I’ve been trying to use social media less and this site more. The hope is to keep a more thorough, short-form log of stuff I’ve read, watched, made, eaten, thought about, etc. However, since the site is a Jeykll-backed static site, I previously had to be at my laptop to post a new entry.

While there are more sophisticated options for managing Jekyll sites, I really just wanted to simple webform to post a new entry which I could access from my phone.

After a few hours of hacking, I put together a simple FastAPI endpoint which performs the following operations:

• Accepts a title, list of categories, post body, an image or video, and an API key for security.
• Pulls the latest version of this site’s repo from GitLab.
• Resizes the image and/or video using ffmpeg
• Generates a jekyll-formatted markdown file and writes it to the appropriate directory.
• Commits the changes and pushes them back to GitLab.

Since this site uses GitLab CI to publish new changes, the new post shows up in 1-2 minutes.

Some things I’d like to add in the future:

• Auto-dithering of images to reduce page size like lowtech magazine. (On the note of reducing page size, there’s some pretty minimal Javascript running that uses JQuery which I could probably scrap).
• Add an “edit” button to each log entry so I can fix typos, or even have log entries that grow over time.
• Some sort of comment-via-email functionality? (this is half-baked).

Here are links to the form and the source code.

Watched Pedro Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Enjoyed the intro sequence with Ivan’s voiceover teamed with the fact that he only interacts with Pepa via voice messages (including their shared work dubbing English films in Spanish) until the end of the film. It’s as if some men treat relationships as nothing more than a series of cliché lines cribbed from pop culture. I saw Almodovar’s recent short with Tilda Swinton, The Human Voice, earlier this year and it clearly drew upon this earlier film, including the vibrant palette of reds, greens, and blues.

Watched Marty last night, a low-key story about a lonely butcher in the Bronx. I loved the back-and-forth between the title character and his friend trying to figure out what to do on a Saturday night, the characters of his mother and aunt, and this line:

Ma, whaddaya want from me? Whaddaya want from me? I’m miserable enough as it is. All right, so I’ll go to the Stardust Ballroom. I’ll put on a blue suit, and I’ll go. And you know what I’m gonna get for my trouble? Heartache. A big night of heartache.

Quote from “Langley’s City Directory” about commuting in San Francisco circa 1867. At the Cable Car Museum.

I initially came across this article through a citation in Software Sustainability, a collection of articles on the topic of “Green in Software” - generally how to make software more sustainable by reducing its carbon footprint. The article referenced “Wirth’s Law” which is:

Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

This can be contrasted with “Moore’s Law”, the better-known observation that the complexity of computers doubles every two years.

Together, these two “laws” form “Jevon’s Paradox” as appled to computing, in which increases in the energy efficiency of computers (defined as the proportion of processing power outputted to energy inputted) have lowered costs and thereby increased demand, negating the efficiency gains. This paradox was initially observed after Watt’s steam engine, which made coal more cost-effective, led to the increased use of steam engines, and therefore coal, as well.