In The beauty of goofy diagrams Einenlum explains how a diagram drawn in a more casual style, can support conveying information easier to the audience.

The thing is, I’m more and more convinced that the style of a presentation matters. Even before looking at the content itself, the style puts you in a particular mood.

[...] To me, although they convey the same content, the first one creates a sense of seriousness and gravity. It feels like only clever people can understand it. I’m already a bit tense and I feel like I need to focus. I almost take a deep breath and say to myself “okay, you can do it”. I feel dumb but I feel that with enough curiosity and hard work I can understand the content.

The second one, on the other hand, makes me feel more relaxed and probably more curious. The topic seems easier to grasp and I’m quite confident I can understand it. It doesn’t mean it brings more clarity: the first diagram is actually probably clearer but the content has more chance of reaching my brain with the second one because I’m more open to it.

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I upgraded the blog to the newest Jekyll 4.4.0 which was released yesterday.
Unfortunately this first resulted in the following segfault while running jekyll build 🙈

/usr/gem/gems/sass-embedded-1.83.4/ext/sass/embedded_sass_pb.rb:11: [BUG] Segmentation fault at 0x0000000000004410
ruby 3.1.1p18 (2022-02-18 revision 53f5fc4236) [x86_64-linux-musl]

Turns out that this is a known problem of the google-protobuf gem (which is used by jekyll-sass-converter which is part of the default Jekyll).
Luckily there is a workaround.
Adding the following to my Gemfile fixed it 🎉

gem 'google-protobuf', force_ruby_platform: true if RUBY_PLATFORM.include?('linux-musl')

Robert Birming maintains a very nice Blog Inspiration page.
It contains a collection of articles and resources providing inspiration for blogging.
Ranging from inspiring stories why people blog, over blog directories to accessibility and design resources.

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One more for the list of blog directories: blogroll.club — A Blog Directory

A space dedicated to curating a diverse and comprehensive collection of blogs, and personal sites across the web. The goal is to foster a community where content is available for anyone and everyone.

Everything about this site is hand-crafted by two human beings: JCProbably and Lou Plummer.

Russel Baylis shares this helpful article about their learnings regarding improving the working environment to reduce eye strain.

I work from home everyday, I am susceptible to eye strain, eye pain, and dizziness. Having a working environment that’s as easy on my eyes as possible is of critical importance. I'd like to share what I've learned over the years in hopes that it can be helpful to you if you work from home, and like many, have experienced WFH eye strain.

1. An even, diffused lighting environment is best for the eyes
2. When it comes to light brightness, too much is just as problematic as too little
3. Use natural light wherever possible
4. Quality of artificial light matters
5. The best lighting for camera, is not necessarily the best lighting for ergonomics
6. Even the perfect lighting environment will fatigue you — take breaks, and take care of yourself

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When connecting to an older SSH device the following 'unable to negotiate' errors occurred. They indicate that my client-side config does not allow the (old/obsolete) methods offered by the device.

Unable to negotiate with 10.222.23.2 port 22: no matching key exchange method found. Their offer: diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1,diffie-hellman-group1-sha1,diffie-hellman-group14-sha1

This can be fixed by enabling one of the old key exchange methods:

ssh -oKexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 10.222.23.2 

Unable to negotiate with 10.222.23.2 port 22: no matching host key type found. Their offer: ssh-rsa,ssh-dss

This can be fixed by additionally enabling one of the old host key types:

ssh -oKexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 -oHostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa 10.222.23.2

terra tauri quotes from the Platform Engineering book:

If you only promote people who solve big technical problems, you’re going to have a hard time retaining the people who do the work to smooth out the usability edges, actively listen to the customer teams, and adjust their work priorities to fix the stuff that is causing the most pain. So, look closely at what you are celebrating, compensating, and promoting, and make sure you are including work that makes the product better, whatever that looks like, even if it isn’t the hardest technical bits. You may even want to reevaluate your engineering ladder to make sure the expectations at each level reflect all of the skills you now demand. Remember, this is a cultural change, and cultural changes that don’t involve changes to what is valued (as seen by what you recognize and reward) are destined to fail.

Looks like this might be a candidate for my /reading list.

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Flexoki — a great looking color scheme inspired by paper and ink colors.

Flexoki is an inky color scheme for prose and code. Flexoki is designed for reading and writing on digital screens. It is inspired by analog inks and warm shades of paper.

Flexoki is minimalistic and high-contrast. The colors are calibrated for legibility and perceptual balance across devices and when switching between light and dark modes.

Full Flexoki palette.

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Manu Moreale: Blogging: you’re doing it right

That’s all you need to know. If you’re doing it, you’re doing it right. If you have decided to reclaim ownership of your place on the web, you’re doing it right. It doesn’t matter how you did it. [...] What matters is that you’re doing it. Your effort is commendable. You deserve to be thanked so, thank you.

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My new favorite type of CAPTCHA: DOOM CAPTCHA

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During casual surfing I found this article from Brain Baker explaining their revised backup strategy.
The most interesting part was the brief mention of PhotoSync used to sync photos to their Linux system.

This came just at the right moment, as I was exploring options how to get photos from an iPhone to a Linux machine as seemlessly as possible.
Previous attempts with ifuse/libimobiledevice didn't work reliably, and uploading the photos to iCloud and somehow scraping/downloading them again doesn't look very future-proof either.
Thus very happy about PhotoSync which runs on the iPhone and talks a plethora of protocols on the other side (in my case I opted for SFTP).

It is a freemium app with paid in-app purchase for the pro/premium features (raw photo sync and autosync in the background).
Based on the good reviews and initial functionality testing of the free version I decided to fo for the one-time purchase to unlock the premium features.

I did setup a chrooted SFTP user to receive the photos on the Linux machine.
Then configured this SFTP access in the app which worked seamless.
So far the manual sync of existing photos and videos worked reliably over WiFi.
And I'm looking forward for the geofence-triggered autosync to run 🤞🏻

In this article, MacKenzie builds up a config, script and systemd file to respectfully fetch an RSS feed with curl.

It uses the following as base config for curl:

fail
compressed
max-time = 30
no-progress-meter
alt-svc = alt-svc-cache.txt
etag-compare = tech.CitizenLab.rss.etag
etag-save = tech.CitizenLab.rss.etag
output = tech.CitizenLab.rss.xml
time-cond = "Tue, 05 Nov 2024 15:00:35 GMT"
write-out = "%output{tech.CitizenLab.rss.lm}%header{last-modified}"
url = "https://citizenlab.ca/feed/"
next

Then adds conditional checks for the etag-compare and time-cond directives, so they are only added if the corresponding file contains a non-empty value.

The last part is then to use a systemd Timer file with OnUnitInactiveSec=1hour, so that the command will be run one hour after the previous run finished.