As I have begun learning Go (or golang as I needed to use for searching on the web), I’ve been running into some sort of chasm that the Go language seems to have crossed1 that my old textbook obviously could not have foreseen when it was published.2 The book asks me to do a go run . to get my file to compile and run. Go seems to having none of it....
I’ve been learning French, on my own at a snail’s pace over the past year or so. All because I want to read Émilie du Châtelet, Dumas, Verne, and Montaigne in their native tongue. Since I cannot do immersion nor give regular practice the time it wants, it’s … slow going But I do, do it. Regularly and deliberately. I’ve built up a vocabulary of about 500-700 words by now and I know if I keep this up, I’ll be able to do read well in time....
First things first, you should be listening to Cal Newport and reading his books too! His recent episode on books and reading was lovely!1 If I remember right, he started doing the podcast, a couple of months after the pandemic broke out and the world shut down. And it felt very much at the time, like one of those friendly voices across the waves in some post apocalyptic movie. It felt warm, personal and gave me something to do in those dark days....
Click the pic to embiggen. Rube Goldberg illustration via James Vaughan Ended up too sick to even tinker, since I last wrote. Well enough now, to scratch out some prose to get my brains in gear. Let’s start with Huginn adventure #1. Buckle up! Background I found Huginn, and am using it as my man friday.1 The “Problem” I run Hugo on two three machines. I’m tired of updating to the latest release manually....
Let’s get the, “What the heck is Huginn?” out of the way. If you’ve heard of Zapier or IFTTT, that’s what this is. Only better. You host it. You control it. You program it. And everything’s in your control. If you’ve used Yahoo Pipes, then I tip my hat to you my dear friend and tell the rest of you folk, that I believe all of these new fangled pieces of zaps and agents are the spiritual successor to that pioneering web app....
I keep writing these tiny utilities for myself in Python and while I love writing in Python, I definitely don’t enjoy the little war dance I have to do everytime I want to run it on a new machine. Keeping track of virtual environments, and then installing packages in them, quickly gets tiresome. I want to just run the program once I’m done with it. Like a C program. Or Rust....
I am fortunate enough, to run most of my life between my local computer and another VM in a cloud. In this day and age of cloud native and serverless, why would anyone choose to run their life off a virtual server aka VM? This post is me, thinking this through. I’ll return to this every now and then, and see if things have changed enough out there, for me to evaluate and make a change....
I’ve been struggling to get org-caldav working on the desktop. Nothing to do with the program itself. It’s excellent, fairly intuitive and really well documented. There just seems to be some gremlin in the works, that does not let the darned calendar see my org files.1 Will keep at it. What this note is for however, was the pleasant realisation that Emacs can transparently work with gpg encrypted files.2 I wanted to keep my calendar user/password credentials in a file, because the to and fro between my Baikal caldav server was generating too many requests for my password....
I use Miniflux as my feed reader, and I love it to bits. It does what I need, it does it fast and it stays out of the way. Well, almost. I have a couple of those—whatchacalit—firehose feeds. And I keep skimming through them by clicking next, next, next on each page. Like so, Except for when there is no next under my pointer. It’d happen quite frequently and I’d have to keep moving my mouse to find the link....
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....