expect fanfiction in the coming months! or terrible failure! I'll be using this post to track what I end up making

genprompt_bingo iyw 2 join

sigh.

a couple days ago I spilled coffee on my main laptop, my primary machine for everything. ...and in trying to air it out my clumsy ass gouged a resistor on the mainboard. so it's in the shop. I've had good experiences with uBreakIFix in the past, and I'm hoping they can repair the mainboard without the $700+ replacement cost I'd be looking at for a new part.

the result of this is that I have gone from strictly using an archlinux install to using a fresh windows 10 install, as I've decided to use this event as an excuse to fix up my desktop, which will be running windows until ALVR stops bugging out on me or such a time as I can afford a non-standalone VR headset. this is my first time daily-driving windows in about a year and a half, and it's weird to be back.

a short list of what's stuck on that laptop, at the moment

• all of my SSH keys. this is fine for most, on account of them being to VPSes with VNC support, but I cannot access the amehut box, unless I feel like walking someone through the ssh key creation process over the phone, which does not sound fun at all.
• all of my obsidian notes
• quite a few saved games that don't have cloud sync (my GTNH save particularly stings)
• quite a few unfinished pixel art projects
• some projects that were never checked into source control (I recently started syncing one of the most critical to amehut, luckily)

the backup plans that worked

• vivaldi sync is the reason I am able to write this with a proper keyboard. annoyingly, the mobile app refused repeatedly to export my backup key. luckily, I was able to export from my other (very slow) windows machine. when my laptop is up again, I will be reinitializing sync and keeping careful note of the password.
• many of my non-sensitive files are already synchronized to my phone, so that's handy.
• I had a spare computer computer with me. this whole ordeal would have been significantly worse were it not for that.

so, what have we learned?

well, I do in fact regret not having proper backups. there's no good reason the data on my laptop won't be mostly recoverable, but it's going to suck to be without my development environment and servers for a bit. nothing absolutely 100% critical is missing, but it's going to be profoundly inconvenient for a while.

I also clearly need to have a solution for accessing SSH without my primary machine. I may end up putting together some sort of backup keystore that can be securely accessed in times like this.

next steps?

no device of mine other than my laptop currently meets my standards for encryption of sensitive files. I am going to try deploying a solution like veracrypt to my windows systems, and begin mirroring critical files from my laptop to there. I will also be synchronizing my obsidian vault somewhere. time permitting, I will organize and backup my dotfiles somewhere.

well, how's windows going?

good, actually. instead of reaching for choco as a package manager, like usual, I decided to finally try winget. this was the right choice. no longer am I confronted with 20 confirmation prompts and licensing upsells, instead the system Just Works. I have yet to try installing something through winget and have it fail. as in, everything I have tried blindly winget installing has Just Worked. this goes for everything from vencord to 7zip. it's wonderful.

I am also realizing that windows 10 was, in fact, created by UX designers that knew what they were doing. I am appreciating the various small UX optimizations that came about in its 8-year lifespan quite a lot.

I am by no means a windows fan, but I am not some linux evangelist either. it's always fun setting up a new machine.

anyways, I've got to go read the aeneid.

~aleteoryx,
signing off

Welp, I'm hosting another thing, but this thing will probably end up being very much so used in the future.

Introducing...

ameHUT(ah may hut), a sr.ht install!

I have a lot of respect for Drew DeVault, and the general philosophy with which he operates. Sourcehut is exemplary of this. It is ascetic software, shipping barely anything to the browser and relying only on Postgres and Redi{s,ct} in the backend. It eschews fancy modern editors for mailing lists and git send-email. Most important for me, it is software built to stay running, and software built to work first and show off later. It is software built to be lightweight and yet capable of scaling with load trivially.

Switching from cgit/soft-serve to this as my main forge feels better, in a way that other, more cluttered programs do not.

SourceHut is also project-focused, not repo-focused. What this means in practice is that docs can be associated with code, without sharing a file tree; announcement feeds can be associated with a number of repos, instead of just one; etc. I find this significantly nicer in terms of organization, and it's a shame GitHub et al. don't have much similar.

As always...

Deployment was a thing!

I spent a week or two setting up the services on a little Alpine box at my house. It proxies via Wireguard to the VPS that runs my core internet services, and I have an Apache macro to manage proxying. Currently, this macro does not account for API proxying, and I will be fixing this... eventually! Currently there are 3 users, myself included, only 1 of which, yours truly, has actually used any of the services, which is to say there is no strong demand for a working API at present time. Wouldn't be hard to get working though lol

SourceHut is built to be easy to shard. Each subdomain is composed of 2+ services, most minimally an API server and webserver. As long as all services can see the same Postgres and Redi{s,ct} databases, it sorta just works. At present moment, I do not have the need to shard, so, naturally, I set the server up on a Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM. Does this work? Yes, actually! With minimal stability issues, too! Sourcehut is almost exclusively written in Golang and Python, which accounts for its backend lightweightness. There will probably be an eventual hardware upgrade, but yk, it works for now.

The setup process for each service is roughly the same. Install the package with APK, copy in and tweak the example config from Git, tell the webserver to listen over Wireguard, start everything, test it, and add them to the default runlevel. There were no major issues during it.

So, what works?

Currently the following subdomains work, and run the same-named services as sr.ht:

• amehut.dev
• git.amehut.dev
• hg.amehut.dev
• meta.amehut.dev
• lists.amehut.dev
• todo.amehut.dev

Planned are:

• amehut.page (srht.site)
• paste.amehut.dev
• builds.amehut.dev

The first is unimplemented due to poor documentation(a rarity in this project, as it were). The second is unimplemented because I am lazy. The third requires special treatment and I have yet to provision a VPS for it. I will likely reuse the one that currently powers redmine, and decommission redmine.

At some point, I will be soft-forking the sr.ht project, and changing around the color scheme and some of the marketing details.

Well, this sounds interesting, where can I learn more?

I've put together an FAQ that says mostly the same stuff as this blog, with some extra details thrown in.

Alas, it seems signups are out-of-the-question.

Almost! If you want an account on amehut, and we've interacted before, PM me here or anywhere else. Despite some of the slightly cursed details of the backend, it runs like a dream.

Oh, nice!

IKR! Also when did you learn to type my headings? Ah whatever.

Aleteoryx, signing off.

I finally fixed the downloads page!!!

I had been really, really lazy in first making it, and called to a mod_autoindex local endpoint. At a certain point, config refactoring broke this very very badly, and I disabled the downloads page altogether. It's back up now, with a table thrown together in PHP like the rest of the site. I'm going to re-add the icons at some point, I just haven't had the energy to yet.

New download!

Part of the motivation for fixing up the downloads code was the release of a """plugin""" for wpren. wpren's design means you can swap out files in wallpaper directories under its nose, and it will just keep chugging, which means wallpapers that can react and change themselves are trivial to implement.

It's a tool for randomly selecting a wallpaper from a pool of options, with support for tagging them by a value. This will only update a given wallpaper directory, and I mainly set it up this way as having 5 new wallpapers seemed a tad excessive in terms of probability distribution.

I've started putting static wallpapers in circulation on my system, and this reflects that, as it currently only supports static wallpapers. I may release an animated version later down the line.

That's all.

I'll post again sometime soon, expect something morbid if I can work up writing energy!

...almost 2 months. that's too long. i need to keep this place updated more.

What's new?

oh lots of things. i got sick, as i write this i've got a hellish fucking cough. the clearlungs is keeping it at bay but it's still painful. i have chorus later today, not sure how i'm gonna manage that.

i sunk the $9 on an uptimerobot paid plan, so there's now a status page for my stuff. we'll see whether i migrate to something self-hosted or not, but i figure a status page is the one thing that's foolish to selfhost.

i've started a new form of to-do list, on my remarkable. the only thing really new about it is that i rewrite it from scratch every day. it forces me to think about tasks more concretely. i also have a second list, the evertodo, for those things that i'll get to later. it's, uh, long. anyways, i'm thinking i'll add a "write something" daily task, try and keep this place updated more.

i started reading ficciones. borges is an amazing author holy shit. i have very little to say other than that i now see from where some of my previous favorite short stories draw clear and direct influence.

i've got matrix and jabber accounts now. @aleteoryx:constellatory.net(good homeserver! cool admin!) and @alyx@jab.aleteoryx.me. contact me if you dare.

i got a pixel fold. convinced my family that the last 6 years of no upgrades was worth funding such an investment. i do enough reading and shit on my phone where being able to say "fuck it, tablet" comes in handy. i've not been using the folding functions enough to properly justify the price tag, but it comes in handy now and again. i expect that when i start doing research on allegheny county parcel laws again, it'll be far more useful.

i've begun actually using my myanimelist account. it's been enough motivation to finally watch stuff. i'll post reviews of stuff as i finish shows.

all sorts of stuff. i started running my own authoritative dns server via powerdns. it's a good little program, and it works well for my needs.

i killed social.aleteoryx.me. it had been broken for a while, it would seem. i still have database backups in case i ever want to try resurrecting it, probably under glitch-soc or chuckya.

i started moving shit off the singular linode i'd been using for a while.

• mk.aleteoryx.me and books.aleteoryx.me are now living on a royale hosting vps together.
• airsonic is back on oci, as it should be.
• discourse is properly setup, and living on its own royale vps.

i setup a redmine install. unfortunately, it seems as though the inbuilt repo browser can't actually handle soft-serve, as soft-serve stores all repos with no working tree. i probably won't do much about this anytime soon, as i prefer cgit to the repo interface i've seen on other redmine installs.

i've discovered that leveldb has a tendency to create unreadable files under gocryptfs. frankly, i'm considering switching to a new encryption solution, as gocryptfs has too many random incompatibilities. steam updates tend to max out all of my cores, only in the kernel, and iirc this did not happen before moving to gocryptfs.

i wrote a bit of the script for the eventual major update to comics.marigold.town. no work has been done on the engine, but yknow, progress is progress.

i mocked up some code and datastructures for the scrobble.observer wizard v2.

i'm now running a public searxng instance. i need to poke at the csp config at some point until stuff stops failing to load, but that's a problem for later. for now, it works well enough that i use it and i've had it listed on searx.space.

Any upcoming plans?

well, when i get the time, i'm going to completely restructure my website. i'm thinking aleteoryx.me will become a mobile-friendly single-page site with links to various things, and the current site will end up at www.aleteoryx.me. i'd also like to have some sort of sso domain so that people i trust can have a unified login system to my things i host, but i'm not sure if sharkey supports ldap or anything of the sort. i've had good experiences running keycloak in the past, so i'll probably end up using that.

lfm_embed is going to get something of an overhaul with regards to theming. handlebars is proving too limited for any real use-cases, and i'm thinking lua may be the right choice going forwards. this is pending on free time.

i'll probably try teaching sharkey to send out normal reactions at some point, although from what i've heard *key federation code is nightmarish. it's a problem for later.

Anything in the news?

neil cicieriga released a demo off mouth dreams, it's ...baby one more time reworked as a symphonic rock song. it's pretty good.

Welp, I'm off.

alright, thanks for reading. i'll be back sometime soon, maybe with a sequel to that thing i wrote that one time.

I built a webcomic searching tool! It's a simple booru-style positive/negative tag search, and the actual catalog doesn't contain that many comics right now, but that's besides the point.

The actually interesting thing is the context, as this was launched as a part of Alexandra's Marigold Town! It's half webhost, half roleplay, with the idea being that each site is a location in Marigold Town. Certainly not a new idea, but anything making the internet a bit of a weirder place is good in my book. The town's mayor is an owl also? Rad. If you've got the sitebuilding bug and some free time you should totally check it out! Also if you want to just dick around online!! There's an apothecary with docs on 19th century and before medicines! A coffee shop with cute little pixel arts to download!! Lots of other cool stuffs!!!

My contribution was Marigold Town Comics, Games, and More. Creative name, I know. Right now it's just a JavaScript toggle for future ventures, and the aforementioned index.

As is starting to become customary, here's a brief technical breakdown:

The actual comics are entered into a big long YAML file. Unfortunately there's no strictYAML port for PHP(I'll probably end up writing one lol), but I know the quirks of it enough to stay safe. I prefer YAML for its general readability, without the verbosity of something like JSON. On pageload, the catalog checks the YAML file's modtime against the modtime of a Sqlite DB file. If the DB is older, it gets regenerated from the YAML file. This is done just because, as more comics get loaded in, having an index saved to disk will be significantly faster than YAML parse -> Hashmap gen -> Hashmap search. Plus it makes the code nicer.

This project contains my most advanced SQL work to-date. The queries are a bit bulky, but I figure keeping everything as 2 or 3 queries will be faster than constantly making Sqlite library calls from PHP. It also makes the code more concise, which is a plus in my book. I did take care to document their workings for future me, so that they're not too unweildly.

That's the only particularly complicated part, from there it's just standard webdev stuff. That help menu is by-far the sexiest CSS I've ever put into prod though.

Short-term Future Plans

• I need to sort out a method for getting user contributions, like adding tags or whole webcomics. This should either be via e-mail, a form, or both.
• Start adding the networks I'm aware of.
  • SpiderForest
  • Xepher
• Continue to add various comics from across the 'net!
• Attempt to put up an archive of gopus.xepher.net

Long-term Future Plans

• This site will eventually evolve into a more complicated web experience! There's gonna be characters and a dialog system and probably some other stuff, too!!
• Spoilers!

The first big update:

The new content system is up!!

This is a completely different system to the old SHTML-based one. For all the charm of SHTML, it's far too verbose for my continued use of it. The new system is written in PHP, and can accept multiple formats, as well as supporting theming. I'm not sure if/when I'm going to get around to making the code for this public, as it's kinda a rat's nest implementation-wise. You'd need to have identical Apache VHost conf for it to work because of how it handles the downloads page, among other things.

That all being said, I'll briefly document the rough design here, for anyone who wishes to copy me(please don't this thing is so janky).

Entrypoint

The entire system is served through handler.php, a script which manages the theming, formatting, and whatever else.

When it loads, it first initializes Parsedown, Mustache, and imports simplehtmldom. These libraries get used at various stages in the game later on. After that, it checks the cookies for theming and JavaScript opt-in data. These will be user settable down the line. Once it's located the theme the user has configured(or fallen back to a default), it loads

The Content

This is one of 3 things. For static pages, it supports Markdown and HTML, and in the case where I need to be more dynamic, it supports PHP.

Once the source file has been found(I let Apache handle the filename resolution for the most part), the system checks for a .nh file. NH for No-Handle. If the system finds one of these, it will stop everything, set the MIME type for the file, dump it over the wire, and exit. What happens next is up to the file extension, which can be one of

.html / .md

Markdown and HTML are handled almost identically. First, the aforementioned Mustache library is used to provide them with limited templating facilities. I don't register many handlers, as it stands, but this will likely change down the line. The crucial things here are the ability to query whether JavaScript and cookies are enabled. Not in the browser, mind you. One of the core things I want for this site is the ability for a user to opt-in to those things. This will end up leading to disabled links and pages, down the line, I'm sure. That's not a bad thing.

If it was a Markdown file, at this point Parsedown gets run over the resulting contents of the file, and the templating process is done.

Almost done, anyways. Because files only have page contents, and can't control the HTML <head>, I need an out-of-band way to set the title, and it would be nice to have a system for disabling theming per-page, without disabling the templating or markdown system altogether. This comes in the form of a simple directive system. It strips lines prefixed with $! and does stuff based on them. The following directives are supported:

• $!title <title> - Uses the rest of the line as the page title.
• $!notheme - Disables the theme completely, only outputting the result of the templating/markdown steps.
• $!noextras - Disables headers/footers, while keeping around the theme's HTML scaffold.

PHP

PHP scripts are simply executed. The Output Buffering library is used to take the stdout of the PHP script. Early on, the script was expected to return the title, but with the addition of notheme and noextras, the script is now passed a set of functions with which it can set the 3 main properties.

Themes

Once that's all finished up, the theme gets run. Themes consist of the following files, which are processed in the following order:

1. /manifest.yml - Currently, this just stores if a theme requires JavaScript to function or not. If a user has their theme set to one that requires JavaScript, but has yet to opt-in, they will be given a fallback theme.
2. /preprocess.php - Allows the script to make modifications to the HTML content. In the current system this is primarily used to generate the ASCII-art <h1>; tags. This is the main source of jank.
3. /extra_ctx.php - This allows the theme to generate data to include in the markdown for the theme's template. The current theme uses it to generate the optionally disabled links in the header, although I'd like to move that to mustache later on.
4. /template.mustache - The actual mustache template! It gets given the extra context and the processed content, as well as the global helpers and some request metadata. The output of this will get sent back to the requester.

That's it!

That's the basic flow of the system, although I've left out some stuff. The downloads page is implemented by forcing all requests to a downloads.php file that does... a lot... of stuff! I delegate to mod_autoindex in there. Figure it out!

Fediring join pending!

My first(second) webring! Technically I'm in the Melonking Surf Club ring too, but I have yet to figure out how to incorporate it into the current design. I've sent in the Fediring join request, though, so that's fun. The buttons are on the hompage, awaiting activation, and when they're up, I'll be properly in! It's fun!

That's all from me!

College has been busy, and I have other things I should be working on than my website, but this has been clawing at my brain for days and I needed to get it all done. Be sure to email me with any issues!

I guess monthly doesn't mean the first.

Development

• Drought - 1/3 done. Need to get the macros to talk to, well, everything, and then start adding the higher level stuff.
• Personal Website - Mostly at square one. All new work pending on Drought's completion.
• Iris(and UI) - Not started, pending more design work and more free time.
• wpren rewrite - Not started, pending time + motivation.

Admin

• Setup Roundcube - I need to get this done at some point, although, not sure when. Pending on working out the silent crashes I was getting.
• Move GSuite email to Postfix - Pending on Roundcube. Need to learn imapcopy.
• Setup Nextcloud - Pending on GSuite being dealt with.

Personal

• College application essay - Done bay beeeeeeeeeeeee.
• Repair Local Nextcloud Instance - Now it is, and it's done lol.
• Start writing down my little stories here. Maybe figure out how to format stuff like a screenplay in HTML. - Everything's pending on like so many things.
• Whittle down Articles folder - 0/9