I like travelling. Who doesn’t, really? Also, I like taking pretty pictures. However, armed only with my phone, the possibilities are limited. Taking a scenery photo during the day will turn out nice, but trying to capture a giant red moon rising at night would be a futile attempt.
Summer Sonic 2018
Have you seen the lineup of this year’s Summer Sonic? It’s pretty amazing. Sure not as amazing as Rock in Japan, but still great. It’s been 7 years since my last Summer Sonic (I was there in Osaka in 2010 and 2011). It usually has one or two artists that catch my attention, but rarely enough to get me to actually go.
This year though there were two bands on the lineup that I didn’t dare miss: ling tosite sigure (don’t get mad at me for the spelling, it’s official) and Mastodon.
No JavaScript, please
The other day I got an email from Axosoft that the payment for my GitKraken license (yes I use GitKraken) was rejected by my credit card company. It was because the card I used there expired, but nonetheless I had to take action.
That involved going on their website and changing my payment method to a card that still worked. It involved first an overwhelmingly complex table like this.
Mounting folders as Docker volumes
When trying to pass data between a Docker container and the host, using ADD in the Dockerfile might be sufficient at first. However, it’s one way, get burned in the image and so very inflexible.
The usual solution is to mount folders using docker‘s -v option. It’s simple, easy to use and pretty reliable. Just add -v "$(pwd):/root" and the current folder will be mounted to the /root folder in the container.
Using volumes is nice because they’re (can be) two way and (can) sync in real-time. Now you don’t need to rebuild your image every time you fix a typo. -v has pretty deep configuration options too, in case you want to go down the rabbit hole.
Using Java signatures in Clojure
A while back I was trying to implement HTTP signatures to use with ActivityPub interactions with Mastodon. In Clojure. There is a go-to library for Clojure when it comes to crypto stuff, but I couldn’t get it to do the specific thing I needed: SHA-256 / RSA signatures. I looked at other options too, but as I’m not familiar with NaCl, that was just a confusing mess of wrappers around Java wrapped around C.
In the end I went with using Java interop to call Bouncy Castle stuff directly. I hate Java and interop in Clojure just feels wrong, but at least I could get it to work. Not to mention if something, Bouncy Castle is maintained. It wasn’t exactly a joyride, but it works. Check out the source if you’re interested (or want to use it). I didn’t make it stand-alone or put it up on Clojars (yet).
Dealing with weird keywords in Clojure specs
Recently I’ve been working on a Clojure implementation for ActivityPub. In the process I wanted to use specs, but I ran into a pretty significant problem. Namely the very first line in basically every single ActivityPub JSON object: { "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams" }.
Do you see the problem? Well. This JSON will arrive at the server, where it’ll be handled by Cheshire or something along those lines. Point is, keys in JSON maps will end up turned into keywords. Clicked the link? The guide isn’t exactly specific about what can and can’t go into a keyword.
Ubuntu 18.04 L2TP IPsec VPN
Occasionally I work from home, and access to certain development resources is restricted to either the office IP or the use of a secure VPN. Since everyone uses Macs or Windows at the office there are no manuals or guides to set it up on linux, so I had to figure stuff out myself.
First of all, Ubuntu doesn’t have L2TP support out of the box currently, but luckily Ask Ubuntu has plenty of questions on the topic. Apparently L2TP was removed at 16.04 for some dependency reason, and replaced with a package called StrongSwan. Luckily it’s in the main repository, so it can be installed without much hassle. (However, I tried it on 18.04 and I was unable to add a VPN as the Save/Apply button simply wouldn’t work.)
The case of the deaf BroadcastReceiver
This weekend I decided to upgrade my old Android #nowplaying app. For the new version I decided to use Kotlin and also make it usable from my Android smartwatch. Honestly, it went much smoother than expected, except for one big caveat.
Out of some weird impulse, I decided to target the Oreo SDK (26). Both my phone and my watch are Oreo based, so that wouldn’t be a problem. Yet I kept running into the weird problem that my BroadcastReceivers wouldn’t receive any intents whatsoever. Interestingly enough, the WearableListenerService I used to to listen to Messages from the watch (I want to post when I tap a button on the watch) worked almost instantly.
Sync to my phone
I originally planned to make a Rust program that would fix the broken encodings in my music files. Luckily, I could solve that without Rust. Luckily, because from what I’ve experienced since then, it would’ve been a horrible pain in the ass to do.
I still wanted to give Rust a try. Contributing Servo is pretty much out of question – it’s just too high level to jump into as a complete beginner. (And honestly, I don’t think I’ll get past “complete beginner” with Rust anytime soon if ever.) It wasn’t hard to find another issue.
Android and UTF-8 ID3 tags
Remember I complained about the Unicode tags in some of my MP3 files would be borked really badly on Android? Well, I solved it. Kind of.
For a while I’ve been trying to figure out what could be causing it. Some of my files were fine, some weren’t. Even innocent stuff like umlaut characters in German could break, while Japanese music would be displayed correctly.
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Recent Posts
Tags
ale anime art beer blog clojure code coffee deutsch emo english fansub filozófia food gaming gastrovale geek hegymász jlc kaja kubernetes kultúra language literature live magyar movie másnap politika rant sport suli szolgálati közlemény travel társadalom ubuntu university weather work zene 日本 日本語 百名山 艦これ 軽音
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