Sander's Blurbs

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Author: Sander

In 2005, Sander started his professional career in the education sector building content management systems and systems automation. At his last job, he worked at one of the leading media organisations in the UK where he helped build and support a WordPress based publishing platform for regional newspapers and magazines. He worked on the first iteration of the core sitemaps feature of WordPress 5.5.

Daily Clean Trash

I use trash-cli on every linux install, and today I realised it’s not actually removing files from the trash, so I’ve set up this little scheduled task to delete items that have been trashed at least 30 days ago:

$ crontab -e
# daily trash clean
@daily /usr/bin/trash-empty 30

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Installation Notes

For future reference here are some issues I’ve come across installing and setting up Tumbleweed on my workstation.

The reason for switching from macOS is that a commercial operating system focused on services builts in too many distractions for me. Also long term the Apple hardware is priced above what I’m prepared to pay, so it makes sense for me to look for an alternative.

Tumbleweed is a rolling distribution which makes for a long term maintained setup, and packages are tested thoroughly but are quickly updated.

So far these are just little niggles.

Day one issues

  • The old Grub menu from my previous Linux installation wasn’t wiped, I simply reinstalled making sure all existing partitions were deleted before partitioning.
  • avahi is not allowed to start itself due to security policies. This was because dbus needed to restart after avahi installed configuration into it. I could have rebooted.
  • My Apple Magic Keyboard must be selected in KDE after the installation as it’s not an option during the installation routine.
  • Opening ports for OpenSSH means that they’re open on the public zone. I didn’t realise this as I want to use the home zone as default.Yast Firewall sorted this out.
  • After installing Lutris, Steam and Proton Experimental, certain games would not start, due to missing vulkan drivers. This Lutris Wiki link describes the issue, I had to search Yast Software for vulkan showed I had to install libvulkan_intel and libvulkan_intel-32bit.

Interesting links

  • There’s a nice tiling window manager script for KDE called Krohnkite. Meta-D conflicted with show desktop, after reassigning the latter I still think that shortcut doesn’t do anything, though.

So far so good. The interface is more snappy than macOS and more powerful, and the system is working nicely.

Bye Twitter

I’ve deactivated my Twitter account.

Twitter didn’t like it, you get unceremoniously dumped out of the service with an error message. All your tweets disappear. Like you weren’t welcome anyway, social media with a nasty streak.

The problem with Twitter is that there’s only space for black/white arguments and replies. It harms compassion and collaboration. It’s algorithms are optimised for making money, not your wellbeing.

Let’s go make something beautiful instead with all the time saved!

Added a little timestamp to my zsh prompt and it makes all the difference. Open ~/.zshrc and add:

# prompt time
preexec () {
  DATE=$(date +"%H:%M:%S")
  C=$(($COLUMNS-10))
  echo -e "\033[1A\033[${C}C ${DATE} "
}

VVV utility for ElasticSeach / ElasticPress

I’ve been switching my local WordPress sideprojects development setup to VVV and one thing I couldn’t find documented is how to setup ElasticSearch and ElasticPress.

There’s a VVV-ElasticSearch plugin on GitHub but it is missing documentation and it’s not been updated for 6 years :D), so I made my own:

elementaryOS 6 refresh

I refreshed the olde Thinkpad to elementaryOS 6, and thought it would be useful to me and others to document the process.

As they don’t support an upgrade from elementaryOS 5, I backed up my repositories using repoman and paved the rest, as I use this laptop for side-projects and have a sync solution in place.

The first install resulted in a black screen (perhaps it went into standby and did not respond to mouse or keyboard presses), but a restart continued the installation successfully. Further OS setup was straightforward and simple. I thought about creating a /home partition but as I was happy with my migration process I decided to go with the convenient default.

The first app to install I had to get from FlatHub, which is nicely integrated. This first flatpakref loaded on the second try and installed using the integration included in the OS.

Syncthing’s introducer feature allows a device to introduce shares to connected devices and this helps setting up the shared folder containing my new-device scripts. It’s important to untick “Receive only” so that it’s a two way sync.

This post will be updated as more thoughts become available.

Perhaps people use the Desktop for their files because of applications using the Documents folder.

It’s not asynchronous communication when you sit around waiting for the answer.

So I spent most of the evening adding drag and drop physics to a card sprite and moving it around. I fairly underestimated the amount of learning required to use this game engine!

GPG failed to sign the data

  • Follow https://www.git-tower.com/help/guides/integration/gpg/mac
  • If everything fails, use GIT_TRACE=1 prefixed to the git commit command to try and see what git is actually doing
  • Key might have expired, run the GPG Keychain application to check, it offers to extend the key.
    • You must then export the new key, delete the expired key in your GitHub account, and upload the new key to GitHub. Unverified past commits then become verified.

Hot take: I feel the web needs an improved markup + styling system, but more practical and reduced in functionality. This way more browsers can participate. Web pages don’t need a realistic ray casting rendering system for CSS, despite of how nice this would look — it has zero business benefits and discriminates against low performing devices. Instead, have a look at a video game engine with html5 output, if that’s what you want.

Found a cool resource, WP Kama notes on Sitemap on the WordPress sitemap feature I helped create, including many scenarios and a performance optimisation! It’s really satisfying to see the care given to something they find has usefulness. 👍

Really like the site as well, it has more reference information than the official codex.

I was using macOS mail rules to sort mail into “Feed” and “Papertrail” inbox subfolders but iOS mail badges are frequently incorrect or delayed. Does it work better when using server rules?