A short note — a blog in Markdown powered by Hugo is simply a breath of fresh air after the sluggish browser-based Blogger. It renders instantly on the local machine, opens lightning-fast — including the already-published version — what a pleasure! (On top of that, it warms the soul to know the blog sits right here on my laptop and is not the property of Google.) The urge to write has come alive again.

Write a manual for operating yourself#

I came across an interesting technique called a personal user manual: the idea is to write, either from a simple template or in free form, an operating manual for the object known as “Me.”

Preamble#

For some reason, I felt like rebuilding my website by the end of 2023 — if before it just hosted the content of my blog (one of them), I wanted to turn it into a “typical” placeholder: a small static page (or a set of pages) with a collection of useful links to blogs, articles, maybe a GitHub or LinkedIn profile, and so on. What’s the best way to host something like that? GitHub Pages, of course — you write some markdown, push it to a repository, GitHub does its magic — and voilà, the site is ready. Minimum effort, maximum result, especially since https://disfinder.github.io had already existed for some time, hosting various notes I made for myself.

I decided that before the new year I want to somewhat reshape the disfinder.com domain — instead of a blog on the root page, make a landing page that would host links to the blog and some useful articles.

The reshaping turned out to be fairly easy, and the obvious choice was Github Pages, for a few reasons:

• I already have it set up
• it’s plain markdown, easy to back up just in case (unlike Blogger)

But the markdown turned out to be not so plain — it’s Jekyll — and anyone who wants to write nice, useful articles there needs to get the hang of Jekyll first.

I’m the kind of person who buys a Christmas tree stand at the end of February.

The Problem#

One thing blogs are bad at is storing posts that evolve over time. For example, if an article or manual is being written and developed, readers only see the first publication — further edits don’t make it into RSS feeds and no emails are sent.

But there is a solution!

A short note — while Apple is dragging its feet releasing the new MacBook Pros with M1X, I’m suffering with an old 2013 laptop that is struggling badly with today’s demands. A video call in Teams or Skype, and especially in Zoom with a virtual background overlay, slowly melts it, despite the thermal paste having been replaced twice (and I might do it a third time, who knows). Even ordinary browsing lags, stutters, and glitches.

The replacement Synology arrived. I swapped the drives over, and while I was at it, threw in 4 GB of RAM that had been sitting in a drawer anyway — now it’s at 8. Plex came up quickly, I restored the config too, fine-tuning will happen as I go.

Not even a year and a half had passed since I became a happy owner of a home server from Synology, and it already went belly up.

The “Canada Days” trend was born in my booze blog, and I kept trying to remember what else Canadian from the past month (besides the beer and whisky) I had forgotten — and here it is.