Pete's Log: Addenda and Miscellanea
Entry #2052, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff, Meta, Starcraft)(posted when I was 43 years old.)
My attention span has been all over the place lately. A few things to kick off 2022:
I managed to get a total of five stars (i.e. 2.5 days) on my Advent of Code misadventure. Time and mental bandwidth just weren't there. Maybe next year. I had an Advent of Sway instead.
Speaking of that linked Sway entry, in the section on swapping caps lock and control, it starts with "This one is a less intrusive modification of the keyboard than Dvorak." Which made a little more sense in an earlier draft of that post. I had gotten way into the weeds with a long introduction that didn't have much to do with Sway, so I ended up killing all that text. This is the relevant paragraph that I was referring back to with that Dvorak reference:
Way back in 1999, I decided to give Dvorak a try*. Apparently I never wrote about it again, but as I recall I became somewhat proficient with it and had it set as my default layout on the Suns on campus. One day in the LSC Jeff needed to help me with something and instantly became annoyed that he couldn't use my keyboard. I don't think I knew how to change the layout either without changing my config and then logging out and back in again. That was the end of my Dvorak adventure, but the lesson has stuck with me in terms of considering the impact of deviating too far from standard setups.
* This may be the first time that the text of a link to a previous entry is longer than the text of that entry
I also now suddenly want to add a blockquote markup to my Pete's Log markup and then use that on the above quote. Also also maybe some markup functionality for footnotes.
There is one dark secret of my previous Sway screenshots that I will now come clean about. The alpine window conceals an alpine configuration that could read but not send emails. So I was using other mail clients for sending. Today I made some progress on figuring out the problem. Alpine was complaining that the SSL/TLS negotiation was failing. The version of /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf that came with Debian was setting a minimum protocol of TLSv1.2 in [system_default_sect]. Disabling that allowed me to connect to send emails. However Branden has the same TLSv1.2 setting and his works fine. So I can send emails from alpine now, but it still doesn't feel quite right.
I joined another webring recently. This brings my total up to four. I should probably stop. Unless I find a really cool one.
I recently came across the 512 KB Club and so out of curiosity I checked my homepage. It came in at 73 KB. Not bad. 19 of those KB are fonts and 5.25KB are the 404 page returned from me not having a favicon.ico. I like the fonts I'm using, but if I'm being penalized for a favicon, then I might as well have one. The one I generated with imagemagick is 5.6KB, so my page grew by roughly 300 bytes, but I'm OK with that. Especially since I found some other savings.
One of the webrings I joined manages the ring with JavaScript and a JSON file of members. This has bothered me from the start. So this was my opportunity to make my own implementation to save downloading a JS, CSS and JSON file just for one webring most people probably won't even click on. And with that done, the webring still works and my homepage clocks in at 49.1 KB. Sweet.
The pages for Pete's Log entries average in the 70-90 KB range, although ones with lots of pictures might be a couple hundred KB. I think that's perfectly fine.
Branden, Brian and I played our first StarCraft of 2022 this morning. At least we're kicking the year off right in that regard.