Personal

I use my Raspberry Pi4 as a home media server with Plex using Ubuntu Desktop. I use a large flash drive for content that needs me to login every time the machine reboots. I started running into a consistent issue where every login would be met with distortion that looked something like:

I had a difficult time searching for just what this could be and took a few different approaches that worked with mixed results:

1. Installed a different window manager like xfce4 or kde-plasma

   1. This worked for a minute until it stopped. I have no clue what magic I did at first but I oddly prefer Gnome now.

2. Created a new user.

   1. I'm not using the default user to begin with but my user jeremy was the only one on the system.
   2. This worked perfectly but it meant setting quite a bit up under the second user.
   3. I absolutely do not understand what in a new user is different to make this one option work consistently.
   4. See https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/qw1cdw/comment/huqutq1/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3
   5. See https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/176cz2u/raspberry_bookworm_xrdp_gpu_acceleration_issue/

3. The approaches outlined in https://devicetests.com/fixing-xrdp-black-screen-issue-ubuntu including the installation script.

   1. I made some of these tweaks before as I had the blackscreen problem and I bit the bullet to reinstall xrdp on a whim.
   2. The updated installation script can be found at https://www.c-nergy.be/products.html.
   3. This did nothing and now I'm greeted with self-sign cert warnings every time I connect.

The solution I ended up going with was outlined in https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=358088 as it works flawlessly for my current user, just as it was before whatever recent update broke it.

sudo nano /etc/X11/xrdp/xorg.conf

Find the line Option DRMDevice line and change it to

Option "DRMDevice" ""

reboot raspberry pi

This is one of the reasons I am not a fan of Linux on the desktop, even in 2024 nor do I think it passes the "grandma test." It was damn near impossible to search for this reliably and took me multiple days of searching over a few weeks. Grandma may have that kinda time because she's retired but I'm not, I need the shit to just work(tm). The Linux desktop experience has come a really long way from when I started working with it though.

Originally, I wrote up a post trying to give a 2020 - 2021 overview that got hosed with a local git repo of this blog. I'm using the moment to remind myself that backups are important. It's also important to complete ideas for posts or journals quickly, even if something doesn't feel complete. Letting those linger for days without a git commit that hit the server is a genuine problem and I need to at the very least create and push to a new branch often.

One change that happened at the end of 2020, I started the journal section to try to capture bite-sized rough ideas. I had started a journal at work with notes in files like Phoenix Developer Diary.txt and I looked for a solution to merge my different diaries. The excellent Claire Codes has an extremely consistent diary at clairecodes and served as my main source of inspiration.

I've gone all-in learning Elixir by participating in my first Advent of Code in 2020. I tapered off pretty quickly as I had serious problems working through loops and control flow. Seeing other examples on Elixir Forum helped immensely as I had slowly gotten better at reading the code. Later on in the year, I decided to take a TodoMVC sample through to a LiveView version with a little help from other resources on the internet. I had also started a diary where I wanted to capture the approaches I took each day I worked on the example. I have a plan to try to tackle my version from scratch but I'm also looking at other application ideas.

While the Advent of Code and TodoMVC was good to get my feet wet, I learned far more by pushing through Exercism exercises. If you're on Exercism and curious, my solutions can be found here. I highly recommend using Exercism to learn any language it covers as the recently released version 3 makes for a great experience. Exercises feel a bit more "real world" and less like brain teasers that happen to use programming concepts. Even if I happened to look at the HINTS.md file, it never felt like cheating as it would only guide us toward a solution, not implement it.

After attending the excellent ElixirConf 2021 virtually, I've started working with Livebook in a few examples. I wanted to highlight the 3 notebooks that use the excellent spider_man package to crawl 3 websites: Elixir Jobs, Elixir Radar Jobs, and Elixir Companies. Parsing the DOM of each required slowly stretching far outside my comfort zone. It's also worth mentioning that in the Elixir Jobs example, I left a problem I found under the Sorting the Results section. Due to the zero-width space, the section throws the message ** (SyntaxError) nofile:5:1: unexpected token: "​" (column 1, code point U+200B).

Coming to the end of 2021, I'm looking forward to immersing myself deeper in the Elixir ecosystem. Livebook is also a great way to get your feet wet with Elixir concepts, like a powerful language scratchpad. There have been other life changes since January 2020 but those deserve separate posts when I can get to them. Fortunately, the pandemic hasn't been harsh on my family or extended family at all, which I consider an extreme blessing. I can't say we weren't impacted by the last 2 years but things could've been much worse.

In my last post, I mentioned the transition to Gridsome and it has been relatively pain free. I owe a lot of this to the existing community and the great list of starter resources. If a concept isn't explained or clear in the docs, chances are you can gain some insight from the various starters.

One particular concept I had a problem with right out of the gate was how to use markdown files from multiple directories. I started with the post type to handle /year/month/day/title routes but I wanted to move to an equivalent of the generic page type from Hexo. In doing research to the search terms I could've used months ago, I stumbled on multiple issues that point out how to do it.

In the file gridsome.config.js, I use the following snippet in the plugins section:

{
  use: '@gridsome/source-filesystem',
  options: {
    path: 'blog/articles/**/*.md',
    typeName: 'Article',
    refs: {
      authors: {
        typeName: 'Author',
        create: true
      },
    }
  }
},
{
  use: '@gridsome/source-filesystem',
  options: {
    path: 'blog/posts/**/*.md',
    typeName: 'Post',
    refs: {
      authors: {
        typeName: 'Author',
        create: true
      },
      categories: {
        typeName: 'Category',
        create: true
      },
      tags: {
        typeName: 'Tag',
        create: true
      },
    }
  }
},

Since Gridsome has a concept of pages already, I chose the word article to represent them instead. As an example, the portfolio page is an article type while this page represents a post type. While hindsight makes this seem intuitive now, I somehow had the impression that you were only allowed one plugin type for safety reasons.

To point out something else, the portfolio page highlights a technique I didn't think was possible at the time. The parent portfolio page is an article type but all the subsequent child pages are markdown files in a separate portfolio directory as a portfolio type. In the plugins section of gridsome.config.js:

{
  use: '@gridsome/source-filesystem',
  options: {
    path: 'blog/portfolio/**/*.md',
    typeName: 'Portfolio',
    refs: {
      authors: {
        typeName: 'Author',
        create: true
      },
    }
  }
},

Coming from Hexo, I opt for placing content in markdown files and having unique layouts defined in the various pages and templates files. As much as Gridsome is a generic website framework, I find that it can be extremely flexible to whatever workflow you wish to create. There are some parts of Hexo I miss like scaffolding new page types or steering me into blog concepts but the transition to Gridsome has been rather smooth. While Gridsome may not be for everyone, I can definitely see how JAMstack has gained traction recently. Barring very few gotchas, working on this site is fun again even in the I-can-see-every-blemish state it's currently in.

It's been over a year since my last post and while unfinished drafts don't count, I thought my blog was due for a change. The move from Octopress to Hexo was relatively uneventful but I found keeping up a little difficult. It wasn't completely on Hexo, I had tweaked things to a point that merging in changes over time became cumbersome and slow. In a previous post, I roughly mentioned the transition and a lot has happened to the web in over 3 years.

Static site generators like Hugo and Gatsby have picked up steam and the feature set of Gatsby, particularly the GraphQL component stood out. I wanted to stick to Vue for as many of my personal projects as possible, so I searched for any static site generator using Vue I could find. Fortunately Gridsome has come along as a nice clone of Gatsby using Vue rather than React and even though it's at v0.7.12 at the time of this post, I've run into very few hurdles.

I don't have the best understanding of JAMstack after working with a sample size of one, but learning GraphQL by only dealing with queries has made this one of the best ways to get my feet wet. I'm by no means an expert but this light interaction compels me to use it more often, as it's mostly been a pleasure to work with. Frameworks like Gridsome and I suspect Gatsby let you focus on almost entirely the frontend. Even though the A in JAMstack stands for APIs, as a backend developer I haven't had to write a single REST, GraphQL or what I'd typically associate with an API like I would with Laravel, Phoenix Framework, or Express.

One thing I miss about Hexo is that it had scaffolding to generate new files. Gridsome is a framework for generic sites, not just blogs, so scaffolding doesn't seem to be included. Coming from Hexo I wanted to keep as much of the existing markdown as possible and I think some of the approaches I've taken may be useful to others. A small example I had a problem understanding is that you can use a @gridsome/source-filesystem plugin multiple times, one for each directory or type. It makes sense in hindsight but none of the starters used the technique nor did the docs seem to suggest it was possible. I'm tempted to create a starter based on my usage patterns but worst case, I plan on writing a post outlining some of these approaches in the near future.

One last thing is a small humblebrag. While the theme for this site draws a few cues from the older version, I wanted to flex my design abilities by focusing on techniques I've learned reading Refactoring UI. By the time this post is published it likely won't be perfect but I think it's a decent first pass that should only get better over time.

I wanted to mark what feels like an oasis in the desert of a long journey. During my last job search over 2 years ago, I tired of what had become a disjointed resume update routine. Accomplish a task, go to the Word-document-as-one-true-source, update, print to PDF, go to LinkedIn, update, go to careers.stackoverflow.com, update, rinse & repeat.

I yearned for one interchangeable format that allowed me to generate HTML, Word and PDF at the very least. JSON Resume combined with resume-linkedin seemed like a great fit. Unfortunately, due to recent LinkedIn API changes resume-linkedin was all but useless. My first contribution was born out of the realization that if you could get the LinkedIn data through the API console, the process still worked, albeit extremely cumbersome.

As I worked on migrating this site to my personal fork of a theme in Hexo, I thought a custom JSON Resume theme would also be a good fit. These changes to my resume can be found here or here.