I found BashWrite which is just a very simple static site generator written completely in bash as a single file script.

The only dependency is having an up-to-date sed command which most systems should have. I use Alpine Linux which comes with a minimal sed command so I had to download the full command through my package manager.

It’s simple, basic and has support for the majority of markdown formatting. There’s some limitations due to it being written in Bash only but I am personally okay with that.

I found it on this list of static site generators if you’re curious to see more options.

It looks interesting and seems like it would be easy to set up. I’ll play with it and see how I like it. Thanks for the suggestion

I’m making a birthday present for a friend of mine. It’s a mushroom carved from wood. I already carved and sanded it and it’s already looking really nice.

I’m now looking to colour it and an doing some experiments on some wood scraps to use tea as a wood stain. So far I’ve tested black tea and after about 10 coats, it has a nice, earthy brown colour. Next I’m going to test out some rooibos tea for some red colouring.

I have a small turkish coffee pot that I used to make coffee with and it was really useful for making the wood stain. I put two tea bags in and boiled the water for about 30 minutes with the tea bags left inside.

I then removed the tea bags and boiled down the water. The result was a deep, milky looking tea concentrate which smelled really nice.

Can’t wait to finish it and I’m excited to give it to her for her birthday :)

Since my logs barely move, I just made aliases to where the logs are so it’s quick display and scan them within the terminal. I’m basically just viewing the system logs, fail2ban log and Caddy’s log so it’s fairly quick and simple for me.

The only change I’d like to do is change the output of Caddy’s log file so it’s not a long single line of information per output. I’ll have to do a bit more reading on that so I know what information I want to keep and how I want to visually organize it. At least for the moment, I am familiarising myself with what I am looking at and am slowly figuring out what information is relevant to me.

I like to keep my systems as simple and lean as possible which seems to strongly reflect my general approach to life. I find that kind of interesting.

I feel like my little Pi server is set up nicely now. At least I’m at the point where I’m not concerned about technically maintaining it. It’s as secure as I want it to be and I’ve tweaked my maintenance scripts slightly to avoid any unexpected issues.

I tried installing snikket but I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work with my Caddyfile using my current wildcard domain cert configuration. I’ll try again another time when I’m motivated again. It’s a low priority to me.

The last changes I made were adding logs and making them accessible to myself. So far they are all boring and predictable. Which is good news. It’s also nice to see that I’m the only person accessing it. The bots haven’t found my little corner of the internet yet.

Right now I’m taking a break from self-hosted stuff to work on my gardens and two artsy projects. A wooden carving for a friend’s birthday and an overly complicated shell script that has no real purpose. Although I’ve learned lots from it already so it’s not a complete waste of time.

My immediate family still can’t understand that I’m just doing things. There’s no plan of action. Just a vague sense of a direction of where I want to go. If an opportunity comes up, I take it and hope it gets me closer to where I want to be.

Whenever I plan a trip, I usually plan how I get there, a few nights of somewhere to stay and plan to get back home. Whatever happens between my few nights at an accommodation and the return trip home is mystery to everyone including myself. Some of those trips have lasted months or years.

I’ve survived this far in life with no idea what I’m doing and still people get angry at me for not knowing what I’m doing. This has been me my entire life. I’m confused why they are so offended when I say “I don’t know.”

Apparently I’m supposed to know why I ate entire bag of chocolate chips. I don’t know, it just happened and I’m just as surprised as you are.

I use rsync too. It’s older and from what I understand was designed at a time when data storage was much smaller so it may not be as fast as other backup options. It also doesn’t have encrypted backups like other backup options (I think).

Rsync has been the most reliable option for me though. Every syncing option I’ve tried seems too complicated and breaks down every time I look away. Since my entire backup size is around 550gb and I’m not concerned with encrypted backups, I think rsync just works just fine.

I even created my own tool that puts my rsync commands into easy to read/modify files so I can organize my most common transfers. I can easily backup my phone, HomeAssistant server, home server and computer to my two backup locations in a single alias or cronjob now.

A bit of a pain to learning how to make proper backups that restore successfully every time, but once I figured it out, I’ve been very confident in my backup strategy.

I was planning on using weechat and the relay extension for a simple, all-in-one package. Currently I just use IRC for tech support, especially with Alpine linux.

Biboumi seems like a good idea if I wanted to set up a server and I’ll keep it bookmarked. I’m still back and forth about an IRC server so that idea has gone into the bonus category for now. I think Snikket would be a service that’s far more accessible and easier to share with the people I want using it.

I do like that it has xmpp support. I assume it would go well with Snikket.

I’ve decided to stop using Podman for the moment since it was not allowing me internet to access my services. I’ll try again later when the motivation comes back.

Other than that, I’ve been slowly working on security, reliability and maintenance. For the moment I am happy with my device’s own security which I just finished last week. If I need extra security at this point, it will most likely be from a third party service but I don’t intend on having a known presence so I may get by just being unknown and obscure.

Ddclient on Alpine linux works very strangely so I made a script to check that it’s still updating my IP address and force restart it if necessary. Combined it with my targetted backups script to make the beginning of a maintenance script.

The last two steps are to setup an IRC client + IRC bouncer and a Snikket service and I’ll be happy. Anything I add after that is simply a bonus I can tinker with for fun but I’m looking forward writing for my blog without technical issues floating in the back of my mind.

I’m happy that in the last 3-5 years that I have been meeting the type of people I want to be around.

All my new friends have been treating me the way I have always wished to be treated. Which is the same way I try to treat everyone else. They also happen to be a very specific type of people that is completely unexpected to me but I’m so happy to have met them anyways. I love them all so much.

I was staying at a hostel in Sydney and It was just me and English girl just chilling in the common area. It was sort of exposed to the outdoors since there was no doors, just an entrance. It just lead to the sheltered outdoor area but each dorm room had their own heavy door.

We both found out that day that the big roaches that roam there knew how to fly. Not well. Like it struggled to carry it’s own weight. We both had time to react and do something. We both just watched in horror as it flew right into her hair.

Whenever I think about the movie Children of Men, all I can think is that the answer to the Human Project’s question was microplastics.

Instead of asking why women couldn’t have children anymore, they should have been checking men for forever confetti in their balls.

That on it’s own is fine.

But I said no. I shouldn’t have to say no more than once because it’s annoying to continually say no. It is weird that they put nearly two weeks of effort into trying to get me to do something when I already said no.

We already worked a physically demanding job and I rode a bike to and from work. I was already happy with my body but they weren’t happy with my arms.

I’m quite fortunate enough to have found people who appreciate my hugs. Not quite bros. Or maybe they are. Depends on peoples perspective. In any case, my arms just fine as they are for them :)

I’ve had a lifetime of people labeling me as something and trying to enforce that label on me. When I eventually do something that sits outside of that label, those same people get angry at me for breaking the expectations that they set for me. Expectations that they never explicitly told me but assumed because of that label they placed on me.

As a result, I pushed back by “delabelling” myself, mostly. If I must label myself, I attempt to use the most broad term possible as to avoid cornering myself. Sometimes it’s too easy to use a label as a conversational shortcut.

As a personal result, I tend to avoid labeling others. In my mind that puts me on even level with the people around me. It avoids me talking to specific groups of people and allows others to participate in the discussion, no matter how those other people view or identify themselves.

I’ve watched how words, labels and categorizations have become weaponized and used to divide people. Which is absurdity. Words are ever evolving and dying so to me it seems pointless to allow words to strongly influence me.

These days I surround myself with people who are able to show me who they are over people who spend their energy telling me who they are. Real confidence doesn’t need to waste their time on only words. Those words should add to that person as a whole. That’s how I want to view another person.

Not trying to convince you to change your mind, I do see the value in using words or labels to find community, especially in times like these. I think you seem open to at least seeing where my unorthodox views come from.

I tend to ignore terms like neurotypical and neurodiverse because I just view everyone as neurodiverse. And if everyone is neurodiverse, then nobody is neurodiverse. That just means to me that people are people. Some more insecure than others.

I also think that everyone is gay. Which means I personally don’t really view anyone as gay, just people doing normal people things no matter who they love. Some people just happen to be insecure as fuck about loving another person.

What I do see are a lot of insecure people attempting to set and enforce normal behaviour because they are afraid of being weird while ignoring the fact that being alive is the most weird and pointless experience ever.

Gotta have a little fun with the weird, pointlessness of existence, that’s what can make life beautiful and interesting :)

I was just having some fun by pointing out that women aren’t the only mythical creature whose signals are hard to read.

I do agree with your last point thoroughly, bullshitters do be bullshittin’ it. A lot. Too much I would say.

I’m quite literally a bro they can hang out with, and have always been. I just lack the big strong arms they want me to have to cuddle them with D:

Part of the confusion is the men I have had experiences with spend a lot of time talking about women but then invest an uncomfortable amount of time trying to turn me into a man that they want me to be for them.

One guy spent nearly two weeks trying to get me to take creatine and go work out with him. Like if he wants me to cuddle him with big, strong, manly arms, he was going about it in a weird way.

It’s just as confusing when men love that I treat them as unique individual but get upset with me that I also treat women like unique individuals, almost like they are jealous.

The signals are there but I can’t read 'em!

I’m autistic as fuck so I can’t read anyone’s signals but men are just as bad. I could never understand why men worked so hard to get my attention and got all weird when I didn’t give them that attention.

They also spend a lot of time trying to shape me into the type of man they want to be around yet they would never outright say what they are doing and why I should change for them.

Then they would get all jealous when I actually hung out with women and get even weirder about it when I wouldn’t engage them in the weird conversations they wanted to have about women.

Like dude, if you want a hug or a cuddle, just say so because these roundabout games you’re playing is confusing as fuck.

So now I wander the earth thoroughly confused…