baleeted!

I'm moving all my public git repositories away from GitHub, to the little git forge hosted on https://orbital.rodeo.

The move isn't complete and the new destination isn't pretty yet either, but I have already gone ahead and removed everything from GitHub.

Feels good, and gives motivation to tidy up, and publish what I think is useful to keep.

Trying on something new.

Retiring the vanity domain that I've kept for the past two decades and instead making my personal site a tilde-subdirectory of something more general-purpose.

It decenters my meat-self, and I intend for it to provide a home to software that is more about the project than about me having written it. (Also, not owned by Microsoft GitHub.)

The page itself is just a placeholder for now...

https://orbital.rodeo/~datagrok

makebakery, my static site generator (formerly known as m4-bakery) has had a spike of recent improvements!

Among other things,
- bumped the demonstration site to use bootstrap 5.0.0
- improved module docs and several demo-site pages
- new modules enabling:
-- `make serve` to stand up a local webserver for previewing changes
-- `make watch` for automatically running make when source files change
-- `make gh-pages` for deploying your static site to github

With a bit more work I might even tag a commit with a first release number and start a changelog!

https://datagrok.github.io/makebakery

I've been having little impulses of motivation to update my website again, since it is very stale, and a javascript banner that I set up for the purpose loudly declares it to be so.

Taking a step back and thinking,

What am I?

What has been the deliverable from my existence? What am I to strangers, other than what I have written?

What do I want to express?
Do I like this collection of writing?
Do I want it to represent me?
What value is there in expressing myself if I'm not very unique, or accomplished, or interesting?

I keep thinking "maybe no, maybe none" and that I should replace my personal homepage with a spinning beachball or similar. Embrace that I am one instance among billions and build the appropriate site for that which may be none at all.

But I'm reminded of the time that I bumped into an old colleague and one of the first things he said to me was how much he liked that zany writing about impossibly ambitious project ideas, that I was thinking of deleting even then. Huh.

What to do.

I got a little 128x64 I2C OLED display for $2.50. It said in the product listing that it used an SSD1306 driver IC, which made me think it would work with #QMK firmware.

I hooked it up but it only showed static.

So I read some datasheets and learned some stuff and did some hacking and now (or very soon) QMK will support this OLED display too! (Turns out it actually uses an SH1106.)

Pictured: the wireless receiver for my Mitosis #mechanicalkeyboards, with a speaker and this OLED display attached.

Do you find that on some sites, emojis show up as outlines instead of color images? If so, try uninstalling DejaVu fonts and installing Bitstream Vera fonts instead.

https://github.com/eosrei/twemoji-color-font#why-bitstream-vera

Making plans to visit and explore around one of the least-used train stations on the entire Nankai line the next time I visit Japan, and I am vibrating with excitement!

There's something about reliable public transit being available in the beautiful middle of nowhere that just thrills me.

(Get this: despite having fewer than 20 passengers per day, trains depart from this station at least hourly from 5am to 9pm 😍)