global wear on trail glove 7 after 60km
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Converting This Blog To Hugo

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

On Saturday I converted my blog from WordPress to Hugo as an experiment and it went quite well. I downloaded the xml file and then I converted that xml with blog2md to go from xml to md pages. A page was created for every single blog post. This took a while. I now have my blog both as static pages, and as a wordpress blog.

Two challenges

There are two challenges. The first is that Hugo has to generate over 5000 pages each time I generate the site, or at least it has to check 5000 pages per change. That’s several minutes of work, every time I tell Hugo to build the site. The next concern is that if I make a change I don’t know whether I need to re-generate the entire site to reflect that change or whether it will just generate one page. I can run tests using Git Version control to see what’s happening.

Is Hugo or WordPress Lighter

I don’t know whether Hugo is heavier, because of every individual file, or whether WordPress is heavier, due to all the functionality that I barely ever use. WordPress often feels bloated and slow, especially in the admin console. It would be nice to play either with markdown, as I’m doing for this post, or html, as I could do, if I want more flexibility

Images Still Load

One of the surprises I came acrosss is that images still load, whether I am in the blog directory I created for testing purposes on the website, or within the wordpress blog folder, as I did by mistake. It’s pretty easy to make the change, as long as you keep the assets where they’re expected. I might consider deleting most of the wordpress install except for the media assets. That will be decided lateri.

What I Like About Hugo

What I like about Hugo is that the blog is generated and links between pages are taken care of automatically. As long as the tags and categories are set ahead of time, the generator will take care of the rest. As I browsed through the blog generated by Hugo I liked the look and feel. That’s before I spend time tweaking the theme and trying to add more.

An Alternative Approach

The blog I use now has been around for 20 years or so. This means that if I make a big change, like migrate from WordPress to Hugo I will kill all the hyperlinks and hierarchy and it will take time for search engines and links to be written to make the new version visible. Having said this the traffic to the site is low and there is a chance that the change will not be noticed. It’s by updating and linking to pages that I will make the entire site more visible.

And Finally

I have written the last two blog posts using VIM and I like the interface. It’s limited in functionality, because I haven’t spent enough time playing with VIM but it feels fast, and effective as a blogging tool. If I use Day One it takes time to load, I theoretically need to pay a subscription and then I need to cut and paste the content from there, to the blog. With this I could press esc, :wq, save, and write hugo and it will upload automatically. My reason for not doing that, for now, is that I don’t want to risk sharing the configuration for connecting to the server. Time will decide.

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Mobile video streaming and the future of video sharing

Byrichard

Two years ago we had the World cup and with that came hundreds of videos shot in cities around the world of people celebrating soccer (or football as a sport). At the time everyone would go out with their video camera, record the footage, wait till they got home, capture it and share via a number of sharing sites.
The problem with this is that it’s both slow and tedious. It takes too much time and organisation to do. That’s where a new generation of mobile video streaming devices come in. Some applications like Qik and Bambuser are limited to people with cheap data rates via their mobile operators. As a result their services are not so interesting.
What was missing from the market place were mobile video streaming services that would allow the content creator to backup the video to their mobile device before sharing it either over the air via 3g networks or wifi. Three services allow for this Kyte, which Scoble has talked about recenty, Flixwagon which I have talked about recently and then Livecast.
Each of these video services allows you to save the video as you’re streaming.
Kyte is interesting because it allows for you to share pictures, video, polls and audio from one application.
Flixwagon is interesting because it allows you to compile all the metadata you want to have included with the video before you stream. It allows you to categorise it within set niches, then add keywords to make finding the video easier.
Livecast is the most recent one I’ve tested (just a few minutes ago) and this one allows you to choose how much bandwidth you want to use, from just 24kb to 160kb. It gives you a stream limit of 2 gigabytes and storage of 100 megabytes… (if I remember right.) It differentiates itself with the stream from file option. You can record a number of videos on your phone and choose to send them at another time. It works well enough

Video streaming is an easy way of sharing video with your friends without the need for a computer. As a result we should expect quite a bit more coverage of live events from the audience’s point of view, not just big budget broadcasters.

This is a little rambling but it’s fun to see what’s available.

I Completed the Apple May Activity Challenge Yesterday
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I Completed the Apple May Activity Challenge Yesterday

Byrichard

I completed the Apple May Activity Challenge yesterday. The goal was to walk or run 349 kilometres within one month. I finished this challenge two days early.


Using the Apple Watch Series 3 and the SUUNTO Spartan Sport Wrist HR BARO I tracked all of my activities. For the first two or three weeks I tracked activities with both devices and then deleted the duplicates on Strava and then I stopped tracking with the Apple Watch as I saw that activity data could be communicated to Apple’s Activity tracking.


During the past month I walked 10-15 kilometres a day and when I didn’t walk such distances I was cycling. As a result I have had a sporty month. I’ve walked in the rain, the wind, and recently the heat. I took up running again and this provides me with an opportunity to play with a podcast, and to play with apps.


Running requires for my legs to adapt to the sport so I’m doing shorter distances than my cardiovascular system can cope with. I don’t want to feel knee pain so I’m doing less than I know I could. It’s about building up gradually, and eventually exceeding my previous best.


Now I have two days to recover, before the next challenge.

A Little Too Experimental
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A Little Too Experimental

Byrichard

The Fediverse is great because people are experimenting and trying new idea. It’s also great because we can be there through every step of the process. This is also why things could be better.


I am now writing my blog in Hugo first, and then moving the content over to Wordpress at the moment. I could just replace my Wordpress blog with Hugo but I don’t for two reasons. The first reason is that I’m experimenting, and if I change my mind about something, I can, without affecting Quality of Service. The second reason is that I believe that the production server should be in fine working order with as little downtime for users as possible. With one or two projects on the fediverse this isn’t the case. Downtime can be for hours, or even days at a time.


A Reminder of Seesmic and Twitter


For a long time Twitter was suffering because it was using Ruby and Ruby had bottle necks. The result was a lot of downtime. The failwhale became a cultural icon as a result. Seesmic was a fantastic video sharing community. It was about video instant messaging. Watch a video, record an answer, watch other answers, record another video. It would go for a thousand video exchanges for some topics. It was great. At the end of the day we even had Seesmix videos to summarise the best moments. In this case as new features were added we would make sure that they worked well. In the end I think Seesmic was sold or abandonned. It marked a turning point in online communities.


Production Server Level Testing


For a while I have been reading and studying web development and one of the key things I read is that you should have a testing environment that is exactly like your production environment, to make sure that everything works well, in testing before pushing to production. With The Fediverse I see people testing in production whilst looking for more people to join. It is normal to want to move fast, but if a site goes down for several days then there are wekanesses in the workflow.If I was playing and experimenting with a fediverse instance I would make sure that I run tests locally, and when I see they’re stable, migrate across. If things broke then I would revert to another instance as quickly as possible.


Playing With WordPress


Sometimes I play with WordPress, as I try to learn new things. I could experiment directly on my blog, and sometimes I do, but I try not to do this too often. I setup a mamp instance instead, and that’s where I break things, and try to rebuild them. That’s where I can break things, experiment, learn, mess up, give up, and more. The production server can go down for a few minutes here and there, as I experiment, but not for hours at a time. My blog has gone down for extended periods of time (a day or two, due to vulnerabilities on my site being exploited)


The Social Web, Conversations and Exchanges


Social networks should have as little downtime as possible because if they go down then the community that relies on them to stay in touch finds itself tempoarily out of reach. If a social network goes down too regularly when people want to use it, then it makes sense to migrate instances. Finding people willing to use a site is one challenge. The second, bigger challenge is to keep them around. If you experiment on a production server then you are disconnecting the community for the time of that experiment. That’s why you have A/B testing, but also why you have two or more instances. If you make a mistake on one instance to switch to the secondary system, fix the primary, and then switch, and fix the secondary.


And Finally


I wanted to experiment with FrontMatter yesterday when playing with my website but found that it has one serious limitation. It requires pages to be markdown, not HTML to work. It is a Visual Studio Code plugin that helps use VS Code as a cms for MD pages for Hugo and other blogging sites. The beauty of this app is that you can see all your tags at a glance. You can sort your pages any way you like. You can create new pages and it will add the appropriate information. What I especially like is that the file name is year-date-day-title and that’s fantastic, for me. I work as a media asset manager and that’s what I wanted to do with my blog, but I didn’t know whether it would then require me to rename every page. With this plugin you choose the website section, the title, and it does the rest. It’s fast and effective, once the DB is populated. The data is kept in a json file.


I will write a more comprehensive blog post about this when I learn more.

ExFat Stability Issues
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ExFat Stability Issues

Byrichard

Yesterday a drive failed to mount so Photoprism and Audiobookshelf failed to work. The server was up and running but the files were not accessible. For this reason two of my services have been unusable for several hours. I believe that the issue came from using an ExFAT drive rather than EXT4 or another journalled file system.

The reason for which journalling is important is that Pis and other systems crash, and when they crash, read write cycles are not completed. The consequence of this is that the drive that had been fine before the crash becomes corrupted after the crash and needs to be fixed. Most of the time this is quite easy. I use disk utility two to three times, and eventually the problem is fixed long enough to backup the data.

Why This Matters

The rational thing to do is to think, “I’m using these drives for something that NAS drives are designed for so it’s normal that external drives would fail.” The reality is that the file system has a bigger role to play than the drive type. If the drive keeps track of what it was doing, and what was interrupted then it can quickly resume from where it left off. Without a journal the drive just sees missing data and asks for repairs to be done. By “asks for repairs to be done” I mean that it fails to mount until the issue is resolved.

Looking Forward

From now on I will use ExFAT as a temporary solution for when I move data from one OS to another but once the move is finished I will use APFS for mac, EXT4 for Linux systems and NTSF or equivalent for windows when flexibility is not needed. It’s easy to format a drive to a more resilient file system.

And Finally

Once I have backed up the data I will reformat the drive to EXT4 and copy the data back. This should make the drive more resilient.

Two days later and the eee pc

Byrichard

It’s two days later and I’m close to touch typing on the asus eee and I’m enjoying the machine just as much. I did try to upgrade to openoffice 2.3.1 from 2.0 and no luck so far. As a result I’m stuck with relying on the cloud instead.

One friend found the machine hard to type on. That’s because with this type of keyboard your fingers are bigger than the keys. It’s important to make sure you’ve pressed properly. For long documents it’s still a challenge to use. For tweeting it’s good.

Walking with Two Pairs of Airpods in Winter

Walking with Two Pairs of Airpods in Winter

Byrichard

During walks, especially once temperatures drop my old pair of airpods tend to die by the time I reach the half way point of my walk. When they’re getting old the batteries in airpods don’t last as long in cold conditions but they’re fine in warm conditions.


A few years ago when a pair of airpods died I didn’t immediately put both to charge and so one of them was dead, dead, not just temporarily dead. I tried to get Apple to sell me a replacement airpods but the person I dealt with was asking me over and over what the problem was and I told him, over and over. In the end I got so tired of dealing with this induhvidual (intentional spelling) and just ordered a new pair.


I looked at the price for replacing the charger and individual earphones and came to the conclusion that it was cheaper to just get a new pair. Sometimes they sell for 189 CHF and other times the same airpods sell for 110 so I buy them when they’re cheaper. The airpods that I killed are no longer in use.


Since then I have bought two new pairs, at least one and a half years between purchases. I use my airpods for every walk I go on, so one and a half hours a day. I also often use them when cooking so that’s even heavier use.


When airpods are new they’re fine with the heat, and the cold, so you can use the same pair without worry. It’s when they have been used for a year or two that they begin to hate the cold of winter. It’s at this time that the left ear usually dies. If an airpod dies while you’re walking you’re stuck without audio. During phone calls you go from a video chat that’s easy to hear, to impossible to hear, due to ambient noise traffic.


That’s where the second pair of airpods comes into play. Yesterday when I was walking I used my old airpods until I started to run. Half way through the run the old airpods died, so I swapped them for the new airpods and continued my run.


The point about airpods is that even when they don’t last as well in cold weather they are still good for years. By buying a second pair you can have a primary pair, that you plan to use for the entire walk, and the secondary pair for when the primary fails.


Why Not Wired?


You might ask “why not use wired earphones in cold conditions and the reason is “comfort”. Airpods are more versatile and practical when you’re wearing layers of clothing, coats and more. I do use wired earphones when it’s windy, when I know I’ll be talking on the phone.


With airpods it’s hard to shelter them from the wind but with wired earphones the mic is easy to shield from the wind. You can continue your walk and your conversation, without the person you’re talking with struggling to hear you.


And Finally


Airpods come in a small convenient charging box so it’s easy to walk with a spare pair in winter. The point is not that you buy two pairs at once. The point is that you buy one pair and use it until it starts suffering in winter, and a new pair, to use as a backup when the old pair fails. The old pair then heat up and recharge as you continue your walk. Once winter is over you can go back to carrying a single pair of airpods again.

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