Title photo
frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Wed, 06 Feb 2013

I just installed and (mostly successfully) tested Ode's ShyPosts addin

Thanks go to Rob Reed, creator of Ode, for coming up with the ShyPosts addin, which allows you to "hide" posts from your blog indexes yet have them available via their permalinks.

You can read about ShyPosts here and in the same place download the addin for your Ode site. The addin itself is small, and the instructions are short. For the most part they work, but I needed to refer to this forum post to figure out how to write a "rule" that lets ShyPosts know what to hide. If anything, the shyness_rules file is a great place to get a little practice in writing regular expressions.

Read the rest of this post

Sat, 02 Feb 2013

From callfortesting.org: GNOME 3 on OpenBSD 5.2

A look at and how-to on installing GNOME 3 on OpenBSD 5.2 from Michael Dexter of http://callfortesting.org.