Microblog

Holy cow, how has this not come across my radar until now? I just found out about Sonic Visualiser, an open source, free audio analysis workbench and plugin suite with superpowers. A friend hit me up asking about free audio analysis tools, and I was about to let him down the hard way, saying “buddy, you really need to spend the dollarydoos on iZotope RX” when he asked what I thought about Sonic Visualiser. I hadn’t heard of it before, so I grabbed a copy of it and poked around for a few minutes. I’m astounded at what this, and the other tools in its suite can do. I want to put it through its paces more thoroughly, but holy moly does this look like a great tool. Thank you to the Center for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London for creating and maintaining this fantastic set of tools. I can’t wait to dig in further.

I recently came back to using IRC regularly after my friend and colleague Jochen Liilch migrated his Monospace Mentor community chat from Discord to IRC. It’s been a treat to go back to a simpler chat system paired with modern creature comforts with IRC clients like Halloy after Discord’s flirtations with the collection of IDs of its users. However, a bit of joy that I didn’t expect to rekindle was in Halloy’s customization options, specifically around the ability to play sounds for certain events (like direct messages and mentions). ...

On Friday, a buddy of mine reached out to me on Discord - “hey, uh, do you happen to know how to recover data from a dead NVMe drive?” Well, no, I didn’t at the time, but challenge accepted? I figured that I could at least figure out just how bad off the drive was. I steeled both my friend and myself for the event in which we wouldn’t be able to recover anything, and we got to work. ...

I recently completed the refresh of my personal projects logo! This is more of a personal change than anything I expect others to get excited about, but I wanted to share it with folks, as well as talk about the journey of self discovery that was required in order to make it happen. When I started my music production journey back in 2013, like all the cool music producer folks I hung out with, I needed a logo. I’ve used the moniker “belthesar”, an accidental misspelling of one of the Biblical Magi (of which these wise men were borrowed heavily in JRPGs in the 90’s and 2000’s) since my teens, so it only made sense to continue using such a self-referential name for this project. Young me, with a passing adeptness in digital image editing software, had created several “logos” in the past, but the biggest reason to make that had always been “because it looks cool”, not because I really understood the value or purpose of having a logo. This time, there was a purpose, and a story to tell, and even though I didn’t actually think in those terms when designing it, I would later discover that I following the time honored philosophy of logo design. ...

I was perusing selfh.st looking for something different, and stumbled across Cert Warden. It’s a centralized ACME certificate manager, which seems pretty neat. While I’ve leveraged Traefik’s ACME support in the past, I’ve had to turn to other solutions for creating certificates for services I don’t proxy through Traefik. In addition, it can make managing certs across ACME providers a bit easier, and at first glance it seems to have a much nicer API, allowing me to delegate specific credentials for consumers to pull things. I doubt this will be of much use for any web apps I’m hosting in my infrastructure, but I can see it being valuable middleware for cutting certs for appliances that don’t have ACME support built in. I might give it a shot soonish.

I just set up Conduit, a Matrix homeserver, for use in the household to replace our reliance on Discord, and so far it’s been pretty neat! My wife has been wanting to not depend on having Discord open all the time, which is difficult, because we both are usually at our desks all day and want to stay in touch, but dislike the idea of always needing to have that chat program up and running. In addition, we both would like to have a more convenient way to share links and files with eachother, and sometimes the kind of data we want to share is personal, which should make anyone a little wary of using a third party service for that. ...

I’ve been using Traefik as a reverse proxy and ingress controller for quite a while, and it’s one of my favorites. I like how I can colocate the networking configuration for my applications alongside my application configuration all in Compose spec files. However, it can get a bit exhausting to constantly repeat much of the same configuration over and over again. Here’s a collection of the things I’ve done to simplify my Traefik dynamic configurations by adding some defaults to the static configuration. ...

I recently completed a pretty slick refresh of my Final Fantasy XIV PVP series tracker. It’s a simple, but useful tool to help you figure out what is the most optimal way to grind out your PVP series. If you’re a procrastinator, but really want those sweet sweet PVP rewards, it can really help you mindfully track your progress. I really wanted to revamp the look and feel of the page, but well, frontend web design has never been my strong suit. ...

In getting CI/CD for this blog set up, I finally had the last straw with git submodules. I recently started playing around with git subtrees for my homelab config migration to git, and while they definitely have their own ergonomics issues, the fact that they vendor the subtree’s data in the parent makes dealing with them in CI/CD scenarios much easier. I imagine a lot of this is easier when you’re all in the land of Github, but I’m using Github Actions vis Gitea and their “act_runner”. In my experience though, when using Gitea Actions, fetching submodules is a huge pain. If you have mixed credentials, they’re a pain. If they’re in private repositories, they’re a pain. If you’re using git+ssh and need to deal with authorized hosts, they’re a pain. (Spoiler alert, the Github Action parameter to provide authorized hosts didn’t seem to work, I ended up needing to run ssh-keyscan in the workflow to get the authorized hosts in the known_hosts file.) ...

Been desperate to get my blog looking a little nicer, and also wanting something that makes microblogging a little easier. The thought of writing small posts that don’t require a huge amount of energy kept seeming more and more attractive thanks to Jeff Triplet’s Micro.blog. Here’s hoping that this sticks, and I start to notate little thoughts to share a bit more.