Pluribus does a great job of making you think about what it means to be human.

Just watched The Terminator - 1984

It’s still a great story and movie.

I ended up removing the following page and instead adding this column to the right with the most recently updated items from every feed.

Immediately I can see issues with the content from some of the feeds when you expand them. I think it's probably an issue with parsing the items on the server side and I will have to tackle it later. Correctly parsing RSS content is unfortunately not so easy or straight forward.

Turns out is was just a html sanitisation issue and it was easily fixed 🎉

I've setup a following page which shows the most recent post from each of the sites/blogs that I follow. It's a nice convenient way for me to read them all in one place. The functionality is provided by another project that I'm working on. It's still very new and there will definitely still be some issues to work out.

I just watched episode 3 of Pluribus and I'm still not 100% sure what I think of it. It's reminiscent of Breaking Bad in terms of cinematography, pacing, and general quirkiness. In terms of story it's not really like anything else.. which I think is a good thing?

I'm of an age where I'm in danger of getting stuck listening to the same music for the rest of my life. So I've recently decided to change things up and (try to) find new music. I have a few ideas of categories that this might fall into.

1. Old music that is new to me
2. New music from old bands/artists that I like
3. Completely new music from current artists that I haven't heard of

The third option is going to be tough so I'm going to start by focussing on the first two. My idea is to remove everything from my music library and then start with Jazz, which is a genre that I've never really got into, then maybe some artists that I like but don't know well, and finally artists that I like that are still releasing new music.

This is my new music library so far:

1. Time Out - Dave Brubeck (1959)
2. Kind of Blue - Miles Davis (1959)
3. A Love Supreme - John Coltrane (1965)
4. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars - David Bowie (1972)
5. Transformer - Lou Reed (1972)
6. Camp Songs - Meat Puppets (2023)
7. The Night the Zombies Came - Pixies (2024)
8. The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)
9. Is this Real? - Wipers (1980)

I went back and added dates to each one and oh boy, I need to concentrate a bit more on this century, but it's a start, and there's not a one from the 90's, so that's progress.

Once you have your first app deployed with Kamal + GitHub Actions it's incredibly easy/fast to copy/paste that config and get your second app deployed ;)

One thing that wasn't immediately obvious to me was that Kamal comes with aliases. Think of them as commands that you can run locally that execute on your remote servers. Kamal comes with the following aliases already setup in config/deploy.yml

console: app exec --interactive --reuse "bin/rails console"
shell: app exec --interactive --reuse "bash"
logs: app logs -f
dbc: app exec --interactive --reuse "bin/rails dbconsole"

So running kamal shell locally in your project will ssh into your server and give you an interactive shell in your running container.

kamal logs will ssh in and tail the logs in your running container.

Incredibly useful and you can add your own.

My feed includes support for source:markdown. In fact I write my posts in markdown and save them to the database in markdown too.

This blog is the first time I've deployed with Kamal and I'm pretty happy with the result. Kamal is a Rails deployment tool that makes it easy to deploy apps to a Docker host.

Combining Kamal with GitHub Actions I have a deploy pipeline that automatically deploys a new version every time I push changes to the Main branch. This is the same automatic deployments that I used to enjoy with DigitalOcean's app platform but at a fraction of the price.

Since this is my first time deploying with Kamal I did run into a few issues that took a bit of time to figure out. Two of the issues were Docker rather than Kamal related and specifically because I installed Docker in Rootless Mode

1. Kamal was unable to map privileged ports because it wasn't running as root
2. Docker would only run while the user session was active

To fix number 1 I bound port access to a specific socket:

sudo setcap cap_net_bind_service=ep $(which rootlesskit)

To fix number 2 I needed to enable linger on the user running Docker so that the process would keep running after the user logged out:

sudo loginctl enable-linger $(whoami)

This seems like a fair place to start. Now more than ever it feels like there's a strong movement towards starting and owning your own website. We have seen where big tech social media leads and it's a dead end or worse (X).

Cory Doctorow was on a recent Decoder episode explaining how big tech companies have enshittified the internet. He does a wonderful job of explaining exactly how they gave users everything they wanted, locked them in, and then did everything they said they wouldn't do in order to sell your data and eyeballs to advertisers.

This is to say that I hope we have all collectively learnt from the last 20 years and I want to be part of a better internet. Hopefully I might also contribute something along the way.

I'm probably going to reference Dave Winer quite a lot on this blog. He is one of the most influencial people on the web and continues to create products and ideas that are groundbreaking.

The reason that I'm mentioning him now is that my decision to group posts by day, and let each post just be a paragraph under a day rather than it's own article with a heading and space around it, comes straight from Scripting News. I think it's a more natural way to write and allows for more of a continuous stream of thought and communication.

Taken in Dublin early 2025.