Roll of the dice

In a previous post, one full of hopeless optimism and naive enthusiasm, I talked about re-launching my BlenderBits domain, see the About link above it you are interested in seeing the domain, for as long as it exists. Unfortunately reality has kicked in and I find, that in all honesty, I have neither the time, nor the interest in maintaining two discrete blogs, especially as they intersect on topics, Blender, so as this is the more generalised one, I have decided to use this one only....

24 November 2023 · 1 min · Mark

Just post something, anything

I just read a post online about writing and the need to keep on writing. It strikes me that there is something fulfilling about the idea of the post I like, and find recognisable. I am trying to post more but often find myself doubting the value of writing at all. I need to remind myself that I am writing for no one other than myself. If someone else reads these posts, then all well and good, otherwise it isn’t relevant to me or my writing, I need to just keep writing....

16 March 2023 · 2 min · Mark, Gunda

Hugo Google-News Error

The Hugo theme template partial google-news has been deprecated for quite some time. A warning message has been posted on build for just that very reason. After the last update of Hugo v0.111.2+extended the partial appears causes Hugo to fail while building. This is the error thrown on my Mac: ❯ hugo Start building sites … hugo v0.111.2+extended darwin/arm64 BuildDate=unknown ERROR 2023/03/07 23:21:02 render of "page" failed: "/Users/mark/websites/markbtomlinson.com/themes/PaperMod/layouts/_default/baseof.html:5:8": execute of template failed: template: _default/single....

8 March 2023 · 2 min · Mark

Git Hooks to Rsync

Getting un-hooked You Git I have been using Git Hooks to sync local Hugo website files to my remote server. This has worked well, mostly, but I wondered if it was the most efficient way of syncing up. I use Git on the local web structure and so have version control. Using Hooks allows me to upload to a remote location and then have the remote server copy the modified file into the live site directory,....

1 March 2023 · 2 min · Mark

Last Day of February

I had wanted to be a little more consistent when it came to posting on here, however this month got away from me, and to at least post something, I am writing this little piece. Before the months comes to an utter end I will slip this one in under the wire. I have been busy though, mostly on learning the *nix CLI and tools, most especially the ins and outs of Find and Grep....

28 February 2023 · 2 min · Mark

Who will read this

This post appeared in my feed: # 7 Reasons why I don’t write Nobody’s going to read it anyway Let’s be honest: nobody likes to shout into the void. Everyone wants their content to be seen, and social validation is the sweet sweet dopamine reward we all crave. … Don’t underestimate how many people actively read personal blogs though! The web dev community is especially fond of RSS, and with the Fediverse gaining more and more popularity, original content on your own domain has a much better reach now than before....

30 January 2023 · 3 min · Mark

Bring Back Blogging

Bring back personal blogging This post from the Verge appeared on my feed this morning: Twitter is creaking. Social media seems less fun than ever. Maybe it’s time to get a little more personal. In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs....

1 January 2023 · 1 min · Mark

End of the year and...

In my last post, The end of social media, I lamented the decline of social media, and my feelings of weariness regarding the interaction and general lack of sociability on social media in the last couple of years. In an attempt to lower my stress level and concentrate on more productive things I am stepping further back from this charade and moving into a quieter corner of art and code. These are the two things I love and have been doing for a very long time....

31 December 2022 · 2 min · Mark

Typora Symbolic Links Mac

Unfortunately Symbolic Links and shortcuts don’t work within Typora’s file listing. I found a work around though: Create a symbolic link to the folder you wish to add in the default Typora markdown directory, this will then show up in the the file listing, it won’t do anything though if you click on it, as it isn’t implemented or supported in Typora yet. But, if you right click on the icon link in the file list and choose Open in New Window it will load the linked directories contents....

1 October 2022 · 1 min · Mark

Long Time No Post

I seem to have let this site go unloved for a long time. The main reason I suppose is a lack of motivation in posting and a bigger lack of interesting things to post. I have been quite busy though, both with Blender and in the last month, or so, with Moi3d. I hadn’t used Moi3d in a long time and was starting to miss the little tool, so took a few weeks to refresh my muscle memory and get some practice in....

21 September 2022 · 1 min · Mark