Category: Uncategorized

I made a thing tonight.

Still life of a fall by Kyle R. Conway is licensed under CC BY 4.0

VirtualCoffee had a great Brownbag talk this morning called How to Promote Yourself to Potential Employers by Abbey Perini. I suspect it will be posted at some point because it was recorded, but there were a number of stellar quotes and I decided to quickly mock up a few of them in Inkscape (initially) and then eventually put one into Blender as well (for fun).

My Rejected 2021 !!CON Talk Accepted PyOhio Application

https://www.pyohio.org/2021/program/speakers/kyle-r-conway

Abstract

Everyone knows that writing code making art is easy! There are so many free resources available on the internet that becoming a programmer an artist has never been easier! In this talk I’ll demo several ways to make a todo list draw a circle! We’ll go through a variety of mediums to get you up-to-speed with new languages and frameworks mediums and methods in no time like:

• Types of paper and surfaces
• Overview of mediums (graphite, inks, acrylics, oils, and more!)
• Performance Art (Dance, Theater, and Song!)
• Digital Applications with live demo circles including:
  • Inkscape
  • Gnu Image Manipulation Program
  • Blender
  • p5.js
  • Krita
  • HTML & CSS
  • and whatever came out between this blurb and the event!

By the end of this talk you’ll be more confident than ever (and not at all overwhelmed!) by the prospect of how easy it is to become a programmer an artist in 2021!

Timeline

• (1-2 Minute mark): The first 1-2 minutes will be spent parodying the language/syntax/and visual style of several landing pages/blogs/paid courses etc. of non-free and free “learn to code” resources. This should be light and funny – the parody will be obvious – but we’re going to take this more seriously than mere parody (i.e. how hard can it be to draw a circle? We’ll take this seriously, though still in a playful/in-character way.)
• (3-7 Minute mark): The bulk of the presentation will literally be demonstrating a multitude of ways to “simply” draw a circle.
  • I will actually have relevant asides about perfect circles (using a drafting compass) vs. sufficient circles (freehand strategies)
  • We’ll talk about these strategies in a variety of mediums (pen, paper, ink, etc.)
  • We’ll discuss the actual effect that different physical papers may have on the resulting shape (printer paper, canvas, etc.).
  • I’ll live demo the creation of a “simple” circle in a variety of free-software tools including Inkscape, Gimp, Krita, and Blender (and more as in the abstract). I will note that I will not be showing how to install these applications on your machines.
  • I’ll also discuss how to make these actually perfect circles created by software less perfect for artistic reasons (and show how to do that in each application).
• (8-9 Minute mark): I’ll conclude with the same platitudes about how drawing a circle is easy and how the learning resources available to you today pale in comparison to what I had when I was learning to draw a circle decades ago.
• (9-10 Minute mark): Break the fourth wall / drop character: I have a PhD in Fine Arts and I’m working on learning coding. I’ll close by noting that coding (like drawing a circle) can both be “easy” and “hopelessly confusing” based on previous knowledge and experience, and it’s important to regularly remind ourselves of this fact when working with, encouraging, and speaking to others. I hope this will help everyone consider this more strongly moving forward.

Intended audience

• Learning to Code: If someone is learning to code (i.e. starting out) they’ve likely come across enough material to both understand and be painfully aware of the parody I’m doing and recognize the specific challenge can exist outside of the tech space too.
• Actively Coding / Coding Mentors / Tech Bloggers, etc.: This group will, I hope, laugh at the title, laugh at the intro, and in the middle demo section realize that what they thought was easy (drawing a circle) has much more complexity too it then they thought, and have the parody hit home in a different way that changes their approach to new learners (and also themselves as tech is always changing).
• Others: I think this is a balanced talk for everyone of all knowledge levels. At absolute worst, people will have a primer on how to draw a circle in a multitude of ways. That’s a pretty good worst outcome.

Short Bio

Kyle R. Conway has a PhD in Fine Arts, an MA in Theater, and experience at successful startup/incubators. He is a 10+ year Linux Desktop user (by choice) and Fedora Linux contributor. He likes tea.

What happens when you just get frustrated and buy an old server on ebay? Well… I don’t know yet because at the moment I’m checking the RAM with memtester on a System Rescue CD running off of a bootable USB drive. What I do know is that this computer has 64G of ECC RAM, 2 Intel xeon processors with a combined 24 cores, and 8 3.5″ drive bays.

After generally confirming the memory was working as intended I ran a CPU stress test for an hour or so a few times. Watching all 24 cores light up in htop was thrilling.

My general plan here is to consolidate other computers that were providing FreeNAS (now TrueNAS), XCP-ng, and other functions into a single unit using the now alpha―should I be scared?―TrueNAS Scale. I’m not switching because TrueNAS is lacking in general as a NAS because it’s been great. It’s just that the VM solution, bhyve, is both not what I’m familiar with and seems generally less good for the virtualization I do. Additionally, TrueNAS is based on BSD, and while BSD is great, I’m far more experienced with Linux having used it for 10 years, and Scale is:

• Built on Debian Linux
• Maintains ZFS for file system
• Integrates the more familiar KVM for virtual machines
• Adds Docker for containers

Basically, it should allow me to consolidate:

1. My virtual machines
   • Currently running on a mix of desktop computers with KVM and a hobbled together machine running XCP-ng.
2. My NAS
   • Currently a dedicated old desktop computer with the sides off.
3. My Docker Containers
   • Running everything from Nextcloud to Minetest and Veloren servers (and increasingly other things).
4. Maybe PFSense (dare I virtualize this?)

I’m have some trepidation about using the alpha TrueNAS Scale on this system that I actually intend to use for real, but I’ve also been very very interested in using this particular iteration of the Free and Open Source project TrueNAS since I heard about it sometime last year (or was it 2019?―what actually is time?).

End of post update

Since I started writing this post I’ve:

• generally validated the hardware is working
• added an internal SSD to directly to the SATA ports
• installed a fresh copy of TrueNAS Scale alpha
• Setup a single-disk pool (pool?) to test things
• installed a docker version of Nextcloud that works well
• created a working VM of Debian 10 Linux and accessed via included VNC
• happily played in the shell with my known panoply of Linux terminal commands (so much less context switching!)
• and generally explored the new web-based GUI (I’m liking it).

I’m not sure exactly when I’m going to fully fully commit to moving all of my day-to-day data over to the new machine (need to add non-test disks for non-test pools), but I suspect in the coming weeks I’ll gain an amount of trust to do so. The release notes indicate a certain stability in many of the elements independently (though when you bring things together who knows), but it looks good.

I’ll likely update here as I encounter problems or move additional items to the server.

Ubuntu server has a nice installation up-front that allows you to pre-select some tools and services at install you might want to have running on your new server.

If you happen to select Wekan it will default to port 8080.

If you then happen to want to install Jenkins via their Debian/Ubuntu method it will fail to fully install at the `sudo apt-get install jenkins` section due to the port 8080 already being occupied.

After running the above command you can edit port in the following file:

sudo nano /etc/default/jenkins

Edit the numbers of the identified port to something other than “8080”

# port for HTTP connector (default 8080; disable with -1)
HTTP_PORT=8090

You can see a video here: https://youtu.be/XVei-AeXLLo

I’ve been cleaning up some items and came across a series of index cards I was using for note-taking during my doctoral dissertation. This one is on the subject of creativity, freedom, attention, and rules.

While this was a preferred method of mine years ago I’ve since migrated to Emacs’ org-mode. I happily typed these in and can say goodbye to the cards themselves and more formally the process.

At any rate, I have some older quotes in a more quickly parsable medium now. I may revisit some of the great ideas in that book in the future here or elsewhere. Mostly I am writing this to say: once I took notes like this. Future self, do you remember this?

http://lichess.org/training/36308