Winter viruses knocked me about a bit this month so I wasn’t able to get out to all the tech events I had hoped to get to and there were a few bed bound days which were pretty disappointing.

I also have a bit of a backlog on writing up the things that I did attend this month.

Synchronising

While I pay for a few synchronisation services (SpiderOak and pCloud) their Linux integration is a bit cumbersome so I’ve been looking for simpler ways to share files between my local machines. I read a great tutorial about SyncThing. The project’s documentation on getting started with SyncThing was also pretty great.

It took less than an hour to get everything going and now I have two of my laptops sharing content in a single folder so it’s possible to move things like credential files around between them simply and hopefully securely. It doesn’t seem to be taking up any meaningful system resources so far.

I also want to spend more time with LocalSend which looks an app version of the PWA PairDrop (cute name, based on Snap Drop). All the functionality looks good and it seems to be lightweight. I’m not quite sure why the app makes a difference over the PWA version.

Zettelkasten

This month I had a bunch of headaches with Roam Research failing logins on Linux and AppImage having a bug which meant that Obsidian and Logseq have to be run outside the sandbox. Getting things working properly was frustrating and while Roam is web-based it has no really mobile web version.

So instead I’d like to stop subscribing to Roam and figure out what I’m using it for. The knowledge connecting is still the most valuable thing compared to pure outliners or personal wikis. Both Logseq and Obsidian are good for this and currently my preference is for Logseq but I think Obsidian is better maintained and has a bigger community.

The other thing I was doing was dropping links into the daily journal for later sorting and processing. I’ve created a little web app to make this easier, currently I’m just building a backlog but it will be interesting to see what I find useful when I do want to dig up a link.

I also started using Flatnotes deployed via PikaPods to have an indie web way of taking a note on the phone but editing and refining it on laptops.

It’s interesting that it has taken so many different services to replace Roam, maybe that’s a sign of value but I think that I was overloading it with different functionality and I’m refining things into different workloads now.

Eleventy

Eleventy is a very cool static website builder that I would like to use as my main website generator in the long run. For now though I am still trying to learn the 11ty way (I currently use Jekyll); this month I was trying to figure out how to use data files and tags, things that power a lot of tricks in my current site.

Eleventy is ridiculously powerful because you can define data files to be executing Javascript files that read URLs or the filesystem and generate data that is then passed on to the page generation context. As an example you can read the directory where the data file is located, read the contents, filter out the directories and then generate a derived value from the directory name and use that as a data value in the rendered page.

In the past I’ve tended to use templates and front-matter in Markdown posts but with Eleventy you can use a mix of shared templates, including inheritance, and a Nunjucks page using these powerful data files and not really need to use Markdown or front-matter so much. You can also share snippets between the Nunjucks pages to get consistency where you need it but have a lot more flexibility about the way page renders.

It is amazing how flexible the system is but it also means that as there are multiple ways to do things there can be a lot of reading to do to figure out what the best way to do something is for your context. Documentation of the basics is good but examples of approaches are spread out across example repos and people’s blogs.

Power is great but so is one obvious way of doing things.

Interesting links

• A musician’s open source toolkit: https://johnoestmannmusic.com/tooling
• Write faster Python: I wanted to know about type versus isinstance but it was good revisiting the whole series
• An interesting post about moving a personal site onto European services, something that seems increasingly worth exploring

It’s not a fun subject but my former colleague Matt Andrew’s post about coping with redundancy was a good read with good advice for any kind of job seeking regardless of the cause.

Ofcom is making a dog’s dinner of applying the Online Safetry Act (OSA) to small communities and it seems to be down to community members to try and engage them in the problems, this writeup gives examples of the problems and pointers on how the regulator can improve.