And I'm done! While it did only turn out to be one a week, I pulled it off, I managed to make it to at least one Fringe show per week!

Yesterday was a full, busy, and hugely enjoyable day. While it could have just been a dash into town to see the show and back home again, in conjunction with Mariëlle (who first introduced me to the Mythos show) we arranged to go watch Oppenheimer first (amazing, easily the fastest any combined 3 hours have passed for me -- I'm not even going to try and write up anything about this, other than I was utterly enthralled by the movie from start to end), grab some dinner, then go and see Mythos: Ragnarok.

With a wee bit of shopping thrown in along the way.

As I've mentioned before, I first saw Ragnarok last year. Then they were in a fairly small venue, with a pretty full crowd. At the end they talked about how the first night they'd played the audience had been a single person; over the nights of the run it had slowly grown, and by the end of the run (we went on the last night) it was getting properly busy.

This year they were in a much bigger place, with a lot more seating, and the house was full. This did make it feel a little less intimate than last year, and also last year we were sat all around the stage, which worked well for the performance; this time around it was a more traditional stage at the front, seating all on one side thing. I was really pleased for them that they were in a much bigger place, but I did miss the layout from last year.

As for the show itself... just as fantastic. There seemed to have been some tweaks and changes to how the story was done over what I remember from last year, but mainly it was the same. The energy in the performance was incredible, and the comedy was spot on, with a lot of nods and winks to the audience. This is the part that I think I enjoy most: they know what they have, they know what they're doing, they know what they have on offer. It's a high-energy play performed by stunt people.

It's amazing.

As I write this there's one last show, I believe, tonight; so the chances of anyone reading this and getting to see it are very remote. But if they're back next year, and you're reading this near then and wondering about Fringe shows, do it! Really, do it. You won't regret it.

I'll be going again. No question.

Almost seven years ago I took up maintaining an ad-hoc photoblog again. I say again because I'd had one once before. I'd kicked that off back in the late 200xs, with my little HTC Magic, and hosted it on Posterous. Eventually Posterous was shut down, mostly because the company (or at least the team behind it)) had been bought up by Twitter. When kicking off the blog this time I decided on a few things:

• I'd host it on Blogger.com; it had been around for long enough, and of course Google could be trusted to keep something that big up and running for good.
• I'd keep multiple backup copies of the images and file them in useful ways (I keep copies in Google Photos, on Google Drive, on iCloud and locally).
• As much as possible I'd automate the process of doing some, if not all of this.

At this point, while it was kind of old as an idea, this felt very much like one of those things that was perfect to do in a Web 2.0 way; the good old reliable mashable web!

So the plan became this:

• Every post would be a tweet, posted to Twitter with a #photoblog tag.
• I'd use ifttt to keep an eye on my tweets and when it saw one with that tag it would extract the image, make a post to Blogger, drop a copy into Google Drive, and do a couple of other things too.
• Every week or so I'd do some manual checks to make sure everything is looking okay.

This worked. Mostly. It ran fine for a few years, with very few problems. I'd take a photo, manipulate the heck out of it for the emotional effect I was going for (that was the point of the blog; it was all about the messing with the image), tweet it, and Web 2.0 magic would happen.

Then the odd issue started to crop up. At one point Twitter made changes to how images were stored, or something, and the ifttt recipe broke for a wee while; then they changed the way that public posts could be seen (long before the Musk-era bullshit) and that broke things again, and so on. I forget the details but at every point I was able to nurse it back to life and things carried on.

Recently, of course, it all fell apart when Musk took over Twitter and massively ruined it, turning it into the steaming pile it is now¹. I've honestly lost track of which change broke what, and of course I also gave up even trying to use Twitter (the drip, drip, drip of right-wing hate politics got to a point where I could not find a way to make it work any more). So that's when I decided to cut Twitter out altogether.

This had actually started a little earlier than that, when the whole API fiasco kicked off. When that came in ifttt had to remove Twitter things from its free tier; I was on the free tier. I was on the free tier only because I didn't need anything the paid service offered. If Twitter had been "normal" and this change had been made I'd have happily paid -- I don't mind paying for things I find useful.

But, nope, given all the context, I bailed.

So by that point I decided the easiest thing to do was to simply hand-add posts to Blogger, and also along the way post to a pixelfed account instead, reposting those posts from my Fosstodon account. Not ideal, needing more manual input, but also I was thinking that once I find a good flow I could probably automate the whole thing again.

Anyway, that's the point I'd reached. Twitter was 100% out of the workflow, there was a bit more manual intervention, but the primary location for the photos was still getting updated.

Then yesterday I noticed this:

I don't actually quite know exactly what's going on here, and at this point I really don't care. My working hypothesis is this: when ifttt added the images to the Blogger posts, it was doing so in a way that it was using the image hosted by Twitter. Because of this, either due to some change in the Twitter API, or perhaps because I've locked down my Twitter account, the images can't be served any more. That's my best guess anyway.

I don't really care to dig deeper than that.

But, yeah, this is another example of the long-growing rot of the dream of Web 2.0. I'm not surprised; I'm not angry; I'm just disappointed.

Thankfully I have all the images saved (see backup options above), so I can go back and edit the posts and drop fresh copies of the images into them. There's 100s of posts affected so this is going to take quite a while; I mean, sure, I could probably do it in a day if I sat and did nothing else, but I have other things to do.

Another option would of course be to create a fresh blog using my own tools; that would be simple enough. I have the images, they're all set with the right date and time, recreating things would be fairly trivial (post titles a slight problem but I could work around that); a tool like mkdocs or Pelican plus some Python code to recreate the posts from the images would be a fun couple of hours mucking about. But... I have a lot of posts on Blogger and all the URLs are stable and still there many years later.

Perhaps I could automate the "fixing" of the broken posts? I wonder what the Blogger API is like to work with?

PS: If you've read this and feel that what's really needed is a "helpful" comment that self-hosting is the solution; please sit on that and read the above again (and, you know, look over the rest of this blog and the entirety of my time and content on the Internet in general and the Web in particular, going back to the mid-90s).

As mentioned just over a week back, last night I went to see a Fringe show that was a production of The Little Shop of Horrors. Before going I had no idea what to expect (in terms of how it would be done, not what the content would be): I wasn't clear if it would be a really small affair, or something on a bigger stage with reasonably high production values (what can I say? It was LSoH, it was a Fringe show, it was booked knowing nothing else).

When we got there and got into the venue it was... small, oh so very small! No real set to speak of. The cast who were about to kick off the performance didn't really seem to have much of a costume going on. So, without judgement, I settled down to expect the next 90 minutes or so to be... a Fringe experience.

First impressions were oh so wrong! While there was (for obvious reasons) a lack of any real set, the effort that went into the performance really worked and I absolutely enjoyed every single moment. Also, because it was a production of the musical (which I haven't seen), rather than an adaption of the movie (which I have), I got to experience a fresh ending (spoilers!).

The seats were uncomfortable. The room was down in the basement, with no ventilation, and so was uncomfortably hot. Physically it wasn't a great space to be. And yet I really wasn't wishing for it to be over. I think that says a lot about the show itself.

I think special mention has to be given to the Audrey II models, of which there were three different sizes. Someone put some real effort into them.

So, yeah, a fun night, topped and tailed with pre-show dinner and post-show drinks with friends. I couldn't have asked for more.

Unless I last-moment book anything else over the next week, there's one more show to go in my push to go and see at least one show per week of the Fringe.

PS: Sadly no photos. I wasn't sat in a great spot to take photos.

That's a third show booked! This means that, as I hoped, I'm going to manage at least one show a week for the Fringe!

Now, this one could be seen as a cheat, sorta, kinda. I've seen this show before. But I liked it so much last year I have to see it again! The odd thing about it was it's not something I would have gone for on my own, it's technically not really my thing, but I got talked into it and I'm so glad I was!

So a year back Mariëlle told me about this wrestling show at the Fringe and how she wanted to go but nobody else was interested and I was all "yebbut wrestling though?" and didn't think much more about it. Eventually though, after some persuasion (I mean, an hour or so at a show and some beers afterwards, how bad could it be really?), I agreed to go. I expected to find it meh.

Holy shit was it so much fun! Like, seriously so much fun. I'd never realised that wrestling was the best way to tell the tales from Norse mythology; turns out that wrestling is absolutely the best way to tell the tales from Norse mythology.

So we're off back again this year. All booked, not this weekend, the weekend after.

There might even be a beer afterwards. Perhaps not quite so many as last year though.

This evening I've spent more time working on the planned complete remake of my personal website, in this case "porting" over many of the files that made up the old "miscellaneous stuff" section of the site. If I'm honest, most if not all of the things in there are no longer relevant (like: who really needs a shell script to make gnuplot plots from files pulled off a 1990s-era Garmin handheld GPS unit?), but I thought I'd keep them kicking around "just in case".

One wee section I wasn't going to get rid of though was my scans of three pages from a UK magazine called Personal Computer News. These contain Grid Bike; a game I wrote for the VIC-20, all in BASIC, and got published. For my efforts I got a huge cheque for £40! If that doesn't seem like much to you, trust me, to 1983 me this was huge.

I bought a 16k RAM pack with the money.

Funnily enough, while trying to improve some of the links in the text, I decided to see if there was now an archive online somewhere and, sure enough, there is: in the obvious place. This means that my web site isn't the only copy of my program on the net. If you go to the December 21st 1983 edition and turn to around page 84, there I am!

At this point I'm almost tempted to try and get an emulator up and running and get the code going again. How much fun would it be to add a video to my YouTube channel, of me playing one of the very first games I wrote?

Late on last year I wrote about a bunch of new things that I'd added to PyPi, things mostly kicked off by an early dog-fooding session we had at textual HQ. Since then I've been slowly doing my best to keep the applications up to date with Textual.

As much as possible we try and not make breaking changes with the framework, but at the same time it is still 0.x software and there's still new ways of doing things being designed so there's going to be the odd break in approach now and again.

Unbored, my kind of silly self-populating TODO list application, has been sitting atop Textual 0.20.x for a while now and earlier today I checked how it was getting in with 0.32.0 and... actually surprisingly okay. Not perfect, there were a couple of things that had suffered from bitrot, but it wasn't crashing.

The main thing I needed to change was the ability to focus a couple of containers (they didn't used to receive focus by default, now they do so I had to tell them not to again), and that was about it.

While I was in there I also updated the application so that I dropped the nifty little slide-in error dialog I'd made, and instead embraced the new Textual notification system.

While the application itself is a bit silly, and likely of no real use to anyone, I feel it's a pretty good barometer application, helping me check what the experience is like when it comes to maintaining a Textual application and the needs to keep on top of changes to Textual.

It goes without saying, I hope, that really you should pin the Textual dependency for your applications, and upgrade in a controlled and tested way; for this though it's less crucial and is a good test of the state of the ecosystem, and on the remote chance that anyone is using it, it'll be helpful to me if it does break and they yell.

This morning I've spent a wee bit of time tinkering with the configuration of the planned complete remake of my personal website. As part of this I made an effort to "port" over a section of the site. The choice for the first section to move was easy enough: Norton Guides.

Of all the parts of my old site, this is probably the most useful in terms of "contains information that isn't generally available out there on the web elsewhere and some folk might find it useful". I mean, at some point in the past, someone edited the Wikipedia page for Norton Guides and linked to mine as a source.

So getting that one back up and running as soon as possible made sense.

I've not added every bit of Norton Guide code to the main page, instead just pulling over and tidying up what was there before. On the other hand, just hacking on Markdown makes it all so much easier so I may expand on it a bit.

The really important part was moving over the file format details. This, I feel, is the information that people will be looking for, if anyone is ever looking.

So, proper start made; there's content beyond the landing page. There's still a lot to weed out and move over, and I think there's a lot of tweaking and the like with the configuration to do too. But the ball is rolling now. Ever time I get a spare hour and the desire to sit at my desk I can pick a section, look it over, decide if it deserves to come over, and act on that.

Heck, at this rate I might even end up with an actively-maintained website again!

As mentioned about a week back, my first show booked for this year's Edinburgh Fringe was to see Nick Harper. It's been a long time since I've seen him; far too long. As best as I can tell the last gig I made it to was in 2009.

Fourteen years. Shit's changed in that time, for me, for the world. O_o

On first getting into town it was warm and crowded, with that fun "town is doing festival shit" vibe that I like, so I went and grabbed an ice cream to kill some time until the venue opened. I knew I was in the right spot when, as I stood on Chambers Street, enjoying the cooldown, the man himself dashed passed, guitar case in hand!

When I got into the venue I grabbed a drink and tried to find a seat; most were taken; except for one right at the front and off to the side. So I grabbed it. Moments later Nick himself came over to say hello to the folk sat in this spot. We had a wee chat about how long it was since I'd last seen him, nattered about general stuff, and he said very nice things about my hat.

The gig itself was fantastic. While I love his recorded work anyway, Nick's always been one of those artists who I enjoy most live. He's got this way of singing and playing guitar that fills whatever time he's got to play; never once have I ever found myself looking at my watch, wondering if it's near the end; or if I have it's because I'm worried it'll be over soon.

A good number of the tracks he played I didn't recognise; at least two of them I know are from a new album that's coming, and I have to admit that when I do listen to his stuff it's the earlier works that tend to go into heavy rotation (I think the last album of his I bought was The Last Guitar). But I loved everything I got to hear. I'll be diving back into his catalogue and also keeping an eye out for the new release.

While there was only an hour for his slot, he did manage to get a couple of old favourites of mine in; I was delighted when he launched into By My Rocket Comes Fire, did a wonderful She Rules My World, and even squeezed in a quick Galaxy Song.

All too quickly though, the hour was up. It was kind of fitting that many of the songs he did have on the set list were all about time (on purpose, I'm sure). I'm happy to say I got to say a quick thank you and goodbye and then it was time for me to head out of town again.

Seeing Nick brought back a lot of good memories, and reminded me that I need to catch up on his more recent works. While most of his stuff doesn't seem to be on Apple Music (what can I say, I'm very online these days when it comes to music), I'm glad to see he's got a full Bandcamp, so I'll be paying that a visit!

I hope he swings back this way some time soon, not during the Fringe, and with a proper long set. It's been too long since I got to enjoy him really going for it and having a ton of fun.

A couple of weeks back I mentioned home my main HomePod had got stuck installing 16.6 of the software that runs it. This situation persisted for days after writing that post and I kept promising myself that I was going to see if I could unstick it by removing it from the Home, doing a factory reset and adding it back again.

Of course, during the week that followed, I never got round to that. You can imagine what it's like: no time in the morning, and by the time I get home in the evening I want to watch TV and use the HomePod as the speaker for the Apple TV, I don't want to be doing tech support shit.

The following weekend... yeah, I kinda forgot.

So, here I am, a couple of Saturdays on, it's early morning, I've had breakfast and I'm having coffee and I think it's the perfect time to do this. I hope the Home app my on iPad and... it's sorted!

So, yeah, it looks like it somehow managed to unstick itself in the end. A quick test of some of the issues I was seeing suggested there was still an issue, for example asking for the temperature in the bedroom would still result in a "working on it" reply followed by it telling me it wasn't responding. A quick reset seems to have fixed that.

I guess it's good to know: if it happens again, it'll keep on working as the speaker for my Apple TV, and it'll eventually sort itself out even if I don't muck about with a hard reset.

And I'm off! This morning I spent a good amount of time going through the sources for the old version of davep.org and removing everything that won't be needed any more, and also building up a rough TODO list of things I may want to recreate as content.

With that done, as mentioned earlier today, I started work on building the site around Pelican. Pretty quickly though I started to feel that that was going to be a bad choice. While Pelican felt like a perfect fit for this blog -- mainly because it seems to be very blog-oriented -- it was feeling a bit clunky for a general website that would have a handful of static pages at best; likely something I wouldn't be updating too often.

So I put it aside and went on with my morning, doing normal Friday domestic stuff like the weekly supermarket shop. It was while I was out doing that that I realised the obvious answer: use what we use for the Textual docs and what's been used for label.dev: Material for MkDocs!

I've just spent about 40 minutes after lunch kicking that off and it was really straightforward. Of course the result is horrifically cookie-cutter in terms of its look -- such is the way that mkdocs-material sites end up looking out of the box -- but I don't much care about that; what's important is that I've got a placeholder page in place, and I've quickly built a framework for writing and publishing the content.

So that's the plan: now that the welcome page is in place and there's something on my domain that looks like a working website again I can start to slowly drag in old content in a new format. Heck, if I'm careful I might even be able to retain some of the old URLs!

Longer-term plans might involve finally sorting out https support (yes, even today, my site is http-only), and perhaps adding some sort of RSS feed so there's a record of when changes are made.

After that... hopefully that'll be about it and perhaps the website will last another 22 years running on top of the same engine (actually that part should be easier because the "engine" is now local and it generates a static site).

The question then becomes who'll last longer, the site or me?