After giving it quite a lot of thought, I’ve finally left BearBlog and moved to a self hosted setup with Hugo. Happily I have the knowledge and means to do this and hopefully can keep finding the inspiration and time to keep writing and maintain the site as well. If anything doesn’t work then someone please let me know. It should all be nicely setup, fully https, images on a subdomain and everything logging and lovely, but still its possible I’ve missed something. ...
This summer has been brutal, amongst others, I grow a fair number of cloud forest orchid species in a grow tent in my garage. This summer got hot in May and stayed hot until about a week ago. Normally in UK summers I can ride out short periods of temperatures above the low 20s (°C of course, I don’t use the ridiculous US measurements). By giving the plants high air movement and high humidity. This year however, things started well above 25° in may and reaching well into the 30°s inside the tent on very regular occasions. Combine that with the fact there was little nighttime temperature drop meant a lot of very unhappy plants. ...
My blog a few weeks ago talked about the 3 book swaps I’ve visited in my home county over the last few weeks. Two are housed in old red BT phoneboxes. There is also a fantastic website that tracks all these old boxes, categorises them on location or current usage (book swap, defib etc). Check out the K6 project; https://www.thek6project.co.uk If you’re interested in seeing what your own county has to offer in terms of old phoneboxes. ...
Cool - without fail the toxic Bear blog meta (that I’m now adding to I know) kicks in and a post responding to mine points out that obviously I’m wrong and stupid and using the wrong search engine. The search engine called ‘small web’ akshually doesn’t search the small web - who knew (not me). no seriously, is Kagi evil? “I realise there are lots of other places to find blogs” and “doesn’t necessarily lead to content. Also a large pinch of English sarcasm here too.” ...
There’s been a lot of discourse about the small web self selecting for AI and Tech and that being the bulk of the content. E.g the very good post here from Hakker in response to this (also very good) post from Gordon I have my own thoughts on this, so thought I’d try an experiment. All using Kagi Small web search, which I believe is designed to focus on blogs and smaller websites. ...
Since my (surprisingly popular) blog on Gemini protocol I’ve continued to poke around with it and these are some very unstructured thoughts. Seriously - I'm typing this as I go, its not a coherent blog, its just me rambling. First off - gemtext, the text format used with the gemini protocol seems to be utterly pointless. Its neither one thing or another. I understand the need to minimalistic, easy to parse text handled by this minimalistic protocol, but you might as well just use just text. The very few options given in gemtext include ...
I understand that this is now getting into the realms of the extremely nerdy. As part of my on-going investigation into the Western Command Stop Line Number 28 based around the Teme river I came across some further HER records1 for extant anti-tank cylinders that whilst also featuring on the Defence of Britain records do, oddly, not feature under the subset of records for the Teme river stop line. Now this might be oversight, as I can’t see any reasoning that given their location, these anti-tank cylinders wouldn’t have been part of the defences involved in the Teme river defence line. Not all that far from the Rochford anti tank cylinders that I managed to find under a hedge, these near Eastham on the South side of the river Teme are much more easily visible and numerous. They are placed along a small North-South road, which is one of many in the area, but between the larger ‘A’ roads of the A456 and A443 which would allow invaders to cross the river Severn at Bewdley or Holt respectively. The Defence of Britain (DoB) records for these actually make reference to how these (and I assume many others) are made. ...
Over the last few weeks, largely in an attempt to inject some whimsy in my life, I’ve managed to visit 3 free book swap locations (4 if you count Tesco). One of the many joys of living in a fairly rural county is such things are possibly and all blessing go out to those people who maintain them. Two were converted former phone boxes (the classic British red phone box) and the other is a shack on the edge of someone’s garden. ...
For some reason over the last week, Insta has shown me videos of disabled British people having problems with accessibility, flights, railways, coffee shops. Its appalling that in this day and age accessibility isn’t simply the default and should something break alternative arrangements not be made immediately to accommodate people. However - there is one form of discrimination that still pervades society and needs to be stamped out. I speak of discrimination against the tall. I’m 2m tall (6'5") in my boots and the world in which I live is an endless stream of problems against me. I go to a supermarket and the automatic tills are at knee level. If I use the manned checkouts then I’m forced to stoop down in order to input my pin. ...
After quite a lot of wine fuelled reading of Brennans Blog I got a little interested in the Gemini Protocol designed as a new internet protocol for “supporting an electronic library of interconnected text documents”. Sounds good to me. I don't often write about tech, because everyone else on the smallweb does. But I've been a Linux obsessive since Redhat 5.2. If you search my real name, there are contributions I made to the Fedora project back when I had free time. I have made my living for 20+ years in the 'just past the cutting edge' of tech, first Linux focused architecture, then increasingly DevOps... I now rarely get to play and instead guide my team in k8s and cloud and frankly they're better than me now(certainly at the later). Somewhere along the way I got less excited about tech...but sometimes, just sometimes I need to scratch that itch. So first off, setup some DNS pointing at my Ubuntu 24.04 server, then setup the molly-brown server which helpfully was an apt package in the Ubuntu repo. Create some certs (guide for all of this are better written elsewhere). Create some files. And finally work with hateful SystemD to get it to startup. Done, took about 10 minutes and 7 of that was System-bloody-D config. ...