I wrote a tiny script that creates an RSS feed for all the audio files it finds in a folder. I call it derb. My mother gets devotional songs and sermons on cds, which I rip to MP3 files and then dump on her phone for her.1 She listens to them all the time, and now three of her friends want to do the same too. I thought of just sticking them in my self hosted Jellyfin instance,2 but then I realised, all of them have erratic, slow internet....
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....
Update: fixed Github link The little script I wrote in 2020, to get me my daily poetry fix, died a couple of months ago. Life got in the way of me, figuring out what was wrong. I finally got around to it today. A little bit of peeking under the hood revealed that Cloudflare did not like me using the Python Requests library to check the Poetry Foundation page. Or maybe it just did not like the useragent string that Requests gave it....
Enough learning. I now have to drill what I’ve learnt over the past few weeks and months by writing lots of code. Been noodling around with what that might look like in my head. Here’s what I got. After tentatively coding up stuff in a couple of domains and after a short chat with a friend, I realise I love writing code for the web. I love reading. I love to write on my blog....
Updated version of the post. I seem to have somehow, mangled the old one. I’ll just blame it on the gremlins in the cloud. I’ve been “soft” looking for a job, since the end of last year when I learnt the basics of Python. (Want me to come work with you as a junior developer? Here’s my resume!) And I’ve had rejection after rejection after rejection. I apparently am good....
Despite financial troubles there’s a sense in which my childhood was immensely privileged — a pauper in the material world, I was a sultan in the world of ideas. — Erik Hoel I started by wanting to share that quote and link on my microblog and then my thoughts turned into a blog post sized comment. I decided to post it here too, then. That quote describes my life to a T, even now....
This post was first sent to my newsletter on March 19th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) I blame Mahe for this post. Hey, Jason! Can you please write an article on how to build a website like yours, where I can post my blogs? Check out her blogs, here and here. This one is squarely aimed at all the young ones, who are convinced that they need to be writing....
*Update: 15/01/2021. It’s done. I moved everything and it all seems to be working. If something is broken, let me know, on [the fediverse][cbj], or mailing me at jason at this domain. To my tech posse, no there is no forwarding of old links happening. The site is too small and I have no time. Nobody is going to miss this. And to that one little friend, who noticed that the site was dead and actually cried, I love you....
My plan for the new year … A final thought from Atomic Habits as we start the new year: “Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are. The goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader. The goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner. The goal is not to learn an instrument, the goal is to become a musician....
Could not focus much on programming today. So decided on doing things with Python programs. Nikola Upgrade I use Nikola to generate both my websites. It is an extremely easy to use, no fuss static site generator, which is easy on my server’s resources. Version 8.1.2 was released a few hours ago and I hopped on and installed it. I follow a slightly unconventional upgrade path, because I was terrified of breaking my server in the early days, when I was still learning about how to go about installing things on servers....