Dispatch #13 (March 2024)

By David Eisinger · View original post

Highlights this month: a weekend in Wilmington, a successful 10K, and a solo dad weekend (including a rainy bike adventure followed by an incredible rainbow over Central Park). Plus some new music and a bunch of website improvements.

Here’s a new track called “Arcus” – smash play and read on.

Arcus.mp3

I’m really pleased with my result in the in the Wrightsville Beach Valentine Run 10K. You can see I’m still far from competitive, but that’s much faster than I ever thought I’d be when I started this journey in 2021. Running (at least at the level I’m at) is one of the few things you can get improve at just by showing up. Want to get better? Run more. Were all the other things I pursue so straightforward.

At the beginning of February, I updated the site to store encrypted photos and display them as black-and-white dithered images. I documented the process in some detail, and then put a link to it on the Hugo discussion forum. Imagine my suprise when, a few days later, one of the core contributers posted that the next version of Hugo would ship with native dithering functionality. I guess my post inspired him to add it, which echoed a post I’d read a few days earler, “Publishing Your Work”:

I don’t create or publish in the hopes of influencing others. I create things because I have an urge to create. But it sure is great to help others along the way, however small my contribution might be.

I stumbled on a retrospective of the HFStival, a DC-area music festival that was a big part of my adolescence. I remembered that I made fan sites for a few of them, and after a few minutes of trying to recall the domains, I discovered that the 1998 and 1999 editions are still online. Not bad, 15-year-old Dave. Funny how I’m still doing basically the same thing 25+ years later, though I guess we have CSS now and I write in Markdown rather than hand-editing HTML files on a server.

I made several website updates this month:

• The site now has full-text RSS; I wish this was the default or at least a toggleable option. The fix is to copy the RSS template into your site and then change .Summary to .Content, which is a maintenance headache.

• I added a favicon using this friendly generator.

• I moved the site to a new server on Digital Ocean. My previous VPS was running a version of Ubuntu from 2014 and was just a mess. I haven’t really kept up with modern DevOps and didn’t want to learn Ansible for my relatively basic needs, but I do have a lot of experience with Docker and decided to use Docker Compose to run this site and a handful of others. It all came together easily with Caddy plus php-fpm and MySQL for an old Textpattern site I keep around. Now I’ve got all my infrastructure in a version-controlled repository I can test locally, and the actual server is doing very little. Here’s a handy script for running docker-compose as a systemd service that I used.

• Finally, I’ve wanted to be able to send out these dispatches as emails for a while now, but didn’t want to sign up and pay for a service like Buttondown when I’ve no idea if anyone would sign up. I discovered Listmonk, which is open-source, self-hosted software that offers exactly what I need: a signup form, an admin UI, and an API for creating new emails. It snapped into my Docker setup super easily, and now you can go to dispatch.davideisinger.com and sign up to receive these posts in your inbox. Go on! Be the first.

This month:

• Adventure: we’re headed back to Wilmington again, this time to run the Steve Haydu St. Patrick’s Lo Tide Run; I’ve also got my annual Vegas trip and we’ll head to Lake Norman at the end of the month
• Project: Nev has this little fidget toy that I’m obsessed with; I want to learn three.js and create a digital version of it
• Skill: just keep making music; I’ve got my eye on this Roland SP-404 sampler that I might pick up – curious how that might pair with my Novation Circuit

Reading:

• Fiction: The Disposessed, Ursula K. LeGuin
• Non-fiction: Dilla Time, Dan Charnas

Links:

• What Kind of Bubble is AI?

  Tech bubbles come in two varieties: The ones that leave something behind, and the ones that leave nothing behind. Sometimes, it can be hard to guess what kind of bubble you’re living through until it pops and you find out the hard way.

  Best piece of AI skepticism I’ve read (though I’d also recommend Ed Zitron)

• Neal Stephenson’s Most Stunning Prediction – if I had to pick a favorite book, Diamond Age would be it; I should re-read it at some point, especially now that I have a young daughter

• On files & data ownership:

  • Why all your notes and files should be plain text
  • Skiff Should Be A Reminder To Us All
  • How to make self-hosting and local-first software work
  • File over app
  • More Files Please
  • The future needs files

• On personal websites / writing online in general:

  • The internet used to be fun
  • What’s the fun in writing on the internet anymore? (via)
  • The Year of the Personal Website