This blog post can also be found at 1ba87346. This short URL is designed to make sharing online more compact without having to use an external URL shortening service. The permalink for this post is 62 characters (plus base URL, everything following discounts the base URL), while the short URL is 11 characters. Every post will predictably be 11 characters since I’m using CRC32 hash of the permalink to generate the short link....

A great thing about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is that anyone can create a thing, share it with others, and anyone else can contribute and make it better. It’s also great to solve a problem for yourself and just share it with the world just in case it helps someone else. I know I have benefited from both those modalities, so I have tried to share a few tools and knowledge on this blog and through my repos....

There’s a new section on the website for Film Photography that is being built by Hugo but independent of the blogging workflow. I’ll create a new entry documenting how that is setup in a follow-up post. I’m not sure if the film photos should be a on the main blog feed but without realizing it I have flooded the RSS feed, perhaps it should be on it’s own feed (don’t want to inconvenience the non-existent readership of this blog!...

I went back to look for eagles again and found that the lake/pond/ditch had frozen over but there were still a couple of eagles milling about and several black birds. Lessons learned: 1/1600 of second still pretty slow for capturing even a big bird in flight. ISO 400 is pretty reliable on my camera and darktable matches the noise profile, doing a decent job of noise removal. Busy backgrounds are hard to work with but they aren’t show stoppers....

Took some photos of bald eagles fairly close to my house, thanks to a tip from a friend. I never think to go exploring around home whereas I would have hiked miles on vacation to see wildlife. This is a great proof and reminder to see your “backyard” with fresh eyes. Photos captured with a Sony A7C with a Sigma 100-400. ILCE-7C 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG DN OS f 6.3 400mm 1/400 s ISO 400 ILCE-7C 100-400mm F5-6....

I just saw this post from VKC about updating the footer of your website, meaning the copyright section. It occurred to me that it’s a manual process for my fully auto-generated blog, so I never think about the copyright info in the footer. Static sites do kind of have a shortcoming of sort. I still have my photos on a WordPress blog and it automatically updates the copyright, which came up, very recently, in a conversation with a friend and yet I never thought about my Hugo site (this one)....

I have access to webhosting through the generosity of a friend and his hosting provider used CPanel and offers paid SSL certificates but does allow for SSH access. So, the best and free way to get SSL certificates is getting certificates from Let’s Encrypt using acme.sh. While I’ve had this setup for years and it works great, it’s a real issue if it breaks because I do the sad thing of hitting up in the terminal history #somuchshame....

I built a small table this weekend and realized that the thing I desperately need if I’m going to build more stuff is a workbench. There are a TON of workbench options to pick from, which is great. But, I didn’t want to get into picking and choosing dimensions and features on the fly, that was asking for a disaster. So I decided to take the plunge and learn FreeCAD. There are excellent YouTube videos targeted at “FreeCAD for Woodworkers” which was a delightful surprise....

Haven’t done any water coloring in months and this fiddly fig wasn’t the easiest one to start with. My friend had a book of botanical watercolors and the fiddly fig was one of the choices. Turns out I have a hard time drawing non standard leaves🍃 that overlap. I hadn’t originally planned to sketch the outline but after I finished (messing up) coloring the leaves, it all looked like blobs in need of structure....

Just came across this excellent post: Poor mans mind mapping tool with just the terminal from @fullstackthaumaturge (account no longer exists) toot on Fosstodon. The whole premise is that you can do a lot things with the UNIX philosophy of using files for everything and manipulating them with simple tools that do one thing but do it well. So if you wanted a mindmap then just touch files in a folder hierarchy and then print it out with tree....