I'm Quinn! Software developer, Li-Ming main, and self hosted.

My phone’s data plan is 500/MB per month. This low cap makes me think very conservatively about what gets sent across the modem as I’m going about my day. While a good source of information, the OpenStreetMap Wiki is not viewable offline. There is no native app nor a PWA to use. The ZIM files from Kiwix are very outdated (at the time of writing). A clever solution is to retrofit the existing Wikipedia App for Android, which already has a “Save page offline” feature and a very nice interface. It might even be as simple as changing the urls. After all, most Wiki sites share a similar backend and API, called Mediawiki, and I was hoping to hook into this feature. Progress The primary reason for this retrofit’s difficulty is Wikipedia’s different (slightly proprietary) rest API. It isn’t shared with the mediawiki suite. This is outlined very clearly in the API comparison table. OK, so a lot more needs to change for OSM to wriggle its way into this app. ‘Simply’ Changing the URLs I had some promising results after changing the base rest_api URL to the ‘old’ Mediawiki target. Search now works immediately. However, internal pages didn’t work. Each wiki page in the app expects a well formatted summary from the API. I could get around this by changing the request for a /summary to the full /html of that article, and now we’re getting closer. Of course there were some other bugs that needed to be ironed out, but those didn’t seem critical. Mainly CSS and indexing issues. Save to Offline did not work, I’m not sure why yet. What do At this point I’m unsure if retrofitting the Wikipedia app is worth it. Rigging the app enough to do what I want would entail only a few more things: Custom CSS injection to fix the worst of the /html responses. Figure out why Save Offline doesn’t work. I’m working on this now in my little free time. 100% by-the-booke correct To do this properly, and not rigged just enough for Quinn’s phone, we would need way more. All the following: A well-formatted response (or converted response) from the Mediawiki API that is not in a Wiki format nor the ugly HTML. Markdown with inline images would be great. The remainder of the rest_v1 endpoints converted in the App’s RestService.kt and subsequent serializers. Reworking the Save to Offline feature, adapting the new (old) responses to the underlying SQLite schema. I’m not jazzed at those prospects, even less so when you consider keeping up to date with upstream. I’ll continue to try rigging it. My Other Idea for Offline OSM Wiki I’d like to investigate .zim files. How Kiwix packages wikis into openZIM format. If I can do this for OpenStreetMap on a more regular basis. If I can build a slightly nicer app to parse custom .zims. What do .zims know, do they know things? Let’s find out. Relevant links https://github.com/wikimedia/apps-android-wikipedia/blob/dc37d97ec30036a62527fb9896ae2875a12b328f/app/src/main/java/org/wikipedia/dataclient/Service.kt https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=wbgetentities https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/api.php?format=json&formatversion=2&errorformat=html&errorsuselocal=1&action=wbgetentities&titles=Tag:tourism%3Dpicnic_site&sites=wiki https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/Android/App_hacking https://github.com/qcasey/apps-android-wikipedia https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Special:Export

Exported Video on Macs do not include any EXIF data. Here's how to fix that.

Using Cloudflare Workers to hack around getJson

I recently exported a Zpool without first removing the corresponding sharenfs option. On the next reboot, exportfs attempted to share this directory from a pool which is no longer mounted (as it doesn't exist anymore).

I recently read this great article about docker image size, how it works, and why it matters. Up until now I hadn’t given any thought to the size of the containers I’m building. Dive is the cli tool I’m using to inspect each layer of the final docker container. I gave these quick changes a try, and am pretty astonished by the results: Before My Fetch Image Proxy project was the most recent offender so I started there. I was using FROM node:17 without any build step. This meant that npm libraries, and the overhead of a debian base was weighing the container to 1 GB in space! After Switching to a build step had the biggest impact, but using gcr.io/distroless/nodejs:16 distroless images for the runtime also made a slight difference. Both small changes combined brought the overall size to 124 MB, about an 8x reduction in disk space. I probably should have known this so far into my career with docker, but if I did I would not have had this fun tooling experience. This is the gcr template for nodejs: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless/blob/main/examples/nodejs/Dockerfile

Proxy to fetch any header or hero image from a URL.

Rosemary is a unique culinary herb. It’s very common in dry coastal regions like California, Portugal, and Croatia. It’s a unique bush because: Rosemary is commonly used as landscaping in public areas Rosemary is delicious Rather than letting landscaping crews have all the fun, one could trim these bushes anytime they made a dish containing the herb. Only to be helpful, of course. Similar projects that I think are neat are Where Rosemary Is (focused on Victoria, BC Canada) and the Stanford Gleaning Project. These are the rosemary bushes I have stumbled on. So far I've documented 27. July 28, 2022 33.464197222222225 -117.08170277777778 July 28, 2022 33.46405555555556 -117.08015833333333 July 24, 2022 33.46313888888889 -117.06910277777777 July 22, 2022 33.501916666666666 -117.091675 July 22, 2022 33.502605555555554 -117.0953111111111 July 20, 2022 33.477725 -117.08670833333333 July 8, 2022 33.478297222222224 -117.0886861111111 July 8, 2022 33.48216666666667 -117.10243888888888 July 4, 2022 34.42182222222222 -119.86375 July 4, 2022 34.42155555555555 -119.86264722222222 July 4, 2022 34.42156388888888 -119.86178333333332 July 3, 2022 34.41719722222222 -119.86391944444443 July 2, 2022 34.41276666666666 -119.84367499999999 July 1, 2022 34.238505555555555 -119.17735277777778 February 14, 2022 33.52878611111111 -117.15604166666667 February 12, 2022 33.50233055555555 -117.14789722222223 February 12, 2022 33.49673055555556 -117.12471388888888 October 25, 2021 44.83871666666667 13.833752777777779 October 9, 2021 51.43678333333333 5.4821583333333335 September 29, 2021 41.36847222222222 2.158736111111111 September 29, 2021 41.369475 2.158533333333333 September 27, 2021 39.864380555555556 -4.020769444444444 September 27, 2021 39.85707222222222 -4.019316666666667 September 22, 2021 September 22, 2021 September 22, 2021 September 8, 2021 33.482075 -117.07604722222221

In my opinion, there are 3 types of useful bookmarks when surfing the web. Temporary Long-Term + Archival Startpage + Frequently Visited Unfortunately, web browsers only competently support the temporary kind. It’s silly to cram all 3 use cases into this one solution. Luckily, people have created a number of tools to fill in the gaps. These are the bookmarking tools I use and when. Temporary “I’ll need this in the next 1-3 days” This is the most common for me. I use Firefox’s standard bookmarking feature for this. Ctrl+D and done. Long-Term + Archival “I might need this someday” I collect some links because they’re useful, or cool, or just something else entirely. I want to hold onto them where I know I can find them later, but don’t want to crowd my “short term memory” of temporary links. For this, I use Linkace. It submits each link to the archive.org wayback machine for backup if the linked site ever disappears. Tags, lists, and sorting all make this a better option that browser bookmarks. Plus, you can export your hundreds of links as a browser-compatible .html file anyway. Startpage + Frequently Visited “I visit these 3+ times per day” These I want to have on hand quickly. Think Reddit, HN, YouTube, etc. I also lump local server tools like Proxmox, analytics dashboards, and self-hosted services into this one. These links are too permanent to be in the “Temporary” bookmarks bar, but also too general to be filed into a link collection. For this I use my custom startpage: Salient Startpage. This page is a list of links that I load on every new browser tab to quickly access my favorite sites.

The Blogroll on this site is dynamic, pulling in my RSS feeds from Miniflux. I use this partial below to render a list of public feeds by category. It’s important to change $allowed_categories here in the script, and to set miniflux.url and miniflux.apiKey in your site config. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 {{/* GetMinifluxFeeds Get a list of MiniFlux feeds by category @author @qcasey @context Page (.) @access public @example - Go Template {{ partialCached "func/GetMinifluxFeeds" . }} */}} {{ $mf_url := .Site.Params.miniflux.url }} {{ $mf_apiKey := .Site.Params.miniflux.apiKey }} {{ $allowed_categories := (slice "Digital Gardens and Blogs" "News" "Releases") }} {{ if (and $mf_url $mf_apiKey) }} {{ $categories := getJSON (printf "%s/v1/categories" $mf_url) (dict "X-Auth-Token" $mf_apiKey) }} {{ with $categories }} {{ $feeds := getJSON (printf "%s/v1/feeds" $mf_url) (dict "X-Auth-Token" $mf_apiKey) }} {{ if $feeds }} {{ range $categories }} {{ if in $allowed_categories .title }} {{ $c := . }} <h2 id="{{ $c.title | lower }}">{{ $c.title }}</h2> <ul class="blogroll"> {{ range $feeds }} {{ if eq .category.id $c.id }} <li> <a href="{{ .site_url }}"> {{ with .icon.feed_id }} {{ $icon := getJSON (printf "%s/v1/feeds/%.0f/icon" $mf_url .) (dict "X-Auth-Token" $mf_apiKey) }} {{ with $icon }} <img width="20" height="20" src="data:{{ .data }}" /> {{ end }} {{ end }} {{ .title }} </a> </li> {{ end }} {{ end }} </ul> {{ end }} {{ end }} {{ end }} {{ end }} {{ end }}

Sometimes a program insists on running large builds to /tmp, like jpeg-archive. I needed to temporarily increase the size of tmpfs at the mountpoint /tmp: 1 sudo mount -o remount,size=16G,noexec,nosuid,nodev,noatime /tmp Took me a while to find this one, most articles only show how to make this permanent using fstab.