January, 17, 2024 archives

When I added auto-posting of entries here to my Mastodon account, it just took the title of the entry and posted that along with the link. But those end up being kind of cryptic, so now I made it possible to actually write the Mastodon post alongside the blog entry.

Just a small step in building out this online presence more fully and making sure it’s connected to other places more thoughtfully.

The next thing I want to do is build a new home for my photos. I stopped renewing my Flickr Pro subscription. I’ve thought about setting up a Pixelfed instance but that seems like overkill. I may use it as an excuse to build something in a language other than PHP because my resume could use that. Nearly all of my non-PHP work has been lost to me because it wasn’t open source.

The movie Unstrung Heroes is one that occupies a small corner of my brain. The Oscar-nominated soundtrack by Thomas Newman is great, but what has brought it to mind recently was the scenes where the main character is implementing the scientific process inspired by his father of solving problems by making a list of possible ideas and available materials. (I may be remembering this completely wrong — I really should re-watch this.)

Now that the store is behind us, all of the supplies and fixtures and everything else has been sold off or junked or taken home, I find myself in the position where I need to put together my own lists of possible ideas and available materials.

Some of the available materials that I have are some computers: a Dell PowerEdge T30, a Raspberry Pi 4, and a Raspberry Pi 400. I’ve been following along with Nelson’s experiments with Proxmox, thinking that I will try to set that up on the Dell. The Raspberry Pi 4 seems like a good candidate to run Homebridge to connect some of our things to HomeKit. I should probably find a new home for the Raspberry Pi 400. It’s a neat little computer, but I don’t know that it is really useful to me.

I’ve been thinking of moving some or all of the sites I have hosted on virtual servers to the PowerEdge here at home and just having a single virtual server running a caching proxy to actually front everything. None of it is very critical and our internet connection at home is pretty reliable.

But before I dive into all of that too deeply, we have a surplus of available materials here at home now and the priority (aside from the ongoing job search), is to get cleaned up and organized. We are finally sorting through boxes that we have had jammed into corners for years.