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TECH, CODE & PIXELS

Blog About Save Guestbook

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I’m Liz, a tech director who loves the small web, tinkering with code,
photography, travel, and gaming. I grew up when the internet was young and got
my first PC in the late 90s. I became fascinated with how computers worked, how
the web evolved, and started being online a bit too much!



You can read more about me or continue to my blog below. Currently a moderator
on the AllThingsTech Mastodon server and testing the waters on Bluesky. Come say
hello!





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NEW PIKA FEATURE

I love the new option to use a stream of posts instead of just links for our
Pika blogs! I’m going to test it out for this site. I love how Good Enough
improve the service more and more. More than Good Enough 💟

Stream of Posts option



November 25, 2024

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POMODORO TIMER

*Originally posted to my old dev blog

The other day I was doing a co-working stream, and pulled up a Pomodoro Timer to
focus on my work and take breaks. If you’re not familiar with the Pomodoro
technique, you can read more about it via it’s website.

My lovely friend Bear created a simple Pomodoro timer with Javascript, HTML and
CSS. He was happy to share his code with me and ask me to style it, so I decided
to fork it and start my first project for this website.

I added PaperCSS, a fun CSS framework to style a page with “paper-like” effects,
added a cute tomato favicon, and changed the alarm sound to something a bit
softer.





Feel free to use it and fork it yourself!

November 22, 2024

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LOVE MY STICKERS

Thank you Good Enough for the lovely stickers! They’ll go on my laptop cover
next.

Stickers by Good Enough, LLC



November 21, 2024

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SELF HOSTED APP INSTALLERS

This past weekend, I took on the project that I’ve been wanting to do for a
while and that is setting up a set of federated apps of my own. I’ve always been
intimated to do this, but recently found two different app installer suites that
seemed perfect for me, since although I can technically set apps up
individually, I really didn’t want to this time around.

Image via Canva


COMPARING CLOUDRON AND YUNOHOST ON A HETZNER VPS

Both provide solution for self-hosting apps, and what made me interested in them
was the ability to installed Federated apps such as Mastodon, Pixelfed,
Peertube, Ghost and more. I really love the concept of federated apps and
alternative social media. Even more so if I can have control over what I use,
what domain I have, and what theme or vibe I want to give. I absolutely love
tinkering with CSS, JS, and images to make my websites unique. I love bright
color and aesthetics, and so here I went to find a server.

I’ve used Racknerd VPS in the past since they had an awesome deal, but this time
around I wanted to use the more popular company, Hetzner. I did run into a bump
with them where they seemed to find either my email (via Fastmail) suspicious,
or they maybe found my IP suspicious? I’m on a home network all the time so I
really don’t know what went wrong. I had to “validate” my account with a $20
credit and use my Gmail address to sign up. I was a bit put off by this, but
really wanted to try them, so there I went to Paypal to send $20 to create my
account. I’m grateful to be able to not worry if this didn’t work out and could
lose $20 if it all went down the tubes. So far so good.

On Hetzner, port 25 is closed, with decent reason as they probably want to avoid
people using the VPS to send out mass waves of spam. But this doesn’t allow
Yunohost to use the port to send emails to you or set up the apps properly. Not
a huge deal I thought, since Yunohost has a TON of applications available, more
so than what Cloudron offers. The setup was pretty easy for anyone who is
technical and good with the command line. The instructions are great and the
forum had answers to a question or two that I had. You need to have Debian 12
installed.

I then decided to rebuild my server with a new image with Ubuntu 24 and
Cloudron. There was no issue with the port 25 being closed since they allow you
to set up an external SMTP relay which works perfectly! It was a much smoother
process, and I’m sad they only allow you to use 2 apps for free. If I decide to
keep my self hosted server for all of my data, I’d invest in the yearly
subscription even if it’s a little pricey. It would be worth it to me. I wish
they had a mid tier for personal use or tech enthusiasts.

There is alot more I can get into, but playing around with both have been great.
What it comes down to for me is:

Yunohost: Free and open source, no charge for running unlimited apps. Their
catalog is much bigger, slightly more to set up, email might be a pain unless
you get port 25 opened on your VPS.

Cloudron: Great for folks who need this to be super smooth and are running
services that many people rely on. Or if you just want an ultra smooth
experience. Worth the money IMO if you’re a solo sys admin and just want things
to work.

Both are great and I recommend you give each a try to see what works for you!

November 13, 2024

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CREATIVE MORNINGS

Courtesy of CreativeMornings.com



Originally posted to my “smol.pub” blog and updated here.



I’ve always enjoyed Creative Mornings which is a series of creative talks that
take place in your local city across the world. from the about page:

> In 2008, Tina Roth Eisenberg (Swissmiss) started CreativeMornings out of a
> desire for an ongoing, accessible event for New York’s creative community. The
> concept was simple: breakfast and a short talk one Friday morning a month.
> Every event would be free of charge and open to anyone.

I’ve always wanted to attend the original events in NYC, but never made my way
over since they are done on Friday mornings when I worked in an office. Now that
I’m remote and in another city (near Detroit), I’m going to give myself the
ability to go to the talks that speak to me. I’d love to pivot my career a
little bit from tech to something creative. I’ll document that here as I go.

November 6, 2024

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THE END OF THE .IO TLD

This was originally posted on my “smol.pub” blog and redirected to this blog.

The Disappearance of an Internet Domain

Reference Mastodon post

I wonder if tech companies are already planning a change over to a new gTLD or
some sort of subdomain within their current domain. Someone in the Mastodon
thread made a good point:

> I think .io should continue to exist, but just like .dev or .tech, just
> changing who administrates it, otherwise they’ll cause so much link rot and
> break the web.

That would make the most sense since it would break SO many huge websites such
as Github pages (github.io) or gaming sites like itch.io.

I’m going to drop the couple of .io domains that I have when they expire just in
case thing suddently drop. I don’t run anything important on them so I’m glad I
can plan accordingly.

October 3, 2024

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