Marks MicroLog

If you're a mouth breather (I am when I'm focusing on a computer for some reason) and would like to be reminded that you are mouth breathing check out this new tool I've made here The Arcane Mouth Breathing Detector

Runs fully client side using JS, basically it detects when your mouth opens (or deviates from a baseline) and plays a lil ding to remind you to close up.

If you go to the home page of my website you will notice a status bar in a marquee tag.

I got an account at status.cafe and use a bookmarklet they provide to update my status. It's really very easy.

I would have built my own tool but the code that runs status.cafe is open source and everyone else on there has a funky website and I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon :)

Still update twitter but this is for more personal things? To be honest I'm not sure what the difference is going to be but it will come into its own I'm sure of that.

It's in a marquee tag because they are cool and more people should use and abuse them.

I've added analytics to this site, I built my own tool to analyse log files for this, source for that tool

I really like how it shows my currently subscribed users to my rss feed, that's the metric I would like to see growing :)

You can visit the analytics here they are updated every hour and show a weeks worth of data.

I've removed email subscribes from this website. I had less then 50 subscribers and no new ones for about 2 years.

I have replaced it with something much cooler, a reply to me via email link. If you want to have a chat with me about something I've written please do email me :)

It's a direct mailto link so let's hope for no spam. If spam I'll change it to some alias

I may add it back in the future, I've not removed any of the database logic, just the actual html form.

Hit counters are cool so I've added one at the end of my blog posts. Wish I did this a long time ago as it does not show historic data (would have over 100k on some!!)

It works by just incrementing a number in a database if your user agent does not contain "bot" or "crawler". So it's ripe for abuse ;)

This does go against the philosophy of adding new features to my website that I detailed in this post but it's cool.

It did also reinforce my idea though. I completely messed up database migrations (different between dev/prod) and took awhile to fix. Don't want to have to deal with that on a personal site.

Is there an idea here? Some kind of service that emails you asking what you did today? Then could upload that somewhere for other people to see? Could this be a thing at companies for employers? Sounds a bit intrusive for that...

I would use something like this on this website though, like a scrolling, plain text widget that I can easily update but maybe it's a product idea? Not sure hmmm.. Interesting!

A weekend project perhaps

Is this just twitter?

My writing sucks, I want it to get better so I'll write more. I've read somewhere that you are more expressive when you are talking to someone. I'll write like I'm talking to someone.

I'll also write about whatever comes to mind, I'll literally click on the create a post button and write something.

I've created bskytoolbox.com It's a fun little project that uses blueskys amazing websocket firehose to make some cool little tools with it.

Most of them just connect to the firehose using JS so nothing is stored server side but the one I like the most is the mentions tracker. This connects on the backend with a simple python daemon that tracks for words you ask it to. It's pretty cool and a good way to see things you are interested in on bluesky.

The code is here if you are interested: https://github.com/oidz1234/bskytoolbox

Just some commands that I did not know for awhile.

These are explained more in this video

(Formatting on this is not great, copied it directly from text file - sorry 😢)

• gi go the the place last inserted
• g; g, keep searching

• gv go to last visual

• y/search yank up to search, can delete and change with d/search and c/search

• * # Search for a word under cursor

  • Forward/backward respectively

• ctrl + [ for escape

• {} paragraph movement

• ~ change a characters case

• gUw change word to upper case

• guw change word to lower case

• ctrl a/x increase/decrease a number

• zt down so current line is at the top

• zz to centre

• gj gk go up /down long text on 1 line

  • g$ same thing but go to end of long line
  • gq break up long lines

I like using push to talk whenever I have to use my microphone. Unfortunately the program I use the microphone the most with - Microsoft Teams - does not support this.

So I went ahead and made a global push to talk script. It only works on Linux (for now) and is written in python.

It does work though, so I now have push to talk on any application where I want it!

The script is here

I have created a new website goodwebsites.org

The purpose of this website is to list websites that I think are good. That I think are good being the key point here. They are not what "most" people would consider good.

The have soul and character and present information well. I like that.

If you have any websites you would like to add please contact me :)

The website is very barebones and the moment, bare with whilst I make an awesome looking design worthy of the good websites name

This blog post got to the number one spot on Hacker News

As a result this website received more traffic then it ever had and still held up. Getting to #1 was the best way to stress test this website and proved that I was telling the truth in that blog.

Full write-up coming soon, but a very quick stat (generated from log files as my analytics crashed) looks like 70,000+ 80,000+ people visited my website.

It's not often that I praise software. But Xournal++ has made my life so much easier recently.

I use it to fill in PDF forms. It allows you to enter text anywhere in the document. As well as allowing freehand drawing which is great for signing and ticking boxes.

I have recently had to fill in many forms and printing them out and scanning them back in was getting very tedious.

Any other program that I have tried to do this has not worked or is just really clunky. I even tried converting them to libreoffice draw/writer documents which is even more clunky! I have not tried any proprietary applications but can't imagine them being good considering the mess that is adobe reader.

Xournal++ is designed as a notetaking tool, it just so happens that it is also very good at filling in PDFs.

I wrote a guide on how to use cron on this website

The website is about how to set up a Linux server and how to host things on it so you can own your own services and data and be a independent internet user like the internet was meant to be.

The site is called landchad, Land being "internet land" and Chad as in the meme Chad. A bit tongue-in-cheek but I am kind of surprised that there is no resource out there like this already.

I'm playing around a bit with an Arduino. Something has clicked in my brain about how cool it is that something can just run code without having to mess around with an Operating system.

It's cool being able to plug this in anywhere and have it do what you told it to.

I have always heard of microcontrollers and had a sort of abstract idea of what they where but never really had a concrete idea of what they where or how they worked. Working with the Arduino has given me new insight into this world of computing and a appreciation of what you can do with very cheap hardware.

I want to learn how to program assembly on these, I think it's possible and I have never done assembly before. Doing this will also force me to understand hardware and electronics better, I don't have a good grasp on those at the moment.

This video is a good explanation on microcontrollers

The best long term solution to bitcoin/crypto passphrase storage is on clay tablets. We have clay tablets from 4000BC that are still readable.

Currently people are using stamped metal to store there keys, I don't see any stamped metal that has lasted over 6000 years.