Pelican is a python-based static site generator (SSG). Pelican has been around for a while (~10 years). It takes files, control files, and template files and generates static pages. Those pages can be kept inside git and then pushed to GitLab Pages or CloudFlare Workers. Installing and Configuring Pelican Installing Pelican Pelican Wiki Pelican Docs ... Read more
First up, Python 2 is dead dead dead. Long live Python 3. Here are some steps to perform: Update alternatives for Python update-alternatives --remove python /usr/bin/python2 update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/python python /usr/bin/python3 10 Edit ~/.bashrc to include an alias to python3 nano ~/.bashrc alias python=python3 Install the python-is-python3 application sudo apt install python-is-python3
The future of the web seems to be the past, namely static sites produced by static site generators. These effectively remove the database component (or reduce it tremendously) so that websites become much faster and easier to scale. This is not to mention the great impact that PageSpeed and Web Vitals are having on increasing the need for speedier and better user experiences on the web.
WordPress, which we've used for years, is the most popular publishing platform. However, it is not the only one and there are definitely better options, depending on one's needs.
Inkscape is an amazing vector graphics editor. It is free and open source and works on a variety of platforms, including Linux, Windows and OSX. Inkscape replaces Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator and can read their files, and is a first class citizen among these other editors.
OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. Those two terms show a fundamental relationship (goals are vague and need to be instantiated through measurable key results). However the complete picture of this goal-setting and goal-tracking method is more complex and much more rewarding.
There are two SAAS companies that provide a significant tempo of change worth of emulation: Telegram and Gitlab. Both have large scale and use, and provide monthly updates. This tempo is something that even small companies can emulate and manage. Monthly updates provide discipline and expectations both from customers and endusers, as well as employees and partners.
Here are some highlights from my reading from 2020, though certainly the books were not all published in 2020. Because I didn't produce this list for 2019 I will cheat and include a few from the second half of the year in this list. I get my reading list from several sources: firsthand recommendations from ... Read more
Email for personal use and the enterprise tends to come down to only a few providers, based on the leveraging of email into an office suite: Google Workspace (formerly Gsuite, Google Apps for Domains) Microsoft 365https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365 (formerly or including Office 365) That said, in reality there are still a preponderance of providers and in no ... Read more
To my daughter Amanda, > We can be knowledgeable with another man's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with another man's wisdom. -- Montaigne Is Advice Even Possible First off, it seems to me, reflecting on my own 25-year-old self (of thirty years ago), that advice is nearly impossible, unless one can actually see into ... Read more
We've used WordPress for more than 15 years, long before Lanna Digital was established. Finding a good framework has been a challenge. There are several factors that are important (and not necessarily obvious) when selecting a framework (a theme framework, a theme builder, or any combination).
Originally published 2018-09-06, updated 2022-09-05 My beloved KeepassX has not seen a release since 2016, but a newer fork entitled KeePassXC has. The latest version looks very much the same when viewed from LMDE3 with a dark theme. The added functionality is quite nice: A TOTP Seed and Code Generator. For native theme support (under ... Read more
There are several advantages to a ketogenic or keto diet. The main problem is that one is faced with having to battle one's culture to do it. Keto as culturally rare Most developed or developing (non-hunter-gatherer) cultures are heavy consumers of carbohydrates: rice, pasta, bread. This is not to mention the impact of sweets and ... Read more
See all Covid-19 articles: Covid-19 Updates Covid-19 Vaccines Facemasks and Covid-19 Herd Immunity and Covid-19 Why People won't get Vaccinated Facemasks in the United States During the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the WHO and CDC initially performed a disservice by downplaying the advantages of facemasks. This was due to the critical shortage of these and the ... Read more
In the mid-2000s I attended courses in Future Studies at the University of Hawaii. Jim Dator, one of the founders of Future Studies in North America was there, and he had some useful, if soft, methods for going about understanding different futures. This is relevant to the latest pandemic because it is one of the ... Read more
Fortune is a pseudo-random quote display, based on formated text file(s) and strfile(s). The runtime is available via apt install fortune, and then it is a matter of: Deleting current fortune files Creating one or more new fortune files Running strfile FORTUNEFILE to generate the .dat file Invoking fortune perhaps with cowsay in the /.bashrc ... Read more
The LMDE3 installation I had done 18 months ago was in need of a refresh. This was based on Debian 9, so I thought Debian 10 would be a good place to start. Unfortunately, the newest release breaks my laser printer, so I've looked at continuing with Debian 9 (aka oldstable) for the forseeable. In ... Read more
The Onyx Boox Nova Pro is a popular 7.8" eNote device with grayscale e-ink Carta screen, and a Wacom touchscreen layer, under mobius and glass. The hardware includes USB-C, an on/off/sleep button and a back button, along with bluetooth and wifi. The main advantage, though still a bit incomplete, is the ability to read and ... Read more
Simplicity is a wonderful thing. For the domain name game and hosting services, there are two kinds of simplicity: A single, monolithic simplicity - aka all-in-one A set of modular simplicities - aka best-of-breed At this stage in web hosting, domain name registration, and DNS service offerings, the second form of simplicity is the preferred ... Read more
Microsoft has gone through a lot, and I've been with them for quite a long time, on and off. I became a MCSE in 1998, with a focus on Web, SQL and Exchange server. At the time we were in the battle for the backoffice, which was vs. Novell and Oracle, mainly, but also Linux ... Read more
This book is badly in need of an editor. That is not surprising as it appears to be a collection of blog posts, but the redundancies and useless repetition truly get in the way of the important points. Also, stylistically the first person voice is also a bit pedantic. Agreed, the author points out that ... Read more
See also the local file sync tool FreeFileSync for handy local drive copying. Google Drive (GDrive) and other cloud storage alternatives such as Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive all have the serious drawback of keeping one's information in a third party cloud repository. Privacy and security are generally compromised this way, even when paying for storage ... Read more
EPUB documents are essentially a kind of html document as a collection of files which are zipped, and include html, css, images, and some XML pages. There are several ways of organizing these, but the most straightforward is one html document for each chapter (or section), a set of images organized in a subfolder, and ... Read more
Size matters, and the smaller the better, when it comes to generation, modification, transmission, and storage of information. The vast amount of unoptimized documents and images on my very own local storage, much less what we send and receive all the time, is astounding. The idea that we need 100gb or 1tb of storage (thank ... Read more
First, there are two kinds of DNS records: those for client look, and those for a server. Client Lookup - DNS Resolvers I don't trust Google DNS, though for a while it was the go to DNS, and easy to remember at 4.4.8.8 8.8.4.4 and 8.8.8.8. For privacy, for me, there are two options, with ... Read more
The day has come when I have confidence it is possible to move off of all third party clouds, with the only exception being social media and social network sites. That is, the wonderful world of email, file sharing and synchronization, and even online document collaboration, can all be supported independent of third party services. ... Read more
This is really about how to get off of Gmail/Google Email for Domains/Gsuite. It is not difficult to get off of Google Drive, and Google Photos, as well as Google Docs and Google Sheets, and the like. But there are certain advatages of Gmail/Google Mail, and the free version of GSuite, which I've been using ... Read more
If there ever will be a world government, one which speaks for and works on behalf of humanity for the entire planet, or most of it, that system will not use miles, pounds, ounces, inches, and yards. That system will be a rational measurement system that 99.5% of the earth already uses. This is how ... Read more
When one wants to understand what the most sigificant digits are regarding courses of action, it is vital to have the appropriate time-scale. What can be done in 1 day is a much more constrained problem than one can be done in 1 year, 10 years, 1,000 years, etc. Ten million years is sufficiently large ... Read more
H1 and Content Boundaries on the Web and EBook Publications NOTE: H1 isn't really a problem, the thing is that it defines a chapter, not a work (though a chapter could be considered a work in the sense of songs being considered works that are part of a collection). H1 is a problem when using ... Read more
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond My rating: 5 of 5 stars Wow, very interesting. If the past helps us understand the present, and help informed decisions on the future, then this work is an important one, and a fascinating read. There is an amalgam of different ... Read more
Paypal Sucks Paypal sucks, as everyone knows. It has one benefit for the consumer (those buying with paypal) and that is their dispute resolution, which I've used perhaps ten times and have never lost. Dispute resolution with credit cards and banks is much, much more difficult and harder to win. For the seller, however, Paypal ... Read more
> Updated July 2019 - I no longer use Paypal, as it is roughly twice as expensive as Stripe when looking at $100 USD/month in transactions (more than 10% with transaction fees and currency conversion), and without currency conversion it is still 30% more when only looking at transaction fees (usually because of the international ... Read more
Telegram is a great chat app, but there is more, and less to it, than say Twitter and Facebook. The first thing is that a lot of this gamification of likes/thumbsup is gone. Want to know if someone read your post? That has to be done either via direct message, or in a group (and ... Read more
APT -- Advanced Package Tool -- is all that is needed for most application installations when there are repositories which are regularly updated for packages of interest. Note that apt essentially makes irrelevant apt-get so there is no reason for that redundancy any longer. Note: Use aptitude when dealing with packages that have upgrade/downgrade issues, ... Read more
Chrome, why are you such crap at simple things? I need to delete the cache/cookies from a single website. It appears impossible these days. There is an odd work around, as follows: > Three Dots > Advanced > Content Settings > Cookies > See All Cookie and Site Data > {Search for site} > Remove ... Read more
Marie Kondo is an expert on tidying a house. Her Netflix series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo and two books (both of which are worth reading, best in chronological order) are best-sellers: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up) Spark Joy: An ... Read more
Our three-year-old wasn't pooping regularly, which caused a lot of concern. Eventually we were going to go to the hospital for a thorough set of tests and what not, after about 4 months of once-per-week pooping. There are many potential causes and this behavior is not uncommon in 2-6 year olds. Possible things to try: ... Read more
Set to 24p Set ISO Set Exposure (no over expose) Do color grading (with LUTS) Note: Shotcut only accepts 3D LUTS (?) so have to convert from other format, perhaps... Set Fstop Use lights/lighting Good audio 12 db Steady (not shaky) Music (edit to music, rather than just dropping music in) Story (not random or ... Read more
The saddest part of the discussion of construction innovation as defined by making buildings more efficiently, is just that. Missing are: Making housing more sustainable (see Earthships) Making housing more affordable (see tiny homes in Kristen Dirksen's channel) Mainstream Media Housing Innovation Coverage NYTimes - Piece by Piece, a Factory-Made Answer for a Housing Squeeze ... Read more
Podcasting is growing (slowly) and offers a great opportunity for brand engagement. Generally free, the idea is to be where the audience already is, and have a reliable host for content and the rss feed. Media and RSS Hosting Soundcloud for Podcasting Google Podcasts and Google Play Music Podcasts Note, these are two different things: ... Read more
This is meant to be a reminder of important issues/decisions that already have some thought put in them (usually by others). Automatic categorization of text is a core tool now Instead of offering advice, rank priorities Build a website first (before an app), some forgotten article but the point is: faster, and desktop users expect ... Read more
Apparently, a reverse sear is the best way to cook a steak, and the basic principle is used to cook everything. Essentially, the idea boils down to cooking at two temperatures: Low and slow (cook throughout) High and fast (sear) In addition, reducing the moisture on the outside of the meat should also be done ... Read more
I've written about WordPress at various points. I've been using this cms for 13-14 years, and for me it is well-known, though a bit worn out. The breakage it has has not improved much, and the resources needed are not up to the modern task. Essentially most performance gains are made through improvements in Nginx, ... Read more
Automattic is the organization behind WordPress the content management system, wordpress.com, and a number of smaller entities. With some estimates, WordPress has ~30% market share of the web. It has taken on in excess of []$300m in funding](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/automattic) over the years. After 2–3 years of development of WordPress, Automattic was founded in 2005 to receive ... Read more
Content Management Systems come in all shapes and sizes, and it is unfair to evaluate their maturity based on their functionality. However, to some degree this is still a useful metric, depending on the fucntionality. Below are hallmarks of functional maturity. Again, certain CMS's will not receive an accurate score based on specific niche uses ... Read more
The original formulation of Zipf's law was based on naturally occurring word frequencies and their rank order in a given English language corpus. For one example, merely 135 words accounted for 50% of the total word frequencies. This could be extended to phrases as well. For foreign language learners, this means that there is some ... Read more
On January 1, 2009 CNN published an article on memory. Now would be a good time to review and expand on that article, in the hopes of improving our own memory. It may be useful to conceive of the Art of Memory as having four broad application areas, a set of techniques (often called mnemonic ... Read more
Necessity being the mother of invention, what if a densely populated, but small (~10m) country were to have zero access to petroleum for fertilizer and agriculture in general? Sustailable Agriculture would be a result (or starvation). What if Sustainable Agriculture Weren't Theoretical? The Case of Cuba Cuba's Agrifood System in Transition How to make prosperous ... Read more
