Work

I did a lot of research the other day about what I’d need to build a contact form for my website. I bookmarked lots of pages. And today, I come and look at this mountain of videos and sites and pages and woneder what exactly it is, that I am supposed to tackle. Nothing makes sense. I know I ruled out Sendy as an option. Or did I? Do I need Javascript? How much? Can I get snippets to copy paste? Do I need to go learn Javascript? What is spam protection? Do I need spam protection? How do I do it? I’ll have to go look at it all again now.1 ...

Warning: Slightly ranty post, with no aim in mind, other than putting thoughts to paper, and to excise some demons from my mind. Several interviews and several rejections later, the one thing I’ve learnt, is that I’d be a good hire, if only I had a little experience. And also that ageism is a thing. While there’s nothing I can do about the age bit, I can do something about the experience. ...

Ok, here’s to learning Kubernetes in earnest, to get that career pivot going. Notes as I learn, over the coming days. This one, is a lot of random thoughts on bringing up a cluster. It is both harder than you think, and easier than you think I did this, because I wanted to run my own cluster, just like the big boys do.1 It’s much easier to run alternatives like kind, if that suits your needs better. Notes to future Jason: ...

I wanted to start learning Kubernetes. So I thought I’d spin up a Ubuntu VM to use as my sacrificial guinea pig. While the normal NAT mode works well enough for most of my networking needs, I wanted the Ubuntu VM to show up and work as a machine on my host’s network.1 I have two network cards on my desktop and wanted to allocate one of them to this VM. I wanted a passthrough, where the guest OS would see the NIC and then have exclusive access to it. When I tried doing that, KVM complained that it could not do this with PCI devices. ...

Every now and then, I spin up a fresh vm. And being a creature of habit, I use the same username on my play / experimental vms as my normal login. So everytime I try to login to such a vm or pi, I get a Too many authentication failures error. So to just get in and start working, I need to tell ssh to ignore my keys and try using passwords as the authentication mechanism. Like so ...

Writing this down, so that I will not struggle the next time1, I have to do this. I use Valkyrie for everything on the blog in various weights, except for code and preformatted stuff, which uses Source Code Pro Medium. Both are WOFF2 fonts. Anything in Hugo’s assets/css/extended folder will be picked up by Hugo and bundled into a single CSS file. The fonts are in subdirectories in the static/fonts/font-name folder. Anything in the static folder shows up at the root of the site. ~/mjb/blog/static/images/test.jpg will become /images/test.jpg I’ve created an embed-font-name.css file in the css folder above, with embed instructions generously provided by Matthew Butterick in his font documentation for Valkyrie. I adapted the same for Source Code Pro as well. Here’s a sample of my embed-source-code-pro.css 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 @font-face { font-family: 'Source Code Pro Medium'; font-style: normal; font-weight: medium; font-stretch: normal; font-display: auto; src: url('/fonts/source-code-pro/SourceCodePro-Medium.woff2') format('woff2'); } Finally, I created a zz-include-css.css file, which I use to overide the default CSS, so I can use my custom fonts. Since it starts with a zz it comes after the files above, that start with embed, in the final munged and minified CSS file. These are my instructions to have most text rendered with Valkyrie and code as Source Code Pro Medium2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 #top { font-family: valkyrie; font-variant: oldstyle-nums; } .post-content pre, code { font-family: 'Source Code Pro Medium'; font-style: medium; font-weight: 500; } Look! So pretty :) P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list! Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe! P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit. ...