Subcurrent | Astoria Tech Meetup

Sucker Punch, 2011

Chris DeLuca — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 03:12:46 GMT

This movie is daffy and fun.

Advanced CSS Custom Properties for Components

Chris DeLuca — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 23:46:13 GMT

Welcome to Advanced CSS Custom Properties for Components. They say that brevity is the soul of wit, and that goes double for titles, so welcome to my witless talk. Thank you for being here, genuinely.

My name is Chris DeLuca, I’m a senior front end developer working at Lullabot. Call me weird, but I love component-based development, and I’m excited to share some of the things I’ve learned about implementing them using CSS custom properties.

What is this?

Let’s get into what we’ll be getting into this afternoon. This talk covers some patterns for using CSS custom properties, or variables, to customize components. It will be pretty demo heavy. You might see some examples that directly apply to your work, or you may not. My hope is that the demos at least get your creativity flowing to start playing with some of these patterns in your day to day.

Now, if you remember the 1998 American Godzilla movie, and why would you, there’s a scene where a scientist, played by Matthew Broderick, has a plan to lure Godzilla into a trap with a massive amount of fish as bait.

The army delivers the pile of fish, and Broderick looks at a guy with a

The Bride!, 2026

Chris DeLuca — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:30:39 GMT

I liked all the themes it was playing with, but it felt muddled and didn’t really hag together for me. Felt like keywords stuffing a plot.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, 2025 - ★★★★★

Chris DeLuca — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 02:57:07 GMT

God damn this movie is so funny. I like it better than the show even. So smart at being so stupid. A+. Go see it now.

Kyoto Tech Meetup links for March 5, 2026

Ash Ryan Arnwine — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 02:05:48 GMT

Time management, OpenClaw, cherry blossoms, and more

February Community Hack Day wrap-up

Ash Ryan Arnwine — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:50:50 GMT

A recap of what we built and info on the next hack event in March.

The Brave Little Toaster, 1987

Chris DeLuca — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:51:59 GMT

I had only seen a small part of this movie when I was maybe six, from under the couch. Really fun to revisit as an adult. I enjoyed it legitimately, but it was also dare I say healing to that little kid who was so scared of it. I think what confused and scared me the most as a child was how mean the characters are to each other. And man does this thing deal with DARK themes. Some banger van dyke parks tunes as well.

Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, 2001

Chris DeLuca — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:48:24 GMT

The human characters constantly have plot realizations out of thin air, and there’s way more ghosts than I was expecting.

Kyoto Tech Meetup links for February 19, 2026

Ash Ryan Arnwine — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 01:09:43 GMT

"Humans are hard" edition

Kyoto Tech Meetup links for Feb 14, 2026

Ash Ryan Arnwine — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 02:27:09 GMT

It's AI all the way down.

Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, 1989

Chris DeLuca — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:31:41 GMT

This is the only children’s cartoon I know of that nails the whiplash morphing of dream logic. One moment you’re joyfully flying through the air on your bed, then next you’re underwater being chased by a train.

Some people may say Nemo lifts directly from the Wizard of Oz, or The NeverEnding Story. Those people are boring.

Nemo has all the emotional beats of a maudlin, down the middle children’s animated feature of the time, with the bug eyed psychedelia of that dream you kept having as a kid. You know the one.

Send Help, 2026 - ★★★★

Chris DeLuca — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 19:22:28 GMT

What a good time at the movies. Saw it in 4DX, which is a gimmick but goofy fun. I don’t think the regal in Astoria’s scent device was working properly, because every smell cue just smelled like lemon pledge.

Rafureshia, 1995

Chris DeLuca — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 17:45:01 GMT

I can’t and won’t describe what I watched.

Kyoto Tech Meetup: January 2026 wrap-up

Ash Ryan Arnwine — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:12:50 GMT

Updates from our morning coffee and hack day events last month. Also, this month's schedule.

Mortal Kombat, 1995

Chris DeLuca — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 03:59:05 GMT

Let’s go.

Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, 2003

Chris DeLuca — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 05:04:45 GMT

Such a cool movie for a perfect album.

How the Kyoto Tech Meetup website works

Ash Ryan Arnwine — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 09:48:16 GMT

TL;DR: Astro, React, Tailwind, GitHub Actions, GitHub Pages, RSS.

2025 retrospective with shirts

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 03:00:00 GMT

This year I bought more shirts than ever. Mostly because I decided to go to as many concerts as I possibly could.

With the year coming to a close, I thought this would be a good moment to look back at the shirts I collected throughout the year and see …

Kyoto Tech Meetup: 2025 wrap-up

Ash Ryan Arnwine — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 02:53:40 GMT

Recapping what the Kyoto Tech Meetup has been up to in 2025.

Kyoto Tech Meetup: Dec 11 and 18 Wrap-Ups

Ash Ryan Arnwine — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 02:17:51 GMT

Highlights from the Kyoto Tech Meetup: engineering management books, Supabase, AI stuff, tech career sites in Japan

Kyoto Tech Meetup Community Hack Day Wrap-up for December

Ash Ryan Arnwine — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 04:58:16 GMT

A recap of the December Kyoto Tech Meetup Community Hack Day at FabCafe Kyoto. AI projects, site features, dev tools, and more!

Kyoto Tech Meetup: Dec 4 Wrap-Up

Ash Ryan Arnwine — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 06:50:47 GMT

Highlights from this week’s Kyoto Tech Meetup: AI tools for database design, project shares, and more.

powRSS

Ash Ryan Arnwine — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 03:01:00 GMT

ashryan.io is now on RSS feed aggregator powRSS.

Song of the Month: Andy Williams - Do You Hear What I Hear?

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 03:00:00 GMT

Slightly late for November, but better late than never!

As November rolled by, and the Christmas mood took over, I put on an old school Christmas songs playlist on YouTube.

Many of the songs I was hearing for the first time. A few of my favorites were Carol of the …

TIL: 2025-11-25

David Viramontes — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 07:00:00 GMT

Lorem CLI

Kyoto Tech Meetup Community Hack Day Wrap Up

Ash Ryan Arnwine — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 04:24:42 GMT

Websites, LLMs, RAG systems, databases, and more at our first Community Hack Day.

Kyoto Tech Meetup’s First Hack Day

Ash Ryan Arnwine — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 02:47:57 GMT

The first Kyoto Tech Meetup Community Hack Day is coming up. We've also got a GitHub org and a starter site.

TIL: 2025-11-15

David Viramontes — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 07:00:00 GMT

Upgrading golang using go

Kyoto Tech Meetup: Nov 13 Wrap-Up ☕

Ash Ryan Arnwine — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 01:36:10 GMT

Highlights from the Nov 13 Kyoto Tech Meetup. AI consulting, cybersecurity in Japan, Astro.js, creative side projects, and more.

Quietly intelligent app features with OpenAI Agent Builder

Ash Ryan Arnwine — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 05:51:05 GMT

How I used OpenAI’s Agent Builder to power an “invisible AI” feature in Collxn. What I learned about LLM reliability, schema design, and control.

Song of the Month: Christopher Cross - Sailing

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 03:00:00 GMT

This month I went on a two week long road trip through California with a friend. We sailed on Lake Tahoe, walked over sand dunes in Death Valley, and hiked between the mountains in Yosemite Valley. We saw the oldest trees on Earth at the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, and …

Song of the Month: Moin - Lift You

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 03:00:00 GMT

My pick for song of the month this time around is a track that played at Spectacle Theater before the movie started (the movie was Mirage Men (2013), by the way). The lyrics are very poetic, and the instrumentation has this eerie and underground feel to it. It's a great …

Pin collection update (128 pins in three images and a table)

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 03:00:00 GMT

It's been almost two years since I posted the "Collecting pins" post! It's time I shared an update.

Somewhere along the way I decided to get more organized and started a spreadsheet to track all the details about my pin collection (has this crossed the line to the unhealthy hobby …

Song of the Month: Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 03:00:00 GMT

Just two days ago I went to an immersive theatrical experience called Viola's Room. It started in a girl's bedroom with dim lighting and a few beds made on the floor as in a sleepover. On the headphones, a beautiful song started playing. The moment was so magical it's hard …

Song of the Month: Junko Yagami - Bay City

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 03:00:00 GMT

Today I want to try starting something new. Every month I'll share one song that stood out to me throughout the month.

For this first one, even though it's already midway through August, I still really feel the need to share this song that has marked my days throughout July …

localmart: why, what, and a visualization

Peter Valdez — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

why & what</h2>
For the first couple months of the year, I was working on an idea called localmart.
The motivation behind of localmart is this:

Lots of people today order things from Amazon that they could get in their neighborhood.</li>
That means that money is being extracted from local neighborhoods into global corporations.</li>
So what if we were able to provide the Amazon.com</a> experience, but all the goods are sourced from local stores so that your money gets reinvested into your neighborhood?</li> </ol>
So in short, localmart is a service where you order local goods from local stores, and it gets delivered within a day or two.
visualization</h2>
I've had a visualization in mind to explain localmart to folks, so here's a quick version.
Cash is flowing out to corporations, but with more local orders, cash stays in the neighborhood and makes the neighborhood healthier.

Orders in Astoria</div>
June 2025 </div>

Experiment #3: Finger Painting

Peter Valdez — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

TIL: 2025-06-27

David Viramontes — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

IndieWeb Ring

Experiment #2: Go Board

Peter Valdez — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Experiment #1: Minus, Plus

Peter Valdez — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

TIL: 2025-05-09

David Viramontes — Fri, 09 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

closest(selector) and matches(selector)

A new theme for the blog (now with 0% JavaScript!)

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Sun, 04 May 2025 03:00:00 GMT

I've recently updated the blog's theme and I felt I should make a post not only to document the reason but also to archive pictures of the blog before and after the change for the future.

When I created this blog, I chose nikhil-theme as the theme because I found …

TIL: 2025-04-19

David Viramontes — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 06:00:00 GMT

go doc

TIL: 2025-03-25

David Viramontes — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

YAML's special indicators > and | handle of multiline strings

Using stow to manage dotfiles on multiple machines

David Viramontes — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 05:35:07 GMT

If you work across multiple systems, you've likely accumulated a collection of configuration files over time.

In search of the perfect pin necklace

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 03:00:00 GMT

Last year, on the "Collecting pins" post, I mentioned that I usually wear my pins on a beanie, but was still looking for a good alternative for the warmer months.

After thinking more about it, I realized a necklace would be the way to go. It doesn't depend on any …

CardOS: Now compiling without Arduino!

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 03:00:00 GMT

In the "CardOS: Writing an OS for the Cardputer" post I shared about the OS that I'm writing for the Cardputer and that the next step was to move away from the Arduino toolchain. It took me two months but I finally did it. The end product was this commit …

CardOS: Writing an OS for the Cardputer

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Sat, 25 May 2024 03:00:00 GMT

I recently got the M5Stack's Cardputer. I was motivated to get it because I knew other people personally that had it too, so we would be able to share our progress, but I was worried it might end up being just another board that sits in my closet forever untouched …

Binary Search in Elixir

David Viramontes — Fri, 03 May 2024 12:00:00 GMT

Let's implement a quick and dirty version of binary search, and we'll improve upon it after identifying the base case and the recursive case.

vCard + RSS as an alternative to social media

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 03:00:00 GMT

Last year after talking for a while with someone during a conference they asked me for my LinkedIn to be able to connect with me, to which I answered I didn't have one.

It was many years ago when I decided to leave social media. I don't miss it. Instant …

Collecting pins

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 03:00:00 GMT

It started innocently about one year ago as I was looking for a gift for a friend. We played a lot of League of Legends and Ragnarok Online back in the day, so I wanted to give him something to remember that. Eventually I came across these pins:

Poring/Poporing …

Meeting the Linux community at my first ELC

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 03:00:00 GMT

This month I attended the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, which was co-located with the Open Source Summit Europe, and took place in Dublin, Ireland. This was my first time attending a Linux conference in-person as a contributor and it was a very special experience.

This wasn't my first ever in-person …

Moving the blog to Codeberg

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 03:00:00 GMT

As someone who cares about FOSS, I'm always happy to move to a FOSS alternative when one shows up, provided there aren't any big drawbacks.

Back when I was in University and starting to learn the ways of Git, I only knew about two Git hosting options: GitHub, the mainstream …

Mac setup guide for web development

David Viramontes — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 05:35:07 GMT

An opinionated setup guide for web development on a mac

Using emojis in matplotlib

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 03:00:00 GMT

Last month, as I was writing the blog post with all the statistics for the blog's two year anniversary, the "Blog statistics after two years" post, I decided that I really wanted to have a plot with emojis. From the moment I thought of this I knew it couldn't simply …

Blog statistics after two years

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Mon, 20 Jun 2022 03:00:00 GMT

Wow, it's been two years since I've started this blog! I'm really happy that I've still managed to keep up the one post per month. Hopefully I'll be able to keep it up for the third one!

For this post I thought it would be fun to look through some …

Discovering the comfort of loudspeakers

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Fri, 27 May 2022 03:00:00 GMT

In 2014, while on a school trip to Germany, I bought a Razer Tiamat headset. The sound was great and for the most part it was comfortable. Its only issue was the clamping force, which was a bit too much, and gave me headaches after long hours of use.

I …

Learning from SerenityOS

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 03:00:00 GMT

One day I was scrolling through Reddit as usual, when I saw a post linking to this blog post: I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time. I was intrigued by the backstory, the premise of this OS, and also by the fact that its development was being …

Running LineageOS on my Nexus 5X

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 03:00:00 GMT

This month marks one year since I bought a Nexus 5X and started using LineageOS, so I thought I'd share my experience.

Setting up

About one year ago, a friend told me he found a really good deal for a Nexus 5X online. The Nexus 5X is an old phone …

Learning x86-64 assembly basics

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 03:00:00 GMT

Recently I decided to learn assembly. I already had a reasonable understanding of how it worked due to some classes that touched the subject in university, however I never had the opportunity to really write assembly code.

Since my everyday computer is an x86-64 machine, it made most sense to …

Making internal linking in pelican effortless

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 03:00:00 GMT

One interesting feature of Pelican, the static site generator I use for this blog, is the internal link expansion syntax with {}. It is documented here. Some examples are {filename}, {static} and {author}. The purpose of the syntax is to have shorter and easier aliases to link to internal content in …

The menus in my system

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 03:00:00 GMT

Another post going through stuff I set up for my desktop environment a couple years ago and that have used ever since 🙂. This time I'll show the menus I've created using rofi.

So, what is rofi? It's basically a program where you feed a list of options to it, and …

The blocks in my status bar

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Fri, 26 Nov 2021 03:00:00 GMT

Five years ago when I moved to the i3 window manager, I started using its status bar, the i3bar. It is text based, and it's up to you what gets shown there. However it is not very modular: it's weird to combine different information to be shown since everything has …

Resurrecting a computer on the go

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Sat, 23 Oct 2021 03:00:00 GMT

Earlier this month I was spending a few weeks in another country. It was late at night and I was once again looking over my personal files and thinking if there was a better way to organize them in folders.

After thinking for a bit I decided on a new …

My journey to a good backup system

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 03:00:00 GMT

I'm a bit of a data hoarder. I still have some of the first programs I've ever written, photos I've taken on trips and drawings I did many years ago, to name a few. And since I don't trust some company to store all of this data for me, it …

Owning my Kindle

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Sun, 29 Aug 2021 03:00:00 GMT

Several years ago my mother gave me a Kindle Paperwhite 2. I have read a few books on it since, but it never felt like it was really mine. Locking the screen showed some annoying ad, all books bought from Amazon were protected by DRM, books transferred through USB only …

Blog customizations

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Sat, 24 Jul 2021 03:00:00 GMT

I've been using pelican as my static blog generator since I started this blog about one year ago. It only took a bit of configuration to get the blog up and running, and a bit of searching through pelicanthemes to find nikhil-theme which is the theme I'm still using.

While …

One year of blog

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 03:00:00 GMT

It's been a full year since I started this blog! So I thought I'd take this chance to talk a bit about the blog itself: How it started and my thoughts on it.

Origins

I had already thought a bit about having my own blog. Having a little corner of …

Keeping track of my packages

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Thu, 20 May 2021 03:00:00 GMT

As I previously mentioned in the "Moving to Wayland" post, I recently moved to a new computer. Moving can be very annoying if you use a heavily configured system and don't have all the configurations easily available to just move over. Since I do regular backups of my files, which …

Learning music theory by writing melodies

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 03:00:00 GMT

Hey, first non-technical blog post 🙂.

Anyway, I haven't talked about this before here, but I'm really interested in playing the piano. When I was younger I took some guitar classes, but I always wanted to play the piano, and a couple years ago I finally got one! I've been playing …

Moving to Wayland

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Sun, 21 Mar 2021 03:00:00 GMT

In the middle of January, my computer decided to surprise me, and not in a good way. Differently from all the quirks I've come to expect from it after all these 6 years of use — faulty keyboard, flashing screen, bad audio jack — this time it was worse, and it wasn't …

Ledsticker: My first holistic SW + HW project

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 03:00:00 GMT

It was in the middle of 2019. I was taking classes in Embedded Systems Laboratory and had to make the final project of my choice. I had the idea to do some sort of a Guitar Hero using a keyboard for the input, an 8x8 LED matrix to display the …

Organization beyond Taskwarrior

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 03:00:00 GMT

In the previous article of this series, I went into all my Taskwarrior and VIT customizations, and my workflow with them, that enables me to organize my tasks and get them done. Tasks, however, aren't the whole story when getting organized.

Another crucial component of organization is having a calendar …

Managing my tasks using VIT

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 03:00:00 GMT

Two years ago I decided to get more organized about my life. During that time I read the Getting Things Done book and discovered Taskwarrior, a task manager for the terminal which doesn't get in the way.

I greatly appreciated Taskwarrior's simplicity and customizability, but after some time, the need …

Porting a flash LED driver upstream

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 03:00:00 GMT

Now that I had a working serial cable for my Nexus 5, as described in the "Making an UART cable for the Nexus 5" post, I was ready to face some action and help in upstreaming.

Looking through Brian Masney's TODO page there were a couple options, but the one …

Bulk file editing with ranger

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 03:00:00 GMT

My file manager of choice is ranger. It's terminal-based, provides keybind mapping for everything making me more efficient in navigating my files, and it's incredibly extensible by enabling the creation of custom commands in python. If that wasn't enough, it also has a ton of other great features (extensible file …

Playlist generation with MPD

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Sun, 20 Sep 2020 03:00:00 GMT

Music is life. I really love listening to music, although not the same kind of music all the time. Most of the time though, anything goes: I like to listen to any of the songs I have at random. But when I'm doing something that needs concentrating (like writing this …

Automatic context detection for Taskwarrior

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 03:00:00 GMT

One of the main ideas of GTD is to have a context associated with each task, so that it is very easy to see which tasks can be done in your current context. I organize my tasks with Taskwarrior, so to make it work with contexts, when adding a new …

Setting up mbsync to work with XOAUTH2

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 03:00:00 GMT

For a long time I used offlineimap to synchronize my emails between the email providers and my computer. Having access to all my emails offline on my computer is pretty handy. But after seeing the brutal efficiency advantage of mbsync over offlineimap, and having had delay issues with offlineimap myself …

Making an UART cable for the Nexus 5

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 03:00:00 GMT

Recently, me and a friend started digging into making the Nexus 5 run the mainline Linux kernel. The purpose of this is, apart from a great learning experience, to make the Nexus 5 run a Linux distro, like PostmarketOS, instead of Android, while also having lifetime updates delivered from the …

Creating movie and game lists using Taskwarrior

Nicolas F. R. A. Prado — Mon, 25 May 2020 03:00:00 GMT

I like watching movies and playing games, but I also like to keep track of which movies I've watched and which games I've beaten. I also got into the habit of rating each movie I watch. For the longest time, though, I have kept track of these collections informally in …

Working with Electron

Peter Valdez — Sun, 12 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Working with Electron</a> is a pleasure. I just built an app called Redub</a> with it. For the uninitiated, here is how the creators describe Electron:

Electron is a framework for creating native applications with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. </blockquote>
Most programmers know how to build web apps. Now, with that same knowledge, you can build cross-platform desktop apps.
Electron gets a lot</a> of</a> crap</a> for being too resource intensive and for enabling lazy developers. The haters say that better frameworks for desktop apps already exist and that you should use those instead.
They're right, Electron apps are more intensive than I'd like. For those unaware, it's because every app has a full browser baked into it. That's how you're able to use Javascript, HTML, and CSS.
But let me be the first to say: the haters are missing the point, as usual. The real value of Electron is that it lets you move from random idea to cross-platform app fast, using the web dev knowledge you probably already have (which also means you have a huge community to draw from).
Also, it's not like you the performance problems can't be addressed. Solutions are already being proposed. For example, there's talks of an "Electron runtime"</a>. Basically, every Electron app on your system would share a s

Insert an audio clip to a video file with FFMPEG

Peter Valdez — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

The goal</h3>
For a hobby project of mine</a>, I wanted to be able to merge an audio clip into the existing audio track of a video file.

The command</h3>

After struggling for an hour or two, I finally came up with the correct incantation of the command ffmpeg</code> to overlay an audio clip to a video file:

ffmpeg \ -i movie.mkv \ -i new-audio-clip.mp3 \ -filter_complex "[1:0] adelay=2728000|2728000 [delayed];[0:1][delayed] amix=inputs=2" \ -map 0:0 \ -c:a aac -strict -2 \ -c:v copy \ output.mp4 </code></pre> The explanation</h3> Line by line:</p> 
 -i movie.mkv</strong>: set the video/audio file as an input</li> 
-i new-audio-clip.mp3</strong>: set the audio clip as an input</li> 
-filter_complex "..."</strong>: specify the two following filters:  "[1:0] adelay=2728000|2728000 [delayed]</strong>: the adelay filter, specifically:  [1:0]</strong>: using the second input file's first stream</li> 
adelay=2728000|2728000</strong>: add a delay of 2,728,000 milliseconds to both channels of the audio (the left and right channels, because the audio is stereo)</li> 
[delayed]</strong>: assign the name "delayed" to the new stream</li> </ul> </li> 
[0:1][delayed] amix=inputs=2</strong>: the amix filter, specifically:  [0:1][delayed]</strong>: using the first input's second stream and the "delayed" stream</li> 
amix=inputs=2</strong>: mix the two audio streams (NOTE: I'm not 100% on the meaning of inputs=2</strong> here)</li> </ul> <

A React Native library to run commands over SSH

Peter Valdez — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

For my React Native app Hooks</a>, I wrote some native Android code to enable the running of arbitrary commands over SSH.

I've now added the iOS side, and after some refactoring, the SSH code for both platforms is now its own library: react-native-ssh</a>.

There are no tests and it's very light on the error handling. But I figured I'd put it out there for others to use and/or improve upon.

Native dependency pains</h2>
Gradle (the Android build system) lets you specify dependencies from Maven (Java's package repository). This meant that including the Android SSH library I needed was a single line. Nice and easy.
Installing third-party dependencies on the iOS side of things is a pain, though. First, a disclaimer: I'm by no means an iOS developer, and have only dealt with XCode and CocoaPods a handful of times.
I first tried to make my library a pod to be installed via CocoaPods, which would allow it to have its own dependencies. However, there are two problems with installing a React Native library as a pod:

it has to list React as one of its dependencies, which is deprecated</li>
it's incompatible with react-native link which links your iOS library for you, and would result in duplicate libraries in XCode</li> </ul> After this didn't work, I decided to go with the manual installation methods listed by a few other libraries (specifically react-native-lock</a>, thanks auth0). So as it stands, after npm-installing react-native-ssh, you have to:

run react-native link to include the library<&#

A mobile app to run scripts on servers

Peter Valdez — Thu, 24 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Over the years, whether I was working with a Raspberry Pi or running a server, there would often be one-off scripts that I would want to run. The usual pattern would be:

SSH into the server</li>
Run a single command</li>
Logout</li> </ul>
I always thought it would be nice to have a phone app that could easily run those scripts.
I'd try some mobile SSH client but those felt clunky; a full-blown terminal was overkill. I just wanted to quickly run a single script.
Other times I'd write a quick Flask app to listen on obscure ports and URLs to trigger a script. This also felt like overkill, though, because I really didn't want to have to expose some HTTP server on some port just to run a script on occasion.
So I decided to bite the bullet and write the app that I wanted.
Hooks</h2>
The app is simple. It works as follows:
- Add a server's SSH credentials</li>
- You'll see a list of the executable files in ~/.hooks-app/hooks</li>
- Tap one of them and it will run</li> </ul>
 I myself have started to use this for a few things, including making sure all the containers are running properly on this server.
 
 What I learned</h2>
 This was the first time I used React and it's libraries. I have to say that using it, particularly together with Redux, felt elegant and safe. The fact that a global state defines the UI really makes things simpler.
 Working with React Native was also a treat. Hot Loading is a wonderful feature that will update your app when you save a file, while maintaining your app's state. This makes UI work so much easier.
 I also got to write some native Androi

A simple image to backup volumes to S3

Peter Valdez — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

One part of setting up my online presence naturally includes getting backups going.

Since I'm trying to keep everything containerized, I did some research into what Amazon S3 backup solutions are out there. I found a popular project called dockup</a> that basically does everything I wanted to have done.

However, upon looking at what I had to configure, I thought it could be simpler.

How dockup works</h2>
In order to get dockup working, you have to mount the volumes you want to backup to some arbitrary place in the filesystem, and provide the following environment variables:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID</li>
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY</li>
AWS_DEFAULT_REGION</li>
BACKUP_NAME</li>
PATHS_TO_BACKUP</li>
S3_BUCKET_NAME</li> </ul>
So, in English, given a bunch of directories (specified in PATHS_TO_BACKUP), dockup will create a timestamped backup (using the name BACKUP_NAME) in the bucket S3_BUCKET_NAME.
I'd do it a bit differently</h2>
My ideal backup image would work different in a few ways.
First, I want a separate backup for each of my apps. At any given time, I'm not sure which services I will be running. Maybe I'll stop the blog and keep the git repo running. Or maybe I'll add a new service. I want to keep the data for each of those services separate.
Next, I shouldn't have to specify which directories I want to backup. I could just put my volumes somewhere specific, like /backups.
Finally, the structure of the backup directory can contain the bucket and name. For example, any data in the directory /backups/app-backups/blog-data will be bundled

Anatomy of this site's Docker Compose file

Peter Valdez — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

As it stands, this server has two services running: a blog and git repository. They're both routed to by an nginx proxy, and my free SSL certificates are provided by the oh-so-wonderful Let's Encrypt.

The best part is that all of that is defined in and deployed by using a single Docker Compose file.

That means the only thing I had to do on my server was install Docker</a> (which is made easy by Docker Machine</a>). The rest happens inside containers that play well with each other thanks to Docker Compose</a>.

I'm going to explain the file section by section, but first, here's all of it:

version: '2' services: nginx-proxy: image: jwilder/nginx-proxy:0.4.0 container_name: nginx-proxy ports: - "80:80" - "443:443" volumes: - certs:/etc/nginx/certs:ro - /etc/nginx/conf.d - /etc/nginx/vhost.d - /usr/share/nginx/html - /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro environment: - DEFAULT_HOST=ptrvldz.me letsencrypt-nginx-proxy: image: jrcs/letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-companion container_name: letsencrypt-nginx-proxy volumes_from: - nginx-proxy volumes: - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro - certs:/etc/nginx/certs:rw blog: image: ghost:0.11.2 container_name: blog volumes: - ghost:/var/lib/ghost environment: - VIRTUAL_HOST=ptrvldz.me - LETSENCRYPT_HOST=ptrvldz.me - LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL=webmaster@ptrvldz.me git: image: gogs/gogs:0.9.97 container_name: git volumes: -

Back online

Peter Valdez — Sun, 16 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

It's been a while since I've had any form of personal site.

Every time I wanted to start one, I would overthink it.

I'd think about the various apps I wanted to host, like a blog, a git repository, a file server, maybe even my own mail. And it'd be all nicely organized and deployable.

But in the end, all I'd do was think and not do.

So today, simple beginnings:

A blog at ptrvldz.me</a></li>
A git repo at git.ptrvldz.me</a></li> </ul>