dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

Articles


Git-based versioning

So you have this (web) application and you are growing a bit tired of having to manually bump the version number it tells to its users. Also, you would like to see if you are using an up-to-date edition of said app. Enter your Git repository. When you are running …

Online life enhancer, edition 1

Today I want to talk to you about the web and how it sometimes sucks. At least, the experience can suck a bit, especially when it is not open enough so you can set things to your own hands. Take for example YouTube, where overlays can ruin the end of …
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'Social gardens', or 'More reasons to dammIT'

Lately I've been making some changes in how I interact with social media, and also how I consume its news and blurps. I started using Mastodon and basically moved my interest there (I tend to double post to both Mastodon and Twitter, as Twitter is still where most of my …

isso commenting system in a subdirectory on nginx

I very recently moved this weblog to a new host, and in the process finally changed from Apache running mod_wsgi to nginx with uWSGI and supervisor (well, at least for the Python based web apps, as dammIT is a flat site). I'm using isso as commenting system, which runs as …

I remember writing

I remember writing (yes, writing) short weblog updates in the train on my Sony Clie running PalmOS, using the fast glyphs of Graffiti, in 2004. I want to go back to that, realising that my weblog had turned into a collection of longer articles as of late, spaced quite far …


Andromeda, Substratum and a Chromebook

Andromeda is a way to theme an Android device with Substratum without needing root. You need adb though, so a desktop or laptop computer is needed to initiate the connection between the Andromeda app and Substratum. On regular machines this is not much of an issue, but Chromebooks are both …

diskspacealarm.py

Because it's Friday, I was bitten by a filled-up volume on my VPS again, because Prometheus somehow is randomly crashing my VPS, and because I like thinkering and Python, I wrote a little notification script. Yes, it checks for available disk space on your nodes, with configuration per hostname (it's …

Limited braincycles

Do you know that feeling that halfway through the day you start to be less 'fresh'? Myself, I have the experience of getting a bit slower over the course of the day: in the morning, I can fix the problem I was struggling with the last afternoon in a few …
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The end of 2017

The end is near. Well, at least the end of 2017, as this roller-coaster of a year is counting its last days. In less than two days, it will be Christmas, and these days mean a general slowing down of life and making time to enjoy each other for us …
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Quick December update

In my lunch break, I tinkered a bit with the code generating this weblog, fixing some theming bugs, adding metadata to some old posts and updated the About page a bit. There's also finally a page overviewing all the tags and the categories page also got some updates; the category …

Using older devices

As an enthusiast for technological things in general, and gadgets in particular, I like to use (and own) shiny devices. Be it a fast (and slightly big) smartphone with the latest OS, or a laptop with a lot of muscle and a 4K (touch)screen, I really can find a …
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EuroPython 2017, part 2

Photos of the whole EuroPython 2017 conference are available at the EuroPython 2017 flickr group, the EuroPython 2017 website, and my photo gallery. Videos (lifestream captures for now) are at YouTube, more will go live later at the EuroPython YouTube Channel. Recommended. Day three, Wednesday We kicked off with the …
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EuroPython 2017, part 1

EuroPython 2017 (Needs editing after I get some sleep and more time) This post also appeared on the Sanoma Technology weblog. Day zero, Sunday After a rather pleasant flight on Sunday morning, where out of 80 passengers, I sat next to the only other EuroPython visitor, I took a nicely …
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Computer Ethics quotes

"I have said that this new development has unbound possibilities for good and for evil. For one thing, it makes the metaphorical dominance of the machines, as imagined by Samual Butler, a most immediate and non-metaphorical problem. It gives the human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical …

shuttereye.org, a gallery

I mentioned in a recent post that I was working on a new gallery, based on some project I started in december. This project grew out of an increasing dissatisfaction with other gallery software (gallery2 has been out of my system for quite a while, zenphoto keeps bugging out on …
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Blog updates

It has been a few days since I relaunched this weblog and I have been doing some tweaking to make things even better. Apart from resurrecting images from the dead (my gallery2 instance has been gone for quite some years, for example, and I have been digging through my backups …

Moved to Pelican

This weblog has always been a self-built affair. It started off in 2003 as a PHP website, and continued in that form for over thirteen years. I open sourced it a while ago (in March of 2014), with a colleague promptly finding a security issue in the admin code. Frankly …
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Hello 2017

The year 2017 has barely begun, but somehow it is already looking up. At least in my personal bubble. Son is suddenly confident enough to try a lot of new words, with mixed success in pronunciation or even correctness, but he is leaping forward amazingly. I am really happy with …
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