deprecated monolithic silo a "Perfect solution".
Instead of doing what's right, and for the right reasons, you eschew dogfooding on #FOSS when you should be championing it, and call a professional data mining haven perfect, when it is anything but.
Well, you're already on the Fediverse, so you should know better, but I'll dispense with the lecture now and point out a few good FOSS solutions that are Fediverse powered (and one that isn't, but still rocks as a publishing platform) for you:
Option #1, #WriteFreely, which you can find over at its git repo under https://gitHub.com/writefreely/writefreely.
Option #2, deploy yourself a #WordPress site, Then install the #ActivityPub plugin - the latest release publishes into the Fediverse and allows any Fediverse account to reply/comment threads natively - like I'm responding now. It also allows anyone on the Internet to join the discussions as well. WordPress has many options for subscriber lists, Etc., as well as #paywalled#digital_downloads, if you like.
Option #3, #Mitra is a Fediverse publishing platform that currently supports paid subscriptions for Authors: https://mitra.fediverse.observer/list - pick one that has open registrations or self-host yourself, like all of the other solutions here :)
If you're really talking about maintaining subscribers lists, but especially Having a subscriber list and building it up, then most ignorant folks would recommend HubSpot - but they would be wrong, because you can get the same powerful inbound marketing solution / #CRM, only better, for #FREE (That's a bare minimum savings of over $500/month)!!! So install #Mautic and let it do what it does, which you can get here: https://www.mautic.org/download/source-code and then after that, use it in conjunction with the following FOSS application that was tailor made for exactly what you're asking for...
#Ghost is FOSS, and in conjunction with an inbound marketing platform like Mautic is the perfect dynamic duo - like Batman and Robin. But even better, is that I'm going to point you towards a #HowTo that is an actual cookbook #tutorial written by someone expressing the same lamentations as yourself, and here's the exact solution they've provided for you:
By the way, your Mautic server also integrates directly with#MailGun (or Sendgrid, SendinBlue, SparkPost, etc.) to complete your transactional email system that will tell you when each and every recipient received, viewed (and or how long) your emails, as well as how many times they looked at those emails, with a bunch of other tools as well.
I hope that helps, and I'm very glad that you came to your senses about not using a privacy disrespecting, proprietary closed source solution like Substack - besides, registering your own domain name would have hidden the fact that you were using substack anyway, so it's about YOU doing the right thing the right way. Please choose your software in the future based upon the freedoms and ethics it offers in serving you and your customers. There's evil people everywhere, and the smart ones are using FOSS too - not substack.
I highly recommend BitWarden as a password manager. It is free, open source, and has a great range of apps and APIs. The one thing it doesn't have is a way to sort your accounts by creation date. I now have over a thousand accounts that I've added - so I wanted to prune away […]
My year with Mastodon (#MastodonWrapped)
I celebrated my first #Mastoversary a few days ago. It’s been a good first year on Mastodon for me; I like the #Fediverse idea, I like people here, and I like the calm vibe this place offers.
Also, I ditched all of my other #SocialMedia accounts. All but one.¹
As I say, Mastodon is a good #platform to be, however there are a couple of things I’ve been struggling with the whole time. I’m going to put together a brief summary below in hope that someone can help me with them.
¹ I still keep Instagram to exchange cute pics of sloths and pandas, and ice-hockey reels with my sons. 😁
🆕 blog! “Find the URl causing your WordPress Error”
PHP has some pretty good error handling and logging, but I do sometimes find it confusing. For example, look at this warning message: [18-Oct-2023 12:34:56 UTC] PHP Warning: Something bad happened in /wp-content/something.php on line 123 OK, so we can go to something.php and scroll to line 123 and try to figure out wha…
Small list of userscripts that improve the Kbin experience
I've been trying out several userscripts for Kbin recently, which have made the website way more enjoyable than it already was. I wanted to share them with my fellow Kbin users....
"kbin How To" on front page would help people new to kbin
I feel like a highlighted basic "kbin how to" on the frontpage would really help kbin in the beginning, I still feel like I don't know exactly how all of this works, didn't knew what things like "boost" means, the difference between adding a new article/ post/ photo is still not clear to me. Just a really simple 1 minute how to...