PhotoGabble

Copy my Copywork

2024-04-27T00:00:00Z

A few months ago I was asked why I publish the source code to this website for all to see and honestly up until that point I hadn't really put that much thought into it. I had been inspired by seeing Xe Iaso linking the most recent git commit in each pages footer to do so myself and that required having a public repository; but none of my previous website repositories are public so why this one?

This website was originally generated using Tapestry a SSG of my own creation written in PHP but I wanted to give Netlify a go due to a recommendation by Cassidy Williams and because I had read a couple of articles by Andy Bell on using #11ty I decided to give it a go.

What was originally supposed to be a small experiment grew into what this website has become today and that is in no short part due to other programmers sharing their source code. Not just in tutorial articles and snippets shared on social media platforms but also in their full website repository being available for anyone to browse freely.

While not powered by 11ty I worked out how to add Wikilink functionality to 11ty from Maggie Appletons website source code, my last.fm integration came from the git repository of Andy Bells personal website and the source code from dozens of other 11ty powered websites helped me build PhotoGabble into the website it is today!

Realising how much I had been helped by having all these resources freely available to me crystallised the decision to not only make the source code of PhotoGabble open but to license it to endorse others building upon my work, to make it their own.

I get immense joy seeing others benefit from my work; be that a short code snippet helping someone complete a task they were stuck on or seeing people install one of the multiple 11ty plugins I have published it's a feeling akin to an artist seeing their work on display.

With that said you can imagine the sense of joy and fulfilment I felt when last November Aram Zucker-Scharff asked if it would be okay to use the source code of PhotoGabble as a base template for what would become their digital garden. In the words of Oscar Wilde: "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

—

Last week I read Copy other people's copywork by Charles Villard and through his words I will conclude this short post. "it’s okay to steal inspiration ... steal ideas. Steal patterns. Steal snippets. Learn what the code does and why it works. This kind of copywork will only help you grow."

🌱

Running Amazon Linux 2023 within VirtualBox

2024-04-26T00:00:00Z

This week I have been battling with getting a Laravel application deploying on #AWS Elastic Beanstalk and one of the issues I had was installing php-gRPC via pecl was taking way too long due to it compiling from source thus timing out the deploy.

My solution to that conundrum was to build the grpc.so file on my computer and create a rpm package file to install it. In order to do so I would need to be able to run Amazon Linux 2023 within VirtualBox as that is what I have installed.

Finding disk images for Amazon Linux 2 was easy however, aws have hidden away the release images for Amazon Linux 2023, most likely because they want you to use docker. In my search I came across Rotan Hanrahan's post Amazon Linux 2023 on VirtualBox from January this year and while they link to the os images for release 2023.3.20240122.0 looking at the most recent AL2023 release notes for version 2023.4.20240416 I could make an educated guess that the disk images could be found at the same url Rotan shared but with the version changed:

https://cdn.amazonlinux.com/al2023/os-images/2023.4.20240416.0/

—

Rotan noted in January 2024 that aws didn't provide VirtualBox disk images. I can confirm that hasn't changed as of April 2024. This means that, at time of writing, Rotan's instructions are the best method for getting Amazon Linux 2023 booting within VirtualBox.

First you want to download the vmware .ova disk image and unpack it to obtain the .vmdk file it contains:

wget https://cdn.amazonlinux.com/al2023/os-images/2023.4.20240416.0/vmware/al2023-vmware_esx-2023.4.20240416.0-kernel-6.1-x86_64.xfs.gpt.ova
tar -xvf al2023-vmware_esx-2023.4.20240416.0-kernel-6.1-x86_64.xfs.gpt.ova

VirtualBox has tooling for converting .vmdk files into .vdi, a format it supports. This is done with the clonemedium command (in earlier versions of VirtualBox this was named clonehd) provided by the VBoxManage command line tool:

VBoxManage clonemedium al2023-vmware_esx-2023.4.20240416.0-kernel-6.1-x86_64.xfs.gpt-disk1.vmdk al2023-vmware_esx-2023.4.20240416.0-kernel-6.1-x86_64.xfs.gpt-disk1.vdi --format VDI

For first boot Amazon Linux 2023, much like its predecessor Amazon Linux 2, requires a cloud-init configuration seed.iso disk image attached as a virtual CD-ROM. For our purposes this image only needs to contain two files meta-data to set the hostname and user-data for configuring our user account.

The meta-data file can be the following one liner to set the machines hostname to al2023.

local-hostname: al2023

The user-data file contains a little more, when copying the below replace {ssh-key} with the content of your public ssh key to allow you to ssh into the vm. Note, according to the cloud-init documentation this file must begin with #cloud-config in order to be valid.

#cloud-config
users:
  - default
  - name: ec2-user
ssh_authorized_keys:
  - {ssh-key}

ℹ️ You can read more about the user-data format in user data format documentation for cloud-init.

In the absence of a network-config file in the cloud-init configuration, Amazon Linux 2023 will default to DHCP on the first available interface. If you want to customise this see the cloud-init networking config documentation for details on how.

I'm on MacOS so I will be using hdiutil to create the seed.iso disk image from the above two files by placing them within a seed_config folder and running the following:

hdiutil makehybrid -o seed.iso -hfs -joliet -iso -default-volume-name cidata seed_config

On Linux you will likely have mkisofs or genisoimage available to you. For mkisofs you can cd into the seed_config folder and run the following to generate a iso image:

mkisofs -output seed.iso -volid cidata -joliet -rock user-data meta-data

—

With the main disk image in the right format for VirtualBox and a seed.iso for the NoCloud cloud-init first boot you can now create a new virtual machine in VirtualBox.

Amazon Linux is like Fedora and so I set the operating system as Linux Fedora (64-bit) then give the machine 2048MB RAM and two processors. Finally when setting the hard disk select "Use an existing Virtual Hard Disk File and the virtual disk file created by clonemedium should already be populated. If not click the folder icon to the right and use the add button above to do so.

Before powering the machine on for the first time open its settings and set the network adapter to "Bridged Adapter" and attach the seed.iso as an IDE storage device.

—

Once the machine had booted I was able to remote into it by running ssh ec2-user@al2023

At this point you will now have Amazon Linux 2023 running within VirtualBox. You can unmount the seed.iso as it's no longer needed and I recommend creating a snapshot now so you can revert back to a fresh install easily in the future without having to repeat all these steps.

Refactored page git log section

2024-02-02T00:00:00Z

In December last year with help from a PR raised by Belmin Began(@MaNemoj01) I added a git log to the content pages of this website, Belmin's contribution aside from being wrapped by caching has remained unchanged until today. I like the addition of page history meta however, I do not want it to take over the page and in the case of some regularly updated pages that was beginning to happen.

I have therefore modified the history layout so that it is now hidden by default behind a small "page history" pull up tab on the page footer. I recently re-discovered the magical :target css selector and used that for toggling the pull-ups display instead of relying upon JavaScript.

For the git history itself I changed the template so that it displays a short paragraph describing the input files creation with a link to edit it on GitHub. This means that the table of history now only displays if there is more than one commit for that page's input file.

This kind of page meta is likely only of use to me, but having shared my changes I had a positive response from a surprising number of people, and so I will be writing a short follow-up in the form of a tutorial on How to add a git log to your 11ty website.

Addition of a Button Board and changes to bookmarks

2024-01-13T00:00:00Z

In December last year I began exploring the vast expanses of The Indie Web and in doing so reignited my love of 88x31 button banners and the Button Boards that people display them on. After adding my own button board I became a Digital Magpie and over multiple Digital Spelunking sessions began filling out my own board with little images that bring me joy.

My precious

I have since made it so that a bookmark can have more than one button, with my button board displaying only the first. I also updated the bookmark page to display all the buttons attached to a bookmark entry.

Adding entries to my button board via the bookmarks has meant that the number of links I have bookmarked increased rapidly and so to aid navigation I added previous / next buttons alongside the current bookmark idx / total.

'Improved' navigation...

Occasionally on my digital excursions I would end up in the digital graveyard, this also highlighted to me the fact that with a growing number of links I too would soon experience an increasing number of those becoming dead. In response to the inevitable march of entropy I both added the digital graveyard list and a dead link frontmatter flag which tells my template to use the wayback link instead of the cited source url.

In doing so I accidentally began my own digital archiving project, collecting screenshots and 88x31 buttons from long since offline websites into a digital mausoleum of sorts. While exploring I found others who had done similar and added their efforts to my internet archivers list.

Two of Cinni's projects: the ichigo directory and the cutie internet archive jump to memory as projects taking a similar path to my own but also on the nostalgia section of Robyn's Website, Pastel Hell where Robyn has collected an impressive number of archived projects and websites from the #OldWeb.

Ultimately I am not aiming to preserve everything I encounter, my button board and bookmarks only include websites that I found interesting either through their content or the buttons that link through to them. It's more a preservation of my experience on the internet, for myself, which may, or may not interest others.

2024, Week 1 in Review

2024-01-07T00:00:00Z

It's a fresh week, a New Year and like many office workers in the UK I am back to work after almost two weeks leave.

This week I read a few peoples end of year reviews: John Wargo's 2023 wrap up, Cassidy William's Bye Bye 2023 and Jeremy Keith's 2023 in numbers to name but a few that stood out; this prompted me to write my own goodbye to 2023 which I think few people will read but might be interesting to my future self some day.

This year I have jumped into the #SmallWeb with both feet and ended up in multiple hours long Digital Spelunking sessions that have resulted in expanding my button board several times over. While not as extensive as some 88x31 Button Collections I have realised that I am quite the Digital Magpie, if your website has a 88x31 button I find pretty I will not be able to resist adding it to my button board.

Around this time last year I stumbled upon Brandur's website and really liked their homepage layout displaying a single photo from their gallery, I'm unsure if its sourced from their Sequences project but I felt inspired by both ideas and would like to add similar to my website.

PhotoGabble started as a photo gallery and portfolio website for my university entrance submission, therefore adding a photography section will be a homage to the domains roots.

Continuing on the theme of photography and inspired by Rob Allan's 2023 in pictures i'd like to be able to write my own "year in pictures" at the end of 2024; having a small yet manageable photography projects like Brandur's Sequences might be the way to go.

Seems it might be time to dust off my dSLR and begin taking some snaps!

Joke of the week

Notable Articles Read

Rob Allen: 2023 in pictures
Clar Fon: Running a multi-purpose server, part 0: what?
Gunnar Morling: The One Billion Row Challenge
Tavis Ormandy: Hiew Hex Editor
[UNABLE TO LOCATE EMBED]
Matheus Richard: Turn Your Code Into Pixel Art , reminded me of executable images
@zimpenfish: Columnarised Highlights , I thought this to be a fantastic way of displaying large bodies of text in a small area. I wonder what the bee movie would look like?

Notable Videos Watched

C64 EasyFlash Release: Space Station 23 +7D by TREX! this is a play through of the C64 game Space Station 23
Game Makers Toolkit: Roguelikes, Persistency, and Progression

Cool things from around the internet

My 11ty Plugins

2024-01-05T00:00:00Z

This is an Anchor Page for listing eleventy.js plugins that I have written.

Eleventy.js Interlink Plugin

view on npm | view on GitHub

I use Obsidian.md to draft my posts before they are published on PhotoGabble. One feature of #Obsidian that I love is interlinking between notes and being able to see the connectivity graph of each note. Out of all the plugins I have written for Eleventy this one gets the most use. I have yet to add the ability to output a node graph but being able to paste notes from Obsidian into my site repository and have the wiki links just work is incredible!

—

Eleventy.js Blogtimes Plugin

view on npm | view on GitHub

This plugin is a direct port of the WordPress plugin Blogtimes which was also the second plugin written for WordPress. History! The blogtimes histogram it produces can be seen on my stats page alongside the newer GitHub style ones output by Robb Knight's @rknightuk/eleventy-plugin-post-graph plugin.

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Eleventy.js Word Stats Plugin

view on npm | view on GitHub

This plugin is a lightweight wrapper for making available reading-time as a filter. I had intended to extend this plugin to provide more extensive statistics over a collection of posts replacing the code I wrote for my stats page however, John Wargo beat me to the punch line with their Eleventy Post Statistics plugin.

—

Eleventy.js Font Subsetting Plugin

view on npm | view on GitHub

This plugin grew out of the tutorial I wrote on Font Subsetting with Eleventy.js it's able to scan your project and compile an optimised set of font files that only contain the Glyphs that you use.

Toshiba T5100

2024-01-04T00:00:00Z

My personal computing history began in 1988/9 with my dad’s VIC20, I was three or four at the time and remember typing in BASIC and playing a lander game from a cartridge. Then in the early 90s (93 or 94) we got an Amiga 600 and it was around 1996 when I was donated my very own computer in the form of a Toshiba T5100 clam-shell “luggable”.

The first computer that was mine

The computer came from a father of one of my sisters friends who I believe worked in computer recycling. He had seen how keen I was to use a computer and cobbled together a working Toshiba T5100 from parts to give to me.

When it arrived all I had was the Toshiba DOS disk and nothing else. My dad provided three floppy disks: a copy of QuickBASIC, Battle Chess and PGA Tour Golf.

It wasn’t until over a decade later that I would learn these programs actually had colour, the Toshiba T5100 itself had a orange plasma screen.

Over the years I obtained a number of BASIC books and unbeknownst to me at the time this computer was the seed that would grow into the career in programming I enjoy today!

—

In 1998 we got our first home PC in the form of a 400Mhz Pentium powered computer running Windows98. It’s around this time that I gradually stopped using the Toshiba and it eventually made its way to my parents attic where it remained until 2017 when I recovered it and brought it home with me.

My heart sunk the first time I saw the rust

Unfortunately it appears the years in storage have not been kind to this machine. When I picked it up in 2017 there was some kind of oily residue around where it’s rusted. I’m unsure what caused that or the rust and haven’t found the time in the years since to open the machine up to take a look.

The last time I remember this machine working was around 2012 and I’m resolved to the idea that it’s dead. I’ve kept it and the few floppy disks I found stored with it as more of a sentimental keepsake than anything else.

I might one day pull it apart and see if it’s fixable but until then it’s correctly stored. I have a working Toshiba T1200 to tinker with in the meantime.

Why I don't go to Twitter anymore

2024-01-03T00:00:00Z

I used to spend an extortionate amount of time on Twitter, upwards of three hours a day scrolling what was mostly a feed of noise. It wasn't all unproductive though, I did relish interacting with the Vintage Computing and Retro Gaming communities on there but alas even their appeal wasn't enough to entice me to stay once Twitter became entirely possessed by the Devil.

—

My disenfranchisement from the platform came several years before the self-declared "free speech absolutist" Elon acquired it; although his doing so sounded the final death knell for my active involvement with what was Twitter.

In 2018, I was invited to join the Mastodon server phpc.social and in October of that same year I set up my own server, although at the time using the light-weight Pleroma due to Mastodon being more complex to setup^[1]. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience making many mutual connections and finding a community of people in the Fediverse that was similar to the tight knit Vintage Computing and Retro Gaming communities I had been a part of on Twitter.

Unlike many others who came to the Fediverse, my transition to using it as my main social network wasn't entirely intentional. I had dipped my toes and found something much more pleasant than I was expecting. Until then my only experience of Social Media was through the lens of a programatic feed and deviating from that in order to interact with groups of people I shared interest in took effort. By contrast, once you get over the initial shock of joining, the Fediverse feels welcoming and comfortable like a cosy old cafe.

The events of October 2022 and the ongoing dumpster fire as documented by Twitter is going great^[2] have solidified my intention to keep away from that platform. In November of 2022 I deleted Twitter from my phone to intentionally reduce the time I spent scrolling its feed to zero; over the course of the next few months a lot of the people I had regularly chatted with on Twitter also setup a presence on the Fediverse (with a few returning to IRC or migrating to other platforms), this migration grew to include a significant number of the Vintage Computing and Retro Gaming communities and in doing so reduced the need for me to visit Twitter further.

Now when I am shared a link to Twitter (which for a period of time wouldn't work unless logged in), I often find the comments people make on the posts to be disgusting, verging on a level I have only ever before seen at 4chan. It doesn't surprise me that Twitters Ad revenue is down 50% what self-respecting marketing exec is going to want their content promoted against ignorance, bigotry and hate?

—

Much like MySpace, one day I visited for the last time, never to return.

If doing so today I would use GoToSocial became its simpler still to get started and has a great dev team behind it. ↩︎
Which unfortunately discontinued reporting in May 2023 ↩︎

2024 Roadmap

2024-01-02T00:00:00Z

After saying goodbye to 2023 I have decided that in order to make the most of my time in 2024 I should plan out how I want to use it; this page will be a Living Document that I update throughout the year as tasks get completed. The idea being that if I ever get stuck for what to work on next I can visit this page and work on filling out the stubs.

What's happening in January

It's currently January and this month I want to start slow, focusing mostly on writing as often as I can but also in a sustainable manor so that I do not burn myself out!

As such I won't be working on any Big projects, I do however intend to deploy an Instagram inspired gallery pages and have my Eleventy.js Interlink Plugin provide a widget for displaying stubs and what pages are linking to them.

While adding images for the Toshiba T5100 page I decided to finally install and use @11ty/eleventy-img. I followed Aleksandr Hovhannisyan's article: Optimizing Images with the 11ty Image Plugin. I should probably update the /changelog/.

I also have three posts from 2023 that I scheduled for publishing but never actually published. In addition to publishing them I also want to finish How to programmatically add tags to posts in 11ty which currently exists as a draft and until commit 4eb9bd7 when I added a display for draft posts I believed this was both finished and published!

What this has flagged is that I need to work on My publishing workflow and look into what tooling I need to implement in order to keep on track!

In my Obsidian vault I have the concept of anchor pages these are fluid foundations for post series and act as a dumping ground of things I would like to look into; they are sometimes useful to share and I would like a new section of this website within which to do so.

I’d like to fit in installing FreshRSS although that might need to happen after Server Setup, Hetzner-Moose and that might not happen until March.

I want to update my Eleventy.js Interlink Plugin to include a filter for parsing Wikilinks within a given string, this will allow it to be used in files that aren't parsed by the Markdown engine.

Key content that I would like to publish:

Trade Wars 2002 and Black Nova Traders which is heavily inspired by it
Evergreen Content
Write about my Toshiba T5100
BASIC Programming Books (mostly the ones I read over Christmas)
Ascendancy retrospective
Lost Smiley ASCII DOS Games
Why I use 11ty and Why I use Obsidian
Update Generating random numbers over a range in Go, I noticed while Porting a 30 year old game to Go that some of what I use in this article has since been deprecated
2023 In Music
2023 in Books

My Plan for February

I'd like to begin anew on my #365DayProject ideally with some programatic support by way of an 11ty plugin or something. I'd like to be able to add issue and volume front matter to all current and future posts within this project and have a short code that is able to display the project stats and maybe tie into gamification of the whole process. Batch writing is also likely the only way that I will be able to have this happen concurrently to everything else going on.

Off the back of that, and taking inspiration from Juah's post I gamified my own blog I would also like to add an "achievements" page with some bespoke art "medals" for things such as "posted five days in a row", "wrote 10,000 words", etc. Small, fun milestones that should be achievable within the year.

I began writing the tutorial: Building a minimal forum with Laravel and htmx in November 2023 and would like to get it completed by end of February 2024.

Key content that I would like to publish:

Startopia retrospective, in 2021 Spacebase Startopia was released with mixed reviews. I'd like to play that and compare
Teeny Towers
Add Roguelike Development anchor page
Virtual Rack
Digital Spelunking

Plan for the rest of 2024

This is largely TBD however I have a new intentions for 2024 page where I am planning out the broad strokes of the year.

Living Document

2024-01-02T00:00:00Z

A living document is something that is continually edited and updated, never finished its purpose is to grow and change over time.