Splicer splicer@awkwardly.social
Clifton Park NY USA
I blog at https://splicer.com/ and dream of the day when my blog and everyone else's will be federated.
Thinking of joining the Fediverse
2021-09-22T15:06:40Z via Pumpa To: Public, McClane CC: Followers
This isn't news; I've been thinking about it for some time now. But I'm considering scrapping this pump instance and turning Awkwardly into a microblogging site with the capacity to reach outside the Pump.io universe, which feels more and more like it's only nominally federated, because it federates only with itself.
It's doubly frustrating staying on Pump because I set up this instance before the documentation was so explicit about setting up SSL before connecting to other servers. I've poisoned this domain and I'll never be able to connect to other Pump servers and have my site have https at the front of my URL.
It's a shame because I have a user on this site other than myself. Dropping this pump instance would mean @McClane would be left out in the cold.
I suppose the other option is to leave Awkwardly running as is in perpetuity, and find another domain for running a Pleroma or Misskey or (gads!) Mastodon instance. I like this domain name a lot but I suppose there are other clever domain names out there waiting to be used.
I wish I had the (mental) bandwidth to be able to contribute my time developing Pump to help get the version with ActivityPub support off the ground. I hate being "that guy" who complains about a platform's shortcomings without being willing to put the time in writing code. But there are just too many projects out there and too many already on my plate.
So please don't think of this as me complaining. I'm just airing my excuses to try to assuage the guilt I feel for even contemplating abandoning Pump and leaving Awkwardly user(s) out to dry.
Maybe you can setup other things in some subdomain like iam.awkwardly.social, very.awkwardly.social or something 😅
In any case, it's your time and effort, I'd imagine your users would understand.
Here for another year
2020-10-26T17:10:33Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers
Just renewed the awkwardly.social domain. Of course this means I am simultaneously thinking about its future and have less urgency to make any decisions because I've got a whole year before I have to renew it again.
Awkwardly back up
2019-09-06T16:09:52Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers
Hey folks. I upgraded from Stretch to Buster and had to do a little cleanup to get Awkwardly back to running. Was down for about 45 minutes while I tried to figure out what was wrong. I had to downgrade from Node 10 to Node 8 and reinstall databank-mongodb but now we seem to be running again.
(I guess I shouldn't say I had to downgrade from Node 10 to Node 8 and reinstall databank-mongodb, but that's what I actually did and Awkwardly is back.)
🙋 !!
The (un)necessary nature of social media
2019-05-18T17:20:56Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers
New post on my blog in reply to a recent article which asserted that social media can be abandoned:
https://splicer.com/2019/05/18/theres-no-idle-gossip-braille
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Back!
2019-03-04T21:13:37Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers
Awkwardly is back online. That was pretty painless, right? We were only gone for maybe ten minutes. I bet you didn't even notice.
Thank you for your patience.
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Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!! 😃
lol no, didn't notice
Downtime (sort of advance notice this time!)
2019-03-04T20:45:31Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers
I'll be taking Awkwardly down for a few minutes, maybe as much as a half hour, just to do some maintenance stuff.
I'm planning on consolidating a couple of my linodes as I'm paying for more capacity than I'm using. This isn't the migration, but I will be taking some of the preliminary steps toward that.
Anyway, not sure how soon I'll be taking Awkwardly offline but it's in my to-do queue for this afternoon.
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Hooray for backups
2019-02-16T23:56:41Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers
This is the second time in two days I've had to restore from backup because I'd made an error while upgrading software. Yesterday my attempt to upgrade Node took down the Awkwardly site, and today upgrading from PostgreSQL 9 to PostgreSQL 11 took down my personal cloud.
This was a rookie mistake, too. After upgrading two other PostgreSQL installations (successfully, without incident) I restored third new instance to find my data missing. Turns out I typed
pg_dumpwhen I meant to typepg_dumpall.Everyone makes errors from time to time, but chasing after "what went wrong" is stressful and tiring.
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Atticus looks down on me
2019-02-16T04:21:08Z via Awkwardly Social Web To: Public CC: Followers
Maybe instead of breaking my pump instance I should spend more time posting cat pictures.McClane likes this.
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Meeeeeeeeoooww!! 🐈
haha the evil master
Awkward again
2019-02-16T04:14:35Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers
Sorry, broke the instance again when I tried to upgrade from NodeJS 4.9.1 up to 10.
Don't know what I did wrong but everything I did after that made things worse. Finally I restored the entire system from a three-hour-old backup. Now we're running again and it's time for me to go to bed.
Having backups means I don't have to know what I'm doing. :-)
Apologies once again for the inconvenience.
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oof, sorry. there's some weird problems with Node 10 I never found time to look into... Node 8 should work ok though, and is supported with security updates.
AJ Jordan at 2019-02-18T03:36:11Z
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Well, that was awkward
2019-02-15T01:37:04Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers
I installed something on the server to test totally unrelated to the awkwardly.social site and ended up with Apache installed and running.
Normally this pump instance runs behind an nginx proxy. There should be no Apache at all here.
So the site disappeared for a couple of hours after I failed to notice and made and ate dinner. Mea culpa and sorry to anyone who was inconvenienced.
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One of the pitfalls of being an amateur sysadmin, I'm afraid.It was probably the warmest spot in the house.
2018-05-17T14:03:41Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers
To make up for letting Awkwardly crash for almost a week, here's a photo of Awkwardly's mascot Atticus blithely preventing me from getting another slice of pizza.
He's in charge of your diet!!
Whoops! Sorry for the downtime
2018-05-17T13:57:49Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers
I just realized that Awkwardly Social has been down for six and a half days!
I have third party notifications from servercheck.in but this one got lost in my pile of email until this morning when I was cleaning out my inbox.
I know there are a few users on Awkwardly who aren't me. Really really sorry for the inconvenience. I hope I didn't scare you too much.
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ah, I see this came back not long ago. thanks for the fix!
Climbing
2018-05-03T17:27:00Z via Awkwardly Social Web To: Public CC: Followers
Any screen door is like Atticus's own private climbing wall.Atticus earning his keep
2017-11-22T18:53:44Z via Awkwardly Social Web To: Public CC: Followers
Once in a while he spends a little time as a lap catCharles Stanhope likes this.
MacOS Pumpa build
2017-11-17T20:01:51Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers
Used the instructions at https://pumpa.branchable.com/install/ and https://github.com/pump-io/pump.io/wiki/HowTo-for-building-Pumpa-on-OS-X and got it to build with very few hiccups.
First attempt to post with an image didn't go through, but I closed and reopened, and did a plain text test. This is a second test with an image; hopefully the first fail was a fluke.
[Edit] Also testing edits (changed URLs to be links)
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Test from Pumpa on MacOS
2017-11-17T19:58:13Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers
The build process seems to have gone OK, but the first post (with a picture) that I sent doesn't seem to have been submitted. Trying a plain post, see how that goes.
Looks like it went well =)
Dianara attempt is next!
Cool!
It should be quite similar, except that you'll need to get and build QOAuth first.
Mainstream media
2017-11-15T20:46:46Z via Dianara To: Public CC: Followers
Pretty much every day:
1. Wake up
2. Read a story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal
3. Open Twitter
4. See Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovich claim that the story is being ignored by the mainstream media.
clacke@libranet.de ❌ likes this.
RIP Techshop
2017-11-15T19:52:30Z via Dianara To: Public CC: Followers
I wish this were a surprise. Even more I wish this were not true. TechShopSF will be missed https://makezine.com/2017/11/15/techshop-closes-doors-files-bankruptcy/
Lottery
2017-11-15T18:42:55Z via Dianara To: Public CC: Followers
It just occurred to me that I keep $1-$5 that I'd otherwise lose every time I'm in a place that sells lottery tickets and I don't buy any.
So what they told us is a lie. You can win if you don't play.
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My answer when somebody tells me "but you save 50% if you buy this thing now!" is "if I don't need it, I save 100% by not buying it at all".clacke@libranet.de ❌ at 2017-11-16T02:47:35Z
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Pumpa
2017-11-15T18:12:50Z via Dianara To: Public CC: Followers
Does Pumpa exist anymore? Asking for a friend.
(Of course I am my friend.)Show all 5 replies>> JanKusanagi:
“https://pumpa.branchable.com/”
Merci beaucoup!
Doesn't mean I won't keep trying to compile Dianara, but I only have Qt5 on the machine downstairs.
If you mean you have some machines without Qt5, you can always build v1.3.7, the last one to support Qt4 =)
>> JanKusanagi:
“If you mean you have some machines without Qt5, you can always build v1.3.7, the last one to support Qt4 =)”
The machine downstairs is where I have Qt Creator installed.