Redesigning Mastodon
I ended up on Mastodon in the Great Twitter Exodus, specifically on Tŵt Cymru since I live and work in Wales. Overall it’s a nicer place, but I’ve been having some niggles with the UI.
Blog
The Art Deco PC
My mum loves antiques, and she’s an absolute nut for Art Deco. A couple of years ago I gave her a mechanical keyboard with blue switches for the clicky and a set of Tall Deco typewriter keycaps from Datamancer. but it never sat right with me that she had to plug it into a modern looking PC.
It’s not been a good week for my Proxmox server
Last weekend I went to install some extra RAM to hopefully carry me through until I’m able to upgrade it completely, only to find that one of the CPU sockets had stopped working.
Time for a change
As you might know, I’ve been gradually revamping this site, and today I turned my hand to improving the typography.
Fixing the NO_LCP error in Lighthouse
I redesigned this site recently. You might have noticed. Maybe not if it’s your first time here, that’s ok too.
Those full page splash images with everything fading into view look pretty snazzy but there’s one small problem: the Lighthouse test’s Largest Contentful Paint test fails to pick up on any element that starts at opacity: 0, irrespective of the fact that it animates to opacity: 1 a second later, leading to the following error:
Homelab update: hardware
It’s been a while since I’ve written about the status of my homelab, and a lot has changed.
Obviously I couldn’t leave the big Supermicro box sitting on a table, that’s just untidy. I picked up an 18u closed rack cabinet from Prism. It’s only 800mm deep in order to fit in the space next to the front door, but there’s just enough depth to install Supermicro’s ball bearing rails.
You can never have too much storage.
At least, I can’t. Between backing up the various machines around the house and the VPS this site sits on, my repositories of past projects and a fairly hefty collection of ripped media (if you have any early DVDs they’re getting toward the end of their lifespan) I was rapidly outgrowing the repurposed desktop that used to serve me as a NAS and VM host.
Rebuilding my PC
I spend a lot of my time creating digital artefacts. Sometimes it’s nice to spend some time working with my hands to create something physical and tangible, and what better project than making one of the tools I use every day quieter and more pleasing to the eye?
The cobbler’s children have no shoes
It’s been a while since I’ve written in this blog. For the longest time this site has just been a holding page, because I didn’t want to do anything on the redesign until it was perfect. The thing is though, it’s never going to be perfect, for any number of reasons: I’m too much of a perfectionist, I’ve had another great idea which I really should incorporate, I was busy redesigning my billing/project management software instead. I’d let perfect become the enemy of good, or at least of good enough.
On Forums, and why they’re a Good Thing
One of the first things people find when they’re looking around for information on any subject are forums. Forums are a great resource because they collect a community of knowledgeable people who actively help each other out, in addition to providing a huge searchable archive of information for people who are just looking to find the solution to one problem.
I’ve recently been involved in a project to create a forum for people who are interested in web design and development and all the disciplines (SEO, copywriting, content strategy) that go along with it, and it’s recently launched – without further ado, I present to you: The Web Design Forum.