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Bluesky for comments on mkdocs blog

Background

I have recently migrated this blog from Jekyll to Mkdocs using material theme. I was also planning to move away from Disqus commenting system given all the known issues and just when I had finished the migration to Mkdocs, there was this post from Emily Liu - which showcases how easily the bluesky replies to a post can be added in comments section of a blog page. Followed closely by this, was a post from Cory Zue who created NPM packaging.

I initially was looking to use that on my blog and while searching for that package on jsdelivr, I came across the bluesky-comments-tag: a package created by Matt Kane. I understood the code behind this one much better and that was my starting point. There were two problems with the solution thus far that I wanted to solve.

Problem Description

For the comments to appear on the blog, the bluesky post url needs to be added to the frontmatter. Now that is a cyclic process because you can't post the url of your blog post on bluesky until you have published it.

This, I have solved to an acceptable flow as shown below and the "How?" is explained in this post.

Logseq Customisations for Project Management Template

Background

While the overall planning of project timeline gets lot of attention in the world of software, the most important aspect of project management in my experience is maintaining and tracking Issues and Actions. This in normal project management practice is carried out through the use of an Actions Log and an Issues Log. In addition any medium complexity project invariably will have internal and external dependencies / constraints, risks which I tend to track on Constraints Log and Risks Log. Finally, every project has decisions that I track on a Decisions Log.

Additionally, any opportunities that I identify during the course of project that are not in the scope of my project I capture those too in an Opportunities Log

Now all these logs have fairly standard fields so I created and started using an excel template and began calling it CARDIO Log short for log of Constraints, Actions, Risks, Decisions, Issues, Opportunities for a given project. This has worked well for me over the past 15 years or so but there are times where in order to maintain it meant cross linking an action to an issue or a risk and so on and more often than not it would become easier to just track actions in one of the other logs and that would make it a bit chaotic.

That problem, however, is what I thought, can be resolved using Logseq especially after starting with the template by the Logseq community user Luhman and starting with his template and explanation provided here.

Git Basics

Basics of Git

Recently, I was asked to help people understand what is this whole business with GIT and I ran a few sessions on the topic specifically keeping in mind that my audience consisted of tech enthusiasts with minimal tech background. The content below is how I explained and as it went down well, I figured it may be helpful to someone else too; hence this post. 😄

JupyterLite on Github Enterprise with Panel enabled

Recently I found myself in a scenario where I had access to Github Enterprise but was limited to a windows machine. Now I wanted to host JupyterLite on Github Enterprise so it can be used by some other people on my team. Challenge was the "Actions" on this instance of Github enterprise were disabled and so I had to build Jupyterlite locally and push it on Github. I figured while at it, I might as well enable the "Panel" and few other dependencies. The steps that worked for me are documented here. This is ofcourse assuming that Python is already installed on the device.

The final hosted JupyterLite can be seen in action here.

The steps below created a Jupyterlite instance that allows use of Panel using the %pip install panel magic command, and if used on Chrome or its derivatives it also allows exploring local file system.

Tech for Diabetics

Background

As a diabetic there are a number of things we are not able to control but one thing we can do is keep tabs on our data and while in past it would have meant meticulously noting down BG readings in a diary, today it is much much easier with all the apps and connected services. In this article, I aim to go through the list of technologies that I am aware of and use to keep on top of my diabetic data right from my phone.

Converting AAX (Audible) to mp3

Lately I have been a bit frustrated because while I subscribe to Audible services, Amazon and Google do not play nice with each other limiting me - the owner of books with rights to listen my purchase on any device - in my options on where I can listen. Now I am yet to find a good solution that can get my files playing on google home and not just Alexa, I guess first step was to free my audiobooks from Amazon jail. That as it turns out is rather simple to do.I must at this point mention OpenAudible which is one fine tool. However, their latest version (2.0.7 at the time of writing) added some limitations whereby you can get it to download the AAX files but not convert them to mp3 without purchasing their license. However,converting AAX to mp3 is accomplished using ffmpeg and I do not believe a nice GUI wrapper is what I need and hence I do not believe my money is well spent in getting a license just to achieve from a graphical user interface what I can achieve for free from the terminal with a single line.There are 3 steps in the conversion process:

Metabase - A BI solution that just works

I like exploring new solutions and anything to do with data always piques my interest. I came across this nice tool through the list of free self hosted software.

UPDATE

I am still getting introduced to the world of docker and while most of it just works few things confuse the hell out of me.

Anyway what happened is there was an update for Metabase and I wanted to apply it on my container and in doing so I realised that some of this post can be changed to make it a better experience from get go because after update all my config and dashboards were gone and I had to reconfigure everything.

It could be that my lack of knowledge meant I did something wrong and faced the issue but irrespective doing it as per updated post below will ensure you dont face the issue at all because I have now tested it twice to ensure it works well.