Sander van Dragt's Notes

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  • Additional housekeeping routine prior to u…

    I upgraded one of my personal Ubuntu servers yesterday and with the knowledge of a good daily backup I knew I didn't have to prepare and see what I would encounter. This particular server has upgraded twice before, so has some custom and legacy configuration. After the third try I was successful and I wanted to share the following tips that helped me smooth out the upgrade process.

    Clean up apt sources

    The upgrade process will disable all third-party sources from your system to avoid complications updating system software, so it is helpful to be able to list all disabled sources. To aid in this I found it helpful to clear out the apt sources files before the upgrade my self.

    In particular, in preparation of the upgrade, I removed .distUpgrade and .save files created by previous upgrades. I then removed all commented lines from the remaining source files starting with # deb, then deleted any 0 byte files which have no content: find . -type f -size 0c -delete.

    This made it obvious what files had changed and what those changes are, that I needed to review. Typically by running find . -name "*.list" -exec sed -i 's/jammy/noble/g' {} \; after the upgrade was complete.

    Update custom apt sources / PPAs before upgrading

    It turns out I had Nginx and MariaDB installed pinned to a particular version that was no longer supported on the target Ubuntu Server version, this caused one upgrade to install the system versions which were incompatible with my configuration. On a second go, I first upgraded the software to the latest supported version for my legacy Ubuntu version, which updated the apt sources to something that was better supported.

    Set DNS servers

    Somewhere Ubuntu switched to systemd DNS management and I hadn't run sudo nano /etc/systemd/resolved.conf and set a DNS server, resulting in not being able to resolve any domains after the upgrade. I was able to set and verify the ResolveD configuration before the upgrade as the system service was already installed. After this, I encountered no issues.

    #linux #ubuntu

  • Workaround for when poetry cannot find pye…

    I use pyenv to manage python versions for my projects, and use poetry to manage project dependencies. Poetry was unable to find the latest python version, and insisted on creating virtual envs with system python.

    Setting poetry config virtualenvs.prefer-active-python true did not work for me, and neither did poetry env use whatever-version:

    $ poetry env use 3.11
Could not find the python executable python3.11

    However pyenv can list the the full path to the currently active python, which can be used as a parameter to poetry, so the following worked:

    $ poetry env use $(pyenv which python)
$ poetry install; poetry run python --version

    Update: double check that pyenv is configuring the shell correctly -- $HOME/.pyenv/shims should be in your PATH variable, and your shell runtime configuration file (such as .bashrc / .zshrc) should contain eval "$(pyenv init -)"

    Hope this helps!

    ‎ #poetry #python #pyenv #ubuntu #elementaryos #linux

  • The future of personal blogging…

    I was thinking of the concept of running a blog like #Lamb in CI, with the artefact hosted as HTML somewhere. Of course this is the essence of what a static site generator (SSG) is. The downside of a SSG is that the publish experience is not up to the same standard as a server-side blog, as the data structure not enforced in the editor and things like search don't exist or are limited.

    Posting directly from Discord has the same problems as the above. It probably is a worse editing experience but you'd not have a site to manage.

    Headless then is splitting off the rendering from the authoring, running that locally, syncing up the database to the cloud (sqlite, so just 1 file!) and having some minor render/search component chewing out the web-pages as needed. This seems overly complicated in the local setup and "Getting up and running" flows.

    So there is still a need of a web admin of sorts and a rendering layer. I just need to add smart caching to Lamb so it's doing minimal work, should this need to scale out further than it does – who even knows how far this already scales, I have done zero optimisation.

    Apart from that Lamb is on the right track for friction-free simple blogging. #technology

  • It seems sometimes I'm researching and want the previous tab to become active after closing a deep dive, and other times I'm reviewing the tabs and want the tab to the right of the active one to become active. Is there any way to codify this I keep changing my browser's settings. #technology

  • Cut a sharp end to a plastic straw. It makes for a good phone charging port cleaner! Actually, it worked better than a tooth pick for me. #technology

  • We need more instant publishing on the web. All the UI holds back our ideas. #technology #lamb #projects

  • Found an interesting article with a positive take on useful features that modern blogs should have. The Hacker News comment thread shows that whether a feature is considered useful is very subjective.

    I'd like to go further and state that most of the usability and user experience enhancements should be implemented as browser add-ons, so that they can be installed if the user sees it as a positive enhancement to their reading experience.

    The old-school view is that the reading experience is the domain and the responsibility of the browser, and we have collectively gone way beyond what a website should offer in terms of behaviour. #technology

  • Navigate Xbox Series console using LG remo…

    To navigate an XBOX series games console using an LG Magic Remote, first disable the Automatic Configuration option in the Connection settings under HDMI Configuration in the TV's settings. Reconnect the XBOX's HDMI cable going into the TV. Then on the input switcher, edit the Xbox setting, mark it as a Blu-ray player manufactured by Microsoft, and follow the wizard. #technology

  • Looking at my browser tabs, I can't believe that we collectively have still not standardized on page title vs site title formats in 2024. I've seen SITE - PAGE, PAGE / SITE, PAGE | SITE, SITE: PAGE, PAGE etc. I'd prefer it if we had a sitetitle tag in head and let the browser figure it out. #technology #html

  • Content vs crap. A single sentence marked with a red box, versus the rest of the site wasting screen space #technology