Blogging from Drummer is now restored, so I can resume publishing of my daynotes. The alias URL that I created now redirects to the new location, which includes my email address. I don’t think I am thrilled about my email address being in the URL, though honestly it’s been so publicly distributed and collected it doesn’t matter, and that is not the address I use for my most important email. I do think that new users should be made aware of how their email address will be exposed.
I have changed the public URL for the OPML file that I use to write posts in Drummer for my blog, and this is a test to see if publishing works. Alas, it is not working. I search Manton’s blog and found the post in which I provided the instructions to configure the public URL of the outline in micro.blog. With luck, now that is done, this should post to my blog. Success!
Googe Nest Hub Disappoints
The Google Nest Hub is frustrating to use because I want to use it as an Android display, as I think I should, but instead it only provides a very narrow set of functions. The most obvious use for me is displaying a local weather radar, which is useful during weather events. A simple way Google could provide this is by enabling Radarscope to run on it.
Today there is an ice storm moving through my area. An option I found is a Michigan weather live stream on YouTube, which I figured I could view on the Nest Hub because it has a YouTube app. Problem is, the YouTube app on the Nest Hub only displays a list of Recommended videos and does not provide me away to select a specific video on YouTube that I can watch. How come Google didn’t provide the FULL YouTube app on the Nest Hub.
I can cast the video from my Pixel 4a to the Nest Hub, but it does not make sense to me that I should have to. I couldn’t even get Google Assistant to display the video I want. some reason why I asked it to display a video from YouTube it wants to cast it to my TV rather than on the display itself!
I use the Google Conversation widget on my Pixel 4a for quick access to messages from my wife and childhood best friend. Of the widgets that I use, this one is the most finicky after a reboot, often not reloading and it seems the only fix is to remove and re-add the widgets.
Today is the first “business” day for updating my /now page, and the process is working very well. I set up the script to run on the virtual machine I use as my personal computer during the work day. Turned out the only real change needed was changing the /Users folder that the Mac uses to the /home folder that Ubuntu uses.
Updating My Now Page
In 2015 Derek Sivers proposed the idea of sharing one’s status by creating a /now page off of one’s web site. The intent of the page is simply sharing what one is doing. The idea caught on and today many sites, some more current than others, have a now page.
I decided to create and maintain my /now page using Dave Winer’s Little Outliner because I felt it was a good editor for this type of writing, and it worked particularly well with another piece of software by Dave called pagePark. PagePark is a HTTP server that renders the OPML files that Little Outliner creates into HTML. Dave hosts an instance of pagePark that is integrated with Little Outliner such that as soon as an outline is saved, the HTML version of that outline is nearly instantly available. Consequently, the process of editing and publishing changes to my /now page was as simple and quick as loading Little Outliner and writing. Low friction increases the possibility of keeping the page current.
Connecting my /now page to my blog was straightforward because the hosting provider makes it easy to create pages that redirect to other pages. Therefore, when you type https://frankmcpherson.blog/now you end up at my /now page. I took the idea of the page redirect off my blog a step further by purchasing a domain, frankm.info, that I configured to forward to the site. If anyone asked me online, what am I doing, I can tell them to simply go to frankm.info to find out.
Over time I expanded beyond the single /now page to add pages that listed the technology that I use and the books that I have read, each with their own alias URL. Using a forwarding URL enables me to move the actual location of the files, update the forwarding destination in DNS, and instances of the alias URL that I have in my writing will point to the current location.
Since the time that I set all this up using Little Outliner, Dave created a new “version” of it called Drummer. I’ve used Drummer since its beginning and always knew that it would some day replace Little Outliner. I didn’t move my informational outlines to Drummer until recently when Twitter made changes to its API that Dave has been using for user identity management and login. Dave announced he would be updating Drummer with a new login process and also move access of it to HTTPS. He stated he did not intend to make changes to Little Outliner, and advised anyone using it to move to Drummer as soon as possible, and at that time I migrated my files over so that I can edit them in Drummer, and I updated the alias URLs accordingly.
Dave had to make the changes quickly because Twitter had not stated a clear deadline by which it would cut off access to its API, and that means prioritizing what he works on first. For example, the blogging capability Drummer provides currently does not work. I am sure that capability will be restored, and Dave will get to it when he gets to it. The “publishing” of OPML files via an instance of pagePark is also lower on the list. Consequently, I started thinking about what I can do to restore my ability to publish updates to my /now page.
One option was to stop using Drummer to edit these pages, but that would create a lot of work moving the content and formattting it. The option that I took was to build my own instance of pagePark. First I tried using an instance of pagePark that I built under a free account at Render. Render only allows HTTPS access and the free account takes the site offline after 30 minutes. When you request the site, it’s brought online but there is a noticable delay. Consequently, I built a new virtual machine using free resources provided by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
I’ve updated my projects outline with the details about how I set this up, it was pretty straightforward after I figured out how to get around firewall issues. What I have is not integrated with Drummer, so there is now a publishing step that involves downloading the files to my computer and syncing them to my instance of pagePark. I can edit at any time with any computer, but publishing is restricted to few computers I’ve set up.
Right now access to these pages is only via HTTP. I’ve looked at the page source for Drummer to see how Dave has changed the includes and I think I should be able to edit the templates pagePark uses with the right form of those includes to eliminate the mixed content errors. I intend to use the instance of pagePark I have on Render to test that work when I have time. If I get access to these files working on Render I will then have to decided how to handle the SSL certificates if I move off Render, which I would probably do by using Caddy.
“We hide our addiction with our liberties. The amount of death that we have grown to accept, the amount of senseless loss of life we tolerate are not signs of a great nation or society.” Indeed.
In my experience, particularly for beta releases of software, it’s common for software developers to compile and publish a known problems list. The idea then is to prevent users from posting already known problems to your support forums.
Look In The Mirror, There Is a Gun In Your Hands
If one is a child, a teenager, a college student in the United States, aware of the realities of the society that they currently live in, how can you possibily conclude anything other than the fact that the generations older, now Millenials through Baby Boomers, don’t care about them at all? It’s seems we have all forgotten the desire for providing our children a better life than our own. Better should be safer. Instead we do absolutely nothing.
I am Gen-X, and to my recollection the last time enough people in power were shocked enough by a shooting was in 1993 when the Brady Bill was passed. Looking back from today, it seems that only the attempted murder of an old white man who happens to be President lead to action. Not murders of elementary, high school, and college students.
I see people of my generation ripping on younger generations as “entitled” and “lazy” and don’t seem to really care why. Might it be that in the United States the probability of a kindergartener experiencing an in-school shooting before graduating high school is greater than zero? I don’t know this is a fact, but I know it’s true, but the fact is that truth does not piss off enough people to take action.
Parents and grandparents need to stop convincing themselves their child will never face a shooting. It’s time to stop numbing ourselves hoping that it will never happen. It’s time to face the reality that it will happen, to your child, someone you love, maybe tomorrow.
Finished reading: Lord, I Don’t Want to Die a Christian by Chandrika Phea 📚
Day 2,920
Finished reading: The Solstice Countdown by Lisa Shearin 📚
The sooner everyone lets go of Twitter, the better. Musk is not a benevolent dictator and you can see that Twitter is going to end up with a Private Equity firm that will be less benevolent.
Currently reading: Lord, I Don’t Want to Die a Christian by Chandrika Phea 📚
“I have heard that the ultimate expression of worship is obedience to a God-given command, submission, and giving. I have also heard that the ultimate expression to God is serving. But personal evolution leads me to believe that the ultimate expression of worship to God is being—being whom He created me to be. It is doing what He created me to do, being my purpose, and therefore doing my purpose. If I were asked, today, “What is worship to you?” Worship is doing what I’ve been created to do, what I am purposed to do and that is, to just be.”
Writing Microblog Posts Using Drummer
The three posts below were intended to be part of one post. I wrote them using Drummer, forgetting that the publish script I use treats each node as a separate post.
I suspect if I want everything in one post I need to write them as a child of a parent node in Drummer. This is a quick test. Confirmed.
Truth is, iPads and Macs are tools, and the choice between which one is used is not life and death. It’s ok to choose a Mac over an iPad, and vice versa, and there is no real reason to try and convince someone that their choices are wrong. Apple does not expect either device to be the best for every single use case, otherwise they would only sell one device.
As the iPad has never been intended to function exactly like notebook and desktop computers, I doubt Apple will ever make them work exactly the same. You are never going to see MacOS running on iPads even if it could. Power users have been pushing Apple to make the iPad function more like Macs, and honestly iPadOS has moved a long way toward that direction. Much more than I would have ever expected. But the reality is, the iPad is never going to be a MacOS tablet and so one needs to come to terms with that reality. (Do you really want a Windows Tablet?)
Interesting thread of discussion regarding (once again) the limitations of iPadOS in comparison to other operating systems. Those who wish to use the iPad for use cases for which it was not originally intended are caught between the possibilities for how iPads could be used and the realities of how iPads can be used. The possibilities are driven mostly by the iPad hardware that is just as capable as Apple notebooks and desktops while the realities are driven by iPadOS that defines how Apple intends the hardware to be used.
During the process of moving my outline files to Drummer, I created a new outline for the books I’ve read this year and added 2023 to my main book index.
Today I learned that Twitter is shutting down their public API, which may impact Dave Winer’s outlining apps that I use. I have been using Little Outliner, which you can think of as an older iteration of Drummer, to maintain my Now page along with outlines that I maintain for the technology I use and the books that I read. Because of the news, today I moved all of these outline files to Drummer so that I can continue editing them. Fortunately, because I am using DNS and an alias URL to forward to the public rendering of these files, none the links to them from here should break.