Sprouts are good for you
July 26, 2024
Hello!
It's the last Friday in July. I hope everyone is ready for the weekend. I am.
-[ Contrafibularities ]-
pg_ninja
Once again Simon highlights an issue with the newsletter RSS feed. This week, duplicate entries were appearing in their RSS reader of choice, Akregator.
This was entirely my fault. I was using a function at the top of the newsletters to dynamically display the date, when the emails are sent. When they get archived, the date continues to get updated each day, meaning the content of the page changes, triggering RSS readers to think it's new content.
Listmonk doesn't allow me to change the previous newsletter content once it's posted. So once again, I am forced to ninja the Postgres database under the hood. I used Beekeeper Studio tunnelled over SSH, and through a bastion host to the backend Postgres server. Manually editing blobs of text in records in the database felt like I was in the Matrix for a moment.
Future popey is committed to typing dates at the top of each newsletter, like some kind of animal.
Listmonk, the software I use for this newsletter, appears to generate non-standard or malformed RSS feeds. Thanks to Stuart for pointing out the issue. Looks like another week of noodling with Listmonk templates!
One day I may stop talking about how the newsletter sausage is made, within this sausage.
-[ Create ]-
boiled sprouts
My good friend, co-podcaster, ex-boss and office coffee-buddy, Martin, created stream-sprout. I helped name it, did a lot of testing (see below), found a doozy of a bug, (watch me file it live!) and packaged it as a snap.
It's a shell script (because of course it is) that uses ffmpeg (because of course it does) to take an RTMP stream and split it out to multiple targets. Useful if you want to stream to multiple video platforms simultaneously. Yes, other options exist. This might be better than those options, check out the README.md to learn more.
To Kill a Mockingbird
I finally broke out of my live-stream funk with a 2h 9m stream to both my YouTube and Twitch channels. This was partly to test out stream-sprout (see above), a bit of OBS configuration testing, and a little prep for later work live streams.
I built a workflow around a to-do list that I work through as the stream passes. It's just a prompt to keep me on track, and still fails, sometimes. I'm quite enjoying having a few friends throw comments and ask questions 'in the chat' as they say. I especially love when they shout "YOU MADE A TYPO!!!" at me in the chat, and I don't see it. Even better when someone clips my reaction as I realise my error. Good work!
-[ Consume ]-
gh
Once in a while I attempt to portray the role of a developer. This week I cut-and-shut some shell scripting and Python to wrangle GitHub data using gh. Other people have trodden this well-worn path before me.
Thanks to this document from Bill Mill, much of the cutting and shutting had already been done. Thanks Bill.
-[ Comment ]-
rm -rf docs/
I've talked about YouTube and Twitch a fair bit recently, in the context of personal and work activites, as well as stream-sprout. For some time I've wanted to try out Owncast, a free software, self-hosted streaming platform.
I set it all up as per the documentation then had to do some other things before coming back to finishing configuring my owncast instance.
By the time I came back to it, a day later, the docs for what I needed had disappeared. The Owncast developer deleted them after a discussion on their issue tracker.
I have voiced my frustration, as it personally impacted my use of their project, and could affect other new users too. However, it's their project to manage how they wish, of course.
Now I'm wondering if those docs should be revived and maintained somewhere else, if the upstream doesn't want to. Maybe a simple blog post, or other easily indexed and maintained location. Perhaps a separate 'awesome owncast' open licensed static site, to keep those documents 'alive'.
What do other projects do with docs they don't want to maintain, but may actually be useful? What would you do?
To the clinic
I maintain some snap packages. Sometimes things break and I'm unable to build one of them. The developers of the snap build tool "snapcraft" hold a regular snapcraft clinic using Google Meet.
I joined last Friday's and was able to share a few problems I'd been encountering. I find it's useful to have a quick, high-bandwidth video call with developers to sanity-check you're doing things right. It turned out I found at least two bugs - duly reported.
I really appreciate it when open source developers make themselves available to have a conversation like this. Bug trackers, chat clients and forums are all great, but sometimes you just need to show someone a problem.
I've previously written in the newsletter and on my blog about the struggles of my recent late-life ADHD diagnosis. I have mentioned the medication options that were offered to me, some of which I have taken up.
Since the diagnosis last year, I've really struggled with life in general. Something that's helped me in the past with life-challenges is psychotherapy. So I'm giving that another go, for an hour a week, with a professional Integrative Psychotherapist.
I'm a couple of sessions in. No long-term solutions yet, but plenty of discussion and already some improved understanding of why popey-brain does popey-things.
Huh. Those last two topics have interchangeable headlines.
Thanks for reading.
-- popey
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© Copyright 2024 Alan Pope. All rights reserved
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