E-Bikes

A few months ago, I was perusing the YouTubes, as one does while social distancing during a pandemic, and it served up a video review of an e-bike. It's been a while since I owned a bicycle, so the tech was new to me, and I watched enough videos that now YouTube thinks I'm an e-bike fanatic or something.

So after months of watching videos I thought, hey, I should try riding one of those things. So, today Heiðar and I went out to test ride a few.

At the first stop, I tried out a Trek Verve+ 2, and (I think) the Trek Verve+ 3. They were both quite nice! They've got a "mid-drive" electric motor, situated down between the pedals, that assists you as you pedal. Even if you turn it off completely, the bike rode quite nicely despite the extra weight.

At the second stop, we tried out a brand whose name I'll avoid mentioning. When their sales guy heard we'd tried a Trek earlier that day, he spent a lot of time telling us how bad it was. He claimed mid-drive motors are worse because they're harder to pedal when the assist is off. (I did not find this to be the case, and in fact, the bikes he was selling with hub drives in the wheels seemed harder to pedal with no assist.)

Still, he was nice and we each tested a few different models. I'm both out of practice and out of shape so we called it quits for the day, but I'm looking forward to trying some more later this week.

I'm trying to decide if the expense will be worth it. I'd like some activity to get me out of the house, and biking sounds fun. We're thinking e-bikes because the neighborhood we live in (and San Diego in general) is pretty hilly, so having something to help get up the steeper hills would be nice. But there's always the chance that after biking for a while the novelty will wear off and we'll have bought ourselves a couple expensive, electrified dust collectors.

FeoBlog v0.3.0 Released

This release brings file attachments to your posts, so bring on the cat pictures!

It also adds automatic builds and releases via [GitHub Actions], which is a nice thing for me. 😊

Version 0.3.0

Released: Feb. 25, 2021
https://github.com/NfNitLoop/feoblog/releases/tag/v0.3.0

New Features

• Attachments!
  You can now attach files to posts by dragging them onto the post editor. A link to the file will be automatically generated for you. If the file is an image, it'll be inlined in your post by default. Syncing between servers will also sync file attachments.
• Release automation.
  This is more for me than for y'all, but the result of this is that releases should be regularly available via the releases page.

Note: There's a known issue (Bug #16) that is preventing Windows builds from working at the moment. I'll enable Windows builds when that's fixed.

Improvements

• Switched to comrak for server-side (plain HTML) rendering of Markdown.
  Users shouldn't notice any changes, but this library operates in a "safe by default" mode which is nice.
• Improved browser caching.
  Protobuf "Items" (and file attachments) are now served with HTTP headers to allow browsers to cache them indefinitely, since they should never change.
• SQLite's "Write Ahead Logging" ("WAL") mode is now enabled when available, which greatly increases write throughput when syncing. This also means that reads and writes do not block each other.
• Disable in-browser signature verification during sync.
  This further improves sync speed, since in-browser crypto is particularly slow. The server will still validate that the objects it receives are cryptographically signed. (And the in-browser client still always verifies content signatures before displaying them.)

Bug Fixes

• Fixed some minor rendering issues when viewing a server w/ no posts.

First Post! (... with a cat)

FeoBlog v0.3.0 is out and it supports file attachments. Everyone knows The Internet is for pictures of your cat, so here we go.

Version 0.2.0!

Version 0.2.0 is out now.

New Features

• Comments!
• Lots of style updates. Items (post/comments) now have a single-line header of metadata.
• Identicons!
• Server-side support for replies.
• New feoblog db upgrade command to keep your database up-to-date with the latest versions of FeoBlog.
• Relative timestamps. (But you can mouse-over a date to see absolute times.)

And more. See all the details on GitHub

It's funny. I'm way more interested in writing FeoBlog than posting to it. Sometimes I feel my own words are boring or tedious, so I'd rather just read others'.

I've been having fun working on the next version of FeoBlog. It's going to have comments, as well as some other features I worked on along the way. (Faster loading of items. Relative timestamps. Some style updates. Uhh... other stuff I've forgotten. Don't worry, there'll be a changelog. 😛)

Example Client

Curious how easy it is to write a client for FeoBlog?

Check out fb-rss.py, a utility to sync an RSS feed into FeoBlog.

Demo Video

A video demo of the features available in v0.1.0 is now available on YouTube.

If you're interested in learning more, but haven't had time to set up your own server, hopefully this will help!

Video Editing

Today I recorded a screencast demoing some of the features of FeoBlog. I'm excited to share it with the world, but first I had to brush up on my video editing skills. (... as if I had any to start with.)

If I were on a Mac, I'd probably have just used iMovie. But, since I recorded using OBS on my Windows PC, I thought I'd just edit the video there.

Windows Photos

So Windows used to have an app called "Windows Movie Maker". Apparently that's just been folded into the Photos app in Windows 10. After I used OBS to "remux" my files to .mp4 files, Photos was able to edit them. Basic trimming worked, but when I went to export things, the resolution was limited to 1080p, though I'd recorded in 1440p.

I was a bit worried about things becoming blurry since some text was unfortunately already a bit small, so I looked for alternatives.

Shotcut

I came across a nice video on YouTube that recommended Shotcut, so I gave that a try. But at first it seemed unable to play my video files.

After some googling, I found that I needed to go to Settings → Display Method → OpenGL (instead of DirectX). That seemed to let it render my videos, but despite having really beefy hardware, things were still really sluggish.

I briefly tried out OpenShot, which has a much nicer site than Shotcut, but it had even more performance issues. (At one point, it took ~15 seconds to close after I'd clicked the close button, and all it was doing was playing back video clips I had put into the timeline.)

Back in Shotcut, I was able to edit things into a somewhat nice state. Tips for any beginners:

• If playing video/audio becomes choppy, save the project and re-launch the application.

• Save often. I found myself accidentally pressing keys that mapped to shortcuts I didn't know about. Having a restore point is handy.

• Though the app tells you it'll auto-detect your video size & frame rate from the first video you attach, it does not seem to do so for 1440p. You'll need to add a custom video mode in Settings → Video Mode.

  I'd neglected to do this, and my first export shrank my 1440p video to 1080p, then upscaled it back to 1440p since that was the export resolution I chose. Took me a while to figure out why just exporting my video had made it so blurry. 👎

Exports are still really slow, unfortunately. My 21.5 minute video is taking over an hour to export. It looks like a lot of operations may be CPU bound. I wonder if it would've been faster to just copy things over to my old MacBook Air and use iMove.

Giles

🐱 stares at my feet

"... yes?"

🐱 looks up at my face, then at my feet

Oh! Uh... is this the first time you've seen me in socks? 😆

So we adopted a cat about a month ago. We named him Giles. There are some pics on Instagram.

It's been nice seeing him come out of his shell. He was quite shy when we got him. Before we let him have free roam of the apartment, he would hide behind between the shower curtain and the front of the tub. Once he had access to the whole apartment, he lived under the bed until we started fishing him out from under there and having "no bedroom access" time.

Now he'll happily spend time with us in the living room or in my office, even when he has access to his hiding spot. But sudden movements do still send him running for cover. We can't scold him for anything because he seems to constantly think he's already in trouble. Poor thing!

Public Release

The first publicly released version of FeoBlog, version 0.1.0 is now available on GitHub! 🎉

https://github.com/NfNitLoop/feoblog

First Post!

... on my personal account, at least. :)

Hello, World!

This is the first post on my public FeoBlog server. 🎉

Tomorrow, I'll work to get the source code cleaned up and published to GitHub so people can run their own servers. For today, ping me personally if you want to be an early tester. :)