I'm on Mastodon/Fediverse!

Hello there once again!

This is just a quick post to let you know that I can now be found on the fediverse! My account name is @sbrl@noc.social on a public Mastodon instance for now, but it may change in the future (I'll update this post if/when I change it).

At the moment, posts are copied from Twitter automatically by this neat cool, which means that automated tweets about new blog posts and Pepperminty Wiki releases, and other tweets I make will also be copied over to my fediverse account.

In the future, I would like to use my new n8n instance that's now running on my cluster to automate blog post notifications instead.

While I'm on the topic, I also now have a Discord server you can join, which also has an announcements channel where blog posts are posts by the above n8n instance I have setup. It also has a channel or two for chatting, which I'll expand and change as necessary. You can join it with this link:

https://discord.gg/aQd6yDNcGV

Finally, as more of a maintenance thing, the automated posts to the subreddit have also been switched over to n8n from their previous home in IFTTT. The (eventual) plan is to switch everything over to my self-hosted n8n instance.

If there are any other social media networks you'd like me to post blog post updates etc to that are not currently listed on my homepage, please leave a comment below and I'll take a look to see how feasible it is.

In terms of new blog posts coming, I have on memtest86+ that's almost finished, but I just need to disentangle memtest86+ and figure out where to download a stable version that supports UEFI from. It's also about time I write another PhD update blog post. And, of course, there are also the random posts that spring out of what I'm currently working on, which recently has been about my PhD AI development (hit a really nasty snag recently which was fun to solve and debug; if I can adapt it into a blog post I'll post it here).

If there's anything you'd like me to blog about, please let me know in a comment below.

--Starbeamrainbowlabs

500 posts - thank you!

500 posts is a lot. When I started writing back in 2014, I never imagined that I was make it to this milestone. I've thought for a while about what I wanted to do to celebrate, but couldn't think of anything specific - so I wanted to thank everyone who has supported me so far in my journey through University - first in my undergraduate course, then in my MSc course, and now in my PhD.

It was Rob Miles that first encouraged me to start a blog in the first year of my undergraduate course. A few weeks later, and I had gone from a coming soon page to building starbeamrainbowlabs.com, followed closely by this blog which I put together piece by piece.

The backend is actually written in PHP - though it is on my (seemingly endless :P) todo list to rewrite it as it's not particularly well written. I've made a start on this already by refactoring the commenting system (and adding more statistics), but I haven't touched the blog itself and the main website (particularly the CSS) much yet.

In total, over the last 499 posts (I'm still writing this post as of the time of typing) I've written 347,256 words in total, counted by doing cat *.md | tr -d -- '-{}\[\]();=><' | wc -w on all the markdown sources of the posts I've written. This is a mind boggling number! I suspect it's somewhat inflated by the code I include in my blog posts though.

On these, I've received 192 (probably) genuine top-level comments that aren't spam (not counting replies, which are difficult to count with jq, as the replies parameter isn't always present in my backend JSON files I store comments in). Each and every one of these has been helpful, and given me motivation to continue writing here - especially more recently on my PhD Update series.

I might have missed some spam comments, so do get in touch if you spot one.

From my first post way back on 29th June 2014 to this post in the present spans exactly 7 years, 10 months, 13 days, and 8 hours (or 2874 days and 8 hours), averaging 5 days 17 hours between each post overall.

I would like to thank everyone who has supported me on this incredible journey - especially my personal supervisor and also my PhD supervisor - both of whom have continuously assisted me with issues both large and small at all times of the day and year. The entire Department of Computer Science at the University of Hull - members both past and present - have all been very kind and helpful, and I'm deeply grateful to have had such a welcoming place to be.

Finally, thank you for reading. While I don't write posts on my blog here expecting that anyone will read them, it's amazing to see and hear about people finding them helpful :D

I can't say where I'm headed next after my PhD (the end of which is still some time away), but I can say that I'm committed to posting on this blog - so it won't be going anywhere any time soon :P

If there's a specific topic you'd like me to cover (and I haven't already done so), please do leave a comment below.

Pepperminty Wiki Turns 2!

2 years ago today, I decided that I'd build a wiki. At the time, I was unsatisfied with all the currently solutions out there - they were either too bulky, old and unmaintained, or just otherwise not quite right. I decided to build something different: An entire wiki in a single file. One single file that you can drop onto your web server and have it just work.

Although I've had to rework and rewrite a few things along the way, development has generally gone ok. I've found that as it's grown, I've needed to change the way I design it slightly - it's been a great learning experience!

In May this year, I managed to get Pepperminty Wiki into Awesome Self Hosted, a list of cool pieces of software that you can host on your own server - a list that has ~12,000 stars on GitHub.

Fast forward to the present, and I find myself with an awesome wiki - that's still all contained in a single file. It's powered by Parsedown. It supports multiple users, page protection, sub pages, full text search (!), customisable themes, tags, redirects, and more! It's also got a whole host of configurable settings system - allowing you to customise how your wiki works to your liking. Best of all, it's got a flexible module based system - so anyone can come along and write a new module to extend it's functionality.

If this sounds like the kind of thing you'd like to use yourself, just head over to the getting your own copy section on it's page (for the lazy, the online downloader is here).

Going forwards, I'd like to a commenting system to let people comment on pages on a wiki. I'd like to add edit previews. I'd like to add a GUI for the settings file. I've got so many ideas that it's difficult to choose which to do next :D

Thank you, everyone for the last 2 years. Here's to another 2 amazing fun filled years! I don't intend to stop development any time soon :D

More automatic reposting!

I've had automatic tweeting about blog posts I put up on here for ages now. I've also had a mailing list set up for a while too. Today it occurred to me that not everyone uses twitter or wants an email, and so I've just set up a few more automatic reposting systems (thanks to IFTTT!).

• If you know me through facebook, I've set it up to post about my blog posts on my timeline.
• If you use reddit, then I've set up a new subreddit that IFTTT will automatically post links to my new blog posts in.

That brings the total number of channels you get notified about my blog posts up to 5(!)

• Good ol' RSS/Atom
• Email (via the mailing list - I won't send you spam or hand over your email address to any other companies. Ever!)
• Twitter
• Facebook
• reddit (via /r/StardustBlog/)

I'm still tweaking and perfecting the new systems - please comment if you notice anything that's off or could be improved. Also, let me know if there's a channel that I haven't covered that you'd like me to set up.

I now have a public website status page!

Just recently Uptime Robot (the awesome service that I use to monitor my server's uptime) have released a new feature: Public status pages! Status pages appear to be free (for now), so I've gone and set one up. Now all of you can see what's up with my website if it's down.

They even allow you to point a (sub)domain at it too. I did this too, so you can visit my status page at status.starbeamrainbowlabs.com.

Achievement Get: Upgrade Server - A writeup of my experiences

The upgrade is complete! I've managed to move practically everything over to the new server, apart from a few automated cleanup tasks here and there. There are still a few issues floating around, but they shouldn't affect this website, and I should have them cleared up soon. Although the migration went smoother than I expected, I did encounter some issues and learnt a few things that I thought I'd share here.

The first thing I found was that starting a todo list isn't a rather good idea. It sounds simple, but it's actually really useful. I found that I had a lot of small tasks I needed to complete, and I kept thinking of more things that needed doing at regular intervals. If I didn't write them down I'd never get anything done because I'd never be able to remember what needed doing first!

It also helps to do your research before you move. Make sure that you're properly reaquainted with all the software running on the system that you're going to migrate from, and that you're familiar with all the ins and outs of your particular situation. If you aren't, then you risk stumbling across some rather nasty, complicated, and time consuming problems mid-migration.

It also helps to do as much of the migration as possible without taking the old system offline. Install the software, Move the configuration files. Set up the firewall. Set up your new monitoring tools. This allows you to minimise the downtime that you have to subject your users to, which is always a good thing.

Lastly, testing is incredibly important. test everything. Make sure that every little feature after you migrate. You'd be surprised at how many issues can crop up after migration.

Server migration!

I've been watching Kimsufi's server page for what feels like absolutely ages now, waiting to get my hands on an ultra-cheap €4.99 per month (excluding VAT of course) KS-1 dedicated server. Unfortunately I've never been quite fast enough, so yesterday I decided that enough was enough and went ahead and bought a KS-2B at €9.99 per month (again excluding VAT). After all is said and done it works out to about £8.39 per month, which, for 2 cores / 4 threads, 4GB RAM, and a 40GB SSD, is an absolute bargain in my eyes.

I've been busy moving things across and it's going well, but I haven't finished yet - I still have the web server and the mail server to set up. I'm also looking at using the Hiawatha webserver instead of Nginx. Hiawatha is a security-first and easy to configure web server. Apparently it's also lightweight, but we'll see about that...! Nginx's config files have been annoying me for a while now, so I think that it's high time I tried something different.

Pepperminty Wiki is now on WikiMatrix!

After a year of waiting (and hard work improving it), Pepperminty Wiki is now on WikiMatrix.org!

WikiMatrix is a brilliant site that lets you compare many different pieces of wiki software with each other in order to figure out which one best meets your needs. Unfortunately, the admins are rather difficult to get hold of, and so new wikis get added rarely.

If you're looking to set up a a small wiki, I recommend checking out my project Pepperminty Wiki. It's inspired by am2064's Minty Wiki that he posted on /r/tinycode, and is designed to be uploaded to a web server and just work (after configuring it, of course!). It's packed into a single file and currently weighs in at ~160kb, so you won't have to wait around for ages for it to download or unpack.

Notable features include multiple users, subpages, templates, file uploads, a full text search engine, page protection, and more! New features are being added all the time - an up to date list can be found in the Github README (link below). Features can be added or removed at any time, too - Pepperminty Wiki sports a module based approach, letting you decide on what features your wiki has enabled.

Link: Pepperminty Wiki

Codepen

Hello!

This is a short announcement post to tell you that I've created an account on Codepen. Codepen is a site that lets you experiment with HTML, CSS and Javascript (or their compiled variants) and share your creations with the world.

I've already created something on there - I'll be blogging about that soon.

Right now though I'm rather ill though, so please don't be disappointed if I don't post right away (although I'll certainly try to get it out asap).

Here's a link to my Codepen profile page.

New Sharing Buttons! (and how to get your own)

The other day I was asked by someone to add some share buttons to my blog. After taking a little look into it, I found that it really wasn't that difficult to do. Now you'll find three share buttons at the bottom of each post. To start with I picked Twitter, Facebook and Evernote, but if you would like to see any other services just leave a comment down below.

The new sharing buttons are surprisingly simple. All they are is an image wrapped in a specially constructed hyperlink:

https://twitter.com/share?url=<url>&text=<text>&via=<via>
https://facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=<url>
http://www.addtoany.com/add_to/evernote?linkurl=<url>

Simply replace <url> with your url, <text> with your text, and <via> with your twitter handle (without the @ sign). Don't forget to run everything through rawurlencode() though, otherwise some special character might sneak through and break the link.