Recently

September, 2021

I haven't updated this site much lately, and figured this might be the best way to do it. Totally stealing inspiration from Tom at macwright.com with his regular Recently articles. Rather than make multiple posts for a given month, I might just update this page (and subsequent monthly Recently pages) during the month as I feel like adding to them.

Begin 2021-09-03

Site Downtime

Occasionally, you might notice (all 2 or 3 of you whoever read this site) that this site is sometimes, well, down.

Never fear though, it's simply because I don't always keep up with the hosting pay-as-you-go credits that my host nearlyfreespeech uses as it's payment model.

Although I will strive to keep up with it, I don't consider occasional downtime on small non-production websites to be too big of a deal. Indeed, the site over at the solar version of Low Tech Magazine explains why they have some downtime and why they have a pretty good excuse for it.

Now, granted, my excuse is less to do with demonstrating renewable energy and lacking sunlight and more to do with being slack and absentminded, but I still like the reasoning that maybe, just maybe, not all websites have to be online all the time. On that note though, I am very tempted to try and move this website to a similar homegrown solution as the Solar Low Tech Magazing site. It would be quite fun and very satisfying, I think.

Learning C

Otherwise, recently I've been trying to learn the C programming language. I've tinkered off and on with it in past months, but I'm trying to make a better go of it.

My main previous coding experience is with the likes of PHP, Javascript etc so mostly just web programming (yes, I know, it's not what everyone considers programming). Other than that, just relatively basic shell scripting.

So, I guess C is quite a jump but even having prior PHP and JS experience seems to help adjust to some concepts.

I actually really like C. Not only does learning it help to be able to understand some of my favourite suckless utilities at the source level, I actually find C to be a strangely elegant and simple language. This isn't to say that I've always found C to be a total breeze to learn or haven't had challenges, but once you pick up on some of the basic concepts and typical gotchas, it's a no-nonsense language well worth learning. I also like the fact that if you keep the code as portable as possible, which isn't that hard for relatively basic programs, you can compile and run the program on nearly any device you can poke a stick at.

Lack of The Linux Rain Content

This one I'm a bit less happy about. It falls both in the slack and also being too busy camps. That sounds like completely opposing scenarios, I know, but it is what it is.

I haven't posted any new articles on there since February of this year, and hope to change that soon. I haven't kept up much with the happenings in the Linux world, so to speak, yet I still use the platform every single day. That's okay though, everyone has different priorities at different times. I never intended for the site to be a fast paced mecha of Linux content, but I would still like to add more and keep it a little more active than it currently is.

End 2021-09-03

Begin 2021-09-19

My own Yarn.social instance

Finally, have my own Yarn.social Pod!

Been tempted to try this for a while and now it's finally done, helping to contribute to the "decentralised" aspect of the platform. It's hosted on my Raspberry Pi 3+ at home, so that's nice too. Actually, so is this very site now, but all of that definitely warrants a whole separate new article...

End 2021-09-19