Blurbs

I am currently implementing BorgBackup for my NAS to meet the recommended 3-2-1 backup strategy. BorgBackup on its own is just a CLI, and on top of it you can use Borgmatic for easier configuration via yaml files rather than manually scripting all the command line flags. But for my NAS I need to deploy Borgmatic with Docker so I’ll be using this borgmatic-docker repo maintained by the same borgmatic team.

Being 3 layers of abstraction deep while trying to learn a new tool made for a few hiccups and what I found online required a combination of sources to piece all the parts together. While I was writing my own notes to document my setup I found this tutorial. It covers everything I needed and with more detail than my own notes so I recommend it for your own borgmatic setup.

I’m using BorgBase for my backups, BTW.

I saw this post The WiFi Only Works When Its Raining on Hackernews. I think I can say I’ve learned a thing or two working at a WISP for a few years because I knew what the problem was by the title alone.

Can you guess what it is?

At home I’ve been using Neovim on WSL2 but out of the box I could not copy and paste from Windows to Neovim or vice versa. There are a few solutions but I found wsl-clipboard to be incredibly simple and apparently unknown due to lack of stars on the repo.

With Pythons pdb usually q for quit is enough to close the debugger and stop the program. When that’s not working you can follow it with a quick ctrl+c to exit the program. But I got stuck in a loop with a poorly placed breakpoint and I didn’t want to close my terminal or use another terminal to kill it so I learned you can call os._exit() to force the Python program to quit skipping all finally blocks and __exit__ methods.

So for this situation import os; os._exit() force quits pdb and your program.

I enjoy sitting outside at night; often times sit on my computer for personal projects. Being in Vanuatu I can enjoy this perk all year long and it also means I’m much more aware of the sun, moon and other things in the sky I wouldn’t pay much mind to if I spent more nights indoors.

Just now I saw the longest shooting star I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve seen many. From my current vantage, it appeared dead west a tad north of where the sun sets about 15 - 25 degree above the horizon and traveled north across the sky while never really appearing to lose much altitude. I could not say why but it flew towards the northern horizon where it fell out my view 20 - 30 seconds after I spotted it. I comptiplated taking a video but never knew if I would have the time to record it so I didn’t. Anyways, it flashed a couple times and grew in light intensity too a couple times but did not burn out which seems unusual also given its duration in the sky.

I’m curious if there is a website that collects known space debris and meteorites so I can read about what I saw.

This project template, Vite Vue Ultimate Starter has been awesome. I’ve used it for one project and I am beginning a new project with it now.

Given the JS ecosystem, I am aware this post is likely to be outdated before I publish this 🤷.

Living on the ring of fire I’ve had my share of earthquakes and we believe generally we think of them as coming without warning. But, I begun noticing earthquakes of 5-point-something or more often have a deep, wide rumble announcing their approach just a couple seconds ahead of the quake. I perceive the rumble to come rushing towards me (if that makes sense), then at its crescendo the quake begins. The otherwordly sound fills the sky as if coming from everywhere at once but it feels as if it is approaching too. A true reminder of how small you are compared to the earth below your feet.

Recently, I’ve been quick enough to recognize this sound as a warning, “an earthquake is coming”, I would say. It felt like a super power the first time I predicted an earthquake and then I decided to lookup online the science behind the sound I was hearing. Surprisingly, there was not much about it online and I’m not sure why, I know what I hear and I know its real after hearing it several times. I even had this conversation with a friend and she too confirmed the same sound in her experience. Perhaps there’s something unique to living on a small island and the interaction between the ocean and the earthquake that produces the rumble, making for a rare effect?

It’s also helpful to know that sometimes dogs, cats and other animals go wild before an earthquake and this phenomenon is much more documented and usually gives you more warning.

I tried to setup a proper IDE experience with vim several years ago; however, I was also trying to dive into i3wm and use tmux at the same time and was too far caught up into configuration instead of working so I had to stop. Plus, running all of this in a VM inside my Windows laptop was clunky. I returned to using Sublime Text and later migrated to VSCode with WSL.

VSCode has been great but now I’m running into problems with VSCode on WSL2 hogging memory and wish I could return to a setup that doesn’t require a mouse. As a result I decided to take a look at vim again and discovered neovim. I have forgotten many vim shortcuts so the Neovim quickref is very useful.

I saw this link, Patterns for Personal Websites (2003), thinking it may outdated and interesting or I may actually learn something. The article on Cover Pages reminds me when they used to be popular and I bet they will make a come back again. But, the idea of a Secret Garden has gotten my attention.

Also, here is a backup link.

In Directus you can make relative datetimes from the provided $NOW timestamp such as $NOW(-7 days) or $NOW(+3 hours).

Read more in the Directus Docs.

I’m using the remark-gemoji plugin to add emojis into my writing by turning shortcodes such as :robot: into 🤖. I don’t use emojis much so I found a Github Emoji Cheatsheet.

Also, here is the official Github Emoji API.

I’m looking into a backup solution for my family’s photos/phones. I’m familiar with Syncthing so I installed it our NAS server. The goal is our phones will transparently send new files to the server and allow us to delete files to make space on the phones.

Surprisingly, this one-way data transfer is not recommended by Syncthing but it can be done by configuring the phone to send only mode, the server to receive only mode and finding the hidden advanced option on the server to ignore deletes.

The name is Syncthing so I suppose I am trying to use it wrong.

Read more details on their forums here.

EDIT: I am questioning this workflow and suspect it is more complicated than just a normal two-way sync plus periodically pruning and copying files to the directory I setup in the NAS for backups. I would like to learn more about setups that work for others.