René’s old blog
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Synology DS720+ and NVME drives – followup
A while ago I managed to use the NVME drives on a Synology DS720+ NAS as drives, which has worked fine — until today.
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WordPress Full Site Editing
In the past I’ve been happily fiddling with WordPress themes and plugins manually, but with the new full site Editing system that doesn’t really work any more.
That’s not bad because you can probably get more effect with less effort using the new system.
I’m not a designer, so I’ve usually worked with child themes.
Somehow, an edited theme with the full site editor seems a bit like an old-style child theme. The modifications you make are in the database, and when the parent theme is updated, your changes remain. That was one of the important features of child themes, and that is also how the new system works.
In that sense there’s little need for child themes.
What if you want to use your modified theme on several sites?
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Koha Library Software
When my father-in-law died some years ago he left us a small, but very eclectic library. He was a painter, so there are loads of books on painting and painters, but also art and antiquities in general. Add to that novels, poetry and then there are our own books.
All in all there are at least a thousand books, and maybe twice that. We don’t know yet.
My wife is a librarian, so she asked to setup some system to register them all.
After a bit of searching I found Koha – an open source library management system which has a vibrant and active community of users and developers.
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Simple cake recipe with variations
Every once in a while I bake a cake, and its almost always a variation of a simple cake recipe that’s very easy to remember.
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Home made chickpea flour pasta
My doctor has told me to lose weight, and instructed me to eat less carbs, especially pasta. I have a Philips Pasta Maker machine for making home made pasta. The two things together lead me to home made chickpea flour pasta.
It is surprisingly easy.
The basic recipe is this (4 servings):
Fediverse reactions
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Mail-in-a-box
Google has decided to shut down the old G Suite Free Edition of which I had two – one for private and family things and one for work related things. As I only really used it for mail, I’ve moved everything to Mail-in-a-box.
Google Workspaces are €6/month per user, while I can have unlimited users on a €3/month VPS with Mail-in-a-box. Kinda hard to beat.
I only used these Google services for email. After the Snowden revelations I moved everything else to a Nextcloud instance on a VPS. Now the email has gone too.
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Paddling Planet overhaul
I’ve completely redone the Paddling Planet site.
The site was originally built with some software called planetplanet, but nobody maintained it any more. I found a replacement, but it wasn’t much better.
A nagging email from Google about the need to update analytics tags promoted me to rethink.
I never have to worry about such things with my WordPress sites. The plug-ins update automatically, and so do tags, metadata, schemes and whatever else is happening behind the scenes of a web site.
I decided to convert the site to WordPress.
There are some plug-ins available for RSS aggregators, but many were overkill and in all cases I would need a premium version to do there site properly.
In the end I rolled my own.
A home-made plug-in manages the links (using the hidden links manager in WordPress), retrieves the feeds regularly, parses them and inserts the information in blog posts. Any featured image is downloaded and added to the post.
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WordPress image sizes
Figuring out proper values for WordPress image sizes takes a bit of effort, but it’s not rocket science.
Whenever you upload an image to a WordPress site, the software generates several scaled copies of the image. Some are built-in to WordPress, some are defined by the theme used, or by plug-ins, while others can be configured on a per-site basis.
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Goodbye Gondola
I bought an old retired gondola from Roberto Tramontin back in 2013. We’ve had some good experienced with it, but we never got to use it as much as it deserved. It is now been retired. Goodbye Gondola!
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Nextcloud on Synology NAS
My four years old Synology DS216 couldn’t run Nextcloud, but the new DS720+ can, and happily so.
The basics are straightforward. Download the ZIP file from nextcloud.org, unzip it under the web shared folder, and configure it in the Web Station app, and run the Nextcloud installer.
I only had two problems.
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Closing the Venice Kayak chapter
Today a chapter of my life is being closed, after a long agonising wait, in part due to Covid. My old company Venice Kayak is about to be closed for good.
I started Venice Kayak in 2008, incorporated it in 2011 and for a while it was quite a success with four, five, six employees doing three or four tours each day for the entire season.
It was good fun, quite a satisfaction, but there’s an end to everything.
Today I removed the last impediment for the final closure of the company by paying the remaining debts dating back to 2018.
The company has been in liquidation for about two years, but couldn’t be definitively closed due to unknown debts to the tax authorities. I’ve finally managed to get the necessary documents from them to be able to close the accounts and pay the outstanding bits.
