ShowFullTextinRSS: true

I added this line in the config.yaml

I really don’t care if it show the full post in the RSS, and personally I like that function when I am brwsing feeds.

But please bare with me as I test this feature, until I get images showing as I like…

I have noticed a distinct decline in interactions on Mastodon recently, the last and only social media platform I still use….

and after some feed back and thought I decided I would do a Post:

To post here or Mastodon

I am now leaning towards posting Notes on here and then linking them over onto my Mastodon. This will allow me more control and I will have them in a nice list and searchable within this Blog.

I think I will still post images, my renders and photographs, directly to Mastodon. This will help keep the bandwidth down on this site and all followers on there to see them more easily Knowing my fickle nature I will change my mind and post here too, but for now it is a plan.

In the long term it is my intention to have some form of portfolio on here, even it is just a series of posts indexed in the Tags section of this blog. I haven’t found a suitable portfolio for the theme I am using so, that’s looking likely. I don’t like posting images over on the Mastodon server either, for the same reasons I mentioned with the notes posting.

I like Mastodon, but I also like my Blog, and want to become less dependant on third party sites for posting. I would still need a window on the Web and Mastodon is my preferred porthole. One day I hope to set up my own instance, as much for a challenge as for any other reason, I know a few who have done it and it appeals to me, perhaps in a masochistic way.

Anyway to sum up I am going to post Notes from here to Mastodon whilst still posting directly there where it feels more practical or efficient. I will continue posting images directly there for now, but that may change.

To wrap up tangled web I am weaving here is a little render of a Torus Knot I made earlier this month:

There were a lot of older posts claiming you could turn off the RSS in sections frontmater and on in some other. This I found out to be a fallacy, all I managed was to turn it off totally or on totally.

The solution does not lay in the frontmater, at least not for me, it lies in the rss.xml file in the themes directory.

The full path to the file will be: <webroot>/themes/PaperMod/layouts/_default/rss.xml

This is of course for the PaperMod theme so your mileage may vary depending on your theme.

Once inside the file the line you are looking for is {{- range $pages }} on mine it was line 67 in the file.

Here is the surrounding code block:

    {{- with .OutputFormats.Get "RSS" }}
    {{ printf "<atom:link href=%q rel=\"self\" type=%q />" .Permalink .MediaType | safeHTML }}
    {{- end }}
    {{- range $pages }}
    {{- if and (ne .Layout `search`) (ne .Layout `archives`) }}

Once you have the line located you need to edit it to read as follows, (backup now):

{{ range where (where .Site.Pages ".Section" "post") "Kind" "page" }}

The .Section on mine was post, I have seen others use blog. It all depends on your setup, be prepared for a little trial and error, and remember that backup.

The net result of this is that only the post type of entry will end up in the RSS feed. The nice thing with HUGO is that you can check all this before deploying you blog updates. Vivaldi has a nice built in RSS reader that makes this very easy, just a tip, not a sales pitch.

Now remember the backup and don’t come crying to me if it all goes pear shaped. Your terminal will show you if there is an error, syntax or otherwise, so keep it in view.

I want to play more later and see about adding extra code to have an RSS for other parts of this blog, but that is for another day.

I had wanted to get a ZX Spectrum previously, but they were in short supply and so I waited until the Dragon 32 appeared on the market.

In 1981 a shipmate of mine who had a ZX80 and had just bought the new ZX81. These were the first personal computers I had seen, tiny plastic boxes with the worst keyboards ever invented. They weren’t that cheap but the build quality certainly felt like it. Plug them into the TV and hook a cassette player load a bit of code and a whole new world opened up before our eyes.

I was in the Navy at the time and stationed all over the place and so ended up having to wait a year or so to get my first computer. Coincidentally I had been a computer watchman on a warship and was responsible to fixing the computer hardware when it failed. Back then it was all discrete components and one PCB (printed circuit board) contained only 2 logic gates, so the computer was large, hot and not very powerful. That was back at the end of the seventies, yea I am that old.

The Dragon was made in Wales, well to be fair it was assembled in Wales and based on a Tandy machine of the time. It was pretty powerful and had a nice keyboard, and it was on that I wrote my first BASIC computer program.

Over the years I have had quite a few machines including a BBC-B and quite a few PC’s from 8086 CPU’s on, but the Dragon remains special for it being the intro to computing and code.

In the early 90’s I ended up at University as a mature student reading Computer Science, I had left school at seventeen so only had a couple of O-levels but I was accepted and finished the 3 years with an honours degree. During that time Java and the World Wide Web were launched, and I was lucky to be at college at the same time, so was one of the early users of both.

So there you go a little history of how I got into the world of computing and the machine that got me here forty fours years ago. (No idea what happened to the Dragon, I guess I sold it in an upgrade)

As some may be aware I am quite a quiet fan of blogs and blogging. I like the low profile old school method of posting news information and updates.

No big companies in the background milking our content for the advertising cow. Just ordinary people posting their thoughts and ideas. Sometimes mundane, sometimes informative but always human.

AI blogging will come I suppose eventually, I think it may already be here in some form, though I haven’t been mithered by it, yet! I won’t be partaking of it in any way shape or form. Someone mentioned in their blog they had stopped using M-Dash ‘’— " punctuation as it is oft used by AI, I have no idea, also no reason not to believe them.

Bubbles

I was recently made aware, from a blog I follow, of Bubbles a Blogs directory gathered from around the Web. These are appear to be non commercial in nature and are varied and assorted on numerous topics, follow the link to read more about Bubbles .

You will find a link in there on how to join in the adventure, I did, as I had subscribed to their feed a while back and was impressed with the variety and quality of the posts being syndicated. They haven’t been live for too long but are really gathering a good head of steam now, for good reason.

Comments

In the past I used to have a WordPress based blog, one of the first I had if I remember correctly, I ran it for years, but one day decided I didn’t like the Database format of the system and so looked for something more along a Flat-File system, this is how I ended up on a HUGO blog, which I really like. Simple fast and posts all written in Markdown which I really love, thanks Mr Gruber! I have been using Markdown since John released it in the early 2000’s.

One of the things I don’t have on my current setup though is Commenting A couple of reasons but mostly to do with noise and cookie regulations, also self hosted comments would need a DB to be realistic. As I mentioned I don’t want one on my server.

To this end I have been prompting people wishing to comment to do so over on Mastodon. So in that vain I will use this post linked on my Mastodon.

Finally:

As is my wont, here is a little model I made recently:

I had kept a list of them on Goodreads site. Then one day in a fit of pique I decided to delete my account and of course the list. However I later decided it was more useful than I had thought at the time, and so opened a new account, reimporting my previously exported list not reimporting or maybe it did, it was hard to tell.

Recently one of my connections on Mastodon added a list of books on their site and I thought that is a good idea.

Implementing it on my Hugo site isn’t ideal as it has to be in listed post format, where I would have liked a grid format with thumbnails linking to a note, but it still works as a reference of what I read and felt about the books.

I have added a few books today and intended to add more over time, not all the books I have read, but certainly the ones I read this year and perhaps a few from last.

The last I may just add as a job lot in one list, which I have as a Markdown table in any case, as there are far too many for me to do it one by one.

Below is a 3d model I made earlier this year for use on something like this post, it took a while but now it is posted and the bookshelf is hung on my blog.

March is nearly over and European Summer Time is just a few days away, and I haven’t posted on here again. I missed February completely and so I was determined not to fail March. To that end here is a little post about nothing in particular to fill the gap.

To be fair though March went by quite quickly, I guess the depressing news cycle helped pass the time with its constant sabre rattling and doom scrolling headlines. Try as I might I find it hard not get caught up in it, mostly in the hope there is some good news and the end of the madness is on the horizon. Of course it isn’t these things go on and on, powered by ego, greed, and stupidity. So no end in sight.

To help keep the remnants of my sanity going I am listening to books and modelling my doodles in Blender. This month I even opened my old copy of Substance Painter, not the Adobe version. The old tool is still working, for now, and I still enjoy creating with it. It really is a shame that one of the few great European based tools sold out to the US monopoly software house. Still hard to turn down a few hundred million dollars when it is offered, eh! Affinity, okay to be fair they went Down Under.

So to wrap up this little post here’s one of the models I made this month, no idea what it does as I haven’t pushed the button, yet!

Oh! Don’t forget to set your clocks on Saturday, if you’re in the zone.

This year has not got off to a particularly good start, geopolitically at least, and do not worry this is not going to focus on that, it is only the basis for my current state of well-being.

I am not one to get involved with online discussions that involve anything much beyond my interest in Computer Graphics and 3D modelling in particular. That is not to say I am happy with what is happening, it is just that, for the sake of sanity, I am avoiding it as much as possible right now.

I pass my time modelling, mostly in Blender, and creating assets for myself, such as textures and labels. I also make little mesh objects such as tools and accessories, that I can reuse to add interest to my scenes.

This is not only cathartic but very good exercise in the “use it or loose it” sense. I also expand my knowledge of the tools I use and it helps to to keep my aging brain sharp.

I also listen to audiobooks, at the moment I am in Wyoming with a certain sheriff and his crazy posse. I find reading books harder and harder, I have always had a problem with books and small text in particular, with tablets it is easier as I can make the text larger, I am a pretty fast reader though, go figure.

I do not read as much these days but still love a good story, plus with listening I can do my modelling at the same time. I used to love listening to music but find I am less likely to do that in recent years. No idea why, it is just so.

I still like to get my head around a little programming exercise, especially little scripts to automate any repetitive tasks, my pet hate is repetition and if I can script it I will.

I have no interest in doing it for money anymore just for fun. A big part of that is the need to support code one writes, which I have no interest in doing anymore either, I see a trend here..

Support concerns and a lack of interest is also the main reason I have removed stuff, I made and had up for sale, all in the name of a quiet life, the other was geopolitical.

So here you go a little light in the darkness, I modelled recently:

For a long time now I have been meaning to delete my Artstation account. One reason I kept it around was that it was a link source of some images on my other website, the other was a lack of impetus.

I haven’t used the place in a very long time. Posting just once in the last twelve months, and then only because I hadn’t posted; very meta I know.

This month I final got around to deleting the account. Pretty easy for once and no hoops to jump through just a simple confirmation click.

Part of the reason I deleted it was to reduce my online presence and especially my use of US based sites. The political situation over there is exasperating, and any steps I can make to reduce my exposure will be welcome. I am fully aware that it will be impossible to fully pull out of US online services, they are too deeply ingrained in the Internet for that to happen, but small steps.

Last year I deleted all my Cloud storage data, Apple Google et al. The reasons for this are more to do with corporate trust and long term control. I am getting older and one day I won’t be here and I have no wish to leave a massive IT clean up behind me. Why should anyone else have to deal with my online data, a few SSD drives and all my data is backed-up. I also deleted all my old archived emails, there were a lot and I am sure some will be missed but most not.

I wonder how many people actually think about what happens to their data after they are gone, after all most think they will live for ever, right. Not wishing to be morbid, just practical, I mean that bus may be just around the corner…

So there you go a little ramble in the realm of data, storage and retention, or not.

To wrap up here is a model of an imaginary storage device I made recently:

This has not been a particularly pleasant year for many. The world seems to be on the verge of some social implosion, it has become tiresome and depressing. Most, I think, hope that the next one will be better, personally however, I doubt it, and so don’t want to think too much about it.

The global state of affairs has certainly affected my will and energy to post or comment, the later always a stressor due to others oft hostile reactions. So I spent most of the year doodling in Blender as a stress distractor and listened to a good number of books whilst modelling.

I made this little guy a couple of years ago and thought I’d take the chance to update his apparel, scenery and render:

So quietly crossing fingers and pressing thumbs for a better year to come…

End of the month once again and as usual I have been lapse in my blog posting.

A combination of external distractions and a general lack of interest in everything at the moment. So, forcing myself, I have managed to do a last minute post, the image fits my lack of energy and I had fun making it, so all good.

I don’t suppose next month will be any different as I seem to be in somewhat of a rut. Having said that I do like September and the end of the school holidays, which is a welcome change.

There are a few more renders of this over on Mastodon if you are interested:

Mastodon Dial Post

I haven’t posted in a while and missed June completely, I could come up with some esoteric reason but the truth is I just couldn’t be arsed. I have a lot of external things on my mind at the moment and writing a post for the web isn’t high on my list of things to do. That said I do hold with the idea of posting regularly even it isn’t anything of particular import.

I have been busy though, I wouldn’t say productive as that is a relative term, but busy with bits and pieces. Mostly making little assets in Blender for my collection. I do this as an exercise in the Blender tools and as a refresher for things I don’t use too often.

I am pretty comfortable with Blender but I still find a lot of interesting and useful tips in the UI often hidden in the status-bar at the bottom of the screen, for example I had a look at the Bevel tool and found a nice shortcut for the bevel mode using the ‘M’ Key. This allows one to change the Mode of the bevel from Width to Percentage. This can be done using the F9 key after the effect but that isn’t optimal as the values will need re-entering as well.

So there you go a little update from me and a little tip from the status-bar in Blender.

Here’s a little render of one of the aforementioned assets:

Some years ago, back when I still using Modo as my daily driver, what a stupid term, as my main modelling tool, that’s better, I made some fruit models.

I have been making a few icons for my stuff over the last years and thought it would be nice to bring the old fruit models over and freshen them up for use in Blender.

As an aside I want to bring all my old work over, into FBX, OBJ and or .blend, I learnt from experience, a long time ago, that propriety formats have an annoying limitation, a use by date.

Some of my early work in 3DS Max should still be accessible as there seem to be a few 3DS importers/convertors out there, but there are none, that I found, for Maya files whether they be .MA or .MB. Autodesk only offers an FBX convertor and as I no longer have access to Maya all those files, that I didn’t export to FBX (for Substance Painter), are effectively lost to me. I suppose in a pinch I could ask someone still using Maya to do me a favour and convert them, but to be honest there aren’t many and you know, I can’t be bothered, but I digress:

So I now have a Pear, two Apples and a Banana. All resurrected and accessible in Blender and rendered in Cycles, By the way I love Cycles the it has become so good in the last few years.

So without further ado here they are:

I have to work a bit more on the Banana model so if you were hoping for a bit of yellow fruit, you’re out of luck, for now at least.

For no particular reason I have decided to move Mastodon instances: from fosstodon.org to graphics.social

Okay partially it was due to my posting: I tend to post 3d renders and graphics and so it felt more fitting to be on an instance that appears to be ostensibly more graphical than software. Also I know a few folk on there and so assumed it would be a good fit.

There was some scandal on fosstodon.org recently which I didn’t really notice and that was not in my reasoning, except superficially…

To celebrate the move I did a new render of my Viking Egg with a rather more cheerful countenance than the previous one.

After updating to HUGO version v0.146.0 I was unable to run the compilation due to template definition errors. I found the solution below and after correcting the lines shown in the diff all was working once again.

For those unfamiliar with diff the lines starting with a +green are the new line, the -red the old.

diff --git a/layouts/partials/head.html b/layouts/partials/head.html
index 3e55c67..ae6450a 100644
--- a/layouts/partials/head.html
+++ b/layouts/partials/head.html
@@ -150,8 +150,8 @@
 
 {{- /* Misc */}}
 {{- if hugo.IsProduction | or (eq site.Params.env "production") }}
-{{- template "_internal/google_analytics.html" . }}
-{{- template "partials/templates/opengraph.html" . }}
-{{- template "partials/templates/twitter_cards.html" . }}
-{{- template "partials/templates/schema_json.html" . }}
+{{- partial "google_analytics.html" . }}
+{{- partial "templates/opengraph.html" . }}
+{{- partial "templates/twitter_cards.html" . }}
+{{- partial "templates/schema_json.html" . }}
 {{- end -}}
diff --git a/layouts/partials/templates/schema_json.html b/layouts/partials/templates/schema_json.html
index dc3bfd6..8a4efb4 100644
--- a/layouts/partials/templates/schema_json.html
+++ b/layouts/partials/templates/schema_json.html
@@ -85,7 +85,7 @@
     {{ (path.Join .RelPermalink .Params.cover.image ) | absURL }},
     {{- end}}
   {{- else }}
-    {{- $images := partial "partials/templates/_funcs/get-page-images" . -}}
+    {{- $images := partial "templates/_funcs/get-page-images" . -}}
     {{- with index $images 0 -}}
   "image": {{ .Permalink }},
     {{- end }}
diff --git a/layouts/partials/templates/twitter_cards.html b/layouts/partials/templates/twitter_cards.html
index 6b0d59b..a6e1d05 100644
--- a/layouts/partials/templates/twitter_cards.html
+++ b/layouts/partials/templates/twitter_cards.html
@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
 <meta name="twitter:image" content="{{ (path.Join .RelPermalink .Params.cover.image ) | absURL }}">
 {{- end}}
 {{- else }}
-{{- $images := partial "partials/templates/_funcs/get-page-images" . -}}
+{{- $images := partial "templates/_funcs/get-page-images" . -}}
 {{- with index $images 0 -}}
 <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
 <meta name="twitter:image" content="{{ .Permalink }}">

Link to the Original Post

It is the first of May or in the common parlance: May Day. The international workers day and a public holiday in most western countries.

I took the day as a day of rest and relaxation, enjoying the fine weather and relative peace and quiet for a change. The older I get, the more noisy humans irritate me and my ability to ignore them diminishes. Perhaps I am imagining it but I am sure world is just getting louder and more annoying.

Over the last week since easter I have been playing around with eggs and characters based on eggs. A fitting theme given the season and the tradition of Easter Eggs, I prefer the chocolate ones to the natural ones but that is neither here nor there.

So here is an egg on me:

The date: variable in HUGO needs to be actual, not in the past, for the post to register. I don’t know yet why but that isn’t important, only the solution is so…

The correct post date format in YAML is:

date: 2025-04-01T19:37:18+02:00

The last part of the string +02:00 indicates UTC¹ plus 2 hours, which for my current location is CET +1 ².

The first solution

After a little searching, for the wrong thing (UTC offsets) I came across the Python class: time and the functiontime.daylight specifically. This boolean function returns True if it is Summer Time and False if it is Winter Time, which allows to check the state in an if statement, thus:

  import time
  
  if time.daylight:
    output_date = datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+02:00") # Summer
  else:
    output_date = datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+01:00") # Winter

This works perfectly well and is fairly efficient if a little verbose, and so I thought maybe I can make it shorter perhaps one line.

The second solution

Given that the return value of the function call is a Boolean i.e. 0 or 1, I did a little string theory magic I came up with the following one liner:

datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+0" + str(time.daylight+1) +":00")

This is a nice clean solution, although I will have to wait until October to know if it works for sure 😉

My little Hugo post creation app stopped working correctly this morning. The reason was the date formatting in the post date: variable. The code had the date formatted for GMT + 1 and now we have GMT + 2.

I haven’t checked what was happening, but assume the date must be in the future for it to fail to post. I can’t see it as a date in the past, which seems more logical given +1 instead of +2.

In any case I need to redo the date formatting to allow for summer time correctly, or just change it every six months. I will probably end up doing that, as I have other things to do.

I recently wrote a Python app for creating a basic HUGO post, front matter and post.md file in content directory.

Then I decided to make an icon on the desktop to launch the code.

This is what I did:

These instructions are for MacOS not Windows:

The main thing is to create a shell script that runs the python file and then copy it to the desktop and remove any extension like .sh

Next CMD I on the icon and drag a new icon into the properties, top left.

This is the contents of my shell script:

    1 #!/bin/sh
    2 echo "Running Post Creator"
    3 cd /Users/mark/HugoPostApp
    4 python3 app.py
    5 echo "Done"

This will then launch the terminal and run the script.

To close the terminal after running: go to the Terminal settings set When the shell exits: to close window on clean exit.

I may share the python HUGO post creation file eventually, once I am happy it is stable.

I have been busy experimenting with Blender again, this time on cosmetics and such as way to try out some different rendering environments. Normally I use a basic three point lighting set up with an HDR image as the fill light. Usually something fairly flat like a cloudy sky to give a balanced background light.

I decided it was time to do some product shots, cosmetics in this case, and they work better with a more artificial set up. Generally two side light panels and over head to light the stage in the rear and a low level fill light on the front. This set up gives nice highlights on the sides of the object and helps lift it from the background. This is important if the background is white and the object is also light.

The scene setup I used in the demos here is shown below.

The result is shown below and the background is extremely clean and so ideal for product shots.

The models above are exceptionally reflective in this instance to show off the lighting positions.

Edit the extend_footer.html ,location shown above, and add the following snippet to the file. This will then zoom the image when clicked and set the background to a darker grey.

{{- /* Footer custom content area start */ -}} {{- /* Insert any custom code
web-analytics, resources, etc. here */ -}}
<script
  src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/medium-zoom/1.0.6/medium-zoom.min.js"
  integrity="sha512-N9IJRoc3LaP3NDoiGkcPa4gG94kapGpaA5Zq9/Dr04uf5TbLFU5q0o8AbRhLKUUlp8QFS2u7S+Yti0U7QtuZvQ=="
  crossorigin="anonymous"
  referrerpolicy="no-referrer"
></script>

<script>
  const images = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(".post-content img"));
  images.forEach((img) => {
    mediumZoom(img, {
      margin: 0 /* The space outside the zoomed image */,
      scrollOffset: 40 /* The number of pixels to scroll to close the zoom */,
      container: null /* The viewport to render the zoom in */,
      template: null /* The template element to display on zoom */,
      /*background: "rgba(50, 50, 50, 1)",*/
    });
  });
</script>

{{- /* Footer custom content area end */ -}}

It has however been very nerving and frankly bewildering. So much of a distraction in fact I ended the month with little more than a pot, that’s it a pot. Perhaps because the whole month has been so damned potty.

Also; I wanted to post something, anything, anything at all, even if it’s just a clay plant pot.

So here you are a pot

I release it CC-0 feel free to use it as you will.

It started when I spotted a Ryzen CPU online and thought it would be interesting to recreate it in 3D. Initially I created an SVG plan of the chip from which to model.

After the CPU I decided to have a go at a little Solid State Drive. I have this on in my machine so that seemed apt.

Finally and for no particular reason I went with a Floppy Disk, in this instance a three and a half inch version.

Here is a SVG of the Floppy Disk I made and used as the modelling template.

And finally, here is the SVG of the Ryzen CPU I also made as a modelling template.

Example maps used above

As an example of some of the textures I made here is a Steel and Rust one used on the shader ball I made. If you wish you can right-click and download them and use them on your own work as you please:

Base Diffuse Colour

Roughness

Metallic

Height

Comments are off on this site, if you wish to say something you are invited to do so via Mastodon

This year I went with a dark grey suit and hat, with the addition of a little colour in the form of the Christmas tree badge.

Here is a copy of the Christmas tree in the SVG format, feel free to copy and use as you wish.

Almost certainly this will be the last post of the year and so I wish you a peaceful Yuletide.

I don’t think next month will be any better, we will see…

The way I have been doing it recently is to add a mesh cube around the object in the scene, see the image below.
Tip: it helps to set the Cube Mesh Viewport Display to Display as Bounds.

The Shader connections are shown below, note the Surface input is empty, the only connection is to the Volume. The settings I used in this demo are as shown and are a good start. The main tweaks are Density and Anisotropy, play with both to see the effect on the scene.

And finally this is full render of the scene, the fog/mist is subtle but effective.

The default one is Sharp and is shown below:

The second one is an Arc:

And finally the Patch:

Personally I like the Arc as it gives nicely spread out geometry around the sides and results in less shading issues.

There are other options in the menu worth looking at but the Outer Miter is the most interesting for most cases.

I started with the old Particle system and them moved on to the new Geometry Nodes version that comes with Blender 4.2 and in my case the 4.2.1 LTS version. After watching a short video or two, I managed to get some quite decent results.
I will link to the videos at the end.

This one is just some random mechanical part that ended up looking a burner so I decided to add a fur wick to it just for the hell of it:

Links to the videos I watched:

Create Dynamic Hair in Blender
Get into Geometry Node Hair Fast

To reset the icon sizes all you need to do is edit the WindowMetrics in the Windows Registry. Using the Registry Editor search for IconSpacing or follow the path in the image bellow. The default seems to be -1125 and if you see a massive negative number then that is the problem.

Reset both the IconSpacing and IconVerticalSpace to -1125 or what ever looks good on your screen. On mine I went with a wider Horizontal -2525 as the default was too cramped.

You will need to log out and back in again for the changes to take effect.

I recently needed to revert the Kernel on my iMac/Linux machine. I had updated to the latest version, which caused a problem with the Brightness not working anymore. On an iMac that meant I had no way to adjust the screen, as it doesn’t have any physical buttons.

I attempted to edit the grub file from the boot loader, but that didn’t work as there doesn’t seem to be an editor in the boot shell. So after booting up a very bright UI I edited from the main UI.

If you are wondering how to access the boot loader screen, mine wasn’t showing by default, you will need to hit Escape as the machine boots up. Just keep tapping it on startup until the menu shows up.

My editable grub file is located in: /etc/default/grub Note: the main file is /boot/grub/grub.cfg Do not edit it though, the file clearly warns that it is automatically generated.

To edit the /etc/default/grub you will need to be root. Below is a copy of my grub file. The key lines are:

GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true

The first line sets the default to saved, the second sets the menu timeout before continuing, and the last line saves the last used as default.

After editing the file as root, save the file, and run update-grub to make changes.

This is my current grub file for reference:

# If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update
# /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
# For full documentation of the options in this file, see:
#   info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration'

GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=menu
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true

# Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs
# This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains
# the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...)
#GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef"

# Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only)
#GRUB_TERMINAL=console

# The resolution used on graphical terminal
# note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE
# you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo'
#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480

# Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true

# Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries
#GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"

# Uncomment to get a beep at grub start
#GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1"

I tried a few methods to model the pencils tip and in the end went with a Boolean cutter, which kind of fits with the real world. Basically a 3D pencil sharpener.

Next, I decided to model a Stabilo pen, as I happened to have one laying around on my desk. The pen was nice in its youth, but now old and drying out. It is too faint to be of much use other than light outlining and model reference.

Anyway here are some of the renders from my little writing episode:

The Node Group

As you see there are no nodes inside the Node Group this is intentional as none are actually needed. The magic is done by the input connector, labelled Toggle above. See the settings for this below.

Add an Empty Group

You may be wondering how the empty group is created:
Blender doesn’t have an empty Node Group in the Add menu, so you will need to make one. The easiest is to use a Value Node. Add it and then select it and hit CTRL-G to group it. Then remove the Value Node from within the Group and connect up as shown above:

The Group Input Connector

With the Node Group expanded (select the node and hit TAB if it isn’t)
Select the Group Input and in the N-Panel select the Group Tab. Change the input socket type to Boolean, it is the one called Toggle in the diagram above, the label isn’t important, I used Toggle for clarity of use. The important part is that it is of Type Boolean.

The Group Output Connector

You can also change the output connector name and type at this time too, again the name should be something that makes sense and the type is up to you, I went with Float as Type as that is the colour type the Fac input is, so it matches.

So what is happening

It may be a little confusing to find that an empty Group does anything at all, why is that.
The answer is that the input connector has a Boolean value of True or False (One or Zero), this the reason the Checkbox appears on the Node Group. This is then outputted directly (Nothing in between the input and output) as True=1 or False=0. In effect an On/Off Toggle is created.

By the way: don’t connect anything other than perhaps another Boolean to the input of the Node Group, the results won’t be what you want, it effectively bypasses the node entirely.

Example use case for the node

Well there you go the magic explained, I hope.

The original Mastodon post:

I can be reached on Mastodon: Mark B Tomlinson. You can also subscribe to this Blog via its RSS link

I can be reached on Mastodon: Mark B Tomlinson. You can also subscribe to this Blog via its RSS link

This demonstration requires only one Add-On to be installed, it is one that ships with Blender by default, and it is called Loop Tools.

1. Create the Loop Cuts

Add some loop cuts to create two vertices with at least four connected edges. In this example one vertical edge and two horizontal ones.

2. Select the Vertices

Select two vertices top and bottom in this example.

3. Bevel the Vertices

Bevel the two vertices using Ctrl+Shift+B (Blender default mapping). Adjust the segments with the mouse wheel or in the dialog after creating. Change the Bevel Shape to something around 0.09 to form a rough circle.

4. Refine the Circle

With the circles still selected, right click on the mesh and with Loop Tools installed, select Circle to form a proper circular shape.

5. Dissolve the Faces

This step is optional, and can be done after Step three, with the Face press X then select Dissolve Faces, Ctrl X is my Shortcut. This creates an N-Gon so it is up to you. I do it as the geometry is cleaner and easier to work with, do this and then rerun Loop Tools - Circle if you have problems in Step Four.

6. Cut the Side Edges

Using the Knife Tool, K in default mapping, connect the two extreme vertices, left and right, to form the lozenge shape, do one side then right click and do the other, space to confirm and exit the tool.

7. Dissolve Faces

You now have the basic rounded lozenge shape, you can now select the polygons in the shape and dissolve the faces once more.

8. Faces after Dissolving

The faces are dissolved to form a lozenge shaped N-Gon for further manipulation.

9. Mark Border Edges

This step is optional but recommended as it helps with clean Normals. With the shape polygons selected right click and choose Mark Sharp from the menu.

10. Inset Edges to Bevel

Next we will inset the faces first to form a Bevel. With the faces selected click on the Face Menu and choose Inset Face, shortcut I. Drag the mouse to change the offset from the edge and use Ctrl Drag to adjust the depth. Don’t be too accurate as you can adjust the settings after in the dialog F9. Set the Thickness and Depth to the same value to get a forty five degree angle, negative for inset. As show in the image.

11. Inset the shape into the Mesh

Repeat the last step holding the Ctrl key to inset into the mesh, as shown in the image.

Finally to Refresh

Circles to Lozenge

Here are the first stages of marking the lozenge shape from two circles:

Inset the Lozenge

And here is the final shape inset into the Mesh:

I can be reached on Mastodon: Mark B Tomlinson. You can also subscribe to this Blog via its RSS link

May has had a slow start, still figuring out where to put stuff in the new place and how many curtains I need to hang, it is very bright here and I have four large windows, three full length with a door to open and a balcony, I know terrible. The problem is blocking the light from my screen in the daytime as it is very bright from behind. I have a solution for three of the windows and another pair of “blackouts” coming on the weekend, then I should be secure in my little dark man cave.

On the technical side, I was looking through some of my old Modo models, which were setup for using Vray, which I have, but wasn’t installed. So I decided to try and get that reinstalled, not as easy as it once was due to it being discontinued by Chaos Group. Anyway after a quick email to their support people, I got it up and running, which I have to say wasn’t as complicated as I had first thought. The big issue was the license server, which was old and no longer working, I got their new one and was pleasantly surprised when it worked.

I am still playing with Vray and Modo, and it works, but to be honest Cycles in Blender is faster and not far off in quality. Plus to use vray I have to use Modo which is also nice, but slow, and to be honest crashes a fair amount. It is something to do with the new drivers and the old version of Modo, I think. I like to play around with tools and it is nice to have the option to use Modo properly with my old models, which was the whole reason in the first place.

So there you go folks, all caught up and up to date.
Oh! and here’s a bonus, Easter Bunny, I spotted in the garden outside my window.

The Elbe is not far from us, about 150m behind our house with the main shipping lane to Hamburg about 1.5km across the water, this means we often hear the deep drone of container ships coming and going, this is more noticeable in winter when the trees along the shore are bare. Worse than the sound though is the pollution from the ships. We never considered this, as we moved in here during the COVID lock down and so it was much less pronounced then.

The main reason for moving, however, is the isolation of this place, there isn’t a single shop here, which means driving to the nearest town every couple of weeks to top up with vittles. No amenities at all, and I really don’t like driving everywhere when I should be able to walk or cycle. The car sits there and every two weeks gets put into action, which is better than a daily commute I suppose.

So we have a new place, all signed and sealed and move in some weeks. As you can imagine the interim is a bit on the stressy side, and the older I get the harder that is to ignore. So I will be glad when it is oll over.

Cheers!

The first half of the month was reasonably productive I managed to add a more features to the addon I am working on. It is almost complete and I will post when it is finished. I am still not sure if I will release it or just keep it for personal use.

So there you go another quick post with next to no substantive information. Hopefully things will improve in the coming months, actually one thing will be cleared up next week or I will be seriously annoyed.

Last year I was working on an Addon for Blender, more details when it is finished. Suffice to say I had the addon working and I’ve been using it for a while. I wanted to add some additional features and tidy up the UI and then perhaps release it.

I’d become stuck with one integration in the kit proper, even though I had the function working within Blender, I found it hard integrating it within the Addon. This month, January, I cracked it and got the code integrated, man that was a good feeling. This lead to some new ideas and wishes for the tool, those are where I am now.

I hope to wrap it up in the next month or so, although I’m not in any hurry and am using the exercise as a learning experience, the Blender API is not the most transparent, often it feels like juggling eels. I’m also not certain if I will release it publicly or not. I would like to, but the idea of dealing with end users doesn’t appeal to me at all. So for now at least it’s a just for me app, I may Beta test it with some people, later though.

So that’s everything caught up, now back to the code…

I have been using Affinity apps for a few years now and thought they were all I needed, and for my renders etc. the tools were more than enough.
However for RAW images and photo organising Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw are far superior. Despite the subscription nature of the tools I am more that happy with my decision. Lightroom has come a long way since I last used it and I am finding the results to be very pleasing.

I am not one to make resolutions, but I think will be spending some time learning how to use Geometry Nodes in Blender. Thus far I haven’t found a need and to be frank I find them confusing and draining on my machines.

Talking of which I going to try and use my MacBook Pro more next year and have made space on a desk for its dedicated use, even attaching a Dell monitor to get some decent screen space. More on that in the future if it works out.

We had a decent amount of snow earlier in the month and this is a shot of the Elbe Strand.

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.

So the dice have been rolled and the decision is made. I will keep BlenderBits around for now, the domain is paid up for while, and being fickle, I may change my mind. I will try and sell it but failing that it will probably just lapse into oblivion once more, or not.

And now for a little 3D Art, these dice are from a session of dice texturing exercises I did some months back. There are a few more renders on Artstation if you are curious.

For a while now, I have been using the gamma node in Blender as an alternative to the color ramp and the map range node.

There are a few reasons why I like the node:

1. It is light weight.
2. It is a simple one slider does all node.
3. The node inputs are easily exposed in a Group.
4. I can use one Image texture easily to drive more than one input - see below.

It isn’t a replacement for the other nodes, but for tweaking the levels it is great.
I often use an RGB image texture and set the Color Space to Linear and then use a Gamma Node set to 2.4 to get a more realistic RGB output, 2.2 is the default but I think 2.4 is more colour accurate, or at least I read that somewhere. In any case it often looks better.
Doing this allows for easy connection to Linear inputs for Roughness etc.

Here is an example of how I may use the node:

Below is the render from the above node setup:

This is a shot of the texture I used to drive the node tree:

So now you know and perhaps you have a go and like the set up.

Recently I started posting pictures on Unsplash, as a way of giving back to the site, which I have used for textures a few times over the year, and here is one I posted recently:

I have been trying to improve a plastic shader for some LEGO bricks I made and wanted to implement a single shader for all colours and this is the result. The full size render is on the site: LEGO - Mauerfall.

I may release the shader later on depending on how I like it.

The weather has also been pretty horrid. Extreme humidity has left everything feeling muggy and damp. We have had so much rain in the last couple of months, I am expecting next years crop to be rice not wheat.

All this is just an excuse to post the sheep picture. The Ewe was watching me from taking pictures and when I waved, yea that’s a thing, she bleated back in response, and not only once. I think she it one of the pack leaders and so on watch. We have the flock going back and forth passed our house a few times a day which is nice, except in summer when they do their group gathering call at 4 a.m.

And now the sheep:

Step one:

Create the node graph as shown above in Blender’s shader editor. Note the samples input this will be added next.

Step two:

Add a Samples input slot, so you can drive the Bevel node samples from outside the group.

Step three:

TAB out of the node group and then right click on the Samples input and Copy as Driver.

Step four:

TAB back into the node group and right click in the Bevel Node Samples input and Paste Driver.

Finally:

TAB out again and you can use the Edge Mask output to drive a Mix Color node or anything else that you want to drive Edge Wear with.

Download

For those not wishing to make the node themselves I have uploaded the finished asset file to Gumroad: Gumroad Edge Wear Node

If you can’t afford €2 and I know some can’t, you can use this code 3M8CFBB in the checkout, enter €2 first then apply the code to get 100% off, free!

I appreciate those that do pay and it encourages me to post more stuff.

If you are interested in checking the channel out it is here: @SwapLampJapan

I hadn’t thought of using YouTube as a source of reference but as the quality of the video cameras improve I am able to get some really nice shots for reference.

Here is one I made earlier:

and here is the wireframe of the model:

The model uses two anisotropic texture maps one for the circular top section and a linear one for the sides. I did this as two materials instead of one as it is easier in Blender to have square textures than rectangular ones. I may be missing something but blender always changes the aspect ratio of the UV editor which isn’t helpful for laying out and checking proportions.

I going to be doing more of these in the next days, as I have a good selection of reference, as I mentioned. I also want to see about using procedural textures for the anisotropy instead of bitmaps, my reluctance to procedural texturing in Blender will be tested though, they always feel overly heavy on my machine, even big png’s are quicker.

But you can achieve exactly the same results by using: CMD-C and then CMD-OPT-V

This isn’t very intuitive as most OS’s use Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V, but the functionality is there if a little hidden.

For a bonus tip: if you hold press ALT/OPTION over the open Menu Bar you will see alternative functions appear.

There is at least one plugin on the App Store, that turns this into CMD-X, but to be honest, I don’t think CMD-OPTION-V too hard a combination to master.

The reasons are the usual ones, a lack of interest and anything interesting to say.

To that end this post is somewhat of an oxymoron, it is all of the above and thus posted purely for the sake of maintaining the blogs output. If I leave it too long, I will fall into a state of low inertia, and so will my posting.

I have been busy, on programming for a change, I have a little pet project I have been working on for a while, namely a kit for Blender.

The kit is fully functional and works pretty well, it isn’t finished though it needs a little trimming and tidying up. Refactoring and general reorganisation.

The kit may or may not get released to the wider world depending on how I feel about maintaining it and the general hostility of the wider web.

I find the web stressful and often wonder why I still subject myself to its foibles, I am though human and inquisitive and the Web is still an interesting place in the corners if not in the spotlight.

Well that is a post done, I have managed to write something, anything…

Ah! The kit, yes right, well that will be for another day…

This will snap the assets origin, as the center, to the surface of the target mesh, when using the CTRL key or by toggling the snapping option Magnet icon in the menu.

The surface normal of the target asset will show as an orange line as you move the asset.

Note: it is important that the origin of the asset is located at the place you wish the asset to meet the surface of the target mesh, to low and it will be above the surface and to high and the asset will be inside the target.

Alt+A = ArrayDir

Ctrl+A = script:moi.geometryDatabase.selectAll();

Shift+A = script:moi.view.resetAll();

Shift+Alt+A = ArrayCurve

Ctrl+Shift+A = ArrayCircular

B

B = Fillet

Alt+B = sBridge

C

C = Rebuild

Ctrl+C = CopyClipboard

Ctrl+Alt+C = ODCopyToExternal

Alt+C = script: moi.view.setCPlaneInteractive();

Ctrl+Shift+C = CopyClipboardWithOrigin

Shift+Alt+C = script: /* Align CPlane with 3D view 1.0 */ var cp = moi.view.getCPlane(), tp = moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel.getViewport('3D').targetFrame, tl = moi.VectorMath.pointsWithinTolerance; if (tl(cp.origin,tp.origin) && tl(cp.zaxis,tp.zaxis)) { moi.view.resetCPlane() } else {moi.view.setCPlane(tp, false)}

Shift+C = script: /* Toggle visibility of all curves */ var objs = moi.geometryDatabase.getObjects().getCurves(); var ishidden = objs.length > 0 ? objs.item(0).hidden : false; objs.setProperty( 'hidden', !ishidden );

D

D = DelCorners

Alt+D = Distribute

Ctrl+D = script: /* Duplicate selected objects */ var gd = moi.geometryDatabase; var objs = gd.getSelectedObjects(); if ( objs.length ! = 0 ) gd.copyToClipboard( objs ); moi.command.execCommand( 'paste' );

E

E = Rotate

Ctrl+E = Export

Ctrl+Shift+E = _sScale

F

F = Chamfer

Alt+F = Flow

G

G = script: /* Toggle Grid Snap */ moi.drawingAids.gridSnap = !moi.drawingAids.gridSnap;

Shift+G = script: /* Toggle grid and axis lines */ moi.grid.display = !moi.grid.display; moi.grid.showXYAxes = moi.grid.display;

H

H = script: /* Hide selection */ moi.geometryDatabase.hide();

Alt+H = script: /* Toggle using hidden edge display for selected objects only */ moi.view.hiddenLinesSelectedOnly = !moi.view.hiddenLinesSelectedOnly;

I

I = script: /* Isolate selection */ moi.geometryDatabase.isolate();

Alt+I = script:moi.geometryDatabase.invertSelection(); /Invert/

J

J = Join

Shift+J = script: /* Show naked edges */ var gd = moi.geometryDatabase; gd.deselectAll(); var breps = gd.getObjects().getBreps(); for ( var i = 0; i < breps.length; ++i ) breps.item(i).getNakedEdges().setProperty( 'selected', true );

L

L = Polyline

Shift+L = Loft

Alt+L = script: /* Select edges v1.4 */ var gd = moi.geometryDatabase, so = gd.getSelectedObjects(); function ss(o,v){o.setProperty("selected",v)} function sl(o){ for ( var i = 0; i<o.length; ++i ) o.item(i).getEdges().invertProperty("selected");} gd.selectLoop(); sl(so.getFaces()); sl(so.getSolids()); sl(so.getOpenBReps()); sl(so.getSingleFaceBReps()); ss(so.getBReps(),0); ss(so.getFaces(),0);

Ctrl+Alt+L = script: /* Loop selection */ moi.geometryDatabase.selectLoop();

Ctrl+Shift+L = script: /*! Show-hide edges on selected objects */var breps = moi.geometryDatabase.getSelectedObjects().getBreps(); for ( var i = 0; i < breps.length; ++i ) {var brep = breps.item(i);brep.getEdges().invertProperty( 'hidden');}

Shift+Alt+L = script: /* Highlight naked edges */ var gd = moi.geometryDatabase; gd.deselectAll(); var breps = gd.getObjects().getBreps(); for ( var i = 0; i < breps.length; ++i ) breps.item(i).getNakedEdges().setProperty( 'selected', true );

M

M = Mirror

Ctrl+M = Merge

Alt+M = unwrapcurve

N

Ctrl+N = New

Alt+N = orient

O

O = Offset

Ctrl+O = Open

P

P = PlanarSrf

Q

Alt+Q = script:moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel.reverseView( moi.ui.getActiveViewport().name );

R

R = Scale

Alt+R = Scale2d

Ctrl+Alt+R = Scale1d

Ctrl+R = RailRevolve

Ctrl+Shift+R = Revolve

Shift+R = ScaleIndividual

S

S = script: /* Scale, switch between center and regular */ var didcenter = false; try { didcenter = moi.command.getOption( 'scale_center' ); } catch(e){} if ( didcenter ) { moi.command.execCommand( 'Scale' ); } else { moi.command.execCommand( 'Scale BoundingBoxCenter' ); } moi.command.setOption( 'scale_center', !didcenter );

Ctrl+Shift+S = SaveAs

Ctrl+S = Save

Ctrl+Alt+S = IncrementalSave

Shift+S = Sweep

T

T = Trim

Ctrl+Shift+T = _sSplit

Alt+T = script: /* Toggle both sides for offset or extrude */ if ( moi.command.currentCommandName ) { if ( moi.ui.commandUI.curvebothsides ) moi.ui.commandUI.curvebothsides.click(); if ( moi.ui.commandUI.bothsides ) moi.ui.commandUI.bothsides.click(); }

Ctrl+T = script: /* Toggle cap ends for offset or extrude */ if ( moi.command.currentCommandName ) { if ( moi.ui.commandUI.curvecapends ) moi.ui.commandUI.curvecapends.click(); if ( moi.ui.commandUI.capends ) moi.ui.commandUI.capends.click(); }

U

U = script:var gd = moi.geometryDatabase; gd.deselectAll(); var objects = gd.getObjects(); for ( var i = 0; i < objects.length; ++i ) { var obj = objects.item(i); if ( obj.name = = '' ) { obj.selected = true; } }

V

Ctrl+V = Paste

Ctrl+Alt+V = ODPasteFromExternal

Ctrl+Shift+V = PastePart

W

Alt+W = script:/* Wireframe v1.0 */ var gd = moi.geometryDatabase, so = gd.getSelectedObjects(); if (so.length>0) { so.setProperty( 'displayMode',1); so.setProperty( 'selected', 0); } else { gd.getObjects().setProperty( 'displayMode',0); }

Shift+W = move boundingboxcenter

W = script: /* Move, switch between center and regular */ var didcenter = false; try { didcenter = moi.command.getOption( 'move_center' ); } catch(e){} if ( didcenter ) { moi.command.execCommand( 'Move' ); } else { moi.command.execCommand( 'Move BoundingBoxCenter' ); } moi.command.setOption( 'move_center', !didcenter );

X

X = Extrude

Ctrl+Shift+X = ExplodeMove

Ctrl+X = Cut

Y

Ctrl+Y = script:moi.command.redo();

Z

Ctrl+Z = script:moi.command.undo();

Shift+Z = script: /* Toggle edge display */ var breps = moi.geometryDatabase.getObjects().getBReps(); var hide = true; for ( var i = 0; i < breps.length; ++i ) { var edges = breps.item(i).getEdges(); if ( i = = 0 ) hide = !edges.item(0).hidden; edges.setProperty( 'hidden', hide ); }

Ctrl+Shift+Z = script:moi.command.redo();

Numbers

5 = script:/* Wireframe v1.0 */ var gd = moi.geometryDatabase, so = gd.getSelectedObjects(); if (so.length>0) { so.setProperty( 'displayMode',1); so.setProperty( 'selected', 0); } else { gd.getObjects().setProperty( 'displayMode',0); }

Numpad

Numpad- = BooleanDifference

Numpad* = BooleanUnion

Numpad/ = BooleanIntersection

Numpad+ = BooleanMerge

Numpad5 = script: /* Toggle between Parallel and Perspective view */ var vp = moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel.getViewport('3D'); vp.projection = (vp.projection == 'Perspective' ? 'Parallel': 'Perspective');

Numpad7 = script: /* Top view */ var vname = 'Top'; var vp = moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel; vp.mode = vname; if ( vp.getViewport(vname).name != vname ) vp.reverseView( vname );

Alt+Numpad1 = script: /* Top view */ var vname = 'Top'; var vp = moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel; vp.mode = vname; if ( vp.getViewport(vname).name ! = vname ) vp.reverseView( vname );

Alt+Numpad2 = script: /* Front view */ var vname = 'Front'; var vp = moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel; vp.mode = vname; if ( vp.getViewport(vname).name ! = vname ) vp.reverseView( vname );

Alt+Numpad3 = script: /* Right view */ var vname = 'Right'; var vp = moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel; vp.mode = vname; if ( vp.getViewport(vname).name ! = vname ) vp.reverseView( vname );

Ctrl+Numpad- = script:/* Shrink selection 1.0 */ function es(edg){ var i,f; for (i = 0; i<edg.length; i++) {f = edg.item(i).getFacesOfEdge(); f.setProperty('selected',0);}} var gd = moi.geometryDatabase; gd.invertSelection(); var so = gd.getSelectedObjects(), sf = so.getFaces(), i; gd.invertSelection(); for ( i = 0; i<sf.length;i++) es(sf.item(i).getEdges());

Ctrl+Numpad+ = script:/* Expand selection 1.0 */ function es(edg){ var i,f; for (i = 0; i<edg.length; i++) {f = edg.item(i).getFacesOfEdge(); f.setProperty('selected',1);}} var so = moi.geometryDatabase.getSelectedObjects(), sf = so.getFaces(), i; for ( i = 0; i<sf.length;i++) es(sf.item(i).getEdges()); es(so.getEdges());

Function

F1 = script:moi.launchHelp();

Alt+F1 = script: moi.ui.createDialog( 'Options.htm', 'resizeable,defaultWidth:43em,defaultHeight:32em' );

F2 = script: /* Edit object name */ var pp = moi.ui.propertiesPanel; if (pp.show && pp.numSelectedObjects > 0) { pp.editName(); }

F3 = script:/* Object Library Dialog*/ moi.ui.createDialog( 'moi://appdata/customui/ObjLibrary.menu.htm' );

F10 = script: /* Untrim the selected surface */ var gd = moi.geometryDatabase; srfs = gd.getSelectedObjects().getSingleFaceBReps(); gd.deselectAll(); for ( var i = 0; i < srfs.length; ++i ) srfs.item(i).getEdges().setProperty( 'selected', true ); moi.command.execCommand( 'delete' );

F11 = script: /* Open Add New Style dialog */ var gd = moi.geometryDatabase; gd.styleEditorOpened(); var dialog = moi.ui.createDialog( 'EditStyleDialog.htm?titleid = Add style dialog title&index = -1', '', moi.ui.mainWindow ); if ( dialog.window.doModal() ! = -1 ) { var styles = gd.getObjectStyles(); if ( styles.length> 0 ) moi.ui.propertiesPanel.editStyleIndex( styles.length - 1 ); } gd.styleEditorClosed();

F12 = var p = moi.ui.getUIPanel( 'moi://ui/BrowserPane.htm' ); if ( p ) { var w = p.document.body.style.width; if ( w = = '' || w = = '15em' ) { w = '20em'; } else if ( w = = '20em' ) { w = '30em' } else { w = '15em' } p.document.body.style.width = w; }

Punctuation

- = script:/* Calculate length of selected curves and copy to the clipboard as text */ var crvs = moi.geometryDatabase.getSelectedObjects().getCurves(); var len = 0.0; for ( var i = 0; i < crvs.length; ++i ) len + = crvs.item(i).getLength(); moi.copyTextToClipboard( len );

`= script: /* 3D view (perspective or isometric) */ moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel.mode = '3D';

Alt+. = ShowPoints

Ctrl+. = AddPoint

Backspace = Delete

Delete = Delete

Space = script:if ( moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel.mode ! = 'split' ) { moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel.mode = 'split' } else { var viewport = moi.ui.getViewportUnderMouse(); if ( viewport ) viewport.viewpanel.mode = viewport.name; }

Arrows

Alt+RightArrow = script:moi.view.setCPlane( moi.vectorMath.createRightFrame() );

Alt+UpArrow = script:moi.view.resetCPlane();

Alt+DownArrow = script:moi.view.setCPlane( moi.vectorMath.createFrontFrame() );

Alt+LeftArrow = script: /* Align CPlane with 3D view 1.0 */ var cp = moi.view.getCPlane(), tp = moi.ui.mainWindow.viewpanel.getViewport('3D').targetFrame, tl = moi.VectorMath.pointsWithinTolerance; if (tl(cp.origin,tp.origin) && tl(cp.zaxis,tp.zaxis)) { moi.view.resetCPlane() } else {moi.view.setCPlane(tp, false)}

DownArrow = Nudge Down

LeftArrow = Nudge Left

RightArrow = Nudge Right

UpArrow = Nudge Up

Shift+LeftArrow = Nudge Left Small

Shift+RightArrow = Nudge Right Small

Shift+UpArrow = Nudge Up Small

Shift+DownArrow = Nudge Down Small

PageDown = Nudge ZDown

PageUp = Nudge ZUP

Shift+PageUp = Nudge ZUp Small

Shift+PageDown = Nudge ZDown Small

MacBook

Ctr+Alt+D = BooleanDifference

Ctr+Alt+U = BooleanUnion

Ctr+Alt+I = BooleanIntersection

When you create the curve expand the Simple Curve dialog in the lower left of the viewport, or press F9:

From here choose 3D and then, if you want curved splines, choose Auto in the Output Curve Type.

The defaults are 2D and Vector and they may not be what you want for your curves.

The difference between Vector and Automatic are shown below:

You can also change from 2D to 3D after creating curves, if you forget initially. The setting is in the Properties panel on the Right (by default) of the Blender UI.

If you need to change the handle type from Vector to Automatic after creation, select the control points you want to change and press V then choose the type from the dialog:

It seems now that the last place that require quad sub-D models is in deformed meshes, character animations and the like. I rarely aim for pure quad sub-D models anymore but still like to practice making them and find them cathartic to create now and then.

I have created a few models over the years for practice, and find the exercise quite rewarding, here are a few examples:

And finally a close up of the edge loops needed to hold the form:

It isn’t, perhaps, the most efficient modelling style anymore but I think it does have a place in 3D work and the results can be very satisfying.

This model, and more renders of it, can be found on Artstation

This has left me with lot of git history in my .git folder, which I really don’t need. I don’t think I am ever going to want to recover a blog post version, ever.

So I thought why not just delete all the history and reduce the junk in the site directories.

The following are the steps I used to clean out and shrink the data down to the latest committed.

• Let’s check the state of the repo:

git status    # get the current state of repo

Caution these steps will delete all the repo’s history

• First create an orphan or isolated copy of the current state of the repo.
• Then add the files and commit.
• Next delete the old Master and move the clone to Master.
• Then push the new master to GitHub.
• Finally clean the old crap out of the repo using garbage collection aggressively.

git checkout --orphan <orphanName>  # create and orphan clone of master
git add -A                          # adds everything hardocre
git commit -am "commit message"     # Commit cleaned branch
git branch -D master                # Deletes original Master
git branch -m master                # Moves cloned branch to Master
git push -f origin master           # Push new Master to GitHub
git gc --aggressive --prune=all     # Garbage Collection hardcore

After running these steps; my site directory went from around 60 MB to about 40 MB, which is a saving of around 30%.
I don’t have a heavily image based site, so mostly the history files were Markdown text files, that being said, the saving is nice and on a larger graphical site it could equate to a lot of duplicated data.

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.

Why, well simple really, I enjoy writing and I am by nature a creative person. Writing along with my 3D work is a creative process that gives me a feeling of achievement. A sense of creating something beyond my thoughts and something tangible even if it is only in digital form.

I am a big fan of RSS feeds and find the technology a great way to bypass the major social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook and get right to the source, often obscure and at the rear of social presence. Hacker News is one of my sources for feeds and it often contains articles and news that isn’t covered by the mainstream sources. The post that spurred this post came via HM and I would never have seen it without my subscriptions to the feeds. I encourage everyone to use RSS and get more news from local smaller sources.

And, to finish as I mentioned 3D creation in the article; here is a model I made recently, not related in any way to this post, but I can post what I please here, so:

Mac Midi Concept Model

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.html:5:8: executing "_default/single.html" at <partial "head.html" .>: error calling partial: execute of template failed: html/template:partials/head.html:162:18: no such template "_internal/google_news.html"

I had been expecting an error, or problem, eventually and as is normal, it happened late at night. It took me a little file search in VSC to find the file in the Hugo theme directory and delete the line causing the issue.

I am using the PaperMod theme and the file is located below and the partial is on line 164:

themes > PaperMod > layouts > partials > head.html

{{- template "_internal/google_news.html" . }}

Deleting that line, commenting it out doesn’t work as it is Hugo shortcode not html, and the site built once more.

I hope this helps someone out with the same issue.
If you want to comment you can reach me on Mastodon
I am pretty much read only on there now and only have the account for Blender and things like this post.

I melted the wax in a pot of hot water, but later found it is easier and quicker to melt the wax in a microwave. The secret is to do it in short bursts and not over heat the wax, 30 second bursts at full power worked well for me, and took about 4 minutes. In the pan with water it took a lot longer.

Nothing to do with 3D but a nice change of pace and a pleasant candle as a result.

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,. This involves a few steps and some repetition and isn’t completely error free. If the Hooks location gets out of sync, which it did for me a couple of times I had no alternative, at least one that worked, but to recreate the Hook directory and start again.

While this isn’t a big issue but one I would rather avoid, if I can, and so I am now trying the old Rsync method.

I don’t know if it is a MacOS issue but rsync on Mac doesn’t seem to work as expected using the online example, for Linux, and so it took me some experimentation to get a command that worked.

Remote Sync or rsync to its friends

Rsync is a fairly simple tool available on most OS’s these days and was originally written in C back in 1996 and is used to synchronise files and local and remote computers. It is also available as a Daemon that runs in the background to keep locations in sync. I am not using that aspect as I only need to run a sync after I edit a post for this website.

The command I use in Hugo, to achieve this from my Mac to a remote Linux server is as follows:

rsync -uavP --delete public/ user@example.com:<PATH TO>/html/website/

The options are explained in the Man page and the –delete option deletes files on the remote that aren’t on the local machine. This can be dangerous so it may be worth running --dry-run first -n is the short form.

The -uavP options are the ones that I had to figure out as the often proffered linux ones didn’t seem to work for me, no idea why. But it isn’t important now as these work for me.

In closing this is a fairly easy way of uploading to a server, and once I got the options figured out it seems to work quickly, the capital -P flag, “Partial & Progress”, shows progress and it is nice to see the files fly away.

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. I have also been modelling as a form of relaxation and working on some little Blender scripts I have been putting off for some time now.

I did a little doodle the other day and it was interesting to see the reaction to it online. It was fairly simple and only took me an hour in total, I did another that took much longer and got about the same interest from viewers.

Here is the doodle:

The full post is here: Abstract Doodle Artstation

I have come to realise it is a very personal thing when it comes to what is going to be popular and what isn’t. I often get it wrong and seem to be somewhat out of tune with the people that follow me.

The moral here, if you can call it that lofted term, is do what you like post what you are happy with and just move on to the next model.

So that has me covered for a second post in February and I can close the month without feeling guilty about tardiness.

Here’s to March, may the farce (sic) be with you.

Most Mac users will know that the open command in the Terminal will open files in the GUI or open a directory in Finder for example open . will open Finder in the current directory, this is useful, but there are a few more things it can do including opening in a specified application.

Here is the usage dump from the tool:

Usage: open [-e] [-t] [-f] [-W] [-R] [-n] [-g] [-h] [-s <partial SDK name>][-b <bundle identifier>] [-a <application>] [-u URL] [filenames] [--args arguments]
Help: Open opens files from a shell.
      By default, opens each file using the default application for that file.
      If the file is in the form of a URL, the file will be opened as a URL.
Options:
      -a                    Opens with the specified application.
      -b                    Opens with the specified application bundle identifier.
      -e                    Opens with TextEdit.
      -t                    Opens with default text editor.
      -f                    Reads input from standard input and opens with TextEdit.
      -F  --fresh           Launches the app fresh, that is, without restoring windows. Saved persistent state is lost, excluding Untitled documents.
      -R, --reveal          Selects in the Finder instead of opening.
      -W, --wait-apps       Blocks until the used applications are closed (even if they were already running).
          --args            All remaining arguments are passed in argv to the application's main() function instead of opened.
      -n, --new             Open a new instance of the application even if one is already running.
      -j, --hide            Launches the app hidden.
      -g, --background      Does not bring the application to the foreground.
      -h, --header          Searches header file locations for headers matching the given filenames, and opens them.
      -s                    For -h, the SDK to use; if supplied, only SDKs whose names contain the argument value are searched.
                            Otherwise the highest versioned SDK in each platform is used.
      -u, --url URL         Open this URL, even if it matches exactly a filepath
      -i, --stdin  PATH     Launches the application with stdin connected to PATH; defaults to /dev/null
      -o, --stdout PATH     Launches the application with /dev/stdout connected to PATH;
          --stderr PATH     Launches the application with /dev/stderr connected to PATH to

Examples:

View a MD file in Marked 2.app:

open -a Marked\ 2 markdown.md

Opens the file markdown.md in the Marked 2 application, note the escaped space.

Select a file in Finder

open -R <filename>

This will open the file called <filename> in the Mac Finder window and then select it.

Edit a text file in Textedit in the GUI

open -e <filename>

This one will open <filename>in the Textedit app, handy if you aren’t comfortable with Vim.

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.

Who’s gonna read your personal blog because it has an RSS feed? I’m gonna read your personal blog because it has an RSS feed. pic.twitter.com/mtcyKhEVet

— Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) January 7, 2020

I can relate to this post completely, and I find it amusingly ironic that the post appeared in my RSS Feed this morning.

Read the original post linked at the top, it is interesting or at least I found it so.

I am now pretty much free of traditional social media platforms, having left the last, Linkedin, yesterday. The slow wind down of social media site addiction began with Facebook and ended, as I said, with Linkedin.

Although I still have Instagram, I don’t consider that a social media platform, I know some do, but for me it is just a place to post renders and 3d work, a one-way place that gets a little traction, and helps with my need for a little external validation from fellow humans.

I once ran a pretty large user group on Facebook (Substance Tools) for a couple of years, well over 20K users, but I still became jaded and walked away. I haven’t regretted leaving FB once, honestly it was on of the best things I could have done for my own personal well being.

Twitter was one of the few places I felt comfortable for a long time, but over the last 2 years it had become less and less appealing, then Musk gave me the impetus I need to leave that one too.
Mastodon, never really worked out for me, enough said.

The points raised in OP are pretty much my experience and feelings about the addictive nature of social media and the concerns raised in the post reflect my feelings too.

I had already decided that it doesn’t really matter how many people see this, one reader would be a nice, but rather I write and post, now, for my own pleasure.
I like writing and love making 3d art, if others enjoy or find my posts interesting, then that is a nice bonus, but not the reason for doing them.

This site has RSS feed, although by default it is a little hidden, so here’s a link RSS until I add it to the sites menu.

With that in mind I have decided, that this year I am moving back to local storage and away from the likes of Google and One Drive. I have repurposed my old Mac Mini as a local storage server. The 2012 machine has a very low power foot print using around 10W in idle, better than many dedicated NAS devices I have used.

I have also added Syncthing to the mix, this is also a low resource tool and pretty easy for anyone to setup, and yea FOSS. The only cloud system I will keep for now is iCloud. This is mostly to do with iOS device syncing, and MacOS app setting syncing. I may look at another way later but for now the cost and overhead of iCloud is low and it works. I don’t intend to store more than the absolute minimum needed on there.

I have cleared around 23 Gb of data from Goggle Drive, most of which was old and redundant, the Photos alone where ridiculous, one kept the images around for no good reason other than sentiment. I have everything I need and want to keep stored locally.

The current state of online security and the proliferation of hacking has pushed me to finally act on this, and I am happy I did.

I don’t know the cause, but I did find a few posts online about the problem I had, namely a login loop: whereby the login screen appeared to accept the login details only to show a blank screen momentarily, and then return to the login prompt.

There were comments online proffering a solution in the form of ALT-CTRL-F1 etc. Which is supposed to open a terminal window to allow fixes to be applied. The problem for me was that none of the function keys worked F1, F2 etc.

The big issue for me though was the lack of access via SSH, this isn’t installed by default yet alone enabled. This, to me is a major oversight in the Distro’s design, I am come from a time when Linux was distributed in the mail using Floppy Discs. So GUI interfaces, or X Windows were secondary to the text terminal default, X is, after all, built on top of everything else and is in effect a front end to the real workhorse that is the kernel and associated tools.

In the end I had to reinstall the whole system, which to be fair was no big deal as I am still in the process of playing and setting up, nothing in terms of data was lost or in danger of becoming so.

The take away from my experience was to ensure that the very first thing that got installed on the device was the SSH Server: sudo apt install openssh-server. That way should the weird and still not explained login loop reappear I should be able to log in remotely, I hope.

After a few false starts with the boot install set up and recovery to Mountain Lion, the drive was locked and not available for the install. I had to use the Terminal in the shell to reformat and mount the 1TB drive for install, easy enough once you know how, like most things.

I now need to update Mountain Lion to a version that can accept updates and browse the Web with HTTPS, so many things get broken if the system is 10 years old. At one point that it complained that the El Capitan DMG downloaded from Mac Store wasn’t valid, their advice download from the App Store, a infinite loop there I think.

My fault for not just dual booting the system in beginning instead of wiping the drive/s for a clean Linux install. All good though as I love breaking/dismantling things, this is how I learn when I get them fixed again, yea sometime they don’t get fixed, but that’s life.

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.
I want to go back there.
The Web 1.0 landscape looked a lot different than the Web 2.0 experience we are used to these days, and personal weblogs or “blogs” were a big part of the evolution of Web 2.0.
In those days, it was really simple. You could sign up for a free site on GeoCities, Yahoo, Blogger, Diaryland, or any of a number of free hosting sites that allowed you to set up your blog, get going with a WYSIWYG editor, and send your thoughts out into the world…

The post mirrors my thoughts recently and it is nice to see the idea of personal blogs, and websites in general, returning being promoted on some of the larger sites out there.

The original article is over here Bring Back Personal Blogging

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. This step back, has come after a strong reluctance to close off avenues of marketing, but I also realise that the returns don’t warrant the effort/time.

I have long since stopped taking on third party work, commissions. They were the highest stress trigger for me. I have been producing things I want, and perhaps then offering them on Gumroad or on Blender Market, neither of which is likely to make more than a few coffees worth of sales per month, but they are made and uploaded and don’t require much maintenance, if this changes I will likely pull my online stuff too.

Blender, in particular, is a difficult sell as the applications itself is free, and the mindset seems to expect everything associated with be the same, with Modo it worked better, but I no longer use Modo so nothing coming for that tool from me anymore.

I am a big fan, addict even, of RSS feeds from online sources, aggregated by Feedly and fed into my Reeder app on my MackBook. It is one way I can bypass the noise, and find diverse and interesting articles on the topics I am interested in. I rarely visit the originating site especially the commercial ones that throw more adverts in you face per line inch than I can both filter or handle. Adblock or not the number of popups and distracting boxes are just horrendous, marketing on steroids, more about returns than sharing information in my opinion. Don’t get me started on the bullshit YouTube promoters, pretending to do unbiased reviews, unbiased my arse.

I intended to post more often on here, and there is an xml RSS feed on here too, if you are interested,. If not I would still recommend using RSS and a decent reader as a way to lower the noise online.

Okay with that, I wish you all a happy new year!

Due to concerns about the aging MacOS version on the machine, it limits my application upgrade path, how long will developers keep compiling for older systems 2 or 3 versions, maybe, often they want the latest and greatest version immediately, who can blame them. Add that to the fact that Apple/Nvidia haven’t provided GPU/CUDA drivers for years, I have decided to retire Apple from my old iMac and switch it over to Linux Mint.

It fits with my general direction, vis-à-vis software and my dislike of subscriptions, renting software, and my preference for FOSS.¹ I have started to take Open Source tools more seriously as a replacement to commercial, this has been spurred on by future accessibility and reliability. Plus companies selling out to the man.

I have the first part done, the machine is running Linux Mint and it looks really nice. I have got some tweaking to do, the old mac had a piggybacked drive set up which I doubt I can replicate, so will have to use the SSD part as the boot and Mechanical part as the storage for everything else. How hard can it be…

Unfortunately, for me at least, the release didn’t live up to the hype and frankly didn’t have features I had expected. Promised features going back years, but I am not here to talk about that, though.

I understand that Serif is a relatively small company and has had to contend with all the effects of Covid in the last few years, however: I was still not impressed and frankly a little disappointed, underwhelmed, as they say.

The big problem for me is compatibility, Version 2 files cannot be opened in Version 1. This was not made clear in the program, no warning when opening or saving in the new release. Apparently they mentioned it in an FAQ, which is next to useless as a place for warnings, as you will only reach for that if you encounter a problem, by then it is probably too late.

The other big issue is the huge price hike, and then the massive 40% launch discount this seems dodgy to me, add that to no upgrade path for existing users and it isn’t a good feeling, add the lack of warning on the trial, it feels like pushing you even harder to upgrade.

As some have mentioned, you can alleviate the compatibility problem by exporting to PSD. This in itself is bizarre, you have to use a third party format to access their format, across versions. Sounds like some dark twisted joke is in there, I think.

The last thing that concerned me was the bold statement they made, about no future updates, this sounded like it was done and the code was sealed. I have since read that operating system compatibility issues will be addressed, so hopefully it will still work when Window 12 or MacOS 14 is released.

So now I wait and see, I won’t be upgrading, the price to feature ratio is too low for me. I am not a 2D graphic artist and I am reasonably happy with the current features for my work. At the same time, going forward I will look at Open Source software alternatives; like Krita and Inkscape. The thing with the later is the odd, at least to me, UI.

I still love Affinity apps and I am grateful to Serif for making them available and affordable, at least initially.

As of Blender 2.8 the API naming requirement is for the class name to match the following convention:

UPPER_CASE_{TYPE}_mixed_case

Where {TYPE} is two letters denoting the class type inherited:

• HT – Header
• MT – Menu
• OT – Operator
• PT – Panel
• UL – UI list

The class identifier “bl_idname” mast match the class name.

Valid class name and identifier examples:

class ADDONNAME_OT_my_operator(bpy.types.Operator):
  bl_idname = 'ADDONNAME_OT_my_operator'  ...

class ADDONNAME_MT_my_menu(bpy.types.Menu):
  bl_idname = 'ADDONNAME_MT_my_menu'  ...

class ADDONNAME_HT_my_header(bpy.types.Header):
  bl_idname = 'ADDONNAME_HT_my_header'  ...

class ADDONNAME_PT_my_panel(bpy.types.Panel):
  bl_idname = 'ADDONNAME_PT_my_panel'  ...

If class name or identifier doesn’t meet the conventions, Blender will raise an Error warning but still run:

E.g.

‘Oscurart Files Tools’ doesn’t contain ‘_PT_’ with prefix & suffix

NB: In the future this may cause the Addon to fail and not run at all.

Solid View

In Solid view, i.e. Matcap, Studio etc. it is set from the topbar dropdown as shown below:

Material View

In Material view, i.e. EEVEE is it set in the shader panel on the right, as shown below:

Advantages

Using backface culling allows the user to see through the backside of geometry. This is handy for looking at the bottom of objects, through a ground plane for example. It is also handy for spotting flipped normals in meshes, as the will appear transparent in the viewport.

Cycles

Culling in Cycles is more complicated and beyond this post.

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.

NB. This trick only seems to work, after you first open Typora. So if it fails; close the app and retry.

This is a nice workaround for me as I have a main notes folder and want occasionally to edit HUGO markdown files in my local HUGO web server directory.

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. Artstation now has a number of new posts and I am happy with the results. Nothing major on there, but steady output.

Update: I have finally got around to automating the posting for this website. So the number of excuses for not writing here has diminished.

@echo off
set "source=c:\source\directory"
set "target=c:\target\directory"
set "exclude=%temp%\exclude.txt"

(
    rem exclude files/dires with these strings into full path
    echo .txt
    echo pipe.cmd

    rem escaped backslash and initial and final quotes to avoid partial matches
    echo "c:\\source\\directory\\something.txt"

    rem exclude thisNot file/directory from source directory
    echo "%source:\=\\%\\thisNot"

)> "%exclude%"

forfiles /P "%source%" /C "cmd /c (echo @path|findstr /i /v /g:"%exclude%" >nul) && if @isdir==TRUE (mklink /d \"%target%\\\"@file @path) else (mklink \"%target%\\\"@file @path)"

del "%exclude%" > nul

Original answer posted on: stackoverflow

I got it working quickly enough. Although I had problems with the media paths not showing correctly in the media browser. The reason for this was, I’d used the default setting (as mentioned in the documentation) which assumes media will be in the root static folder, where as I had media in an assets folder under the content folder.

This caused the links to be shown as /content/assets/image.png and not simply /assets/image.png as expected.

In any case the solution was to edit the Front Matter settings and set the key: frontMatter/content.publicFolder to "content"

This then presented the correct path in the media viewer section of the addon, button for copy and pasting into the post.

More information is available on Elio’s documentation page: puplicFolder, I really recommend taking sometime to read it through, as it is very helpful, at least is was for me.

It was a little involved at first, but once I got my head around the idea of a git repo within a git repo, not being a git repo but rather just a folder marked as a submodule of some parent module… you get the idea. A confusing concept that is simple and sounds simple, but isn’t explained particularly well in any article I found.

Basically I have Git setup on my local Hugo folder and then I set up a submodule on the /public/ folder in the Hugo folder. Then I can just push the /public/ directory to my webserver host. Works well on first testing, time will tell though in the long ter. Another push and all seems to be working now.

The command to push to the remote server is this:

git subtree push --prefix=<submodule name> ssh://<user>@c<domain>/<remote git folder> <branch>

This is using SSH and I have a script in the *hooks folder, set up to copy the pushed files over to live directory on the web-server.

I might write a post on that later, as helps me remember how it is done.

Here is the template:

type C:\Users\<user>\.ssh\id_rsa.pub | ssh <user>@<remoteserver> 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'

This assumes your public key is in the default location, your home directory under the .ssh directory, if not modify the first part of the command to reflect its location

Another way is to use the git terminal for windows as that has ssh-copy-id installed.

On Mac or Linux or the Git Shell you would just use:

ssh-copy-id <user>@<remoteserver>

This will copy from local default to remote default locations. As usual Windows is a little more involved but it works fine and it isn’t too hard to understand what is happening.

I found a fix online, don’t trust me check if there are any risks in this fix:

Create or edit this following file and add the 2 lines to the file.

~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf

[default]
protocol_vers_map=2

You can find all my assets over at Gumroad.

For more information on the assets for Blender and Modo just visit the link above.