zkbro's tinylog

Going somewhere, but nowhere in particular...

author: @zkbro@gmi.zkbro.com

2025-07-14 07:50 +1200

Getting my routine back with being early for everything. Takes a lot of stress off. Now the routine is there it's just second nature.

2025-07-11 22:37 +1200

Today at the workshop I saw what looked like an old Raspberry Pi 1 in the bottom of a container with other neglected bits and pieces. I'll ask the boss tomorrow if he needs it. Might be a fun project on the way.

2025-07-11 07:54 +1200

Contemplating the whole "because I can" reasoning. I think for me it is more "Because currently I can't, but I will do my best in figuring out if I can." Theres also an alignment of values with the thing I'm doing for me to actually give it a crack.

2025-07-10 22:18 +1200

After getting home at 5, going for a run, eating dinner, showering then going for a drive to the grocery store, I fell into total relaxation. It was so good I nearly closed my eyes and fell asleep. Probably not ideal at the wheel. I had my radio off. It was dark. Traffic wasn't bad. I think I was just exhausted from the week so far. All the noisy building sites. I usually avoid the shops because the traffic is usually bad. Not this late though. I don't need to go to the shops either. I can just drive. Maybe I'll try that every now and then.

2025-06-09 20:20 +1200

I have just booked my first real holiday in about 10 years. I'm off to Vietnam in August. Can't wait. Doing a southbound tour from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh. Never thought I'd do a tour, but here I am. I'm going with Intrepid Travel. Was told they go alright. It is such a nice feeling to have this finally set to go.

2025-06-06 06:47 +1200

Snow flurries coming in this afternoon to 300m. That's ground level for us. Hoping to finish a solar gate installation before it turns to crap. Not sure what is planned for the rest of day, but hoping I can start setting up our Unifi server on our Raspberry Pi. That'll be a nice inside job to round the week out.

I did a beef slow cook overnight. Had a bit for breaky. It was delish. Gotta do that more. Such an easy way to cook good food for multiple meals.

2025-06-03 20:49 +1200

...settled on an approach for tags. Appending a /* to the bottom of a page followed by #category #category2 etc

Nice. I've put mine in the header eg. "Tags: #tag1 #tag2". I'll be curious how @sbr's categorisation turns out on their capsule. Might get motivated to change things up. I do like using JBanana's Tags page:

2025-05-30 06:50 +1200

Nuts dream last night. I don't dream much. Was being chased through a dark urban environment by a giant rabbit that hopped like a roo but 5-odd meters high. I think I was riding one to escape. The rabbit turned into a manic 2-dog-and-rabbit snapping it's way towards me. I crashed into a gum tree heavily infested with spider webs, tried to wrangle my way out but just got further stuck as the webs entangled me. As rabid dog-rabbit beast got closer it hit telephone wires injuring them badly, tumbling into a drooling bloody mess close to where I was suffocating in the web. Then I woke.

2025-05-29 20:10 +1200

Very wet day today. Inside jobs. Ladder checks (we have 12) and solar panel build for a gate motor in the morning. Then off to site. Installed a 75 inch TV with Sonos soundbar. Mounted on wall. Cable management. Looks good. Heavy bugger. Thin too. I hate that. Scares the crap out of me. Haven't broken one yet, but we've received a couple 85 inch TVs broken in transport. Anyway, relatively easy day. We set up a UniFi VLAN for the guest house too. One more day before long weekend. King's Birthday public holiday on Monday. Winter is right bang on time with snow warnings beginning tomorrow.

2025-05-29 06:45 +1200

Back home. Got through the KNX training. Delivery wasn't great but I kind of expected that. Felt I learnt enough to get the basics. Hoping I'll have time at work to dive deeper. Our residential jobs are pretty big, some with 40-odd integrated devices, so there'll be plenty of things to learn.

I started a flounder.online account but realised I actually don't need it. This Tinylog is fine. I can access it remotely via Tailscale on my phone as well so no issues there. I'm also carrying Tails on a USB so could access it via any machine if I'm not carrying my own and don't want to use my phone.

2025-05-25 21:35 +1200

Did my stretches and went for a run today. Feel better for it. Really need that routine back. Keep finding excuses. D&R flew back to Aus today. Early start tomorrow for flight to Auckland. KNX training. When I get back I will tidy up the spare room so I can rent it out. I need the extra cash. Raining now. Nice pitter patter on the roof.

2025-05-25 08:18 +1200

I think I have a compartmentalising issue on my web spaces. Getting torn on where to write my thoughts and notes, resulting in analysis paralysis. Like here, this post right now as a tinylog - I boxed myself in previously saying I'll just put in tech-related thoughts into a tinylog. Why? From memory it was so I didn't have to think about where certain thoughts go.... but it's actually doing the opposite. Why should I care where it goes? So I'm breaking that habit by writing this here, simply because I was already working in my capsule workspace and it was the most frictionless way to start writing.

2025-05-24 07:34 +1200

Been trying out the overthewire wargames to learn more about infosec and just general command line use. What a fantastic way to learn. It must get pretty tricky. "Bandit" will do me for now.

2025-05-19 20:05 +1200

Created an .alias dotfile. Feels a bit more organised that way.

2025-05-10 21:36 +1200

In the dumbphone community I’ve seen a lot of hype for a really bad and dangerous app called Beeper that’s basically a proprietary Matrix bridge to Signal (and other apps) meaning… they can read their users’s supposedly e2e messages!

I've been using Beeper for a while now to bridge SMS, WhatsApp and Messenger. Probably should look into how secure it is. Been turning a blind eye to it. Seems very beta with lots of updates being pushed through weekly.

2025-05-04 16:55 +1200

Sweet, got tmux set up so I can load a saved layout. Had to use [Tmux Plugin Manager] and [Tmux Resurrect], but I think I've got my head around it now. Any layout I save is saved as a .txt which I can call at any time if I [symlink it to the "last" file]. I had to [add lazygit and yazi to the list of programs to restore]. All-in-all, happy with the switch from zellij.

2025-04-30 20:25 +1200

Plan on reinstalling Debian on the weekend on my laptop. Going through the currently installed apt packages, these ones will make it to the next install:

buku feh gimp git imagemagick jellyfin jhead peel qbittorrent ripgrep rsync steam surfshark syncthing tailscale todotxt-cli tmux vlc xsane xsel

Bins are:

stew helix lagrange lazygit marksman soulseek yazi zellij zola

And a bunch of others requiring a bit more fuckery to get installed. It's been a good exercise. A lot of culling of legacy tools.

2025-04-27 21:41 +1200

When folk log onto GTL what do they hope to see? I want to write for myself, but I also want to be considerate of others. Like, if I see way to many political posts, then I probably won't ever visit that aggregate again (the odd one is fine). Personally I like a mix of every day stuff folk do and some tech issues one is battling, or tech wins. I guess that's all just relatable stuff. I can't stand word or puzzle game things clogging feeds. I also want to share an album I'm digging right now (maybe this is also something someone wishes not to see):

2025-04-26 11:31 +1200

Trying out tmux. It gives me a bit more screen real-estate than zellij. Key bindings function a bit differently, but I can get used to that.

2025-04-20 17:28 +1200

Sheesh completely failed at running a caddy server through systemctl. I get lost with all the user folder/file permissions. ~/.var vs /var vs /etc/caddy/Caddyfile vs ~/path/to/site/Caddyfile. Then I have the SSG installed via pipx with plugins injected into that environment which adds further turmoil into my brain. Anyway, it's running, NOT through systemctl, but it works. I'm learning things the hard way. A lot of circle-work. I think I'll have a beer.

2025-04-18 09:17 +1200

Forgot to run ddclient on my pi. Had it going on my laptop which isn't on all the time. Not 100% I have the daemon interval set correctly.

2025-04-17 23:50 +1200

Been spending way too much time on deciding an SSG for a website I want to publish. Think I've settled on MkDocs with the Material plugin. I like the notes style.

2025-04-16 00:05 +1200

I quite liked reading this thread around the coming and going of Gemini users:

This quote by mrrobinhood5 stood out for me. I've seen similar feelings expressed in the wider web too.

long story short, be the solution. post content that will inspire explorers to do the same...

I'll try and just do my thing.

2025-04-15 23:38 +1200

I thought my bookmarks were getting out of hand in lagrange, but then I realised the search function works really well and it doesn't matter (I was previously just scrolling down a large list). As long as I tag them I can generally find what I need.

2025-04-13 16:02 +1200

After having to reset my router and receiving a new public IP, it appears I didn't have my dynamic DNS set up correctly in DDClient. All fixed now. The /etc/ddclient.conf file should look something like this:

# Configuration file for ddclient generated by debconf
#
# /etc/ddclient.conf
protocol=namecheap \
use=web, web=ipify-ipv4 \
login=zkbro.com \
password='DDNS_PASSWORD' \
gmi

I had mucked up the "login" and "gmi" bits.

2025-04-13 10:28 +1200

It feels great when the codes run smoothly like butter!

Writing a reply post is another story unfortunately! Incredible amount of friction. I might be doing something wrong. I'm not using the X window system so yanking is a bit difficult. The tui_show_stub didn't help much. Creating the link at the top of this post was the hardest, having to manually copy your tinylog URL, author name and post date. Anyway, I got there :)

2025-04-13 09:58 +1200

Got GTL linked to my tinylog.gmi and helix set to my $EDITOR variable. Groovy.

2025-04-12 08:13 +1200

I think I'm going to make this capsule a reference notes repository on all my techy things. I have a couple on my HTTP site, but have stalled on adding more there because I didn't feel it was the right place. Starting a Wiki on Codeberg Pages was another option I looked at, though I think this will be a good first project for my new Gemini home.

I am very much a beginner-intermediate tech-head, which is another reason why I think Gemini is a good place for these reference notes. I resonated with [cinni's post] in that supposedly "easy" setups are not so easy, however I think there is a GOOD amount of LACK of information, to tickle the interest of the beginner-intermediate tech-heads (like myself) into tinkering and figuring it all out. If it was TOO easy, then the sense of achievement probably wouldn't be as satisfying.

I am also seeing a great ethos in the use of Gemini, from both the contributors and the responders. [JeanG3nie summed it up well]:

Gemini tends to collect people who want to not only express things on a little deeper level, but those who are ok with having their views challenged so that they can learn and grow.

I'm hoping to revisit some of my notes and update them at a deeper level, and I'm also hoping that it will spark some improvements or healthy discussions around my methods with other geminauts.

On another note - how tiny should a tinylog be? I wonder if folk have certain criteria in their head about when to make a tinylog a gemlog.

2025-04-10 20:07 +1200

Absolutely not angry. Thanks so much for looking into it! I've found using the +1200 offset in my tinylog and setting my GTL config file date_format to "2006-01-31 15:04 MST" manages to be smart enough to convert +1200 to NZST in GTL. Happy to work with that.

2025-04-09 20:53 +1200

There seems to be a lot of movement going on in the Gemini space. Tinylogs and GTL getting some special attention. Feels like I'm coming in at a good time. Just reading through fab's and bacardi55's threads is helping me understand the pieces a little better.

2025-04-09 19:48 +1200

Figured out how to update my Tinylog from my Android phone via Tailscale and Material Files. Pretty cool.

2025-04-08 17:41 +1200

In setting up my Gemini capsule, I've decided to create a Tinylog. I think it will complement the space nicely. I've installed bacardi55's GTL as well and started subscribing to any recently active feeds I can find.