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....
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....
I’ve been using org-transclusion for an “inverse literate” Emacs config and tangling all the config chunks on save and exporting it as a markdown file. This has worked fairly well except for the fact that org-export creates org-export regenerates ids for all the headings which creates noise in the git commit history and also in-page anchors can’t be reliably linked to a specific part of the document (independent of the git forge’s markdown parsing implementation)....
Gnome Terminal and fish I have been using the default Gnome Terminal with the fish shell for a long time and it has served me well. Since fish provides a lot of functionality out of the box (including meta information about git repos in the prompt), I have stuck with it for the convenience. However, there is ONE major downside to fish; it is not POSIX compliant. Why ditch fish? See what had happened was… Non-POSIX compliant wasn’t a big problem until I found myself writing a couple helper functions with fish syntax....
I use a Corne low profile keyboard running the QMK firmware. It is a 42 key layout and although it has a sixth column where a lot of folks put the traditional SHIFT and CTRL modifier keys, I’ve opted to go with the home row mods so that I’m not stretching my fingers and negating some of the ergonomic advantages. The downside is that it is difficult to type full words/phrases in capital letters without switching which hand is holding the modifier....
I have been wanting to transition my photography site to Hugo as well but have not investigated how to utilize Hugo’s image processing capabilities. Yesterday I came across Wivik’s helpful shortcodes that display EXIF information and presents the photo with a frame and a caption. I’m experimenting with it now and might modify it and eventually migrate my photography content. I ran into nil pointer evaluating resource.Resource.Resize error when running the shortcode and tried out the built-in figure shortcode with the same path to verify that it wasn’t an actual path issue....
I fell down the split ergo mechanical keyboard rabbit hole thanks to a dear friend who was kind enough to loan me his Gergoplex (despite my incessant teasing about his hipster keyboard). The Gergoplex is on the deeper end of the rabbit-hole with only 36 keys and 12g switches but it demonstrated the value to me. I ended up getting a pre-built Corne and added the lightest switches I could find at the time: Gateron MX 35g switches....
I’ve used OBS as a virtual camera input for various reasons (to compose scenes, to control field of view, etc.). I was setting it up on my desktop (Pop_Os! 20.04 with Guix as the package manager) today because Microsoft Teams recognizes my El Gato CamLink 4K but won’t show any video. Since I had successfully used virtual camera before I tried setting it up, but ran into some issues. OBS needs the v4l2loopback driver in order to enable the virtual camera functionality....
I have been using Darktable and transitioning away from Adobe’s Lightroom. However, I have almost a decade of edits and experience with Lightroom so doing a cold-turkey switch is proving to be challenging. So I decided to investigate if I could “natively” run Lightroom (without a VM) so I decided to give wine a try. I use guix as a package manager on Pop!_OS and guix has wine but it did a while to build and install....