I’ve decided that I’m not going to renew my Lightroom subscription when it comes due. I’ve just gone through and brought all the photos that were on the Adobe Cloud back to my local NAS. I just don’t do enough photography anymore to justify the expense.
He’s almost over the flu now.
I have changed my DNS provider to OpenDNS. I have been using CloudFlare DNS and have nothing but praise for its speed and stability. However, with kids in the house, I need the additional network filtering and site-blocking that OpenDNS can deliver.
For OpenDNS to work it needs to be kept abreast of my home’s IP address. My ISP doesn’t provide1 a static IP. While my dynamic IP doesn’t change often, any change that does occur prevents the OpenDNS filtering from working. What’s more, it’s a non-visible problem. There are no error messages that pop up alerting of a problem. The filtering just stops working.
OpenDNS know this. They offer an app that runs in the background to monitor and update the OpenDNS service with the current dynamic IP address. However, that app isn’t nice. What’s more, I don’t like the idea of the network filtering being dependent on a laptop device that might not always be available on the network to perform the update.
I have a Raspberry Pi that provides ad-blocking throughout my home network with the brilliant Pi-Hole. Given it’s already important role in my network configuration, I decided the Pi should also be responsible for monitoring any changes to my dynamic IP address.
A bit of research led me to discover that ddclient was the tool for the job. It’s not installed by default on the Pi, but can be installed through the GUI package manager or on the terminal with:
sudo apt-get install ddclient
Once installed, I progressed to follow this solid step-by-step guide on how to configure ddclient with OpenDNS.
The end result is that I now have ddclient running as a daemon process on the Raspberry Pi. It launches upon reboot and checks my IP address every 1 hour.
The best part is that I don’t have to run the very ordinary OpenDNS Updater app on my Mac.
That is, I’m too cheap to pay for.↩︎
Well, this is a good reason to completely leave Google. It’s not sending me 2FA codes to my devices, and my attempt at recovery failed. So, I guess no more access to my Google account?
Thanks @cleverdevil for your “On This Day” extension for micro.blog.
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I read this because it seems one of those books that should be read before one dies. So it goes. The worldview (universe view?) of the Tralfamadorian’s resonated with the reading I have done recently on stoicism. Perhaps that was always as it was meant to be?
I am glad to have read this book. but will have to contemplate more on what it means for me, who is currently living in an existence in a different era.
View all my reviews
Yes! I got my Hugo/Netlify site up and running. I’ll go run my victory lap now.
I was defeated by the combination of Hugo, git and Netlify. C’est la vie.
I’ve discovered this site by Bryce Wray. I have no idea if it’s already widely known, but it’s new to me. I like the writing.
I succumbed and bought iA Writer for macOS.
The search for the right Mac Markdown editor is like a quest for the Holy Grail. There are many options, but finding the ideal fit is a challenge.
It got to the point where I had to do an audit of the options that exist on my computer, and consider which one might be best for my needs.
The list I came up with is, in potential order of preference:
A special mention:
I thought I would end up choosing BBEdit. That’s why I typed this post in the app. But in usage, I think the winner might be MultiMarkdown Composer.
Hey micro.blog friends, you’re a coercive bunch! I think I’m going to have to run with iA Writer! Is there a way to get x-callback URLs to render as tapable links though?
I’m getting the hang of using git from the terminal now.
I’m really in the mood for shaking up my apps. Now I’m looking at Mailmate for email. It’s an app I’ve known about for years, but now I’m genuinely interested.
“The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42.”
– Douglas Adams
In that case, I’m looking forward to true enlightenment because today is my 42nd birthday.
I was fortunate to be born in Australia. We didn’t have much growing up. Raised by a mother whose husband returned to the USA without his wife and four children, we benefited from the generosity of the country’s social safety net to keep our heads just above water.
Life went on, I enjoyed my education and saw it as a pathway to something bigger. The nation helped me once again with its low-cost loan system to support students in the costs of attending university. Without the ability to defer these subsidised university fees until I was employed, I would not have gained a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Law.
At 22 I met my wife, Hannah, through a random chance encounter during a night out. We hit it off and things grew from there. As it turned out, my wife is the daughter of the man who at the time was Leader of the Federal Opposition party, and who had served with distinction as a Minister in the famous Hawke government.
The fact that I, a boy who grew up with not much, should be thrust into this very different world, is a measure of the egalitarian potential of our nation. It has led to a whole range of circumstances that seem unimaginable from my perspective of a boy from a low-income family.
In 2005 we married. Since then we have owned and operated a small business and had two wonderful children. Over the years we have had had medical emergencies and fun and sadness. We exist most happily when we have a project to focus upon.
I played basketball until I was 40, at which point my knees and hips said, “enough”, and I was forced to give up my favourite sport.
I’ve always been interested in computing and technology. This interest persists even as I’m no longer the young whipper-snapper.
My hair is greying, my wrinkles are deepening, my belly is expanding. I am a family man who values his wife and children over and above his job, a career, or professional reputation.
I see the potential in Hannah to participate in the body politic of our nation. The country that held me close, lifted me up, and gave me the chance to build resilience in my youth and explore my potential in adulthood.
So here I sit in the foyer of middle age, full of interest for the future.
This is my 42.
This is a post written in 1Writer and to be published via Working Copy on iOS.
Now I’m editing this file in iA Writer as it is linked with Working Copy’s instance of my file through iCloud and Files app.
I wish iA Writer supported TextExpander.
I’ve always had a version of BBEdit on my Mac. For a while it was TextWrangler, but now it’s back to BBEdit (unregistered). It’s one of those apps I don’t use very often, but when I want a pure Mac text editing experience, I know I can rely on it.
BBEdit can do a whole bunch of things that I don’t understand and have no need for.
But it is working very nicely as an integrated text editor for GitHub Desktop, and I feel like I might now benefit from the ‘unlocked’ version of BBEdit.
So now I have cloned my Blot repository into Github and am using Github desktop on the Mac. As this is editing via Github I have no idea how or if my edits here will make it to my site.
The nice thing about Github Desktop is it allowed me to easily open this whole project/site into BBEdit.
At first this didn’t work, but it was simply because I’d forgotten to add the .md suffix to the file in BBEdit. So this stopped Blot’s renderer from creating the HTML version. At first I thought the file hadn’t uploaded. It had, but it was not showing on the web.
So this section has been added as an edit, which I should be able to push and commit as a new version of the same file.
I’m going to try to share it over to Working Copy for publishing via Git.
Wish me luck.
I’ve opened this file in iA Writer from the Working Copy files provider for the version stored on Blot.
What happens now?
This is literally a test post using Git instead of Dropbox. I have no idea what I’m doing with Git, but what could go wrong?