I have completed my Phase 5 project which can be found deployed here:
https://party-planner.onrender.com/ The related GitHub repo that’s part of this project can be found here:
https://github.com/SamuelBanya/PartyPlanner This is a full stack web application that is written with React for its frontend, and has a Ruby On Rails with Postgresql database backend. It can be deployed locally by using the following set of commands:
NOTE:
You need to have ‘postgresql’ 15 installed on your local machine, so search online how to do this first before proceeding.
The Phase 4 section featured the ‘Ruby On Rails’ framework, and more specifically its ability to utilize ‘Active Record’ which can be found here as this guide helps explain this in more detail than I ever could:
https://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_basics.html ‘Rails’, as it is commonly known, helps take the edge of from having to handle a lot of the ‘backend’ work that’s required for a full stack web application. Remember, when someone mentions the ‘frontend’ of a ‘full stack’ web application, this means that they are referring to the user facing portion.
My Phase 4 project can be found here which includes the ‘client’ and ‘server’ components which you will have to run in two separate terminals with its own associated commands dicated in the ‘README’ of the project:
https://github.com/samuelbanya/craigscookout This particular project allowed me to utilize React with its frontend component, and ‘Ruby On Rails’ for its backend component.
The idea behind this app is that a user is allowed to create a cookout that other users can utilize.
I have recently completed the Phase 3 of the Flatiron School Software Development Bootcamp. As a result, I now know how to interact with the backend of a full stack web application.
Just for reminder purposes, the ‘frontend’ of a full stack web application is the beautiful client facing website that allows the user to interact with a given project to generate data. The ‘backend’ allows the user to then send the data from the ‘frontend’ to the ‘backend’, and process that data.
I can easily say this web application has been quite a challenge to pull off. Not only is it using multiple React controlled forms, but it is using ‘useState’ and ‘useEffect’ hooks to make sure everything is in sync within certain parent and child components. Ontop of that, I have had to really make sure that the Ruby based models of the backend matched the requirements of the project as well, which was tricky without the ability of having a ‘User’ specific model to join a few of the models present.
In this blog post, I am going to go over how I deployed the Phase 2 project I created for Flatiron School Software Development Bootcamp, which is a React app that provides an image reference board for users. This app itself depends upon a ‘db.json’ database that needs a live ‘json-server’ instance running so that it can send related fetch() requests to it accordingly.
In terms of the technologies used for this deployment, I utilized Netlify (https://www.
I am happy to note that I have successfully completed the requirements of Phase 2 for the Flatiron School Software Development Bootcamp.
Overall, it was not that easy to complete, but I am very proud that I did it. React itself was a very new topic for me, so unlike the previous phase where I completely knew what I was doing, I felt like I was thrown into the deep end with a floatable raft that comprises the React docs themselves.
I am pretty stoked to have finished my Phase 2 project for the Flatiron School Software Development bootcamp called ‘Back To The Drawing Board’, which can be found here:
https://github.com/samuelbanya/backtothedrawingboard This project runs locally, so you will have to use the ‘git clone’ command to pull that project down to your local machine, and install necessary dependencies with ’npm install’ in the root directory.
Also, this utilizes the ‘json-server’ dependency, so you would have to install it with ’npm install json-server’, and then run the project accordingly with the following commands:
I have a thing for themes, especially in text editors. The way I see it is if you have to live inside a program all day doing something for work, like text editing for documents and todo lists or creating code for software development projects, you might as well be comfortable with the visual colors of the program you’re using.
That being said, I recently created my own theme called ‘morrowind-emacs-theme’, which can be found here:
I thought about ‘where’ to host my portfolio projects, and despite there being some great alternatives like ‘Netlify’ and ‘Heroku’ that do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, I went ahead and took up the challenge to self-host my own projects subdomain.
I did some research and found this great blog post on the topic of how to host subdomains within the same website on a VPS running ’nginx’:
I have been consistently frustrated with trying to use Emacs for web development since ’lsp-mode’ is really not that easy at all to set up.
The typical suggested workflow is to just use ‘use-package’ in your Emacs config to allow ’lsp-mode’ to be installed, followed by a lot of configuration in terms of how you want ‘IDE-like’ qualities to be added to Emacs.
The problem that I found was that the language servers by default were automatically installed no matter what I did.
I have been helping triaging a few bugs for Emacs Org Mode on the weekends, and honestly, its been kind of fun. I was able to reproduce a few personally, and am aiming to figure out how to fix them along with the help of the existing maintainer named Ihor.
He’s been super helpful to a newbie like myself, and is a complete wizard when it comes to his own Emacs workflow.
I finally figured out how to use ‘rsync’ so that I can sync battery saves between two handheld retro handheld devices I bought last year, which include the ‘Anbernic RG351MP’ and ‘Anbernic RG351V’:
https://anbernic.com/products/anbernic-new-rg351mp-retro-games-built https://anbernic.com/products/anbernic-new-rg351v ‘rsync’ is basically a program that allows you to sync files between two Linux machines. You can use it for backing up files, entire harddrives, websites, you name it.
The cool application that I am going to explore in this blog post is how to make ‘rsync’ work for you so that you can seamlessly backup saves between your devices.
I am happy to have completed Phase 1 of the Flatiron School Software Development bootcamp program!
It has been a learning experience in many ways for me, as I already knew a lot of JS development through various tech support jobs I have had over the past few years.
However, there are a few topics that were introduced within this phase that were challenging even for someone as technical as myself.
I am happy to note that I have successfully completed the Phase 1 project for the Flatiron School Software Development bootcamp, which can be found here:
https://github.com/SamuelBanya/Meowser I don’t have a live version of this project up yet, as I am assessing what specific platforms to possibly re-host all my pre-existing projects on, but will update this site accordingly with a list of projects when I am able to figure that portion out.
I have ported over my entire site to now be a ‘hugo’ based blog site, the repo of which can be found here:
https://github.com/samuelbanya/musimatic Now I can easily post in single .org file and export to multiple Markdown files with ease, all with a nice theme to match.
This process was a long time coming since the look of the site needed to be updated accordingly to look more professional, and I believe ‘hugo’ is just perfect for this kind of thing.
I’ve been busy with working on some coursework for the past few weeks.
I started a Software Engineering bootcamp with Flatiron School a few weeks ago since I decided enough is enough in terms of having to settle with technical support gigs as a career. I only ever get approached for tech support jobs nowadays, which is kind of sad comparatively since I have tried so hard over the past few years to be seen as more than just my current position.
I modernized both the ‘Bandcamper’ and ‘Scripture Of The Day’ projects by adding Bootstrap buttons (https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/components/buttons/) and Bootstrap navbar items (https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/examples/navbars/) via the CSS stylesheets for both projects.
I also refactored the code for both projects a bit as well, since they were both in a bit of rough shape:
https://github.com/SamuelBanya/Bandcamper https://github.com/SamuelBanya/ScriptureOfTheDay Overall result looks decent so far, looking forward to creating more JS heavy projects soon.
Other than doing this, I’ve been trying to get a working ‘Navidrome’ instance (https://www.
‘ArtPortfolioCreator’ is now complete:
https://github.com/SamuelBanya/ArtPortfolioCreator Adjusted the stylesheets of both of the following pages to match:
https://sambanya.com/ https://www.sambanya.com/music.html End result:
An art portfolio page that finally just works as intended by simply dumping all portfolio images into a single directory, and letting the page create itself via an hourly crontab job. ~ Sam
I did some changes throughout both of my live sites.
Here are the changes I did for the ‘musimatic.xyz’ tech portfolio site:
I changed the styling of this page since I’m gearing this to be more and more of a tech resume / portfolio website. I revised the main CSS stylesheet so that the button transitions are nice to show off the effects I have done. I also added some ASCII art as the title, which really fits the vibe of the site.
I have tweaked the designs of both sites a bit further, and clearly modeled the CSS styling of the buttons from a few examples I found online:
https://musimatic.xyz/ https://sambanya.com/ The first one is definitely looking up-to-par, and has vastly improved.
Obviously, I need to create more actual projects, but that comes with time.
Of course, that will only increase once I finish a related Typescript and Postman course, and begin figuring out how to really get more Full Stack experience to create more web apps.
I’ve been in some rough shape with my back health for the past two weeks.
This means I haven’t been able to work on much art, or even the synth album I was working on a bit. Kind of sucks, but that’s how life is sometimes. Can’t say I didn’t think of great ideas in the meantime and similar webpages to copy entire styles from though.
That being said, I did some major overhauling with the two websites I run.
Found five pretty sick Dungeon Synth albums today:
https://protodome.bandcamp.com/album/4000ad https://zweihander.bandcamp.com/album/primeval https://darkagelegendry.bandcamp.com/album/barbarian-master-2 https://bookofskelos.bandcamp.com/album/cryptic-conjurations https://mystictowers.bandcamp.com/album/caverns-of-crystal Makes me want to complete the one synth album I’ve been working on for a bit, and really learn the Ardour DAW a bit better to use similar synth VST’s.
What’s nuts about that first ‘Protodome’ album above is that the guy made it with ‘μMML’ or ‘Micro Music Macro Language’, from his own personal GitHub project:
Found this artist aka ‘Flooko’ who does some cool sci-fi type paintings.
He does a ton of timelapse videos on YouTube which showcases his technique to make acrylic paintings, cool stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YURTeGrHCRo&list=UUKDKtibZDMfbUaTIpwTG8nw&index=1 Found another artist that does Elder Scroll paintings as well which is neat, since they do it on small canvas discs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YL-pn7EUpU&list=UUmGR65P_heANmq71qXpW0DA Even found a guy who does Tolkien based Lord of the Rings styled paintings in a related outfit:
Found some more cool sci-fi artists to check out:
Chris Foss’s portfolio artwork: https://www.chrisfossart.com/category/portfolio/ Chris Foss’s space artwork: https://www.chrisfossart.com/category/portfolio/space/ Chris Foss’s related YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheChrisFossArt/videos?view=0&sort=da&flow=grid Chesley Bonestell’s website: https://www.chesleybonestell.com/ Rudolf Zallinger’s dinosaur based artwork: Debating somehow checking out this video course by Syd Mead since it goes into exactly how he’s able to produce space art:
https://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/airship-arrival Also debating getting a Wacom Intuos Medium PTH-660-N or a decent printer.
This random YouTube video got me thinking to maybe either get the Canon PIXMA TS3320 or Canon PIXMA TS5320 printer:
I am still debating the exact CSS stylesheet to use for the main art portfolio website:
https://www.sambanya.com/ I am still leaning heavily towards copying the style of these three sites somehow:
https://karlkopinski.com/ https://wyliebeckert.com/ https://davidmattingly.com/sketches/ I found this site to be useful for studying posing figures since Blender makes my old Thinkpad X230 become a furnace, so this is a nice browser based alternative:
https://www.posemaniacs.com/ I also got lucky and found a YouTube channel that actually interviews a lot of the awesome 1970’s sci-fi artists which is great since their workflow is so elusive even after heavy research.
Found a couple of cool illustrators via this YouTube playlist named ‘illustratori’, which I’m assuming is Italian for ‘illustrators’:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYoJN0iAttfVjzGFpvMFkAXdbDYYsOdS- Here are the highlights of what I found
Mirko Hanak: Cool illustrator that emphasizes the watercolor WITHOUT an outline, very cool and unique: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Mirko+Hanak&iax=images&ia=images Syd Mead: Cool sci-fi illustrator into retro futurism kind of art: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Syd+Mead+illustrator&t=ffab&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images Chesley Bonestell: Cool sci-fi illustrator into sci-fi type backgrounds: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Chesley+Bonestell+illustrator&t=ffab&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images Zdzislaw Beksinski (I like the color usage, but dang is this guy’s work dreary and death based) https://duckduckgo.
It’s funny how one simple change to a CSS stylesheet can make or break the effects that you’re after.
Thankfully, I was able to ask the ‘FancyBox’ JS package about a CSS issue I had with my Art Gallery page via this GitHub issue:
https://github.com/fancyapps/ui/issues/209 They told me that I was applying style changes too broadly to the ‘img’ tag in general.
Therefore, I changed the section for images in the CSS stylesheet for the ‘ArtGalleryCreator2’ project to be the following (Related link: https://github.
I was able to deploy my art portfolio website yesterday after a ton of work to get it working with the ‘Epik’ domain registrar, and ‘Vultur’ VPS provider:
https://www.sambanya.com I am in the process of migrating all my artwork to it so that I have more space for it going forward.
Is it fully functional?
No way. Not at all.
There is still a lot of work to be done, since I’m trying to figure out how to create a CSS stylesheet that will rival the following artist websites that I think look fantastic:
I have been trying to figure out how to contribute to Emacs Org Mode and Puppy Linux.
In terms of my web development projects, I can’t seem to get my ElectronJS project to actually produce sound on Linux, but modeling it after a similar example from GitHub, I was able to get it to work on the workbased Macbook:
https://github.com/SamuelBanya/SimpleSynth This is the project that I heavily modeled after since the docs on ElectronJS on how to actually incorporate other libraries like sound libraries (ex: synths, etc) are very limited, and there are barely any actual working examples that do this on the ElectronJS docs page:
I have been doing a ton of artwork, and having a ton of fun as a result.
I skimmed a ton of art courses, and realized two things:
Every single teacher that tries to cover anatomy basically rips off Bridgman or Hogarth Past the basics, most of these same teachers just showboat for the remaining portion of a given course with ‘rendering’ With this in mind, I pretty much have just been drawing along with the Bridgman based anatomy book whenever I feel like learning more of the figure, and then will literally draw mannequin forms of action figures to further simplify poses with gesture drawings.
I re-uploaded my developer projects back to GitHub:
https://github.com/SamuelBanya?tab=repositories Reason being is that I wanted to distro-hop on my personal machines (laptop, Desktop, etc) like a mad man to check out some other workflows, though mostly because I think Thunar file manager’s bug in XFCE desktop on Manjaro desktop that automatically mounts SD cards as ‘root’ is crazy hence I’m switching out to something better.
The less I have to actually depend upon existing on the file system for a given laptop or Desktop via a different Linux distro .
I was able to complete all of the tasks I had assigned myself this entire year.
This is saying something because I’m a pretty motivated person, and am surprised I got through all of those tasks. Seriously.
Recently, I got the following tasks complete:
Pretty much almost sold the old Odroid HC-4 I bought since it was such a hassle to figure out how to setup with Open Media Vault –> Don’t buy one, just don’t.
I added some older projects to the ‘git.musimatic.xyz’ site, specifically under an ‘Archive’ repo:
https://git.musimatic.xyz/Archive/tree/ I also open sourced my projects running on crontab jobs on this site as well:
https://git.musimatic.xyz/ArtGalleryCreator/tree/ https://git.musimatic.xyz/Bandcamper/tree/ https://git.musimatic.xyz/ScriptureOfTheDay/tree/ https://git.musimatic.xyz/RandomCSSColorGenerator/tree/ For my new job, I’ve been working on making ‘hello world’ typo repos as well as some basic GUI type program examples for the team to learn from. Reason being is that I have to deal with a variety of programming languages to assist Dev’s on a daily basis, so I wanted to know how the very basics of the following languages at the bare minimum:
I released the second JeeveSobs album called “Breakpoints”:
https://jeevesobs.bandcamp.com/album/breakpoints Planning to do a synth based third album later on. Probably will involve using ‘JACK’ via ‘qjackctl’ with multiple input configurations between synths, drum machines, and lots of samples with loops. Should be a lot of fun.
~ Sam
I was able to finally re-design the Art Gallery to incorporate the ‘FancyBox’ JS library, which makes it SUPER easy to view any images on the page.
Related link for the ‘FancyBox’ library:
https://fancyapps.com/docs/ui/installation I specifically modeled it after this example that they provided:
https://fancyapps.com/playground/vl This is the end result:
https://musimatic.xyz/pythonprojectwebsites/ArtGallery/artgallery.html Also, I was able to re-design the main site, and also scrape random palettes from ‘Lospec’(‘https://lospec.com/') and also determine if the background and foreground palette colors were light or dark based upon a few random posts and articles.
Been going through Greg Vilppu’s drawing courses, and learned a bit of figure drawing.
However, I will have to really go through his anatomy courses to figure out more in depth on how to actually draw the head, torso, arms, legs, etc. This is more so because that particular teacher knows his anatomy inside and out so its kind of hard to follow along when I’ve been guessing, since its been so long since I ever took an anatomy course anyway.
I spoke too soon.
That self-creating art gallery page was great, but the amount of images, and the default sizes are CRAZY big.
Therefore, I had to incorporate creating thumbnails into the logical process as well.
I tried many, many, many different attempts to resize the GIF’s without success.
I have no idea how to resize the GIF’s. I tried the ‘resize2gif’ library, and even tried to follow two vague Stackoverflow posts to manually hack the module’s code to work with Python 3 without matrix array errors.
Hard work pays off.
Though the CSS styling for this page is far from complete and needs a lot of work, the idea is fulfilled:
https://www.musimatic.xyz/pythonprojectwebsites/ArtGallery/artgallery.html Basically, I created an entire art gallery page that creates itself.
How it works:
A Python 3 script creates the page by iterating through the related image directory on the site, and creates an HTML page. If you like Python 3, and source code, well, this is for you, since this is how I did it so you can do it on your site as well:
I found a few art gallery pages worth stealing design ideas from, which include William L. Eaken’s illustration page:
http://eaken.net/illustration_index.html Love the layout, how each thumbnail reveals a corresponding page. I could probably accomplish this but would have to create automatically generated pages for each and every artwork I have. No way would I do this by hand, but its definitely possible with a CronTab job Python 3 script though.
I have failed a lot in quite a few projects lately.
So, ultimately, this is a message more so on how to fail, and more or less how to accept it.
Things I have failed at for the past month:
I just can’t figure out how to get Emacs Tramp Mode to work for ‘gcp’ boxes for work to make my work life easier. My artwork-based WordPress site just wouldn’t work due to the “White Screen Of Death” issue, despite so many attempts to fix it so I nuked it.
I forgot to mention this, but the other day, I fixed the ‘w3mBookmarkSorter’ so that it now is able to take a user’s config file, read it, and then determine where their given w3m related ‘bookmarks.html’ file is so that it can sort it alphabetically:
https://git.musimatic.xyz/w3mBookmarkSorter/ This is an important utility in my opinion since w3m lacks the functionality to sort bookmarks in this fashion.
I might consider joining their mailing list and just asking them to consider adding my project directly into w3m because I know the last time I had asked about how to contribute to the Debian part of w3m, I was told it basically takes forever for something to get approved.
I changed jobs recently, and am now working for a cybersecurity firm as a Technical Support Engineer.
The job itself is really interesting, and the product itself is really neat. It’s a lot to learn, but I think I’m ready at this point of my life. Let’s just say I spent the last week learning how to use a Mac, and figuring out how to get the best version of Emacs up and running for my daily note taking, which in itself, wasn’t too easy.
Took a few months, but I’m happy to have released that JeeveSobs album called “Jagged Edges” today, which can be found here:
https://jeevesobs.bandcamp.com/album/jagged-edges Pretty happy with the results.
Second album has been worked on for a while, and is more drum and loop focused which should be cool too.
Stay tuned.
~ Sam
I was able to deploy my own Searx instance, which means that I have my own search engine.
This means goodbye to Google and DuckDuckGo, I’m using my own search engine from now on.
You can use it too here, have fun:
https://www.searx.musimatic.xyz ~ Sam
It took a lot of effort and some research, but I was able to get the ‘weather’ page working again, as I had realized that the National Weather Service moved their Apache server hence why my weather radar GIFs that I ripped using ‘wget’ weren’t working for a while.
They replace their main page with some dumb bloated web app, but luckily you CAN find the related weather radar GIFs if you look hard enough.
I revamped my VPS and Raspberry Pi within the last couple of days.
Also, I added a random crontab job that changes the color scheme of the front page every 5 minutes for fun. The results are cool, and here to stay. Might even make it more wacky with some interesting background images, who knows.
I did some deep thinking and yeah, I’m not gonna host any bloated web apps on the site since I really feel like I just don’t want to showcase any more bloat on the web anymore.
I have been mostly tweaking my Emacs configuration for the past couple of weeks, both on my personal config and my work-based config.
Let me tell you, it is awesome to be able to utilize Emacs Window Manager inside a VM, along with ‘magit-mode’ for git commits, and just all of the small tweaks I’ve added after watching all of Uncle Dave’s Emacs videos.
I think I will blow some people’s minds at work once my full setup is complete so that I can maybe get them to possibly use it too (though… I doubt it, but one can hope I guess).
I archived all older blog posts back into the main “blog.html” page, and have removed all pages and references to the older versions of the site, as I already have done a personal backup of the page itself.
If you ever wish to see the previous versions of the sites (though sometimes incomplete), you can visit the Archive.org archived page here to view different scraped versions of this site from 2018 to 2020:
I am happy to note that I have successfully moved over to Gentoo on bare metal, meaning its on my Linux laptop and no longer in a VM.
I have coupled Gentoo with Emacs Window Manager (exwm), and honestly, it is fantastic!
The fonts, and unicode characters need to be adjusted as I’m not sure if you have to RICE it via ‘~/.Xresources’ or via the Emacs config itself (but this is what the README is for I guess).
I had to create a throwaway email to post a GitHub issue, as I can’t stand Microsoft anymore, let alone GitHub. Yet, like all similar services, you NEED to have an account to raise an issue on some random GitHub project, so I had to figure out a way around this.
Luckily, there are some sites to easily make throwaway email accounts that get destroyed in 10 minutes or so, so here they are for a scenario like this:
Check out this revival Geocities-esque site where you can browse other people’s sites, cool stuff:
https://neocities.org/browse In my spare time, I’ve hacked my PS3 and Nintendo 3DS with custom firmware to load homebrew and similar applications.
The only thing left I would like to consider for the PS3 is how to figure out how to load .iso’s via the NTFS backup external drive I have instead of having to transfer the games to a FAT32-formatted flash drive in such a jenky fashion.
I haven’t felt well at all stomach-wise for the last few days, but today, I worked through it to get back into a routine.
I did a lot of self-reflection today, and realized that all the goals I set aside for work-related things really actually came to fruition this year.
I still haven’t decked out my Emacs work configuration as far as it can just yet, and even then, that’s probably maybe even 15% of the potential I could probably experience with a finely tweaked Emacs setup.
I tried using my work Windoze laptop to install the PS3 firmware hack, but realized that the dumb laptop doesn’t allow flash drives to be used while booted into Windoze –> Into The Trash (Just kidding… but I wish I could just use Linux all day, one can dream).
I instead utilized the ‘md5sum’ Linux terminal utility that’s built in to verify the ‘md5sum’ hash of the download, and just utilized pcmanfm-qt to mount the drive.
Enjoying surfing the net this fine Saturday morning, and I came across a few cool things in terms of old-school Geocities-esque pages.
This is a cool designed “Neocities” site that I absolutely adore the color and design of, never thought to put the navigation pane on the far right:
https://jackomix.neocities.org/collection/ This is a search engine you can use to find older pages:
https://wiby.me/ Found a page that imparts the old-school tropes of all those 90’s pages too.
I created a separated config for Emacs for work, which is working out pretty nicely.
So far, I have Slack working in my work-based Emacs, which is really cool.
You can find out more about how to use ‘Emacs-Slack’ on their GitHub page:
https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack/ Slack sucks on its own to be honest. It is a dumb proprietary ElectronJS app that wants to be IRC so badly, but had to settle for being a commonplace item in most workplaces.
I got my Gentoo VM up and running again, but its the classic scenario where you can’t necessarily follow the Gentoo AMD64 handbook verbatim, as I had made the mistake in making ‘/dev/sda2’ or /boot as ’ext2’ when you need to make it ‘vfat’ to handle the UEFI based boot process.
I had to adjust this by moving everything from /boot to /home, reformatting /boot to be with:
mkfs.vfat /dev/sda2 Then, I re-installed Grub 2, and it worked thankfully after rebooting.
I finally uploaded my ‘w3mBookmarkSorter’ project to my Git repository, which can be found here:
https://git.musimatic.net/w3mBookmarkSorter You can ‘git clone’ the repo with the following command so you can use the utility locally on your Linux machine:
git clone https://git.musimatic.net/w3mBookmarkSorter Further installation instructions can be found in the “README.md” file included in the project.
It’s a pretty cool little simple utility that sorts the bookmarks from A to Z for ‘w3m’ as the functionality just doesn’t exist yet.
I debated how to properly deploy the ‘w3mBookmarkSorter’ project, and it turns out that it’ll be a hard uphill battle on how to package it for the Debian release. This is important because the major ‘w3m’ fork, even on GitHub, is for Debian itself. The project itself is based in C, while my plugin uses Python 3 with the BeautifulSoup4 library.
That being noted, I’m most likely going to just create an alt account on GitHub to host stuff as well, but also mirror it on my own Git page as well.
I finished the ‘w3mBookmarkSorter’ project. Its beautiful, and works just as intended.
I am debating to mail this to the ‘w3m’ team as a patch plugin for ‘w3m’ via email as I think anyone who uses ‘w3m’ would absolutely LOVE this functionality, as w3m doesn’t sort bookmarks at all by default.
Emacs Conference 2020 is coming up next weekend (Thanksgiving weekend) and I’m looking forward to some of the talks, especially the talks with Rainer König, who has some amazing Org-Mode tutorials on YouTube, and RMS (Richard Stallman).
I tried tweaking my Gentoo VM to be able to add a different “profile” to allow it to download the [20] desktop specific option. The reason for doing this is so that I can add the necessary “USE” variable flags to be able to install xorg-server, so that I can install Emacs Window Manager. During this entire process, the SSD drive gave in, and went into read-only mode, which freaked me out to say the least, because I thought the drive died on me.
I worked on the ‘w3mBookmarkSorter’ project, and made a lot of headway by just re-thinking and reducing the amount of Python 3 code present.
I think I’m pretty close to what I want, and will most likely release utilities like this on a public Git instance as I think ‘w3m’ as a whole could benefit from something like this.
Though I like Emacs a lot, I realized its much more fun and simpler to just use terminal apps instead.
I deployed my ‘cgit’ instance here:
git.musimatic.net I basically replaced the existing ‘GitWeb’ instance with ‘cgit’, which is really nice. All it needs is a dark theme, and I think it should be fine.
I tweaked my Emacs config a bit, and its looking pretty good so far. I’m pretty impressed with just the simply default zoom based Hydra command for example since I really like the idea behind it to just keep repeating the same macro until another key is pressed.
I’m in the process of deploying ‘cgit’ to git.musimatic.net via nginx.
The one important link command to create a symlink in this kind of scenario, let’s say “default” would be:
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/default /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default It’s not working yet, but I do understand the concept of what I’m doing in terms of making sure nginx understands to listen on Port 80, and then run ‘fcgiwrap’ to actually deploy the website showing the git repository.
I am looking into how to deploy “cgit” instead of my current GitWeb instance, as I never seem to use it anyway, and kind of think it sucks.
There’s something a bit uninviting for it, especially if you just have it present to show dotfiles or something else in a public repo.
Here’s the site for ‘cgit’:
https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/ I did find a blog post on the same topic that I might rip from if I can’t figure out to get it working on ’nginx’ myself though.
I looked into FreeBSD, and wow, I am impressed. It pretty much can run most Linux software in its own compatibility layer. This includes window managers, and other key things I use on a daily basis.
Here’s some great vids on the topic of using FreeBSD as a Desktop-centered OS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4WXHdB_-98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=revOJcX2rLs I think I might even swap out my go-to Devuan setup for just a FreeBSD setup to run Linux based VM’s though I’ll have to try out FreeBSD in a VM first.
I mostly chilled out today and did some art.
Here’s a cool link to a site that features color cycling art from Mark Ferrari that you can experience in your browser. You can change the time of day, and observe the constant shift of color palettes as a result. Really neat and inspiring scenes:
http://www.effectgames.com/demos/worlds/ Hope everyone is well. ~ Sam
I began working on the “Yahoo Finance Stock Ticker App” project.
I’m planning on assigning a “Scrapy” based agent to each of the pages, and to consistently return the same data feed.
Here is a link to the related “Scrapy” Python 3 module:
https://scrapy.org/ I’m using this instead of BeautifulSoup 4 as I’d like multiple agents to send asynchronous requests instead of just one at a time.
I’d like maybe deploy this with some kind of lightweight backend program like ‘Flask’ in combination with React to make it sort of a hybrid between Python 3 and JS.
I’ve been doing more and more art in Grafx2.
It’s one of those positive things to do despite any frustrations in life.
Any time doing art is time well spent. I don’t care what anyone says on that front, since if they say its a waste of time, then they probably don’t have any useful talent either.
What I’ve always like about art is that I can easily see the progression, as well as the risks I took.
I re-organized the site a bit more, and got rid of the “Radio” section as I really only had web apps on that page anyway.
Though I think Ham Radio is pretty cool, I’m still not that versed or well into the hobby yet to show off any cool projects, so I think its a bit of a waste to have a section on that topic anyway.
With that in mind, I re-organized all those web apps I’ve made just on the “Programming” site itself:
Today was a great day.
I finally did it.
I finally installed Gentoo in a VM.
It took three separate attempts over two weekend sessions but I got it booted thankfully. I plan on figuring out how to maybe get Emacs Window Manager present in that particular VM as well, so that’s gonna be a cool project indeed. Otherwise, my related installation guide is now pretty complete, so I could easily do it again in less than an hour if I needed to.
This week has been a bit long in many ways, so I was looking for more ways to get back into doing digital art this weekend to just relax.
I still have that Loomis art book laying around so I might read that.
I found these two goldmines for art learning, both of which have a ton of related links:
https://sites.google.com/site/ourwici/ https://hubpages.com/art/how-to-draw-learn I didn’t even know people replace drawing tablet nibs with weed wacker cable snippets that are sanded afterwards.
I’ve been looking up more Hungarian food recipes to make this year.
Here’s a great YouTube channel to learn how to make some Hungarian food, as the recipes use both metric and Imperial measurements:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCecewhDyWq15EGwE3CJ18MQ Here are two great YouTube channels on Hungarian cooking, but be warned, they’re both in Hungarian without any subtitles or captions, so I would recommend this only if you can understand Hungarian (like me):
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRxaYgjGaaxeQwmMwxQ2pGQ https://www.
I began work on an AngularJS app to record callsigns for Ham Radio:
https://musimatic.net/radio.html#callsign_recorder I plan on making it AngularJS based, and want an easy way to quickly record callsigns and look them up on a related callsign lookup site.
I’m still debating the usefulness of it, as it would be cool to export the same data. However at the same time, instead of exporting it to Excel or .txt formats, you could have easily made a similar list in your text editor of choice, so why bother exporting it?
Still working on the “Space Weather” JQuery UI app.
I got the actual K-Index and Sunspot data to display on the page itself, so that’s pretty cool. I also got the “K Index” graph to also display by using appropriate “src” attribute for the related img tag. Only thing I have to modify is to include a setTimeout() statement to have it continously looping. Otherwise, its pretty much done:
https://musimatic.net/radio.html#space_weather Now to think of what to do for a simple Angular JS app next :)
I have been in the process of installing Gentoo. Though it has been fun and I have learned so much throughout the process, the process itself is pretty long to the point where I had to pause the KVM Virtual machine in Virt-Manager to continue the process sometime later today. The IRC channel for Gentoo on Freenode has been SUPER helpful though, and overall, the process has been so much better than trying to do the same thing for Arch or something.
I did some slight work on that “Space Weather” app.
I was able to index into the related JSON data from the NOAA Apache Web Server in the JS console, as its just a JSON object with specific key values.
I’m still debating on how I want it to look though, so I’m torn between the JQuery UI’s “Tabs” vs “Accordian” look.
I found this cool site that gives homage to old Geocities cities, and is worth looking at, as the guy took assets from older Geocities sites:
I did more thinking about what to deploy on this site.
So far I’m thinking of deploying:
An RSS Feed Agregator Stock Ticker Email Server Voip Telephone In Browser BBS Gateway For Echolink, DMR, and Fusion Radio Nodes Webpage For Old-School Computer Emulators OpenStreetMap Page Web fonts repository to store nice fonts (https://github.com/Finesse/web-fonts-repository) ytdl-webserver to pre-download YouTube videos Office suite software on a webpage to avoid using “Office-365” or “Google” based software Pastebin without syntax highlighting VPN service Search engine (Searx, etc) URL shortener client Image gallery for my artwork tube, a YouTube-like alternative (https://prologic.
GitHub is pretty much trash these days, but here is one cool thing I found from it:
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted Basically that link is a ton of apps and resources that you self-host yourself on sites like this.
That means, MORE IDEAS FOR APPS TO DEPLOY ON THIS SITE :)
I was already kind of just set on deploying Unrealircd to create a IRC server to connect to via SSH key or password or something, but I’m glad to find more ideas of things to deploy :D.
I’ve been debating what I want to do in terms of a JQuery UI style App.
I’m leaning towards using the JQuery UI “Accordian” widget to make some kind of expandable web app.
I found two cool NOAA based directories to either obtain JSON and image data from:
https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/json/ https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/ Here’s the overarching site if you’re interested in other forms of data from the NOAA server, which is neat since you don’t have to apply for an API key in order to utilize their data:
I got my Jitsi instance running.
However, it’s only usable using a Chromium variant browser. Because I despise Google, I’ve had to resort to using Ungoogled Chromium which works flawlessly for Jitsi thankfully.
There are a TON of Firefox issues for Jitsi-Meet, so I don’t feel bad at all why Firefox doesn’t work, since its a known issue, and there’s no known workaround:
https://community.jitsi.org/t/software-unusable-on-firefox-why/22143 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1468700 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/2835 I basically followed this blog post to deploy a Jitsi instance on this site for anyone wanting to do it on their Debian VPS server:
I’ve been trying to get the Searx instance running, but it appears that the “filtron” component is the part that is doing excessive rate-limiting for some reason.
I’ll have to lurk on their IRC channel to maybe get some feedback of what to do.
Speaking of IRC, I found a couple of links that are interesting and useful as well to find IRC networks OTHER than Freenode:
https://netsplit.de/networks/ https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php Been also debating the best ham radio setup as well, since I might just get one of those meme-y type 40 inch antennas for my HT (Baofeng UV-5R) to improve my signal strength to hit a few more repeaters for like $20.
Learned a little more about APIs from the JS book I have.
Debating what kind of web app I should create, either with JQuery UI, or Angular, just for the experience, and also debating the “why” aspect of it.
Also debating what else to deploy on this site, will most likely be one of the following ideas:
Unreallircd Server Mumble Server Jitsi Instance Searx Instance BBS I’ve been playing around with KiwiSDR, which is another “Software Defined Radio” type website where people basically allow you to play around with their already configured shortwave radio via a web page.
I changed the “favicon” for my site to be a cool neat lightning bolt I customized myself, which you’ll see at the top of each tab.
The fact that it had the old stupid “InMotion” favicon bothered the heck out of me recently, so I decided it was time to get rid of it once and for all.
I originally tried using this site to create the favicon using some example Pokemon sprites:
After a lot of effort during lunch breaks at work, I was able to finally fix the issues with the “ISS Location Receiver” project on this page:
https://musimatic.net/radio.html I have to thank this blog post since it basically did the same idea, but their project is a little bit more refined and polished:
https://thecodingpie.com/post/build-a-real-time-iss-tracker-using-javascript/ I found a Budapest, Hungary based SDR to check out for anyone interested in Hungarian Ham Radio:
I found out about “SDR”, which is Software Defined Radio through someone who talked about this on IRC.
This is better explained on the SDR website found here:
http://www.websdr.org/ Also, there are other ways to listen to Ham Radio online, so check out this link:
https://www.hamradiosecrets.com/listen-to-ham-radio-online.html Just give the SDR’s below a shot by loading one of the links below in a modern GUI based web browser, and play around with the tuner (yellow icon) to change the frequency.
I’ve been working on utilizing a few links to get the “ISS Location Receiver” project underway, which can be observed in the “ISS Station Location” section on this page:
https://musimatic.net/radio.html I’ve been utilizing the following links to do so:
http://open-notify.org/Open-Notify-API/ https://leafletjs.com/examples/quick-start/ https://leafletjs.com/reference-1.7.1.html#map-options https://asmaloney.com/2014/01/code/creating-an-interactive-map-with-leaflet-and-openstreetmap/ https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Slippy_map_tilenames#Tile_servers https://openmaptiles.org/ https://mledoze.github.io/countries/ Still deciding on how to best do this as you can easily just have it run every five seconds with a “setTimeout()” JS function.
I did a lot of backend website modifications, including re-ordering of my Git repos for my projects.
Though I haven’t gotten all of the older projects up and running, one particular new project I have up is the ISS Location Receiver based script that pulls in the longitude, latitude, and Unix timestamp of when the ISS Space Station is overhead.
This means that you can monitor it going over your house over the course of the day.
I’ve been getting more into Ham Radio recently, and it has been super cool.
The license exam itself is kind of useless for someone like me that is using a low-tier handheld radio, as the questions are geared towards older enthusiasts who have amples amounts of money to build radio towers on their property, with a $500 to $1000 radio to match.
However, once you kind of get past the somewhat useless exam which encompasses a good majority of high school level physics, its not too bad.
I changed the CSS of this page to be a tad bit simpler as the solarized theme for the CSS was a bit much.
Pretty happy to get back to the whole dark blue purple theme, so I’m pretty set.
Might add some small tweaks with fonts, but the simpler the better as I plan on overhauling the theme to like a Geocities-type old school theme at the end of the year as well.
I did a very big move recently, and we just got all of our stuff settled into the new place.
It’s been great so far, and pretty laid back comparatively.
However, its been a lot of ups and downs regarding how to rent a house, so I can’t say its been too easy, but I’ve been grateful that we made it in one piece and are closer to family given these crazy times.
I’ve been in the process of trying to get “BasiliskII” emulator to work, so that I can run some cool old Mac programs for fun. I was thinking to maybe setup my old Raspberry Pi 3 to boot into BasiliskII to run MacOS7 or MacOS8 to possibly do some cool audio recording ideas, and play some old games / use older Mac software.
This link looks promising as a good guide, but we’ll see:
I have been in the process of trying to deploy a ‘Searx’ instance on this site, but so far, I haven’t made much progress and am kind of stuck on why its always stating “Rate limit exceeded” when you attempt to visit the Searx instance via the ‘curl’ Linux terminal command.
I’ve been trying to utilize this part of the Searx official documentation guide and a related GitHub issue that has a very close nginx based configuration for the ‘searx’ site but haven’t really figured out the root cause of the issue as I’ve followed each of the installation steps VERY closely:
I’m back to just using regular Emacs.
I tried Doom Emacs out, and what bugged me is that the overall community’s sentiment towards it is correct. Doom Emacs is really just someone else’s config. Sure it might be faster than regular Emacs, but at least I know how I want my Emacs experience to be configured.
Also, using Doom Emacs with Org-Mode kind of sucks since the C-u C-c C-. command doesn’t work right at all, which is SUPER crucial for my every-day ticket based work at my actual job.
I was able to figure out with the help of IRC how to actually git clone my repos as the ‘git’ user:
For example, if I had SSH access to my VPS on another machine, then I could do:
git clone -v git@www.musimatic.net:/var/www/git/dotfiles.git Also, I learned how to configure Virtualbox on a Windows 10 ‘host’ to run Devuan inside of it as the ‘guest’ with the help of this guide:
I am happy to note that my git repos are live at the following site: https://git.musimatic.net/
What does this mean?
You can see the progress of any of my own public repos that I contribute to, so that you can steal my ‘dotfiles’ configurations for your own use to tweak for example.
For example, I will literally be able to go to another machine, pull down related configurations, and it would look exactly like my current machine without any problems.
I am in the process of trying to figure out how to get the Git bare repos online as public repos on this site.
Unfortunately, the Git book is mostly ‘Apache2’ based, which doesn’t help because this site is now running using ’nginx’.
However I did find a couple links that I have to go through to make some decisions on how to properly configure and serve the following directory: git.
I am happy to note that this site is now running on ’nginx’ thanks to Luke Smith’s video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWAqilIVNgE
Pretty stoked because dealing with Apache configurations was a bit of a pain, especially since I wanted to add a Git server to this site, as well as Searx.
We are now running on a Debian 10 based VPS droplet running on Digital Ocean’s VPS servers in NY :).
Regarding My Digital Art:
I got good news in that I was able to finally get around to modify the existing JS code for the “GIFs” section to make the Digital Art 2020 and Digital Art 2019 “back”, “random”, and “forward” buttons actually work.
You can check it out here: http://musimatic.net/art.html
Regarding ‘Audacity’:
I tried to get Audacity to work on my Devuan laptop, but attempting to do overdub tracks made weird sounds on the overdubbed track.
I debated installing ‘firefox-esr’ since Qutebrowser just wasn’t working with YouTube’s sign in page at all. It turns out that the dumb blanket error message they give when you try logging into YouTube with Qutebrowser, “you’re using “a browser […] that doesn’t allow us to keep your account secure” is totally a lie.
They just want more control over your browsing experience to monitor your viewing habits, and to make ad revenue, plain and simple.
After much deliberating, I was able to kind of get ’transmission’ working on both my local machine and my Raspberry Pi since I wanted to download safe files like Linux distro ISOs, wallpapers, etc.
Think of ’transmission’ as one of your typical BitTorrenting clients, but with a bit more control, and a heck of a lot of less ads and potential for getting viruses.
The reason why you would want to have ’transmission’ on a Raspberry Pi device is that you don’t want to waste so much power downloading things like torrents, images, etc, when you can do it on a low power device to do it all day for you if needed.
I figured out how to handle images with Emacs Org Mode and related formatting to make this blog a little more lively with images: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/images-and-xhtml-export.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Images-in-HTML-export.html#Images-in-HTML-export
I figured out how to use thumbnails with the ‘mogrify’ command from ‘imagemagick’ will become SUPER useful later as I make more and more useful tutorials on this site with just .org mode sites for specific topics: https://imagemagick.org/Usage/thumbnails/
Here’s the relevant ‘mogrify’ command: mogrify -format png -path thumbs/ -thumbnail 100x100 (name of image)
I tried to install Jitsi Meet but failed because of these two dumb issues that still haven’t been resolved by the Jitsi team:
Related GitHub issue on the same topic: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/6371
Duplicate issue where they’re still working on this issue: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/pull/6627
Basically, in a nutshell, they’re using “Certbot-Auto”, which has been deprecated for releases like Ubuntu 20.04.
This means that unless they patch this into the installation shell scripts, I would manually have to apply a workaround using ‘certbot’ to install the appropriate certificate, and manually configure a lot of the files present to get it to run.
I got up to Chapter 5 for that C Programming Language book today.
C is such a cool language, and the power of it can’t be overstated. It is embedded in so many devices to the point where if you can program in C, you can pretty much use it to program on anything (that isn’t requiring pure assembly language of course :D).
I’m debating what the best things I can do to install on the work based Devuan VM I have so far.
Thanks to my dude, Luke Smith, I was able to finally get all my Git repositories back on my site with his latest video: https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=ju9loeXNVW0
If you’ve never used “www.invidio.us” before, then you probably should, as it allows you to check out YouTube videos in terminal based browsers like ‘w3m’ easily.
If you attempt to use vanilla YouTube’s site in ‘w3m’, Google complains about the lack of the JS scripts that are not present because ‘w3m’ runs purely based on HTML alone, so they can’t track you nor give you targeted ads.
Learned three cool things this week regarding Linux.
First Thing:
This is Linux file permissions in a nutshell from what I learned:
You first have ‘-’ which is a file, or ’d’ for a directory. Past that, you’ve got three groups: You, your group, and everyone else who can execute scripts on the machine. The options include ‘r’ for read, ‘w’ for write, and ‘x’ for execute. r: 4, w: 2, x: 1 And that’s basically it.
I was able to get sound working on my Devuan desktop, but let’s just say Nvidia drivers are a pain to attempt to get running if you want to limit what’s installed via ‘pins’ in the following directory: /etc/apt/preferences.d
This is important since I’d like to update my video card drivers to use game console emulators effectively, since the performance out of the box was pretty bad, which is weird since that desktop was an older gaming rig anyway, and I’m just using it for emulation and POSSIBLY music creation.
Minor point I learned the other night is to be able to pipe the ‘pwd’ command into the ‘xsel’ command.
This allows you to pipe the ‘working directory’ that you obtain with ‘pwd’ command into ‘xsel’ which copies your working directory onto your clipboard.
This allows you to be able to paste your working directory into another terminal pane in a multiplexer like tmux so that you can work on a similar task in the same directory.
I installed Devuan on my Desktop computer yesterday with Openbox, and I must say, its a pretty comfy experience.
I was trying to get some game emulators working, but sound isn’t working on the Scarlett Solo audio interface I have.
I got sound to work in the past, but maybe its an issue with alsa. I’m also thinking that I probably might have given up and installed Pulseaudio as a result.
I completely removed my GitHub account as I want nothing to do with Microsoft going forward.
I think GitHub isn’t that great of a service and feel that I do better off with hosting my own projects as just .git directories on my own web page.
If anyone is really that interested in obtaining a repo for their own use, then they could just ‘wget’ the contents of the page and be done with it.
I re-did my Linux laptop with Devuan instead of Debian min installer.
It went well except I had to follow this post to fix the sound issue present with alsamixer: https://dev.to/setevoy/linux-alsa-lib-pcmdmixc1108sndpcmdmixopen-unable-to-open-slave-38on
Basically, I just had to add a “default.conf” file in the etc/modprobe.d directory.
Devuan is basically Debian without ‘systemd’. ‘systemd’ is pretty controversial as it is an init system that could be potentially used as a backdoor.
I’d say as long as I have the freedom to install whatever I want on my computer, I’d rather opt out of systemd completely, so I did.
I’ll be working on one of these topics tomorrow:
TODO List Item Reason 1. Make the images part of this site actually useable Because it could look better 2. Migrate all my repos off GitHub and onto public ones on this site, and be done with Microsoft once and for all Because life could be even that much better 3. Install Devuan in a virtual machine on my laptop, take notes, and replace all Debian drives with Devuan Because ‘systemd’ is evil 4.
After much deliberation, I was finally able to get “youtube-dl” to work with Udemy.
Udemy is basically a site where you can take online video courses.
I combined a few ideas but here’s what you have to do to download Udemy videos using ‘cookie extractor’ and ‘youtube-dl’:
You have to first provide a web browser cookie that contains your previous login information. This means that you’ll have to literally use a web browser of your choice, login to the Udemy website, and close out of the browser.
I finally got AwesomeWM to display terminal windows with gaps, with the help of this example AwesomeWM config I found: https://pastebin.com/yTHUmDeL
This is mentioned in the Arch Wiki, however, its not too clear where exactly the “Theme” section begins: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Awesome
Here’s a screenshot to show the “beautiful.useless_gap = 5” setting (which I was able to do via Emacs with C-u C-c C-l):
This is good since I was pretty dang close to just finding a new window manager if I couldn’t figure out gaps easily.
I was able to install ‘pywal’ with pip3, which basically allows you to change terminal color schemes on the fly.
Here is the link to ‘pywal’ on GitHub: https://github.com/dylanaraps/pywal
However, it wasn’t necessarily changing my wallpaper as well, so I created a function within my .bashrc config file to change both the color scheme via the ‘wal’ command AND the wallpaper via ’nitrogen’ command:
This can be found in the “# ‘pywal’ based adjustment” section of my .
I made improvements to the “Outlook Terminal Client” so that it now has further enhancements to force the user to select correct prompts for the month, day, and year entries.
I also prevented future date entries as well.
I added screenshots and improvements to the README.md as well, which can be found here: https://github.com/SBanya/OutlookTerminalClient/blob/master/OutlookTerminalClient.py
I was able to refine the “Outlook Terminal Client” project further, and am pretty much almost done with it.
The only tasks left to work on for this project include:
Allow user to re-select the already chosen date if they would like to
Allow user to select a date before 2020. For whatever reason, it doesn’t allow the user to do this, so this might be an limitation / issue with imap.
I’m in the process of relaxing for a bit as I have the week off due to the buildup of one comp day, and I’m piggybacking off Memorial Day weekend.
As such, I have had a bit of time to really adjust my aliases for my .bashrc to allow to for quick two letter commands to open up programs easily in two seconds in Bash terminal, which is pretty cool.
I learned a lot with w3m in the past few days but more so today, since I’ve been able to utilize a few macros from the YouTuber, gotbletu’s videos on the topic.
Here’s gotbletu’s related video on the topic of advanced macros in w3m browser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL73xWsaJP8&list=PLqv94xWU9zZ35Yv0s6zMID5JoS8qu19Kh&index=10
Here are some example commands that I added to my ‘keymap’ file in my ~/.w3m/ directory so that I can easily do some w3m commands with ease, the last of which I came up on my own to toggle the ‘color’ command in w3m to allow for color to be displayed on a page:
Over the past few days, I figured out how to use YouTube without using YouTube, which has been the coolest and best breakthrough ever.
Enter Indivio.us: “https://invidio.us/”
It’s basically a website which you can run with a JavaScript-less browser like w3m which allows you to search YouTube without ever be thrown a targeted ad, nor be given any mention of any forced suggested videos.
What you can do is to literally pipe the link you’re currently on, and then output it to mpv on a separate shell window.
I was able to modify my Newsboat configuration so that I could use a macro to open up YouTube videos with “’,’ (Comma) + m” which opens up the video in MPV.
I also made a revision to do the same action but instead be able to open up the same article in Firefox with “’,’ (Comma) + f” as well.
How this macro basically works:
It utilizes the “macro” key to set a macro in w3m.
I started work on a new Selenium based Python script project as I find it pretty frustrating how YouTube has elminated the ability to export your Subscriptions as an OPML file anymore.
I believe they are doing this purely for the fact that there’s YouTube Premium now, and they want to squeeze as much ad revenue as possible by forcing people onto their site to view content.
However, the lack of being able to export your Subscription feed into an OPML XML file doesn’t help anyone at all who accesses their site via Screen Readers who happen to use (ex: blind people who can’t see video content but want to keep up with the audio versions of their Subscription content on YouTube purely on text based titles for videos).
I’ve had a pretty easy going week at work this week, which led me to finish a lot of work projects in the next few weeks ahead of time in terms of a week off of vacation.
That being noted, I’ve also made strides to really see if I can attempt to tap into ZenDesk. I’ve come across a few barriers including the fact that I don’t have access to the ZenDesk API for work.
I worked on using the “SC-IM” program to manage my yearly finances and expenses.
“sc-im” which stands for “sc-improved” which is basically a spreadsheet program that utilizes Vim bindings: https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im
Two really good videos on how to use “sc-im” which I have found to be super useful include:
Luke Smith’s video on SC-IM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_8_gazN7h0&t=19s
gotbletu’s video on “sc”, which is the predecessor to “SC-IM” which covers some of the formula usage in “sc” which is pretty neat and not necessarily too intuitive in the man page for “sc-im”: https://www.
I am happy to note that I have successfully created the Scripture Of The Day project.
My resulting output webpage from this project can be found here: http://www.musimatic.net/pythonprojectwebsites/ScriptureOfTheDay/output.html
Basically, this takes a random verse from the King James Version of the Bible using the ‘kjv’ terminal program, which can be found here and built from source: https://github.com/bontibon/kjv
It is updated daily via a cronjob.
Very happy to have been able to complete this successfully.
I forgot to post this the other day, but I did make one final album for my Shibes band here: https://shibes.bandcamp.com/album/perspectives
Unfortunately, with all my attempts to re-arrange my Linux harddrives the other weekend, I actually erased the contents of the entire album, so I only have the final exported music files as remnants of those sessions. This is fine since I’m more of a person that just prefers to get stuff out there, then to dwell on stuff and never release anything.
I’m glad that I now have access to my own website again so I can freely post as I please again.
Clearly, the world has changed quite a bit in the last few months.
To stay positive, I’ve been re-affirming my Christian faith, so that’s been a focus of mine.
I’ve been reading through the Bible with the help of ‘KJV’, which is a really neat terminal based Bible program: https://github.
Here’s a pretty useful command if you’d like to search for programs on the command line within a Debian based Linux distro:
apt-cache search (pattern or name of program you're interested in): This allows you to search for programs on the command line to install. Here’s an example of how to apply this idea in action. In this example, let’s search for some terminal emulator programs on Debian’s apt package manager by simply providing “terminal emulator” as the pattern:
I finally got the Gifs page to work with the necessary file permissions, so go check it out. These are the gifs I’ve made for the past few years using a few apps on an old Samsung Galaxy S6 phone I’ve had. Definitely would like to continue making art in this style with the use of the program, GIMP, alongside some scripts to help automate it as creating gifs can be a tedious but fun process.
In case you ever need to indent an entire webpage (just like this one!) in Emacs, you can actually select all of the code present with:
C-x-f (Ctrl+x+f): This allows you to select all lines of code present in a file. You can then finally then indent everything with:
C-M-\ (Ctrl + Alt + \ 'backslash'): This indents all lines of code accordingly. I found out this trick the other day, and it helped so much especially on a site like this when I use multiple programming languages like Python 3 vs.
I am planning to do a re-design in early 2020 for this site to be more minimalistic in design as I think the style attempt is good, but it could be a bit simpler, and be based on more templated designs. I’ll figure out how to do this using either purely templates, or purely JS.
I am really looking forward to working on the Bandcamper project soon. This project’s GitHub page can be found here:
I have finished the Express Or Local App, which is a Python 3 based webscraper runs on a non-stop cron job that pulls MTA 7 Train data and displays it in a nice and easy to read HTML table. I’m glad this project has been finished as it has taken quite a long time to pull off. I’ve been in the process of making sure my older webscraper projects are working, and have fixed the Hockey Webscraper to make sure it runs daily.
I have been healing after a major stomach surgery about a month ago, but have been doing very well in terms of progress. As a test for myself, I put myself up to the challenge of being able to try to tap into GitHub’s REST API. Just in case you are wondering, “<strong>REST</strong>” stands for “<strong>RE</strong> presentational<strong>S</strong>tate <strong>T</strong>ransfer”, while “<strong>API</strong>” stands for “<strong>A</strong>pplication <strong>P</strong>rogramming <strong>I</strong>nterface”. It is basically a way you can access a company’s website’s data, which in my example is act of me obtaining the company, GitHub’s data relating to my GitHub user commits.
I wanted to share a couple of new Emacs commands I learned while on a plane ride back to New York after a week-long vacation on the West Coast.
m-f: This allows you to go forward one word in emacs.</code> m-b: This allows you to go backward one word in emacs.</code> c-a: This allows you to go to to the beginning of a line in emacs.</code> c-e: This allows you to go to the end of the current line in emacs.
I am now updating this website with the power of ‘rsync’, which is a Linux command line utility that I use to automatically sync the changes from my local computer (laptop) to the Digital Ocean droplet that hosts this site. I have also set this to be done on a Crontab job, meaning that if I ever feel like updating this website, I can do so at my own pace, and it will be automatically be updated every 5 minutes.
The Creators of SQL: Donald D. Chamberlin, and Raymond F. Boyce designed SQL while working at IBM to manipulate and retrieve data that was stored in IBM’s original sudo-relational database management system, System R, which was developed at IBM’s San Jose Research Laboratory in the 1970s.
Reasons To Use SQL: SQL (Structured Query Language) allows you to easily query databases for use in your data projects.
Though there are many variants on DBMS (Database Management System), knowing the basics can allow you to interact with databases regardless of what software you eventually use.
A Brief History Of The Emacs Text Editor
Richard Stallman created Emacs in late 1976 after combining the MIT lab ‘E’ text editor, with a set of macros to make the text editor easier to use.<sup>1</sup>
The Basics Of Emacs: I have begun to learn the text editor, Emacs, with the use of their in-built tutorials. I have always liked Vim, but would like to learn both in case it become useful later for a future Dev or Dev Ops role.
Digital Ocean Now Hosts This Site: I’ve recently shifted this website to now be hosted on DigitalOcean droplet, which means that I now have total freedom of what gets installed on the backend of the site, and can actively support my existing projects with cooler Linux functionalities, especially with Cron jobs.
I have also been getting the hang of using SFTP to download the site and work on it remotely, and then reupload it when I’m done instead of having to use SSH which disconnects regularly.
This is the Welcome Center I have been developing for the past several months with the use of C++, as well as the Qt framework.
Thankfully, it is now a fully functional one window application that is meant to help guide a new user of Lubuntu of what to do after installing the operating system.
Features of the Welcome Center
Open The Lubuntu Manual Webpage Configure Monitor Settings (Resolution) Open LXQt Configuration Center To Further Adjust Entire OS Setup Open Lubuntu Community Links Webpage To Get Help Through IRC, Telegram, And Mailing Lists Open Up Contribution Guide To Find Out How To Help Contribute Work Towards Lubuntu
I have begun the new year with quite a few changes to note. I was unfortunately sick for the last two weeks, but began an awesome new job doing customer support for a software firm. I plan on sharing my adventures in learning automation tools like Selenium, and PowerShell, in order to automate some of the boring or repetitive tasks regarding customer tickets in ZenDesk, and JIRA.
I finally have the Hockey Webscraper up and running after getting the FTP side of things resolved with the web hosting site and am trying my best to still work on finishing the MTA based Express or Local App.
I finished the Garfield Comic Of The Day Webscraper, and posted the results on the site. It will now post on Twitter at 11 AM everyday, and spread the joy of Garfield comics :)
I again made little progress to my projects this week due to personal things. I am in the process of making a Garfield themed fake website, and have been actively trying to redo the Python based Express or Local project using an example project I found. I also am learning Ruby on the weekends, and am planning to do a Yelp related project based on restaurants in Sunnyside, Queens.
I made small progress this week towards Python and C#, since I’ve had to deal with web hosting issues this week. I am currently in the process of making a Garfield themed fan website to showcase the skills I have gained from Chapter 4 from the HTML+CSS and JS books. I have also begun learning Ruby on the weekend as well, and updated my GitHub repo with all my progress as of late, but will rehost on Repl.
I posted on the MTA related Google+ group forum to ask how to hone in on the specific 7 NYC Train data. I also switched my focus on the Bull or Bear Webscraper C# app to try to scrape the CNBC website, and then switched the focus back to trying to utilize the Bloomberg C# API since they DO provide examples within the same download, and its worth a shot. I updated the Python and C# sections with new examples from Chapter 7 and Chapter 2 respectively.
I was only able to work on Python this week, but made a bit more progress on the MTA Express or Local App, since I cleaned up a lot of the code into separate functions. The biggest issue I’m facing is trying to make the data only look into the 7 Train, by indexing into feed.entity with a specific value. I’ve been trying to just brute force it and see which value works, but I might be better off actually looking into some of the .
I finished applying Chapter 3 of the “Javascript & JQuery” book to the “Visit Monaco” website. I plan on modifying the content by adding additional CSS styling changes next week. I only made small progress for Python and C# due to working overtime to leave early for the Thanksgiving holiday next week. The current issue with the Python based MTA Express or Local App is the looping section for each of the train properties.
I updated the “Visit Monaco” website to include Math and Number JavaScript object specific methods. I also fixed the time module specific issue for the Express or Local MTA Python app, but need to fix the looping issue for each of the stats. I also will follow a YouTube tutorial for the C# based Bloomberg webscraper, since the Iron Webscraper module isn’t able to be imported with Repl.it.
I updated the “Visit Monaco” website with more object orientated specific methods and properties (String and Number Objects in particular). I also have been working on fixing the time module issue for the MTA Express or Local App. I also have begun learning C# 7.0 within the last two weeks, and posted my latest progress work, as well as a Bloomberg related C# 7.0 webscraper project.
I updated the “Visit Monaco” website with more JS based scripts, and also included more of my Python Chapter 7 examples in the Programming Books Progress website progress page. The MTA app is turning out to be more or less a database SQL app. I also posted C# examples from the OReilly “C# 7.0 in a Nutshell” book in order to learn it to possibly use the skills to apply for a related job in the Dev department at work.
I made better progress on the MTA based Express or Local App by using the .txt files found in a related forum post that the MTA didn’t include in the initial .zip download. I also worked to include Browser Object and Document Object model ideas into the Stats section of the Visit Monaco website.
I also have been working on the “qt Beginner Guide” that’s provided by the official documentation for qt in order to become more familiar with it so I can further help the Lubuntu team, and will include related examples in the Programming Book Progress section of the site.
I’ve made better progress with adding more Chapter 3 ideas for the Visit Monaco website by including Browser Object Model, and Document Object Model ideas, as well as solidifying object orientated scripts in the stats section. The MTA Express or Local app is taking longer than expected since I can’t figure out how to interpret stop_id and train id values to make it feasible yet. I found two related projects, and messaged these devs for advice, and posted on the MTA Google + group.
I updated the Visit Monaco website’s stats sections with more arrays and object orientated programming ideas. I also have been making progress on the Express or Local App by displaying information about the first train in the dataset every 5 seconds in console. I hope to soon demystify the route id’s and stop id’s to make it clear where the current train actually is in relation to an actual NYC subway stop.
I have made more changes regarding object orientated JS ideas to the Visit Monaco website, and also uploaded my progress for the “Express or Local App”. I have been actively trying to help the Lubuntu community with two related bugs using C++ and qt, as well as Python.
I have been making more progress on the Express or Local Python app with the help of IRC members from the #Python channel. I’m getting closer to being able to parse through the unbuffered .proto protocol data stream from MTA, and will work with it to make it useable. I’ve been also implementing more object orientated scripts for the “Visit Monaco” website as well.
I completed the Hockey Webscraper project, and it now runs at 1 PM every day on my Twitter account. I am now working on an MTA related Python app called “Express Or Local” that displays express or local train time, and will display user configured route settings. I also have been working on adding more JavaScript scripts to the “Visit Monaco” website.
With the help from some programmers on the #Python IRC channel, I have been able to run the Hockey Webscraper successfully. The only thing remaining for this project is to add team logos as another dictionary of .jpeg pictures within the same directory. I have also continued to make progress in “Automate the Boring Stuff with Python”, and also have updated the “Visit Monaco” webpage with a few more scripts in the Stats webpage.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to fix the “ftplib” Python module issue, and have been sending e-mails back and forth to the web hosting company to figure out the exact FTP directory I need to upload a link for the Hockey Webscraper. I’ve also ran a test suite for the Pybee open source project, and am going to run more specific tests for the project next week. I received the switches in the mail for the PODHD500 guitar pedal, so I’ll post pics of how I fix it by soldering new switches within the next two weeks during a weekend.
I have been updating the Monaco website to include more scripts on the stats page. I am also becoming more active in Open Source projects such as BeeWare, and am working on running test scripts for this great open source project. I am also working on finishing the Hockey Webscraper to include an FTP link via the Twitter post that will be hosted from the webhosting provider’s FTP service via Python’s “ftplib” module, and using urllib3.
I’ve been working on the Visit Monaco website, and to update the Hockey Webscraper to be placed on Twitter. The only issue at the moment is to account for Python’s FTP module, and with the shared hosting server that this website is on. Once that is included, I can finally include Twitter posts with Excel .xlsx file attachments for the Hockey Webscraper. I also have been working on different Automating The Boring Stuff chapter projects which I will upload at a later time.
Uploaded Garden Menu Webscraper Twitter Bot, which basically scrapes the menu of a Brooklyn based restaurant, and reposts the link on Twitter for ease of use by customers. I also worked on the Monaco website this week as well.
I updated the Cat Of The Day Twitter Webscraper Bot to actually run at 1 pm every day! This took several attempts since the urllib module is very specific on how its methods are called. I am currently working on adding more features to the Monaco website, and am also working on making a menu webscraper Twitter bot that will actively scrape a Brooklyn based restaurant’s PDF menu. I’m waiting for Twitter to approve this bot’s account, but should be working soon.
I finally uploaded the results of the Hockey Webscraper, and am actively working on the fake website, “Visit Monaco, The Second Smallest Country In The World”. I am also working on creating a “QC Auditor View” JavaScript project for work to help me and my fellow Quality team members while auditing our website to redisplay Ad ID’s, and links to internal tools directly on each ad.
I am working on the “Visit Monaco, The Smallest Country In The World” website currently. I am making a lot of progress on the Hockey Webscraper at home, and am working on putting the results in an Excel .xlsv file so I can attach it to an e-mail, and send it to the user.
I finished the fake website, “The History Of MS Paint”, and uploaded the results. I am still working on the Hockey Webscraper at home, and am attempting to use Selenium to automate tasks at work as well.
I am making progress on the Hockey Webscraper, but haven’t posted the results yet. I created another fake website called “The History Of MS Paint” to demonstrate my skills learned from Chapters 1 & 2 for the HTML & JS books so far. I look forward to doing more project work before continuing in the actual books so that I can reinforce and demonstrate what I’ve learned so far.
Was incredibly sick for the last two weeks, but thankfully feel much better now. I have started working in the programming books at work to continue my progress, and will focus on the Hockey Webscraper first before revisiting the Song Of The Day Webscraper, since that will take more time to really find a solution via Repl.it
Still trying to find a capable Python based synth that will work in Repl.it to convert the MIDI sample to WAV for the Song Of The Day project. Made small progress this week due to sickness this week.
Updated overall website design, looks good so far. Still trying to make the Song Of The Day Webscraper actually work on its iFrame webpage. Cat Of The Day Webscraper still works, and I’m making progress on the Hockey Webscraper. I might shift focus to purely implementing the MIDI to Audio conversion for the Song Of The Day Webscraper though.
Updated the Song Of The Day Webscraper with my current version. It’s still not working because I haven’t figured out the MIDI to audio conversion process within the same tab. However, its getting closer since I’m using “FluidSynth” to do this, as well as the Midi2Audio Python library, and e-mailed the library’s creator with questions.
Updated background color to light purple on all webpages. Fixed Python script for Cat Of The Day Webscraper. Still working on making Song Of The Day Webscraper functional without use of MIDI, and currently researching MIDI to WAV converters to allow the user to play it in browser. Will also update guitar section with actual step by step process on how I will fix my Fender Jaguar guitar’s input jack with soldering since it’s my first time doing so.
Added my Python programming projects, Song Of The Day Music Webscraper, and Cat Of The Day Twitter Webscraper to the Python projects section. Need to fix the errors in the Repl.it verison of the Music Webscraper.
Fixed script issues on Collar website for Spin To Win webpage, and adjusted styling consistently throughout the website. It’s complete, and I like how it looks with Bootstrap. I tried adding a dropdown menu nav bar with Bootstrap, but this is not necessarily working out easily. Will try again next week.
Completion Of Phase 5 Project For Flatiron School Software Development Bootcamp I have completed my Phase 5 project which can be found deployed here:
https://party-planner.onrender.com/ The related GitHub repo that's part of this project can be found here:
https://github.com/SamuelBanya/PartyPlanner This is a full stack web application that is written with React for its frontend, and has a Ruby On Rails with Postgresql database backend. It can be deployed locally by using the following set of commands: